“Why do you support Nazi policies” is not a legitimate question. But intelligent conservatives do make some good points about Obama’s health plan (like how we’re going to pay for it) that are unfortunately getting drowned out by the insanity of the town hellers.
So what are some legitimate questions conservatives should be asking?
What is the problem we are trying to solve?
I’m dead serious. I still don’t know, from the mismash of multiple 1000-page bills circulating through Congress, as well as Obama’s and everyone else’s town halls.
- Is it to provide insurance to those who cannot afford it?
- Is it to provide free, universal healthcare to everyone, like the NHS?
- Is it to ensure that everyone (even those who don’t want it) must have insurance? Is it to ‘force’ people who don’t want insurance to buy some?
- Is it to reform Medicare to lower the future liability for my children?
Or something else?
Just for the record I heard that questioner was a LaRouche nut. Not surprisingly, very few in the media bothered to ask.
A few questions I have:
- Why not expend our efforts fixing the system we already have in place?
- Why do we need to completely destroy the current system in order to have “change”?
#1. What happens if it doesn’t work as planned and costs more than estimated?
#2. If it does not work, how do we roll out of it?
Slee
What happens if the heath care movement is defeated? We all know that health care is gobbling up an increasing amount of our money. What happens ,if we do not fix it? The problem is still there.
Seems to me that liberals should be asking those as well.
What do you mean “we”? “We” don’t really have a system. Doctors, hospitals, insurance companies and patients are all independant actors and not all part of a single, nationwide system. (OTOH, Medicare is indeed a single system for providing the elderly with health care).
If people don’t want government to fix the non-system, then they don’t want “us” to fix it. No government = no system.
Explain to us how we’re “completly destroying” the current whatever.
I’ve been reading on it and I’ve read most of those answers.
That’s a part of it. Currently many are simply priced out of the market. For instance because I was born with asthma I was quoted over $1000 a month. That isn’t affordable to an awful lot of people.
No. No one is suggesting that, at all. If you’ve heard that someone is misinformed or lying to you. NHS is a single payer system. What they are looking at is insurance reforms (like not letting insurance deny people with pre-existing conditions), and the creation of a “public option” that would be a government formed insurance company that would have to be funded by premiums, just like a conventional insurance company. The difference would be it would not have any profit motive and would would be much more efficient. I know you’re likely to scoff at the idea of more efficient government run insurance, but the facts are it would streamline billing and have a gigantic risk pool.
The same way it forces people to pay into social security. Look, even if you don’t want insurance you still need it. Even if you’re young you can still have a leg smashed in a car accident. This will require a mandate, everyone needs to be insured. The very poor will have the government pay for some or all of it, just like welfare.
Medicare is currently more efficient than the private systems. Part of the goal of the legislation is to make medicare more cost effective and limit fraud.
It’s primarily a vehicle to slip in Death Panels. 
That’s what we’re doing. We aren’t instituting a new system like the UK or Canada have. We’re reforming the insurance laws so companies can’t deny coverage to or drop people who get sick and creating (perhaps) a government run health insurance company that has to be funded by premiums, just like your insurance. The public option would simply not have a profit motive and would create a low priced option that private insurance would have to compete against.
We aren’t destroying the current system. We are putting regulations on it and creating a government run health insurance company. Whoever told you that is misinformed or lying.
Are you talking about the public option? It’s an insurance company. It will raise it’s premiums to provide care, just like any other company.
Don’t take the public option.
P1. Then I don’t want any part of it. I don’t want to pay into Social Security. In fact, I would be willing to write off the $100,000+ of my lifetime wages that have already been paid into Social Security, and not ask for a penny back when I retire, if the gubmint would stop taking my money going forward. What an offer! Think they would take it?
I appreciate your concern about how I ‘need to be insured’. But I’ll take care of myself. Thanks.
P2. You must be joking. A program with a $30+ trillion unfunded liability, and whose estimated date of insolvency keeps ramping closer and closer in time (2019 is the latest estimate, I believe) is ‘more efficient’ than a private system?
Can you point me to any entity, anywhere, who has that amount of future liability? Answer: You can’t…because they would have gone bankrupt long ago.
Usually the studies that purport that Medicare is ‘more efficient’ than private systems use extremely simplistic methods of variable cost comparisons for supposedly similar treatments. They ignore any measure of value, quality or availability and ignore the balance sheet of the program.
Destroy the system? The changes would still have private hospitals, private doctors, private hospices, private companies supplying them. The only change would be to insurance companies who suck 35 percent out of the health care costs. These companies are adversaries to their customers. They take premiums and spend a lot of time searching for ways to deny coverage. The delivery of health care would be unchanged. But doctors would not have to waste time and money fighting insurance denying companies.
Government plays a part in the current system. Tax incentives for companies created this employer-based system. How can we move toward more individual choice between competing plans.
Obama is on record stating that he prefers a single payer system and that we might only be able to get there in increments (i.e. public option). This destroys the current model entirely.
This is the part of the logic behind this that loses me and, I imagine, many others. I agree that a public option would not have a profit motive, but I don’t think it necessarily follows that it would result in a lower price.
Yes, profit motive makes businesses what to increase revenue and reduce expenses where, theoretically, a public option wins because they’d have revenue and expenses roughly the same. However, I’m interested in the flexibility of the plan and how that affects it.
Let’s use me as an example. I’m young, in excellent health, haven’t had a serious injury in years, have been sick enough to require a doctor’s visit only once in the last several year, and so I cost virtually nothing to insure. While a public option may have a lower average cost per person, chances are that someone like me can get even cheaper insurance from another insurer because they can afford to charge me lower rates. A public option has no incentive to lower rates for me to keep me unless there’s policy in place that takes that into account (hence the flexibility concern).
Now extrapolate my example on a larger scale. If this flexibility isn’t there, many people who are in a similar situation would also have incentive to get private insurance. Now many people have left, the cost to revenue ratio has increased, and the public option now need to raise revenue or reduce expenses they start running in the red. When they do that, potentially even more people may find they’ll get cheaper insurance or better coverage elsewhere, and it causes a domino effect where only the people who are expensive to insure and/or unable to afford better coverage are left on the public option, and now either they have few benefits, or it’s still really expensive, unless they get external funding.
Perhaps this perspective is a little too theoretical, but I think it naturally leads to the same problem of revenue vs. expense that has caused the very problems that it’s meant to fix in private insurance, where you can only get insurance if you’re in good health or wealthy enough to pay for it.
Even more, with the current tax incentives and the employer-based system, since effectively part of what I make goes toward that insurer whether I use them or not, it’s usually going to be significantly cheaper than any other option. So if you introduce a public option, how can they compete with a company that is getting a signficant portion of it’s cost from me whether I want them to or not? The only way I can see it competing is either instituting something similar via taxes (ie, such that people are effectively paying into it whether or not they use it) or to remove the tax incentives and let the public option compete on equal footing. Otherwise, I don’t see how it can get off the ground.
Depends on how you measure efficiency. Medicare pays out far more per person than other insurance plans, so it’s administrative costs are very low compared to payouts.
On the other hand, it’s administration costs per person are very high compared to private insurers.
There really isn’t any difference writing a check for $20k to a hospital vs $200. You pay the same wages to the person cutting the check, so it’s silly to say that you are more efficient because you wrote a bigger check.
You don’t understand. Do you have insurance now? If so, then you meet the mandate. Your HSA (I’m gonna guess you have one) counts. You don’t have to have public insurance, you can just keep what you have now. If you don’t have insurance, you will need to get some. I suspect that you don’t cry and whine about having to get car insurance, right?
First off, private systems are doing it right now. Health insurance costs have doubled in the last eight years. Private health insurance is doing worse than Medicare, that is to say Medicare cost is growing slower than private care. And Medicare works with the elderly and can’t say no to clients. Private insurance is terrible in terms of efficiency.
The unfunded liability is silly because small changes over time can fix it. At some point in the future we’ll raise taxes or reduce benefits. Welcome to the real world.
That is a statement of ideological belief, not fact.
I would like discussion about what “working” means for health care. Right now, we’ve got most Democrats saying “What we have doesn’t work because blah blah” and we have Republicans saying “What we have works because blah blah.”
If we can’t agree what working means, we can’t discuss what to do if it “doesn’t work.”
So,
#3. What is the metric for “working” or “success” that we will use? What is the metric for “not working” or “failure” that we will use?
I think that it should be set at a minimum percentage of Americans covered. I think we need improved outcomes. I think we need not to be the 37th best health care system in the world. I think we need not to be spending twice as much as the next nearest country in the developed world.
I would also like to see discussion about how much money as a country, public and private, can be spent on health care. Right now, we’re much higher than other countries as a percentage of our GDP, and our GDP starts out higher than most other countries. Some people say “We can’t afford to do this,” but I would say the numbers suggest we already aren’t affording it.
So,
#4. What’s the cap? What’s the absolute most that could be spent on health care and how do we stay below that? What policies will drive those costs down? Do we have too few doctors and nurses? What can we do about that? Do we have too much testing and diagnostic equipment and too little preventative and palliative care? What can we do about that?
If, and the bill isn’t final yet so everything is an if, the public option isn’t cheaper for you then choose something else. More likely the public option will scale based on actuarial realities.
You just created a problem and solved it. How efficient!
You are of course missing that the public plan will have the same factors as a private one, with lower overhead, a bigger risk pool and no profit motive.
The public option won’t be supported by taxes. It will be supported by premiums and will have to be run so it doesn’t lose money.
Taxes will be raised on those making more than $250k a year in order to pay for subsidies on those of the 46 million uninsured that can’t afford premiums.
I found this in another thread (Thanks Mr Moto!) How Healthcare Killed my Father
I would ask every politician on either side to discuss the points and issues raised in this article, and to present their opinions and responses.
And then I would ask them how their plan addresses any of this.