And yet somehow FedEx and UPS are still around, and are many people’s perferred carrier…
I love that people believe in capitalism. However corporations do not. The HC companies have consolidated over and over wiping out competition. The simply set prices. Efficiency and competition are good for the consumer. Companies do not want to fight for customers and cut prices. They will do everything they can to eliminate it. The government will not limit prices for HC companies. They will just do it better and more efficiently. Medicare has customer service at the top of its to do list. It is not on private companies thoughts at all. They are fighting the premium payers to avoid paying what they are paid to provide. It would not be difficult to defeat their twisted business model.Who would want to stay with a company that wants to cheat the customers?
Isn’t that the truth. The Republicans have claimed that any public option would be inefficient yet, in the same breath, they also claim that it’ll also kill private insurance.
Those are only mutually exclusive if you ignore the idea of negative externalities. Since the whole point of single payer health care is to convert internalised costs into negative externalities by socialising the costs of health care, that’s not a reasonable assumption.
For most people, with health insurance plans at least partially paid for by their employers, the cost of health care is already socialized. What the proposals do is to socialize it for the rest of the public. A single payer plan is not free (in the sense that people would pay for it like today) or does it necessarily eliminate the need for co-pays. In the past years many insurance plans have greatly increased the percentage that patients pay - can you demonstrate that this has slowed the rise in health care expense or use?
Just out of curiosity, what’s the cost of the private plan? Is it something that is available only to, say, the upper middle class?
And, a related question - is there anger in the UK about how “the rich” (or whoever) get special perks out of an additional private plan, and the poor should be treated the same?
No anger whatsoever.
BUPA comprehensive (but with the usual host of ‘exemptions’) costs a couple of grand or so a year. But BUPA runs in a symbiotic relationship with the NHS, using NHS trained staff working in a private capacity and NHS facilities as well as their own.
Serious conditions exempt from their cover are shifted to the NHS with its better facilities.
Therefore private health cover is not too expensive but not directly comparable in costs to the USA.
It is undoubtedly true that the US system is best for the very well off but the British simply find it incomprehensible that a country as wealthy as the USA refuses to provide universal health care. To us it looks like you pay more for less and the thought that medical costs can cause bankruptcy is shocking.
“Will a public option kill private insurance?”
I certainly hope so, but unfortunately not very quickly.
Insurance is the largest unproductive sector of the economy. Their only tangible product is fine print and plenty of it.
But as Rysto closed by saying, surely the way to maintain the same number of units sold is to maintain the same price? It’s not like the “demand curve” will change in response to the change in the suppliers’ fixed costs.
That ignores the supply side of the supply/demand curve. If fixed costs are higher for the market as a whole, then the supply curve is higher, and there’s less supply available at the old price, which pushes the point at which these curves intersect to a higher level.
To use a hypothetical extreme example, suppose the fixed costs involved in opening a individual medical practice were increased to $5 million per year. It’s obvious that no doctors would stay in business charging current fees, and the increased costs would need to be passed along to the purchasers. Obviously nothing as extreme as that is being considered here, but I would suggest that all mathematical and economic arguments should be tested against this situation.
(In addition, demand for medical is relatively price insensitive, partially due to its being mostly covered by insurance arrangements.)
That has been it’s intent!
I offer as evidence quotes from its proponents
Every one listed above is NOT thinking!!!
Every one listed above is NOT elucidating!!!
Every one listed above is NOT simplifying!!!
Every one listed above is on a voyage to no where!!!
I’d wager that everybody here knows someone who has been dicked with by the US government!!!
TheMadHun is simply wrong!
Insurance companies paid out billions for losses in Katrina, 9/11, other hurricanes. In order to pay out those billions insurance companies work everyday investing money received in premiums. Profits for insurance companies will be way down for 2008 and 2009 due to stock market and marxist-fascist-socialist-stalinist-poopypants lunitics screwing around in the mortgage backed securities market
Simplicio is simply wrong!
The USPS made a decision not to compete with FEDX and UPS as they basically are hand tied by their mandate.
Basically Obama’s claim that UPS and FEDEX do compete is groundless. And offering that relationship as evidence of the fate of private insurance to compete is non-sequiter, (argument where its conclusion does not follow from its premises)
The USPS having a monopoly, cannot provide universal service obligation of affordable and uniform pricing so therefore did grant to UPS and FEDEX the right to provide service. Essentially the USPS purposely intends not to be competitive and really can’t be competitive based on its universal service obligation.
Further, with years of understanding, Congress does not provide funds for either general operations or capital investments of the USPS. The United States Postal Service (USPS) is funded almost entirely by Postal rate payers rather than tax payers. Congress has funded loans to the USPS to satisfy cash flow obligations but with rate increases and diligence in its operations has paid these back.
This is not to say that the inclinations of Congress might be otherwise in the future. So McCaskill is wrong to compare National health care funding with the USPS funding. There is a clear desire by congress to fund certain retiree health care premiums on page 65 of the house bill. Unions and the SEIU would qualify for such subsidies. There is an intent by congress for the National Health care to compete with private insurance to reduce costs. And unless funding to the national health care insurance is restricted as with the USPS then the power of the unlimited ability of the federal government to tax and borrow, and spend then private insurance will not be able to compete.
Also the 21 million employee government and 1 million employee USPS for that matter and the millions in labor unions will reduce the customer base for private insurance thereby limiting the ability of private insurance to spread the loss burden out among the largest pool of insured to be able to deal with calamities that befall a small subset of that pool.
The private insurers will most assuredly slowly but surely go broke and with a government insurance option there will be no bailout!!! In the long term, the government insurance option then becomes a single payer monopoly!!!
Voyager is simply wrong!
Voyager attempted to evoke emotional jealousy to create scapegoats for problems with todays American Health care costs and engender support for Health care reform. Attacking profits and CEO compensation is direct from the Carl Marx play book. Voyager , therefore, is a socialist and Marxist.
These profits and salaries are the carrots that motivate excellence in America’s private Health Care system as it does in any capitalistic endeavor. Voyager and the government wish to eliminate the smartest people in management and in the investor community so that a government run health care plan will appear the best that can be obtained.
It is preposterous notion that Profits and CEO compensation are the reason for high health care costs!
Law enforcement officials said it’s just one of the many widespread, organized and lucrative schemes to bilk Medicare out of an estimated $60 billion dollars a year and FY 2006 - Medicare budget is $325 billion. and the US GDP is $13.48 trillion and Health care is 17% GDP.
$12 billion profit is 0.5% of health care costs.
$60 billion Fraud is 18.4% of Medicare health care costs.
Profit and CEO compensation is a clear indication that fraud is not a cost factor in private insurance. Fraudulent insurance claims reduce profit and reduced profit reduces CEO compensation.
The government needs to get its own health care system under control before it can have any legitimacy to chastise the private health care industry!!!
And Voyager thinks that his car body and that thing that is keeping up his head are comparable!!!
The evidence is in athelas statement. 89% K-12 students use the Public school option. A Public health insurance option will eliminate 89% of the private insurance companies!!! That means that 209,000 that now work for the private insurance companies would have to become federal employees to administer public insurance to provide public oversight and management of the health care industry. Data is form here.
Employers compete in the industry for talent. Good talent will make or break an Employer. Employers offer differing health care plans just to attract the best talent. If you are good at what you do find a new employer. If not then get better at what you do then find a new employer! Mediocrity is a bitch.
There exists a government plan for those who cannot afford insurance. Fix the existing government plan by ending rampant fraud. Fraud does not exist in the private plans that is one reason why they have big payrolls and have a profit. Efficiency of the private plans is not broken so don’t fix it. Leave my insurance alone!!!
Tort reform has reduced health care costs!
“Evidence from the states indicates that premiums for malpractice insurance are lower when tort liability is restricted than they would be otherwise. But even large savings in premiums can have only a small direct impact on health care spending–private or governmental–because malpractice costs account for less than 2 percent of that spending”
"Research suggests that the noneconomic caps led to a “large decline in losses for both general and medical malpractice insurance”; “increased profitability for insurers”
“According to a recent article in the New York Times, physicians are flooding into Texas because of the state’s recent approval of a constitutional amendment limiting medical malpractice awards. Further, physicians noticed that the state of Texas experienced an average 21.3% decrease in medical malpractice insurance premiumsduring the four years following the tort reform legislation.”
If politicians would do what we pay them to do, understand benefits of tort reform and police Medicare, We the People would save 5.2% on total health care costs today!!!
Tort reform of 2% + Medicare fraud of 3.2% = 5.2% total cost reduction.
5.2% of $2.291 trillion would be $119 billion dollars of savings
And if Medicare fraud was eliminated then the people denied needed health care in public sector would be reduced from 6.4% to the 4.4% enjoyed by private insurance purchasers. **This one piece of data, from the governments own statistics collection agency, reveals that the government’s (Obama) claim that a government run health care system would reduce the number of people denied medical service is false.
**
Fotheringay-Phipps is actually being more subtly manipulative than that.
In a competitive market, it’s true that Rysto’s calculus doesn’t actually work. Or rather, it works only to determine the optimum output of a single firm, not considering the market as a whole. Firms are price takers in that system, and F-P is actually correct to point out that the firms put out of business by a large increase in fixed costs would shift the market supply curve, which would raise market price and decrease market quantity. (Each individual firm would be operating at a higher volume, but the market as a whole would produce less.)
But of course, the insurance industry is not competitive. Barriers to entry are high, and many insurance markets are provided by monopolies or near-monopolies. More competition could do a world of good with such a market structure. This is why the only arguments against a public plan are ideological hypotheticals about the government boogity-boogity-boo. Which is ridiculous, given the craptacular nature of our current system. Even a somewhat bloated government system like the UK’s is fantastically more efficient than what we have right now.
You seem to have lost track of what this discussion is about.
We are not discussing the economics of the insurance industry. We are discussing the economics of health care providers, e.g. doctors, hospitals, labs etc. The question is whether an increase in their costs will ultimately be passed on to health care consumers.
My position, again, was that if the government forces these providers to accept a lower level of reimbursement from a government plan, this represents a cost that would be passed on to others whose fees were not being regulated.
That’s potentially true, although the argument as you previously laid it out is a little rough. You’re still relying on a “market supply”, which is a hazy concept for health care providers, who tend in operate in somewhat non-competitive conditions. But the gist is at least clear.
If the system is designed to be unfair, then the system won’t be fair. Okay, then. But for those of us who don’t have an ideological compulsion to believe in inevitable unfairness, this isn’t especially convincing.
The insurance companies suck 30 to 35 percent of the healtcare costs and provide nothing…unless you believe fighting their customers over coverage and fighting the hospitals and doctors is valuable .