Hillary Clinton's health care plan

[What_Exit]

@Pleonast

I don’t have a problem with funding coming from higher levels, as long as the control is at the lower level. The organization of Canada’s health care would probably be acceptable to me. I was mainly wondering how important BG’s use of “national” was to his point.

Yes, the biggest European nations are larger than the biggest U.S. state, but there are smaller one as well. I didn’t intend a direct comparison of population, anyway, but rather a more fuzzy “complexity” level. Thinking in terms of population, area, economy, degree of sovereignty, etc. If the Netherlands and Luxembourg can handle their own health care, than so can Ohio and Delaware.

Smaller states might need state-wide systems, but larger ones would do better with regional or county-level plans. I’d be surprised if even the poorest states could not handle their own health care plans.

Okay, specific handling of plans now to the local level.
Negotiate drug prices at the national level.
National directives of care to oversee State that would oversee local level.

I can see that as better than one Federal level system trying to do it all.

Jim

[Voyager]

@Weirddave

shrug The government funds studies all the time, and I’m willing to bet that you consider any such study above reproach. It’s not who funds the study that matters, it’s if they control the data. Unless you have some evidence that the Doctor who did the study was skewing his results, I don’t think where the funding comes from matters.

I’m not saying that this isn’t the case here, but would you trust a study funded by tobacco companies on smoking and health? I doubt if everyone in the government today (especially today!) is necessarily in favor of health care reform. If you said you wouldn’t trust a study funded by the Clinton campaign, then I’d be right with you.

Seems pretty clear to me. What don’t you understand?

Sorry for not making myself clearer. If the cost is benefits divided by number of claims, and if the amount of claims is proportional to the number of claims, why would a greater $ amount of claims create an unfair comparison of administrative costs? The numbers are so big in both cases that I think that the fixed overhead, that doesn’t scale, won’t affect the numbers much. If a lot of Medicare claims were for huge amounts, then I see it, but that is not evidenced in the data I have, and from what I see from my parents and in-laws (and it’s starting to be me) I get lots and lots of relatively cheap visits. So I understand their point, but it looks to me like an attempt to explain away the numbers.

This is pure speculation on your part, obviously fueled by a personal dislike for businessmen on your part, and likely pure hokum anyway. You’re completely ignoring a whole raft of costs that aren’t included in that 4%.

I like some businessmen just fine, such as the CEO of my company, who gets money on stock options (and we riff-raff got plenty of these too) and didn’t pull in a big salary (he took $1) when things weren’t going well. I’ve seen the salaries of these execs, they seem a bit overblown. But we’ve had that discussion before.

All those costs, or their equivalents (which includes CEO salaries), are counted against the private sector to come up with 20% and omitted when calculating the 4%. Weather they are more or less is certainly open for discussion, but you can’t simply ignore them because you are trying to advance an agenda.

I admit the disparity - I just don’t think it is very significant in explaining this gigantic gap.

That’s not true-or at least it’s put in an offensive manner. An insurance policy is a legal contract. It is against the law for an insurance company to refuse to pay for covered services. If they do, you file a complaint with the proper regulatory agency (your state’s insurance commissioner) and it’s investigated. If the insurance company has failed to pay a legitimate claim, then they are made to pay it and may be penalized on top of that. What insurance companies DO spend a lot of time on is making sure that they are not being asked to pay for spurious or extraneous claims. That’s called quality control and it’s a good thing, it keeps costs down. That allows the company to profit (which is not a dirty word, no matter what the Marxists try to tell you) and also means that the consumer pays less for their insurance.

My daughter’s boyfriend is interviewing for exactly this kind of job tomorrow. I’m sure it is not to illegally deny benefits, but I’m also sure it is to err on the side of not paying. I just had a prescription claim turned down. Fortunately the amount wasn’t much greater than the co-pay and I have the money, or else I might not have been able to afford something vital to my health. We switched insurance companies in January, and the increase in delays has been astounding. I had to tell them five times that my wife does not have her own insurance. Most of this affects the doctors and not me, but the delays drive up their costs. Profits are fine, but profits come from both eliminating fraud and from denying legitimate claims, or delaying payment as long as possible. I’m sure you are quite aware of the benefits of delaying payments to the bottom line.

In my case, my company is self-insured, so I suspect this obnoxiousness is to allow the insurance company to bid low on the contract.
BTW, I’m beginning to think that mentioning socialism, communism or Marxism in a health care debate should be an automatic loss. It always does seem to get mentioned, doesn’t it?

[Crafter_Man]

@Pleonast

I would agree with this statement if you removed “national” from it. I’d prefer government functions be performed at the lowest practical level.

Education, for example, should be controlled at the local level. The community should have complete say over how their children are educated. Only when the local government fails in its duties (poor standards, discrimination, or inadequate resources) should higher levels of government be involved.

I see no reason why welfare and health care shouldn’t be done at the community level as well. Let each city/county/whatever set up its own welfare and health care systems. The state can insure adequate funding and standards. No need for the feds to get involved.

Any reason you think these things need to be nationalized?

Completely agree.

The problem with nationalized healthcare is that there is no choice and no freedom. If you don’t like the system, tough.

With healthcare run at the *state * level, you have 50 laboratories doing 50 different things. This is a *very * good thing, as it fosters creativity and competition. It also allows us to determine what types of plans work, and which ones don’t. Most importantly, it gives me freedom. If I don’t like the healthcare system in my state, I can simply move to another state.

[Bricker]

@BrainGlutton

Canada’s single-payer health care system is administered and funded by the provincial governments (and was, in fact, originally enacted in one province at a time), but under national legislation that sets minimal standards, so public health coverage is more or less uniform from one province to another. That could work here, I think.

And I’d be cautiously in favor of it. One of the beauties of the dual sovereign system is that we have fifty laboratories, ready to experiment with various plans. Let the states execute a plan – let’s see fifty versions and then learn from the ones that don’t work, and apply those lessons to the ones that do.

On edit: Crafter_man and I are NOT the same person.

[What_Exit]

@Crafter_Man

Completely agree.

The problem with nationalized healthcare is that there is no choice and no freedom. If you don’t like the system, tough.

With healthcare run at the *state * level, you have 50 laboratories doing 50 different things. This is a *very * good thing, as it fosters creativity and competition. It also allows us to determine what types of plans work, and which ones don’t. Most importantly, it gives me freedom. If I don’t like the healthcare system in my state, I can simply move to another state.

Well hell, I can go along with that plan, I just want to see everybody have access to preventative care, how a state goes about, I sure as hell do not have the answer for. I like your idea of the 50 states acting as 50 labs for good methods. This has worked well for other programs over the years. Again, I would like to see health care divorces from business, but I suppose if some states experimented that direction both the people and the businesses could vote with their feet.

Jim

[jshore]

@Bricker

Missed my edit window, but a disclaimer: the Frasier Institute’s web page says, “Competitive Market Solutions for Public Policy Problems,” so I infer they are not a neutral party. But that does not mean their wait times stats are lies, of course.

FYI, the Fraser Institute is pretty much the Canadian equivalent of the Cato Institute.

My guess would be that their numbers wouldn’t be outright lies but they might be lacking context. I.e., what defined “treatment” and how would these wait times compare to the U.S. and was 2003 chosen because it just happened to be the most recent year they did the data for or was it cherry-picked because it had the longest waits?

[Voyager]

@Crafter_Man

Completely agree.

The problem with nationalized healthcare is that there is no choice and no freedom. If you don’t like the system, tough.

With healthcare run at the *state * level, you have 50 laboratories doing 50 different things. This is a *very * good thing, as it fosters creativity and competition. It also allows us to determine what types of plans work, and which ones don’t. Most importantly, it gives me freedom. If I don’t like the healthcare system in my state, I can simply move to another state.

Moving to another state isn’t so easy. As for choice, my company switched insurance companies, and I didn’t have a damn thing to say about it, and have no choice to change. (Except for using a known crappy HMO.) The choice I do have, which would be preserved under all existing plans, is the choice of a doctor. Of course, not all doctors sign up for all plans, so a single payer system, where pretty much every doctor is enrolled, would actually give more physician choice.