Attention anti health-care reformers

The BBQ Pit
121

This ignores the reason most companies offer health insurance in the first place; it is a benefit to attract and keep the best employees. If conservatives are to be believed, government health insurance will be so inferior, any company who offers private health insurance will be able to hire the cream of the crop, and any company so short sighted as to drop health insurance altogether will soon find themselves with cubicles full of everyone else’s rejects.

If the free market is everything touted by the conservatives, your scenario won’t play out, because it is not in the economic interest of companies to put themselves at a disadvantage when recruiting the best talent.

122

Because then the CEOs won’t make a billion dollars a year.

123

Is it oyur contention that CEO and top-management salaries are a substantial part of the cost of insurance?
If the highest slary/benefit anyone could get as a healthcare/insurance-company executive was 250k a year, how much would the price of insurance go down?
My guess 0.1%.

124

No, but it’s irksome that they’re getting so much money for providing so little service.

And it’s irksome that the Conservatives want to deny our freedom to choose.

125

Medicare is run at ten percent of the budget that private plans are. The problem is the government is not picking and choosing its customers. Private insurance does not want to cover seniors, the disabled or those with ongoing health problems. They kick you out if you threaten to cost them profits. The government is the insurer of last resort. If we UHC ,we would cover those who do not use up great resources.
I am on Medicare and it is fine. I am encouraged to use preventative care.
The bill sucks because it forces you to get care from for profit companies. They are the problem, not the solution.

126

How many are going to be collected under ‘the mandate’? How many are going to switch because it will be cheaper (not because care will be better)?

127

Do you honestly NOT see that happening?

128

If it does, why is that bad? Why can’t consumers and employers decide what is best for them?

If insurance companies want to stay competive against a cheaper alternative they need to enhance their efficiency and/or sell a better product. Private schools manage to do this. Why can’t we trust insurance to do so?

129

TBH, mainly because the government is effectively the one thing driving private industry under the bus. If the market did it, I’d have zero problem with it.

To clarify, the government can run this program at a deficit, private insurance cannot run under a deficit.

130

There are some things the government is better at providing than private companies. If private companies can’t compete because the government is simply better at it, I’m not going to be shedding any tears.

131

And therein lies the rub…

We must have differing opinions of “better”, because otherwise I’d be in agreement with you!

132

Here’s a question I’ve asked a few times, and will ask again, risking redundancy.

One of our main points of ire is the insurance companies committing dastardly acts in the name of profit. I trust this point has been illuminated enough so that I need not dwell on the ghastly details, I am tender-hearted by nature, and rather prefer to avoid going over ground that would either cause me to weep or provoke a murderous rage.

Do they do it because they must? Is their margin of profit so desperately thin that these sorts of things simply must be done, or they are driven out of business?

Or is it because it fattens a modest profit into a larger one? Which is to ask, is a criminal conspiracy against our citizens necessary, or simply desirable?

If they cannot prosper within reasonable limits without doing terrible things to their fellow Americans…gee, that’s too bad, but them’s the breaks. We can thank them for whatever efforts they may have made to avoid such a wretched choice, and relieve them of any further necessity to make it. Many of these people are at least nominally Christian, we should not place them in peril of their souls, if the iron laws of economics renders them helpless. They are going to go out of business because, really, there is no option, try as they might, they simply cannot conduct their business at a profit without committing heinous acts. Damn shame, but there you have it.

If, however, they could conduct their business at a modest but real profit, and choose not to…well, then, greed is all that’s left, isn’t it?

If the first, they should be gently led away from the marketplace, they cannot perform, its not their fault, but they simply cannot conduct their business to the benefit of our people.

If the latter, they deserve to be driven from the marketplace and publicly horsewhipped. They could have done a good job, could have performed decently, and chose not to. Fuck 'em.

Is there a third option? If they can’t do a decent job, well, too bad, but we need the job done, we’ll simply have to try an alternative. If they could, but won’t…then we are tolerating a greedy, legal-but-still-criminal conspiracy to prosper while sacrificing the health and even the very lives of their victims.

Which is, of course, intolerable.

133

Perhaps it fattens a negligible profit margin into one that is sustainable?
Look, does someone need to make a billion dollars a year? I, personally, would say no but again it isn’t me that gets to decide what someone could potentially be worth in a different market.
Of course they are greedy. I give you as my cite, EVERYONE who runs a business wants to make a million.
What would insurance companies do without government intervention? We will never know. If they are truly so bad, surely they could do something to increase competition. If the government wants to compete, let them compete on an even playing field. waggles finger No running at a deficit, not even one year. That sort of business model is not sustainable.

I guess bottom line (and I may very well be proven false) is my assertion that this cannot be done efficiently or effectively by the government for less.

134

Well, perhaps if we scrimp and save? Maybe not squander fortunes on futile military adventures? (This has the additional upside of not getting a big bunch of our kids dead…I like that part. A lot.) Maybe not spend billions of dollars for airplanes that cannot fly in the rain? Perhaps not send cargo jets aloft to rain metric buttloads of benjamins on our distressed stockbrokers?

Perhaps we should spend our money taking care of our people? A radical notion, I’m sure, but maybe we could give that some thought? Yeah, I know, crazy ol’ **'luc **again with his wild-assed notions… But if they’re not our people, who’s people are they?

135

The trouble is that essentially, that is all people have to show that the government cannot do this efficiently or effectively - is an assertion.

When shown that other governments of other countries can manage single payer healthcare just fine, the evidence is frequently handwaved away with an “American exceptionalism” argument.

People seem to think that the government will have their hands in every aspect of healthcare, from essentially telling doctors how many aspirin to hand out to establishing “death panels”. This is not true in any other single payer system, so why think it will happen in the US?

136

Upon reflection, perhaps it would seem that I have side-stepped your point, and that would be wrong. If, as you suggest may be so, this cannot be done at a responsible profit, well, then, so be it. Perhaps this thing cannot be done, even though others do it rather well. Perhaps we are the retarded Americans, what others can do is simply beyond our grasp.

There are footprints on the Moon. They aren’t Chinese.

“The difficult we do at once, the impossible takes a little longer.”

137

Private insurance can run up a billion dollar profit margin, too. Maybe that’s not so bad if we’re talking about cars and microwave ovens. But life and death stuff, not so much.

It seems that the leading concern that I’m hearing is that government care possibly will be lower in quality.

First of all, where’s the evidence for this? It’s not as if private insurance are bastions of cornucopic generosity, letting doctors run as many tests and prescribe as many brand name drugs that they want.

Secondly, is the mere possibility of low quality a reason to argue against the idea? If it turns out the government will cut too many corners, why not simply fight for it to be better when we cross that bridge? It may turn out that compared to what we have now, there is no disparity in quality. Or if there is a disparity, it’s marginal compared to the gaping gaps in coverage that we see in our populace now.

138

You think consumers are so dumb they shouldn’t be allowed to choose for themselves?

You really need to read the bill. The House bill specifically prohibits the public option from running a deficit.

Also, you should ask UPS and Fedex how they manage to compete against the US Postal Service under such onerous conditions.

It will not happen, because employers need to offer private insurance to attract quality employees. Or are you admitting that the government can provide better service than private industry?

139

So it seems that one of the most prominent reasons I’ve seen floated against UHC, or a public is option, is that if that is offered, poor people will avail themselves of it. Can’t have that now … costs for rich people will go up. Think of the yacht sales, ferchrissakes. Why do you hate America?

140

It remains a bad analogy to equate having insurance to cover a choice, such as driving a car, to mandated health insurance. But let’s not get stuck on that.

It does not follow that everyone will at some point need expensive health care. Actuaries for insurance companies are essentially gamblers, betting on the odds of who will be using the insurance. A lot of people never really do. Things like life insurance and health insurance are based upon that ratio of users to payers.

Let’s just be honest about the mandate. The whole plan only works if young, healthy individuals who will not be using the system, or at least not for a long time, are forced to pay for those that do. A lot like social security where many persons pay into a system that some never will use. And it would be better to deduct the cost from every wage earner in the country right up front so the cost is clear.

The proposed system is likely to create a feeding frenzy and out of control greed in the private insurance business world. And that will need to be fixed later with yet another huge bailout. Or the private health care industry gets destroyed. I’m of two minds about the possibities.

In my opinion the mandate is just a new socialogical tax. And that it would be more honest to show it as such. I do not believe that the penalties are going to fly very far without the whole idea of fines being scrapped and the costs being added to the normal tax structure. And if the health care bills would have been presented with the true cost supported by the increases in the tax structure, the bills would not have gone so far.

It has been good politics, but poor policy.