Gee, spoke-, with all the big bad insurance people following the money, I can’t imagine what the rest of us do. We would never be greedy. 
Not quite so deceptively, I should hope.
Oh, no, we want universal health care out of the goodness of our hearts. There is no selfish motive present at all.
There is no deception in wanting that. There is deception in the insurance lobby’s game. That’s my point.
Pursuing your self-interest is one thing. Lying to pursue your self-interest is another.
Like: “no one will have to pay for health care”?
Like: it is a right to have health care?
Sure, if you’ve acquired it peacefully and honestly.
I see your quotation marks, erislover. Who are you quoting, pray tell?
And more to the point, do you mean to imply that we should ignore the deceptions of the insurance industry in their attempts to defeat universal health care and to promote restrictions on patients’ rights? Do you mean to say that we should ignore the fact that they have invented a “malpractice crisis” out of whole cloth to promote their legislative agenda?
What are you saying, exactly?
I don’t mean to imply that at all, except I do not understand what you mean by “patients’ rights”, so maybe I did mean to imply it. But I don’t propose we ignore anything, so maybe it doesn’t matter what that term is supposed to mean.
I wasn’t quoting anyone here. I’m sorry, I forgot that the rest of the world I interact with isn’t available in this thread, so no one has ever said that. I withdraw it.
Yes, everything would be cheaper if people didn’t make a profit on it. I’ll concede that in plain English.
By “patients’ rights,” I mean the right of a patient to recover damages which flow from the negligent act of a physician. The euphemistically-titled (dare I say deceptively-titled) “tort reform” espoused by the insurance lobby is designed to restrict those rights.
spoke- -
Under a single, government run system, would patients be allowed to sue the government to recover damages?
Regards,
Shodan
Single payer doesn’t (necessarily) change that because
the health providing industry stays in private hands.
One doesn’t sue his insurance company when the doctor cuts off the wrong foot. One sues the doctor.
And of course, the doctor would carry malpractice insurance.
Which is becoming more and more expensive- not so much for low risk practices like GPs, but for OB/GYNs & surgeons, it can run into 6 figures per year.
I don’t doubt that malpractice insurance is becoming more expensive, even drastically so. The question is why?
Are the rates increaing in response to a real explosion in malpractice judgments? (Doesn’t seem to be supported by statistics; see the citations in my earlier link.)
Or is the insurance industry artificially inflating premiums?
I suppose this is your way of saying that you want to ignore facts like the U.S. spending much more on health care as a percent of GDP than Canada and other nations with single payer systems do and yet is still performing worse on lots of international health outcome measures (http://www.cmwf.org/fellowships/anderson_intrntl_healthcare_255bn.asp):
Instead, I guess we should just focus on what we are told these other nation’s health care systems are like from conservative groups and the insurance company lobbyist.
St. Paul Insurance, the company I just retired from, was the leading medical malpractice company in America. Last year, they simply quit the business. Their top management decided that they had been losing large amounts of money for years, and that there was no hope of future profits.
But these gross measures do not adequately examine other factors, including the average heavier immigration, cultural differences (too many Americans on bad food leads to much of the shortened life span) and so forth.
In other words, this may, I I suspect, does not have anything to do with the quality of the American health care system.
Another thing to consider is the long-term impact opn science and progress. Buying ourselves universal care now may mean a huge slowdown in technological advance.
The more money in the game, the more people are willing to do to get it. Coming up with new treatments and such is a good way to do it. Plus Europe and some other nations are effectively stealing American money by limiting drug prices.
Well, that could be the result of an increase in malpractice verdicts, or it could be the result of bad underwriting decisions and bad management. So it doesn’t really answer the question.
The question is:
Is there any hard evidence of a “malpractice crisis,” that is, a radical increase in malpractice verdicts. I haven’t seen any such evidence (and I’ve looked), but I’m keeping an open mind.
Let’s see some underlying statistics which prove the existence of a “crisis,” if anyone has such stats.
I didn’t know all lawyers worked for free until there was a verdict.