Posted on 03/14/2013 8:11:08 AM PDT by ksen
Pure single payer as in Britain is a nightmare.
Maybe I should have worded my OP a bit differently because I did have the French system in mind when I posted it.
Hugo Chavez didn't, and now he's dead...Coincidence? I think not.
When you open the can that contains the worms of our tax code with the idea of replacing red wrigglers with night crawlers, the spending adicted in Washington are going the merely add the night crawlers and then keep the red wrigglers.
They aren’t fishing — they are baiting a trot line with snag hooks to snag and catch wholesale all they can.
Until the intention of spending without budgetary restraint is checked, the methods of feeding the revenue stream should not be adjusted as the later will increase with nothing being cone on the former.
No, Government has been dictating to insurance companies for many years, telling them what they have to do, that is why we have the problem to begin with as with every thing the Government touches which is every thing.
The question is NOT about health care.
The question IS about SINGLE-PAYER.
Single-payer healthcare
- (your health needs are managed and delivered by the SINGLE-PAYER).
Single-payer foodcare
- (your food needs are managed and delivered by the SINGLE-PAYER). [maybe Bloomburg will be made the food czar!]
Single-payer energycare
- (your energy needs are managed and delivered by the SINGLE-PAYER).
Single-payer housing
- (your housing needs are managed and delivered by the SINGLE-PAYER).
Wake-up, Ken. Before its too late.
no...
obamascare is set-up for single-payer and I’m surprised he didn’t push that evelope
Look at medicare and medicaid if you want to see what a single payer system would look like under the present legal climate. Providers being paid pennies on the dollar for their services is the only way they can claim to save money. The only way to lower medical costs are to get both the government and the lawyers the hell out of it.
Having power of attorney of an elder relative, I can assure you that the problem I see is the physician overscheduling every darn test and procedure possible. (And the ensuing anxiety such testing causes...) Surely there is a large gray area between death panels and spending tens of thousands on grandma with very little benefit for the money spent.
The waste I have seen with this one relative is shocking. And the overmedication. Ugh A 90 year old on tamoxifen for stage 0 (DCIS) cancer? Seriously?
No. In my opinion, the goal of the health care system is to provide health care.
So I want a system that provides superior care. My goal is to have the best health care in the world. I live in a rich country, so we can afford to pay more for that privilege.
My second goal is to make health care competitive on both the care and cost fronts. No more price -fixing by large insurance conglmerates.
To do that, we need to go back to people being in charge of either paying for their own health care, or at least individually responsible for picking their health insurance, like they do for their homeowners, car, and life insurance.
That way, the insurance companies have to compete with each other by offering superior insurance at a cheap rate; right now they work on providing the best illusion of “insurance” at the cheapest rate to COMPANIES, who are looking to retain employees and keep costs low. It’s a triangle which obscures the market forces that would otherwise be in play.
A single-payer plan removes all incentives for some providers to do better than others; it prevents me from shopping around for the best provider regardless of cost; it keeps me from getting a level of insurance commensurate with the money I have to spend to get the best health care.
And since I like “easy”, I might well pay a good deal more for the privilege of getting better access, of not having to do a lot of paperwork, or not paying deductables. Or, I might decide to be frugal, and get a catastrophic care policy and then choose my health care providers for what is cheapest, and use the internet to figure out if I need better care.
Single-payer means my provider has no incentive of being better than the guy down the street, if it costs more. He’ll get the same money anyway. He’ll want to minimize face time so he can see more patients, and then he’ll win the business of the single-provider insurance by lowering the cost.
And of course, the single-provider will be government, who will make me pay more or less based on how rich I am, so I’ll be subsidizing worthless lazy people.
Even if it was cheap AND provided the best care, the answer is no. It’s morally wrong for the government to forcibly take from one and give to another, even if it’s really efficient at doing it.
Bwahahahahahahahaha........congrats for trying to further those leftist lies of yours again........
Yep, he actually believes this, but then he thinks everyone is as short sighted and in to unreality as he is.
Whatever you do, don't get sick, because we can't afford that!!!
There are plenty of communist progressive countries that have your model system. How are they working out? If you like them so much wouldn't it make more sense to move there then to try to overthrow our system of government?
IF they can FIND a Doctor. That can be a difficult, if not impossible thing to do.
I’ve changed carriers before. I have yet to change gub’mnt agencies! They don’t allow you to do that
Check out this sample entry form to Obamacare, demonstrating once and for all, the speciousness that somehow the Department of Motor Vehicles approach (government bureaucracy in control) will streamline things and make them efficient. 21 fricking pages.....just to enter the program......think about that for a minute: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2996833/posts?page=1
I will say, though, there seem to be some right here who resent hc providers making a “living off” others’ misfortunes. Like it or not there is some correlation between market incentive and quality of care delivered. And don't forget about the bedrock of the American medical industry that historically separates it from all other countries: innovative products, techniques and methodologies. Think we'll see a whole lot of that under SP? Either you want all the trappings of Soviet style hc or you want the benefits of a traditonal, freer mkt approach. Can't have it both ways. Not that its delivery cannot or should not be improved upon.
Your best bet going forward is to utilize services outside the system on a concierge medicine basis to the fullest extent possible. Of course if you're already a Medicare/Medicaid subscriber, then you will encounter barriers(stateside).
Amazing how you have some left-bent website and its links, all ready to paste into your response. The methodology used to measure "efficiency" is meaningless, as well as the term, "basic research."
Being very close to a major pharma company, I can tell you have no idea how much is spent on funding clinical trials and drug development. And drug formularies still have to approve paying for those drugs, even if they are approved. Increasingly, if your newly-approved drug doesn't offer significant improvements over existing treatments--particularly off-patent treatments--as a drug company, you won't be profitable.
You don't hear seniors clamoring for medicare to be done away with and turned into block grants do you?
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