Kreutz wrote:No one is suggesting doctors work for free(though many do donate services of their own volition). The core reasoning behind "Obamacare" was increasing access to healthcare; not making it "free". Irregardless there will still be co-pays and deductibles.
There is a legitimate problem with access to care in this country, and the results which I mentioned before are a tangible negative in shifting ever increasing costs further onto us who do pay.
How do we have an access problem? Access is a word that Democrats made up because they wanted to redefine the issue, but it means the same thing.
Who is restricting or not allowing some people access to health care? Is anyone blocking the entrance to hospitals with armed guards like a certain Democratic governor did for schools? Nope. Is anyone being denied care because they are Black, Hispanic, White, Asian, etc? Nope. Who and how is access to health care being denied?
There are only two ways access is somewhat denied. The first it the ability to pay and the second is the government regulations. The government has already dealt with the unable to pay issue with disastrous results and now wants to double down. They also restrict and limit what is consider "health care" much to the benefit of "traditional" providers. The Obama health care bill doesn't address either of these "access" issues. Access is nothing more than a Democrat code word for can't afford.
You are correct though, there is no way to cover people who don't have access because they can't pay for the services rendered without negatively impacting the costs for those who do pay.
Kreutz wrote:I am moralizing it to some extent (as I believe healthcare is a right), but in reality hospitals and clinics would be more solvent if this were to happen. Solvency would also be increased by refusing care to illegals, which is not currently permissible unfortunately.
You don't have to create a massive bureaucracy to accomplish that. All you have to do is give hospitals back the liberty to deny care. Technically, it is a better solution because it has none of your government overhead and if an illegal needs care and the hospital wants to provide it as charity, they get care. Again, they caused the solvency problem by denying the liberty of hospitals to make their own decisions and now they want more power to "fix" it...yeah right.
I do find it interesting that you have no qualms about legislating your morality even though it requires restriction of liberty and ethical violations to implement, but take issue when say a Christian wants to implement theirs. You are the first person to cry foul when someone else wants to government to implement their morality, but yours is fine. Consistent much? The government should not be in the business of legislating morality no matter who's it is. It always fails.
I also find it interesting that you consider it moral to use force to make other humans do what you want them to do. That usually is consider unethical and immoral.
Kreutz wrote:Of course in the end government will foot the bill, which means we (or China) will. Again, this is a matter of priorities for fiscal spending; I consider health care as vital a national resource as infrastructure, you consider it a privilege. That is a moral argument and unresolvable.
The first flaw is that the federal government only has the ability to promote the general welfare, not provide for it like they can for national defense. If you look at the historical context of what promote meant it really was intended to keep the states from restricting it outside their boarders. E.g. the interstate commerce clause wasn't intended to restrict interstate commerce, but rather to keep the states from doing so.
Second, the resource is a flawed analogy. When health care is provided to me you can not use it which is very much unlike roads, etc. Public resources or infrastructure has always been things anyone can use, not services rendered to a private individual. It is bad enough to use force to build a road which everyone can use, but worse still to use force to make others provide a service to one person.
It isn't that I consider it a privilege so much as it is the basic laws regarding ethical human interaction an social cooperation prohibit your scheme from being successful. We created modern America by promoting incentive's for people to do things better of their own volition. That drove innovation and competition so that new things were created, bad ideas were eliminated efficiently, and costs came down so everyone could eventually afford the service or product. I can not create a better tomorrow by putting a gun to someones head. It's been tried and it never works.
The false narrative again is that we can continue to progress and have what we have today through force rather than incentives. You paint the picture of you can have health care and pay for it or you can have the government provide the same thing for less. The real world doesn't work that way. You can either have the health care for a high cost initially where only a few people can afford it or you can not have that care at all because there are no incentives to create the next best thing. You are mortgaging our future because you are satisfied with care today, I am not. I want treatments and technology we can't even imagine today that some genius will create because there is a reward for doing so. Yes, they will get rich off of doing it and it will cost a bloody fortune at first, but at least it exists at all. Your economics always ends up destroying that which it wishes to protect. Such is the flaw with communism, socialism, etc. They all remove the social incentives which promote progress.
Kreutz wrote:In all honesty...we can do it. Current payment methodologies do not encourage preventative care. Ergo we pay more for unnecessary care that could have been avoided altogether.
Ah, the old preventive care argument. Yes, who created those payment methodologies? Government did. They pushed them with tax law, they regulated them, they are their creation. The government aided by the law of unintended consequences created the model you hate so much. Why give them more power when they have already demonstrated their incompetence at the task? American's use to pay for preventative care out of pocket and we also had a lot more of it. The government pushing insurance as a tax advantaged benefit has caused a serious distortion in how American's use health care. More of the same can't fix it.
Kreutz wrote:There is merit in medical tort reform I admit, as "defensive medicine" is also a contributor to these unnecessary tests which raise costs higher.
Yes, and try getting insurance to pay for a cheaper, but not standard care alternative is like pulling teeth for the same reason. Case in point. The US has a higher death rate for infants and mothers than Europe does. However, most of Europe uses midwives to perform their births at home. Only if you are high risk or run into complications do you go to a European hospital for birthing. There are lots of studies which suggest causal reasons for this such as a lot of our deaths are due to infection. While a hospital is fairly clean, what does live there is very resistant to treatment. On the other hand a home is less clean, but contains the same germs that the mother has been exposed along with the baby for 9 months. However, in the US we tend to C-sections ASAP to avoid any birthing risks. While hospital birthing is significantly more expensive than a home/midwife birth, insurance companies don't like to pay for that care in the US because they listen to the hospitals and assume there is more risk despite the statistics saying otherwise.
C-sections are being used as defensive medicine. Also, there are some links to physiological issues with all the drugs we use during the birthing process. e.g. we suppress the dopamine(s) which are responsible for mother/child bonding post birth.
Kreutz wrote:Again, what you say is true, nothing is free. Its a question of allocating resources.
Yes, and force is always the least efficient way to allocate any resource. The whole concept of a free market allocation is based on efficiency. In fact, that is the whole point of economics! Economists want to know not only how resources are allocated and why, but how to do a better job. The combination of the price system and the free market are theoretically and practically the most efficient mechanisms for all resource allocations. Information theory prohibits a centralized allocation scheme from ever knowing enough information to make the correct allocations without piggy-backing on a price/market system. It's called economic calculation and socialism can't do it. That's old hat and was settled long before your or I were born...doesn't keep the socialist from making false claims anyways. I.e. if the people are ignorant to the economic calculation problem, then socialism and other central economic schemes look real good on paper.
Kreutz wrote:It can promote efficiency through its sheer size. If we gutted the special interests of say, big drug companies, our government could (gasp!) negotiate lower drug prices. Currently forbidden to do so, has been for ages.
Why do big drug companies have those special privileges? That's right, our government gave it to them in exchange for monies!
Size doesn't mean efficiency. Look at GM, they were huge, but were horribly inefficient. You have the causal relationship backwards. Size doesn't cause efficiency, efficiency causes growth at the expense of your competitors so that you become large. Try again.
Kreutz wrote:Our government is the only one in the world paying retail for drugs. Medicare would save boatloads if it could just use its size for bulk discounts, but due to special interests, it cannot.
It's always more government power with you statists isn't it? How about the government not be doing Medicare in the first place! It has no such authority to provide for the common good.
Kreutz wrote:Is that a free market solution? Probably, but I am not so ideologically hidebound as to have a knee jerk reaction when I consider one choice more efficient than the other.
It's the kind of free market solution the fake capitalist have pushed for years. Nothing is free when you force it and government can only force things. I.e. the government doesn't create freedom, it restricts it in certain key, but limited ways.
My free market viewpoint isn't out of knee jerking or ignorance. I would have thought you would know that by now.
Kreutz wrote:gunderwood wrote:The government model is far worse. It makes the choices for you and applies an "equal" standard. Everyone gets the same regardless if they want more or not. This promotes everyone wanting to get their "fair share" which always is the maximum of what the rules say they can take
.
Not really. I can only use Medicare as an example, but not all treatments are the same at all. The usual course of treatment for an ailment is most conservative tried first, getting progressively more invasive until "cured". Private insurers are identical as there is an incentive to save money by avoiding the moist expensive treatment. Your above assertion has no real world equivalent of forced "equal" care.
Not everyone on medicare for breast cancer gets a mastectomy after all. Least invasive is the way it is. For some its chemo and antineoplastic drugs, for some its a lumpectomy or a full on mastectomy is the previous two failed. Thats just good medicine and sound financially.
You completely missed the boat on this one. There are many ways to be equal and that isn't the one I meant. For example, being created equal and having different unalienable rights as the DOI states, is vastly different that government attempting to promote or provide equal outcomes.
Kreutz wrote:Medical folks that bill (doctors and hospitals) unlike salaried folks like nurses or phlebotomists aren't paid like that though, so the above example also has no real world example outside of the actual socialized medicine countries like England where the government sets a salary as the doctors are government employees.
Yes, in what is left of the free market they aren't, but it must come under the Obama system. Because Obamacare doesn't actually address the issue (my complaint and reason for bringing it up), people will be be disillusioned with it and wonder why it hasn't kept costs down (just like we have become for every previous reform bill which increased government control). At some point the politicians won't be able to demonize the insurance companies so they will find a new target. At some point the high salaries of the doctors and other medical professions will come under attack to promote the next round of government control and intervention. Just wait until when the people realize that their "access" hasn't gotten better because there is no such thing as a free lunch.
"Not to worry, I got this !!! " "Stand your ground. Don't fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here." Captain John Parker
