Same reason they all don’t cut costs by paying minimum wage. As soon as someone offers better compensation, they get the best applicants, and everyone else follows suit. Employer-provided healthcare is an expected part of the compensation package. Who’s going to accept a job at an employer who doesn’t offer healthcare when the company down the street does?
Because the fact that you don’t have health care isn’t, or at least, shouldn’t be the government’s problem. It’s not the government’s job to take care of you…it’s your job, and if you don’t have health care, it’s your responsibility to either take actions to remedy that, or go without it.
Transition Issues:
- Insurance company employees and shareholders.
- Reimbursement rates for procedures. Medicare reimbursement rates do NOT pay for themselves in most physician offices. Physicians limit the number of medicare patients (if they take them at all). If you switch everyone over, you will either need to INCREASE the reimbursement rate (which means that your cost model changes), or you will have physicians going out of business / not able to pay their loans. This brings us to…
- Medical schools will have to change (and some might close), since I assume that under a federal system the average income of physicians will drop significantly. That will knock out the ROI for the $200k in loans that docs often graduate with.
- The Pharmaceutical and Medical Device industry will get hit hard if you nationalize the US health industry as well. They depend on early adopter level high profits in the US, and you will be changing the ROI on ALL private medical research.
My proposal:
Combine Medicare, Medicaid, Tricare and the Federal Employee Health Plan (whatever it is called). Make them one big government health plan. ANYONE can get into it, with a sliding premium scale based on income (e.g. zero if you make nothing). That basic plan becomes the floor for everyone that is funded by payees and taxes. This is the only plan that Congress gets, just to make sure that our government feels the pain.
Allow private insurance. Payments are a deduction no matter what your income level (you are no longer beholden to your employer). There can be some fantastic plans out there that pay for private rooms, top notch surgeons, and a blowjob with every office visit. Others might just allow you to be a step up from the government plan.
Allow people to purchase Government Plus type coverage. You can buy into a plan that is made to ride on top of the government plan, so that you pay the government and a private operation for special services if you want them (maybe the government only pays for generics and you buy a rider for name brand pharma).
This will use existing infrastructure, provide healthcare to everyone, yet still keep the private market going. I would add that everyone MUST have coverage - your SSN is tied to your healthcare, and if you don’t buy a private plan than you will get hit on April 15th for a year’s worth of Government plan premium payments.
Free for all? I think not. Maybe free for those that don’t currently pay taxes…
In other words, the weak shall perish, hmm ? If you are poor or have a serious accident, you are evil and deserve death, right ? Other people are just there to be used, and you owe them nothing, right ?
In short, yes. That’s how it works. What do you think is so wrong about this? Do you think society should be set up so that no bad outcome happens for any of its members?
Please. Who’s using who here? You want a system that’s mostly funded by the top 5% of Americans to pay for health care for all Americans. I guess the rich are just there to be used?
They won’t let us eat them.
Because it’s evil, and it’s stupid. Because it’s a really bad idea to create a situation where much of the population has zero reason to care about the survival of society, or is actively hostile to it. You want to create a situation where there is no POINT to society, or to the law. A society that thinks that the “weak should perish” is evil, and should be overturned or destroyed - and by it’s own standards it can’t honestly complain about that.
And I’m quite sure you don’t think that your own philosophy will ever be applied to you. I’m sure you wouldn’t hesitate to condemn someone who murdered you and looted your corpse, even though by your own “the weak shall perish” standards you deserved it, or you wouldn’t be dead. If you are willing to condemn people to death to keep money in your pocket, why shouldn’t those same people kill you to empty those pockets ?
Straw man. Helping the unfortunate, such as the sick survive isn’t at all the same as making sure “no bad outcome happens for any of its members.”
The rich HAVE MOST OF THE MONEY. They’ve spent decades looting and exploiting America and the world. They’ve bribed, lied, enslaved, cheated, stole, and killed their way to owning most of America’s assets. They think like you; anything is moral if it makes a profit, and they think they owe nothing to anyone, no matter how many suffer and die. They are humanity’s enemies.
As far as I’m concerned, after all they have done, all the suffering and death they’ve caused to get rich letting most of them live is generous; taxing them is nothing.
TBH, if media representations of your system are accurate, then I disagree (I have only tv and films to go on).
In Ireland the norm is six beds to a room and shared toilets.
In the US you have huge corridors, single rooms and a far better nurse/doctor to patient ratio. And your hospital food doesn’t taste like its already been eaten.
Your health care system seems to be a lot more focused on patient satisfaction than a universal health system.
Thats nice.
/Adds Der Trichs to the ignore list.
To the “what’s in it for me” people I have a sobering reminder–disease is no respecter of pocketbook. Economics might be able to force the poor out of the health care system, but economics does not protect you from random disease vectors, and people who don’t have health care are excellent disease vectors. Your gated communities aren’t enough to keep you safe from an epidemic and the more people are denied access to good health care the more likely it is that we’re gonna get some doozies.
We need a paradigm shift–people are infrastructure. Jobs don’t get done without people to do them. Healthy people work harder and better than sick people. When a sick person takes time off from work, a healthy person has to make up their work–which places more of a burden on the healthy. Absenteeism due to illness is a huge cost to business–all business. It is in the best interest of the entire society that every member of that society be maintained in the best possible health. There’s no morality to it, just simple self interest. Nobody wants to work harder for someone else just as nobody wants to pay for somebody else’s health care but it’s inevitable–it’s gonna be one or the other. We all do pay already for everybody’s health care, one way or another, it’s just that we’re doing it in the most ass backward, expensively wasteful way possible.
For the record, my daughter works in the Patient Billing department of a huge hospital, and her entire day is spent mediating between the hospital, outside doctors, patients and various insurance companies trying to get payment arranged for the various medical procedures the patients need. Some of the ridiculous scenarios she has to face and the hoops the insurance companies insist everyone jump through just amaze and disgust me. She gets paid about twenty bucks an hour, is one of the least tenured people there, and there are forty or fifty people in her department. There are several other similar departments for other branches of this ONE HOSPITAL. Can you imagine how much actual health care could be provided to sick people if we didn’t have to pay all these people just to argue about paying sick people’s medical bills? It’s mind boggling. Also, in case anyone’s wondering, the sentiment is running about 95% FOR Obama and UHC in this department, because it’s killing these kind and compassionate people to have to add the burden of economic stress and uncertainty to the other troubles the patients have. They WANT to be out of a job if it means doing better for the patients they work with. When the rest of the “screw you, I got mine” contingent are even a fraction as willing to put themselves out as these guys I’ll listen to them, but so far there’s nobody as willing to put their money where their mouth is.
Sorry, I have seen the overcrowding in community hospitals in poor areas in the USA, you really don’t know much about this subject.
And didn’t someone in one of the other threads on libertarianism/healthcare/socialism mention that Ireland doesn’t actually have a single payer system ? Or something of the sort ?
We do not care if you ignore other posters. However, it is against the rules to make a point of telling everyone on the board who is or is not on your ignore list.
[ /Moderating ]
Funny how you are viewed as radical and deranged for these observations, whereas “how about we just let the poor die sick” is generally considered a valid subject for civil debate.
Der Trihs, we’ve done this song and dance before, so no need to do it again. Can I ask you one question though? In the context of your reply to me above, who exactly do you include in the category of “rich”? Thanks.
I’m talking about the “better” hospitals that people go to if they have great health insurance. I’ve seen some of the community hospitals on Law and Order, and tbh, most hospitals under a UHC system will have a similar crowdedness.
In Ireland:
You pay c.€50 to visit the GP. You can get this back if you have a medical card.
You can avail of free healthcare, available to all citizens, at any public hospital, but there is still private insurance, which speeds your access to services, and gets you more comfort etc.
There are a few private hospitals, but the number of public hospitals is far larger than the number of private.
So we have some private, but we pretty much have UHC.
For those who can’t or won’t read the Pit thread mentioned by Bayard, I was tempted to summarize it but I could never do it justice. Go there and read it. You’ll get angry, you’ll laugh (and perhaps cry) and you’ll wonder how things ever got so bad in the good old US of A. You’ll wonder how the same critics of UHC in that thread could have the the gall to trot out the same tired canards in this thread. That thread needs to be in Threadspotting.
The military has universal healthcare. Seems to work for them.
Wait… How did it suddenly become society’s job to provide healthcare for the military? WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME? :mad: