I’ll admit that the minute I read “national health care plan” I r:rolleyes:ll my eyes and stop reading. Why? Because I’ve always had a good health care plan because I WORK! I give an honest days work, for an honest days pay (and, yes, benifits). It’s not my problem that some people have chosen a lifestyle (or employment) that doesn’t reward as mine does.
What I want to know is, what exactly SHOULD a national health care plan consist of? And, more importantly (at least to me) WHO should get it?
Should the scumbag who mortgaged his future get the same health care as me?
How about the thief? He steals, I work, we both get the same health care benefit?
Explain why I, in a higher tax bracket, should pay for the benefits of a bum? He pays nothing, contributes nothing. Yet gets the same as I, who works his ass off? WHY?:mad:
How exactly should national health care be run in America?
Why should a failure receive the same as a successful person?
Should those that contribute NOTHING to society receive the same benefits as those that are in higher tax brackets?
What if those that contribute nothing, do so, not because of bad luck, but because of their own actions? (drugs, lazy, etc.)?
How would you set up national health care?
And how do you justify parasites receiving benefits from a system they don’t to contribute to?
There are bigproblems for nationalized health care.
For one thing, market forces are pretty strange when it comes to health products. After all, if it’ll keep you alive you’d probably pay anything, and the manufacturers would be happy to oblige. However, most people can’t afford the prices that are charged, and that’s because the health insurance company has more money than their members do, so the health industry can charge it more, and does. So we would expect to see prices absolutely skyrocket if the government either directly or indirectly paid the bills. While there are certain fixed costs in R&D, manufacturing, and treatment, I suspect the gov’t would eventually find itself wanting to control or otherwise put a cap on prices, which the industry isn’t going to like. Nor would the doctors still paying on their $100,000 in student loans appreciate it, I imagine.
Another problem I see with a nationalized approach is the question of where to stop treatment? If there’s a procedure that will cure cancer but it costs a million dollars, is everyone provided with that? What if it costs ten million dollars? Does the government eventually decide it just won’t pay for that treatment, that it will spend the money on more care for more people? Doesn’t this lead naturally towards some Logan’s Run scenario, a nightmare world wherein people above a certain age are just killed off so that they don’t continue to use up resources?
The more fundamental issue here is resource allocation. If there are only 10 dialysis machines within a certain geographical area that service X number of people who need it, then market forces would simply drive the price of usage up until the supply met the number of people able to pay. It might seem callous to simply let market forces allocate the supply to those able to pay for it, but what other way is there? Do we really want the government making value judgments about which people live and which die? I’d rather have the impersonal forces of the market deciding that, as opposed to some group of people making a conscious decision with all that power in their hands.
I’d say that any nationalized health care scheme would run into awful ethical questions eventually, ones that I certainly don’t trust government to make. The strength of the free market is that no person has to make and enforce these decisions, the impersonal market simply allocates medical resources naturally. At the very least, there would need to remain some private health care facilities outside of the gov’t system where those with the means could make the sacrifice, mortgage the house, do whatever they could to preserve their own lives.
All that sound good, the problem is that the market is now beginning to fail in comparison to other nations with national healthcare, I remember that usually the number Americans without insurance is 40 million, a few months ago that number was revised to 70 million,
I have noticed that the private insurance market right now is sandbagging people that want to do business on their own, recently in the local news channel was the case of a slightly overweight woman that wanted to get insurance: working on her own, starting her own business, she found that the insurer refused to give her insurance (or at a nasty rate, because of the weight issue). She found out later that if she had been working in a large office the insurance company would have given her (trough her job) insurance with very little questions.
So now the market is benefiting big companies, but startups, and small business now are IMO competing with a serious disadvantage, small business AFAIK are a big factors in getting people back to work, I think America is shooting itself in the foot on this one.
Related to that IMO, is also the fact that if you are expecting people to train for a different job, when the manufacturing job is exported overseas, and you are from the “do not put any stop to corporations who do this” crowd. One thing that will help ease the burden, to the American worker for losing that job, is national healthcare.
My overall question is a cruel one: who get’s health care, who doesn’t, and why to both? And WHO get’s to decide? Under the current situation many people who work full time get at least some form of health care.
Should the bum who harasses me for change on the street get the same health care benefits that I, a hard working professional (whom works 2 jobs mind you) get? Why should my money pay for this piece of shits well being? Who decides this?
I keep hearing libby’s whine about health care in America. I want to know why those who have screwed up their lives should get the same bennies as those of us who didn’t?
Under a “national health care plan”, would there be anyone that would be told “No, you suck. Die!” Or does the failure get the same as the successful?
This brings up another interesting point. If government were paying for health care, they would probably be as concerned about the health of their “clients” as some insurance companies are. But they couldn’t simply refuse to cover the overweight woman, I assume this program would be designed to cover absolutely everyone. Would this be the government’s wedge to open up the possibility of sweeping regulation designed to improve the nation’s health, and thus keep costs low? Would this be the justification they need to outlaw tobacco, alcohol, and fatty foods, essentially to criminalize unhealthy behaviours?
Of course, perhaps government would take the attitude of the insurance carrier in the large office you describe, and simply not care too much about an individual’s health. Still, I find it hard to believe they would ignore larger health trends in the public. The states already make arguments along those lines routinely, citing the health care costs to the state as reasons for certain regulations and sin taxes.
At least now I can choose to be unhealthy and either pay ridiculous premiums or just remain uncovered. That option might disappear with nationalized health care.
pkbites, I think I addressed your point. Would some people be told “you suck, you die”? Well that’s the problem isn’t it. A certain percentage of the resources held by individuals in this country go towards providing medical care, and that percentage could be artificially increased by government confiscation of wealth, but there would still remain some finite number representing those resources. We simply don’t have the resources to provide everybody with everything.
And the marginal rate of return for expenditures on people above a certain age isn’t much. What is it that everyone is supposedly entitled to? Treatment until age 70? 80? 90? If a million bucks provide the medicine to prolong an 80-year-old’s life by one year, do they spend it? If it continues to escalate and yield diminishing returns, where do they stop? The fact is they’ll have to stop somewhere.
Right now, the market allocates resources naturally to those who have value to exchange for them, solving these problems for us. Under a nationalized system, there would presumably be government bureaucrats artificially allocating those resources, either randomly (through lottery), arbitrarily (through waiting list), or at worst for political reasons (extended care for this group with political pull, none for that group nobody likes.) Rather than survival being contingent on the ability to produce the means necessary to survive, an individual’s survival would be based on one of these artificial methods.
Who gets to decide? Right now bean counters are deciding that! And it doesn’t matter that the affected have full time jobs!
Many times they are causing grief not only to the patient but the doctors!
When the insurance that you thought was ok, suddenly decides a procedure was not covered: a relative recently had this happen to him: even tough the doctor and insurance approved the procedure, the insurance company said later (in a compressed form) “Just because we approve of a procedure doesn’t mean we will pay for it, if we decide later the doctor should not have done it.”!
It took a stern warning from the doc to settle the issue.
And RexDart, I don’t think the market is naturally solving this for us: I noticed you ignored the problem of jobs going overseas.
The idea that people “choose” whether to be economically productive/successful is debatable, surely. We are born with varying degrees of inate intelligence, opportunities, luck.
In the UK, where most people use a socialized health care system, health care has to be rationed (it’s free - so demand exceeds supply, as per basic economic theory). This means waiting lists for operations, etc. It also means that certain people have to be turned away. In practice, a 70 year old needing a kidney transplant will lose out to a 20 year old in the same position.
I don’t understand why jobs going overseas is a “problem”. If it’s more efficient to move those jobs overseas, and thus the costs of production are lowered, along with the ultimate cost to the consumer, I’d say that’s the market working as it’s supposed to. Maybe we here in the USA ought to realize that all the artificial constraints we place on market competition are starting to drive jobs away (though not yet on the scale of France, thank goodness.) And as for the high-tech jobs, maybe it’s time to shake up the education system, stop using public schools as a laboratory for social experiments, raise standards to start focusing on the brightest students rather than on the dimmest ones, and we’d be right back on top.
But hey, the character of a nation’s job market changes over time. America used to have mostly manufacturing jobs, now it’s alot of service industry jobs. Perhaps we’re in the midst of another shift.
And if you have a lag time while retraining to adapt to the new job market, well you can go a year without insurance. I haven’t had insurance in 3 years. My parents, and my two brothers still living with them, didn’t have it for well over a year until my dad recently found new employment. My brother broke his hand while they were without insurance, they just found a way to pay for it. The point of insurance is that the buyer is risk-averse and the provider is risk-neutral by virtue of having so many clients, insurance is a way to hedge your bets. You don’t automatically keel over and die when your health coverage lapses. Insurance is supposed to provide for contingencies, not day-to-day life.
Oh, I see you are one of those that in an emergency do jack up the insurance of others, check.
Not all families are the same Rexdart, or have the luck yours have.
Not having national health care is biting bigger companies also, but this time this bite is coming from the “unfair” fact that other industrialized nations have national health insurance:
We will immediately eliminate every neo-natal intensive care unit. After all - infants don’t work, they don’t contribute. For that matter, no healthcare whatsoever for anyone under 18 unless they have a job. They don’t work and they don’t contibute, right? If a four year old breaks his arm he can darn well pay for it himself! Why should someone else subsidize his recreational choices?
And the physically handicapped - why should a man with no arms and no legs feel entitled to healthcare. I mean, he doesn’t contibute, he doesn’t work, he’s costing somebody money.
And the mentally retarded - they just can’t contribute more than bagging groceries at the local supermarket, why spend any money on them?
Following your line of reasoning to its logical conclusion may be good, pure capitalism but some of us have more and ethical beliefs that it would run roughshod over.
Define “mortagaged the future”? What do you mean by that?
When Arthur Anderson went under thousands were out of work. I know two of them, who had, up until then, always paid their bills on time. Within a year they were both bankrupt - why should they suffer because those leading the company made mistakes? Oh, I know - 15 years ago when they were interviewing for the job they should have realized that in a decade and a half there would be a scandal and not hitched their horse to that buggy.
As it stands now, if the theif lands in jail he probably has BETTER health care coverage than you do.
Because he is a human being and supposedly we value human life and dignity.
But let’s do it your way - no health care coverage for anyone not working. Your baby gets meningitis? Too bad - he’s not working, he’s not contributing, he gets nothing. Your retired parents? They’re not working - if papa is having chest pains so sorry - hope you have money for the funeral.
Yes. Because making more money does not make you a better person, morally superior, or more deserving of life.
Same way I justifty feeding children. Hell, we should outlaw pregnancy - all those fetuses sucking the lifeblood of their mother, the little parasites…
Well, pk, I WORK! too, but I don’t receive health care benefits through my job. I’m one of two employees at a small non-profit that simply can’t afford to provide health benefits. Many full-time jobs, particularly in retail or food service don’t come with health benefits. When I worked as a temp, I qualified for benefits if I was on assignment for the agency for a continual 3 months. Which would have been great, except that given the nature of temp work, I often had 2 or 3 days between jobs.
Although I’m in favor of a national health care system, I’d settle for tax credits for people who purchase their own insurance. What I really resent is the assumption that people who don’t have a health care plan through work are lazy bums.
With the emergence of superbugs, new viruses like SARS etc., I think it’s just stupid not to provide health care to everyone. Especially considering that a lot of those who don’t have coverage are working in food or other service industries where they have the opportunity to spread their germs to as many people as possible.
It variable, if you are willing to pay waitng is not problem, also urgent operations are carried without much wait, the main problem in gettin a kidney transplant would be finding a donor (though I’m not sure if kidney transplants woiuld be classifed as ‘urgent’ as patients can live for extended periods of time using dialysis).
Where it can be really variable is general practice, for example I live in the most affluent area of my town and I know that I can get an appointment to see my GP within at most 48 hrs, but someone living over the other side of town would probably have to wait two weeks to see their GP.
Anyway, I still think a national healthcare system is much more preferable to the US health system as I don’t much like the idea that someone should die from lack of healthcare simply because they do not have enough money.
And many who work full time get NO healthcare. Wow, what a wonderful system :rolleyes:
Well, since we aren’t willing, as a society, to watch people die in the gutter when we have the knowledge to save them, in the end you already pay his health care, through the taxes that support the “free” care provided by hospitals and doctors.
Seems to me that in a national healthcare system it’s more honest in the sense that you can see that X amount of tax money is going to fund this activity.
How do you know the guy “screwed up his life”? Not every homeless guy is homeless because of drugs or alcohol. There are several thousand people in Southern California even as we speak who have lost their homes in recent weeks, own only the clothes on their back, and a number of them have lost employement because their place of employment burned down. How have those people “screwed up”? How are they “failures”?
You do NOT have total control over your life, even when you think you do. Bad things can and do happen to good people, hard working people, wealthy people… I would agree that those who are capable of contributing should carry their share of the burden, but it is in no one’s interest to abadon the weak and the helpless because YOU might be in that category one day.
Given recent events in Florida, I think it more likely that under a national system disconnecting the hopeless cases from life support would be much more difficult than convincing the government to pay for care.
I have to ask - who defines “failure”? You? What is your definition?
I would expect that, in some cases, care could be denied. I mean, all the money in the world won’t buy an active alcoholic a liver transplant here in the US. Organ transplants are not performed in 95 year old people. Even in a free market system there are limits on care, through both law and professional ethics.
I would expect that under a national system a certain basic level of care is guaranteed, but if you want to pay additionally you could, and perhaps have more choice in doctors or a private room at a hospital or whatever.
The problem is that unemployed consumers can’t buy anything. If you ship high-paying jobs overseas, and either don’t create new jobs or only jobs of lesser pay then the consumers can’t afford to buy the cheaper stuff you’re making overseas. Then you have retailers complaining that sales are down.
That’s also the problem with using “tax credits” to fund health care. If you have no income you pay no taxes, therefore you have no tax credits and no means to buy health insurance. So you’d still have a massive pool of the uninsured.
Henry Ford was considered nuts in the early 1900 for paying his workers the (at the time) incredible sum of $5 a day. But by doing so, they were able to buy what they were making, as well as houses, food, trips, clothes, and lots of other stuff - which benefited not just Mr. Ford but all the other businesses in the area. That is also the market at work.
Oh, like the computer technician jobs that are now being outsourced to India? If you export the factory work, then export the technical jobs… what is left for people to do? Service jobs require people outside of the service industries to be able to make money to pay for the services provided. But if there are no jobs other than service jobs… where does the money to drive the economy come from?
Perhaps we’re doing something really stupid. OK, we move all the manufacturing jobs overseas - then our President says something jack stupid and offends the overseas people, who then decide to sell their cars and toasters and other material objects to someone else, like Europe or Africa. Then what? It’s STUPID to eliminate entire cateogories of work.
Maybe you can - but not everyone. There’s a man down the road from me, good capitalist, owns his own business. He’s also had a kidney transplant. Without insurance he’d have to pay the $12k or so a year to keep him alive out of his own pocket. If he’s unemployed (Maybe his building is struck by lightening and burns down) he doesn’t have the money to have either insurance or pay for his medication. Without his medication he will die. The only alternative he’d have would be to get “free” care, specifically dialysis, paid for by the taxpayers, in the end. This guy is not a “loser”, or “failure”, he doesn’t drink or do drugs, but without medical care he will die. In much less than a year.
Likewise, if Type 1 diabetics do not receive their insulin they will die. Ditto for severe asthma, heart disease (especially for birth-defect heart problems and inherited disorders completely independent of lifestyle) and many others.
Sure, you can go without insurance - but there are many, many people who can’t go without medical care. If they don’t have insurance, YOUR taxes are helping to pay for it. So, in a sense, we already have a “national healthcare system” but it’s haphazard and incredibily inefficient and provides very poor healthcare.
A hand fracture is a relatively minor thing. What if your brother had been severly burned? Could your family pay for the 1 to 2 million such an injury could cost. What if you lost a leg in a car accident? Could you pay the 20-30k hospital stay, the 15k for a very basic prosthesis, the cost of rehabilitation? That’s easily 50k - could you “find a way”? What if you ate some bad mushrooms (purchased at a grocery store, let’s say) and they destroyed your liver - could you “find a way” to pay for the organ transplant, and the 15-20k per year for the medicines you will then have to take everyday for the rest of your life?
I’m glad your family is healthy and I hope they stay that way. But one bad car accident, one bad house fire, one bad circumstance and you will be financially wiped out and at the mercy of the kindness of strangers.
Western industrial nations with nationalized health care typically spend less as a proportion of GDP on health care and typically have as good or better health services as compared to the US, measured by such things as infant mortality and life expectancy (though granted such comparisons aren’t perfect indicators). Obviously, there are some issues with some particular implementations of national health care (though I think that many of the problems Americans hear about are blown out of proportion by people ideologically opposed to national health care), but many systems are working quite adequately by any reasonable standard. Careful study of such things ought to result in a quite workable model.
The haphazard patchwork of health coverage in the US is extremely inefficient, as many who are not insured, or are insured poorly, will avoid seeking medical attention when simple and inexpensive treatment would suffice, and instead show up two weeks later at the ER in dire health needing far more expensive treatment. Generally they will get this treatment, and someone somewhere pays - likely you already, in spite of the lack of nationalized health care, in the form of higher premiums, etc. If national health care were introduced, you would probably pay less for the medical care of those less fortunate than yourself than you currently do, not more.
Insofar as it is inevitable that someone at a desk somewhere has some say in how I might be treated, I much, much prefer that person be a government bureaucrat than a bean-counter at an insurance company. The civil servant technically works for me, and her incentive is to ensure that the delivery of health services will be satisfactory to the public. The bean-counter’s incentive is merely to satisfy the shareholders, who are only interested in stock prices - ultimately the bottom line is all that matters.
Same one as you, I expect. I have no illusions about the benevolence of civil servants, but their incentive structure differs from that of insurance execs, who form the relevant comparison class here. Are you honestly suggesting that you’d prefer to put your life in the hands of the latter?
Do you really not believe that the incentive for the civil servant is to ensure that delivery of health services will be satisfactory to the public? How do you think the system works? If people are pissed off at the state of health care, what do they do? Fire off nasty letters to their elected representatives, and vote them out of office, that’s what. And what do the elected representatives do to forestall such things? Axe the bureaucrats working for them in order to appear like they’re doing something about the problem, that’s what. Granted, there are any number of ways for things to go awry in the process, but it’s a damn sight more likely to work out roughly in this fashion than it is for some invisible hand to move an insurance exec to compassion.
If you have a choice in your insurance carrier (given that most people get their insurance through their employer, this is a big IF), then the insurance company has WAY more incentive to keep you happy than some faceless bureaucrat.
Actually, many employers do offer their employees a choice among several different plans, and even different companies…
My 18 year old works part-time and he was able to find insurance on his own. Why can’t others? And if they can’t, how is that our problem?
Why should my tax dollars pay for something others should provide for themselves? I am not your keeper.
Let me cite another example, this one hits close to home for me: My brother-in-law is what I call a “voluntary loser”. All his problems in life were/are his own doing. His entire life he’s been a bum. Rarely worked, sponged off of others, partied, drank, drugs, landed in jail a few times, made several women pregnant and didn’t pay support (because he wouldn’t work) etc… A real asshole. Disappointing seeing he came from a very good family. He’s kicked around his whole life, and contributed nothing to our society. All he’s ever done is take, take, take. What an embarrassment to his family.
And now, at 42, he’s sick. No medical coverage. Should there be a national health care system that would cover even guys like this? Someone who has done nothing but suck off the system his entire life. Whenever I hear some Pol spewing about health care in America, I want to know why some people should get something for nothing?
My image of nationalized medicine is, it will turn into the same dependency mess that the welfare system turned into. How will that solve anything, and how is that better than what we have now?