No, what I am saying is that at this stage of the game, whether it is the correct thing to do or not, it is unfeasible to get rid of the private insurance companies. Its easy to say that the insurance companies are economically wasteful and that the money spent there would go to some other sector. But as great as that sounds as a business school scenario, it basically glosses over the real-life effects. In the region I live in, if the private insurance companies went away or were drastically curtailed, thousands of people in those companies and in companies that support them would lose thier jobs or see their salaries drastically curtailed. What do you think that would do to the areas real estate market or retail sector? It would be a disaster. Would other sectors of the economy benefit as a result and replace the jobs that were lost? Not necessarily. Your point ssumes that the new system would be more economically efficient than the current one, something that is not by any means guaranteed.
Your arguement is also dependent on the fact that private insurance is the major cost in driving up healthcare. I would aruge that hospitals being forced to care for uninsured patients and then being stiffed by medicare/medicaid and thus forcing everyone else to pay for those costs; or the myriad of compliance and regulatory requirements that the healthcare field has been forced to compy with have added as much, if not more, to the cost of healthcare in this country.
Citizens in every state in the country have mandated certain things of each other, and asked us each to pay for our own. I’m required to have a septic system at my house that meets certain criteria, for the general welfare of the public. I had to pay a profit-making company to install said system. I’m also required to innoculate my pets, mow my weeds, and drain and backfill stagnant ponds, all of which requires me to pay profit-making companies. I have no choice, I have to pay for it, and someone makes a profit on it. I’m not sqwakin’.
Furthermore, SS is not an insurance company. It is simply a way to take money from the younger generation to give to the older (and generally wealthier) generation. There is no way such a flawed system would be implemented today.
Nationalized health insurance? Nationalized insurance in general? Settle down, comrade! Next you’ll be saying the workers should own the factories. No, we need to keep America on the same track, if nothing else as a scientific control in the ongoing experiment that is the world. Contrast and compare, you see…
I’ve worked for Maryland’s state run auto insurer of last resort. It’s not pretty, in theory it could work better than it did and might in fact be better now but, when I was there the management and many of the employees were not of the same calibre as private industry.