Kreutz wrote:Taggure wrote: You know that only the ones that can pay like you and I will be supporting all the Freeloaders that think that healthcare is a Right not a Privilege. (Hey what is different then now? Oh I now we are mandated to under this law to pay for the Freeloaders)
But under the current system we do that now in the form of higher premiums (and taxes to support Medicare and Medicaid) due to what we in the biz call "uncompensated care"....you know, people not paying their bills?
To compensate for this, hospitals have to jack up their charges on everyone else, which in turn means insurers(be it third party or in the long run Medicare) pay more, which means we pay more.
Wasn't it Congress who made it mandatory? Yup, they have caused one huge mess here. Now they must treat people who they know won't pay and more importantly, don't really need ER services. It was a rare things for someone who actually needed real ER services to be turned down before the law was changed. Now, people go there expecting not to pay and for things which they should be seeing a normal doctor for.
Kreutz wrote:I too am a Veteran “Retired Air Force” and I have served 17 of my 21 years in overseas assignments and have a European wife. My wife can tell you the horror stories of the European "Free" Health system with tales from her mothers encounters as well as hers. If you like waiting for a year or so to be scheduled for a Hip Replacement or any other kind surgery then this is the health care model for you.
if I had a choice between waiting a year or going bankrupt, I'd rather wait the year.
Two can play that game. If I had the choice between being dead because I had to wait a year and being bankrupt, I'd rather be bankrupt.
zephyp wrote:Cost of malpractice insurance -- extremely expensive and can cost between 25 and 50% of a doctors earnings....so, I've heard
This is a huge problem! While our courts have failed us, it really is indicative of a larger change in attitudes about risk. American's use to accept a certain amount of risk so they could have freedom. Now, we want to feel free, but have no risk. We can not be a free people and have everyone else carry our risk. This is exactly what the debate over health care is about, do we retain the right to our bodies or do we "minimize" risk by becoming health care slaves? The irony of it all is that the government option doesn't really reduce the risk at all, it simply masks the risk which is always there.
zephyp wrote:Cost of medical education...can you say exorbitant
Another major issue but it applies to all higher education. This is just like the housing bubble. The government decided to make student loans cheap and easy which has allowed the educators to drive up the cost and not care. Tyranny of good intentions and all.
zephyp wrote:Cost of fancy medical equipment...
There isn't much you can do here, but there is some. The cost of some of these machines is astronomical because of all the testing they must go through before being approved for human use. You should see the number of EEs going into biomed and making big bucks designing failsafe after failsafe so these machines can't ever harm anyone. That level of design and qualification takes a lot of resources. I'm not saying that is bad, but perhaps offering more choices would be better...kind of like how we have a spread of quality in most markets (guns, cars, housing, etc.) E.g. car A is $2k cheaper, but only carries 3 stars while car B has 5, but also gets 4MPG less. The regulations on medical devices drive the costs way up.
Also, there is a question of availability. The use of the machine would be far less if we kept it running 24/7/365, but we don't. Lots of expansive machines sit idle in the US because was want over-provisioning to handle peak demand and reduce scheduling conflicts. If we were willing to wait several weeks for our turn in line before a test it could reduce the apparent cost of the machines. This is just like high-end manufacturing, if you aren't running the machine all of the time you can't afford it.
Being first always costs a bundle. R&D, prototypes, testing, etc., etc. To some extent first world countries will have to live with that cost in order to have the highest standard of living. Unless we want to stop progress, there isn't much we can do about that at all. Specifically as the specialized tools are needed by fewer and fewer people. I.e. we treat most common things fairly well, but still have a long way to go on specialized treatment.
ChicagoGuy wrote:But as a former service member that served more than 8 yrs overseas alone. I've seen many, many other countries and nations that just don't have this problem.
Yes, they can afford to do it better than we can because
we pay for their defense. Most of those countries are free loading off of our military so they can divert the money towards other "free" services. It only is a marginally sustainable system because they aren't paying for other services, which means to say their system collapses as soon as we quit funding it.
It is a simple calculation. As long as there is liberty there will be stratification. Simply put, liberty allows people to devote resources how they desire and the freedom to make good and bad choices. I devote a lot money towards guns, other people think that is stupid or crazy. However, they drive a Lexus and I drive a Honda. To each his own. As long as there is liberty to make our own choices there will be stratification of resources based on our decisions (i.e. how much money you have). Even then, as long as there is freedom, people will optimize their resources to acquire the most "happiness." I like guns, they may like shoes. This would be true even if we had the exact same amount of resources (money). Some people will choose to put their resources towards better health care, some towards a wardrobe, some towards a car, etc., etc.
Even in "flat" societies like communism, socialism, etc. there still is stratification...it just isn't many shades of gray, you either are special or you aren't. The great myth here is that we can have everything we want in health care. Simply put, there are some treatments which are too expensive to justify their use on me. I do without them or I must give something else up, just like I must do when deciding to buy a new gun. Every penny I spend on the new gun is a penny I can't spend elsewhere. This is exactly why the mandatory ER law is so bad. It allows people to allocate all of their health care resources towards Xbox, HD TVs, cars, housing, eating out, etc. and then get free health care when they need it. Many things in the ER don't actually need ER services.
ChicagoGuy wrote:While I'm not sure what the answer is. I'm not suggesting that forcing everyone to purchase healthcare is the answer either.
What other choices do you have? The problems we face today are mostly a result of wanting our cake and eating it too. We can either have the liberty to make our own choices and live with them (good or bad) or we can have the government take our resources by force and they also get to make the decisions. You can't have it both ways. Go read up on all of the previous health care reforms and you will see one common theme, the government has caused the issues we have today by trying a part liberty, part tyranny solutions. Every time the government attempts to regulate behavior where there is no ethical transgression we get unintended consequences.
ChicagoGuy wrote:But, I'd hope some would agree. SOMETHING different has to be done. To think if you or a loved one lost their job today. They could go broke if they had a serious accident after "COBRA" ran out (If they could even afford COBRA) just makes no sense. Think about it......many people pay and pay and pay for insurance. Many never use it. Then in an instant, at a low point an accident happens "the day after" job lose or missed payment. Then what? It just seems like a shity situation to me.
No, that is the whole concept of insurance. If they charged you almost as much or more than what the actual medical costs were (they have overhead) why would you ever buy insurance? Hmm, I can pay $2k a month for insurance or I can just suck it up and pay $8k a year in actual medical bills. They need people on the rolls who are not using "their fair share" in order to cover those who are using more. The idea is that while you likely will pay more in for the insurance option, you have the safety net if something really bad happens.
One of the problems with insurance is that people expect it to pay for "maintenance." Imagine how expensive your car insurance would be if they also had to cover oil changes, broken parts, etc. Insurance is a poor system to cover regular maintenance of a car or a human. It is really designed for those events which are a few sigmas outside the norm. You pay for it so if you have an accident you are covered, health insurance needs to return to being the same. However, the whole reason we expect it to cover everything goes way back to the Great Depression. The government, in their infinite wisdom, decided to put wage caps in place. Employers needed a way to compensate those employees who use to make wages over the cap or near to it. They accomplished this with benefits, particularly health care. Eventually the government decided again in their infinite wisdom to make those benefits tax beneficial to the employer so that more employers, besides those who had highly compensated employees, would offer some health care. Of course dumping all those people into employer run plans means that most people were unhappy with their insurer. I.e. what you want and what I want are two different things, but we both get the same insurance through our employer. That of course led the government to step in again and regulate the insurers to the nth degree. Remember, what your insurer did/does was because the government said they must. HMOs, PPO, etc. are their doing. Of course more government regulations also means that there more people working at insurance companies dealing with them and thus more overhead.
If you want to fix things this is what must be done. Liberty must be restored at all levels of health care. If you don't like that option than ultimately you will be left with a series of disappointments until you have no health care freedom.
