Posted on 08/03/2009 1:58:55 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Throughout the heroic struggle in Congress to provide a "public option" in health insurance, one question never seems to get answered: Why are we so intent on protecting the private option?
The "public option," as followers of the debate know, is a government-sponsored health plan that would be available as an alternative to, and in competition with, the for-profit health insurance industry, otherwise known as the private option.
[...]
So it's proper to remind ourselves what that American way entails. For if the insurers have proved anything over the last 15 years as the health crisis has gathered speed like an avalanche roaring downhill, it's that they're part of the problem, not the solution.
The firms take billions of dollars out of the U.S. healthcare wallet as profits, while imposing enormous administrative costs on doctors, hospitals, employers and patients. They've introduced complexity into the system at every level. Your doctor has to fight them to get approval for the treatment he or she thinks is best for you. Your hospital has to fight them for approval for every day you're laid up. Then they have to fight them to get their bills paid, and you do too.
[...]
"The health insurance industry is bigger, richer and stronger, and it has a much tighter grip on our healthcare system," he said. The last thing they want is a government program set up as their competition.
The two largest insurers, WellPoint and UnitedHealth Group, each acquired 11 other insurers between 2000 and 2007. They now control a total of 67 million "covered lives" (that's customers in health insurance-speak).
This consolidation has produced functional monopolies in communities across America.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
The low “costs” of public funded healthcare today are passed along to those paying privately through cash and insurance options.
It is a lie to say that everyone will get those rates if we nationalize medicine.
The basic laws of economics are predicated on pricing and its relationship to changes in supply and demand. When the entity that pays the bills isn't the one that gets the service, then the whole system will eventually fall apart.
And the federal goobermint doesn’t strip out its own share of the “profit” from the programs it mismanages?
How many of the “education” dollars are stripped out before being apportioned back to the states WITH STIPULATIONS?
How much paperwork does the goobermint require for any of it’s insanely mismanaged programs?
Stripping the profit out of anything guarantees that you’ll have an inefficient, unresponsive and useless entitlement program that will never seek to fill the needs of the “customer”.
I would prefer to get the insurance companies out of the equation altogether.
Let consumers contract with doctors on a retainer basis, just as with lawyers. Medical firms will compete with each other on price, keeping prices down.
The “private” insurance market is so heavily regulated by both the federal and state governments that it’s hardly reasonable to describe it as “private”. Conservatives really should be pushing for truly private health insurance AND truly private hospitals. And for an end to federal meddling in the whole business by using tax incentives to coerce employers into providing “private” health insurance, which has led to an effective lack of choice for most people with private insurance, and has led to the insidious linkage between employment and health insurance.
Excellent points.
We already have massive bureaucracies involved in making health care decisions, they’re just private rather than public bureaucracies, and not necessarily better for being so.
GOVERNMENT screws up ANYTHING it gets into....and their is already too much GOVERNMENT IN HEALTHCARE....for heaven’s sake....in some states insurance companies don’t even offer policies anymore....BECAUSE THE GOVERNMENT said you have to OFFER AIDS coverage, and coverage for OTHER THINGS PEOPLE DO NOT WANT. We already have Government Healthcare.....now they just want to EXPAND IT!
“What’s so great about private health insurance?”
What’s so great about ANY alternative? Rationing? People dying while they wait for diagnostic testing? Triage that denies care to the critically ill? Everyone complains about the cost and availability of health care and assumes that the excellent quality of the service delivered now is invulnerable to endless bureaucratic tinkering. The alternative to what we have now is scarce, substandard care that would be universally available.
I don't know what the average profitability of these businesses are, but I greatly doubt it's more than 10% of sales. Government entities have repeatedly demonstrated an ability to fritter away significantly more than that thru inefficiencies.
imposing enormous administrative costs on doctors, hospitals, employers and patients. They've introduced complexity into the system at every level. Your doctor has to fight them to get approval for the treatment he or she thinks is best for you. Your hospital has to fight them for approval for every day you're laid up. Then they have to fight them to get their bills paid, and you do too.
The author's argument here is based not on showing why government health care will be provided more efficiently, but only in pointing out that private insurance creates huge inefficiencies. Which is true, but public health care is quite likely to be even more inefficient.
Ah, yes the Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae option. That is a large, expensive, politically connected( that did Raines get paid, 100mill for driving FM into the ground?)
I bet you can not wait to pay the health care of 30-40-50 million plus illegals! Yeah baby, come on north!
Bump!
what’s great is that you can buy it or not, depending on what suits you. The police won’t come and take you to jail if you don’t want it.
1) It's not GOVERNMENT health insurance.
Need any other reason?
I agree. Everyone should have a policy with a huge deductible to cover the big things, and pay for the routine stuff out of pocket, which is exactly how other kinds of insurance works.
Add tort reform to that and the “health care crisis” is solved.
If the gummint wants to get involved, they can underwrite the catastrophic care policies for the “poor” and leave the rest of us alone.
“Why are we so intent on protecting the private option?”
Because competition is healthy for the customers.
The current effort for health care reform is not about reform at all. It's about installing the socialist goal of a single payer system. Any examination of private health insurance must include the lack of accessibility, portability, right to freely associate, tort reform etc... and these must be done FIRST AND NOW. A single payer system will not lower costs and not reform healthcare.
Some states have excessive regulation and idiotic requirements that make insurance prohibitively expensive. And yet some states with a reputation for very expensive insurance policies also have some of the most solid insurance companies in the industry because of the very stringent regulations. I'll cite New York as a perfect case in point. An insurance company that meets the regulatory requirements of New York State can rightly tout itself as one of the most reputable, reliable insurance companies in the nation.
Private insurance currently allows the existence of ALL private practice, non-governmental physicians who are not salaried by a hospital or govt facilities. They are the only bastion against medicine by BUREAUCRATIC ALGORHYTHM ONLY. It is the last bastion of non-socialist or quasi-socialist (healthcare providers as insurance favored providers at discounted fees is partly socialist in intent) healthcare in a supposedly FREE society.
Obama intends to eliminate ALL private insurance. Only some doctors from private practice will be asked to participate in hospital related groups and comply completely with the mandated medical practice parameters.
Most private practice MDs.....will be gone.
Better the Devil I klnow.
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