BG:
This sounds great…but when you start using that term “fixed cost”…there will have to be cost controls that go beyond just drugs…(things like futile “end-of-Life care”…demands for certain high-cost test…going to ER for colds because it was close…just to name but a few examples…)
And Americans have shown little tolerance for that.
Beyond drugs; what has been the suggestion for limiting other cost and over-usage?
[quote=“Mufasa, post:60, topic:230931”]
There you go; (as you often do); of making Straw-man Arguments based on things I neither said nor believe.[/quote]
Well you have stated that Obama was a good President and he did at least try to socialize healthcare. And you are all over this board talking about health care as if it is a right. So…
Then give me your alternative. I have heard nothing from you in that area.
It is you using a straw man argument Ha. I never once said bake sales and Church socials would solve the health care problem. AND you know it.
I will bet you right now that IT WILL NOT meet my criteria. The toothpaste is out of the tube. Can’t take stuff back once it’s been given. If you think so name one program your dem buddy’s have passed that has been taken away?
Well @Mufasa , I’m no rocket-surgeon… But in a free country couldn’t I buy into a cooperative that didn’t offer end of life care, addiction treatment, or any other service I deemed unworthy of my dollars as a healthcare consumer?
For anyone on this thread that worships at the feet of government run healthcare you need only read the link below. There are better ways to do this like deregulation and competition.
_"My health-care prejudices crumbled not in the classroom but on the way to one. On a subzero Winnipeg morning in 1997, I cut across the hospital emergency room to shave a few minutes off my frigid commute. Swinging open the door, I stepped into a nightmare: the ER overflowed with elderly people on stretchers, waiting for admission. Some, it turned out, had waited five days. _
The air stank with sweat and urine. Right then, I began to reconsider everything that I thought I knew about Canadian health care. I soon discovered that the problems went well beyond overcrowded ERs. Patients had to wait for practically any diagnostic test or procedure, such as the man with persistent pain from a hernia operation whom we referred to a pain clinic—with a three-year wait list; or the woman needing a sleep study to diagnose what seemed like sleep apnea, who faced a two-year delay; or the woman with breast cancer who needed to wait four months for radiation therapy, when the standard of care was four weeks."
We’re actually getting close to something resembling a discussion that might be worth having. Bravely soldiering on, BG. If we get a few more posts like this and can keep this out of “government healthcare” territory, this thread has hope yet.
I know this will fall on deaf ears, but here goes: Adopting single-payer does NOTHING to reduce COSTS. Who pays the bill does not affect how much the bill is.
Good discussion, BG.
Yes…but let’s take it a step further.
Your Cooperative will have to be associated with a Hospital. And for that Hospital to be viable; it will have to offer; Emergency/Trauma, Intensive and uninsured care. (Which are some of the highest cost care there is).
How does one defray those cost, so that your affiliated Hospital does not go under?
How does one differentiate…at the point of care…those that have purchased certain coverage’s and those that haven’t?
Let’s say you have paid for a policy that doesn’t cover rehab; and you or one of your family members is in a horrendous auto accident (I use this often, because it is not an unusual occurrence in the U.S); they make it through intensive care…but they require months of rehab.
Then what?
These are just some of the complexities of thinking there are “simple” answers to Health Care. (Not you specifically…and of course, we have Zeb’s answer to it all… BBQ’s and Bake Sales…)
You once again misrepresent my position.
It’s fun for you though, and since you cannot actually argue with the facts that I presented I guess you should keep up the clown show.
The US government has had its fingers in healthcare since Teddy Roosevelt was in the Oval Office. If you think you’ve seen free market healthcare in the USA you are either the oldest person alive or a retard.
The problem IS government involvement. Its the same cycle of degeneration: pay then failure, pay more leading to more failure, etc that we see in a host of policies of which any semi-conscious person knows about.
I’ll be fair, Zeb…because you piss me off royally when you make assumptions about me that aren’t true.
I believe in “taking care of my own” also…but I also know that unless I am a Billionaire (which I am not)…the ACTUAL cost of care in the U.S. (NOT what you pay in premiums), would bankrupt even a successful business man like yourself. (And I will go out on a limb and guess that you aren’t a Billionaire either…which I am also guessing is Obama’s fault too?..)
So the floor is yours.
How would you “take care of your own” in the case of catastrophic/intensive/cancer/rehab/emergency/hospital care?
I’m tired of peoples “Bumper Sticker/MEME” answers to complex problems…
You are spot on I am not a billionaire not even close and I never will be and that’s okay with me. I have worked very hard to get as far as I have as I grew up in a working class household. And I recall very well my parents scrimping and saving in order to put cloths on my back and food on the table. Why am I telling you this? Because I think you get the wrong idea when I encourage others to take care of themselves and their families. That doesn’t mean that I don’t want them to have affordable health care. It just means that it should not come from or have anything to do with the US Government.
As I said above Mufasa I think it would be wise to have a greater amount of competition for the buyers dollar. If more companies were involved that would also drive down prices so that the average American would find it affordable.
I simply do not want the federal government in charge of the health care system. I am not overly impressed with what they have done with the US Postal Service and other programs that they have run. The Federal Government is simply too large and tries to do too much they are ineffective and very wasteful.
Why can’t free markets solve the problem?
As a side note I pay for my employees to have health care and it is incredibly expensive. So much so that I had to raise prices. So, who is really paying for health care? In the end it is the consumer as costs are passed on.
On this we agree.
There is most likely a “place” for Government…but not in controlling the whole thing.
I think that Zep is the only poster here who actually wants this. I haven’t seen anyone else that advocates full government control of HC (we should also pause to laugh at the irony that Zep is simultaneously arguing for single payer while also railing against the FDA and its cozy relationship with Big Pharma…not sure how he can reconcile those two positions, really).
With that said, there is an option somewhere in the middle between “the federal government in charge of the health care system” and “the government having zero involvement in health care” - creation and maintenance of a government-sponsored option for a healthcare plan (not “free” healthcare, but a plan which people would have to enroll in and pay for), still allowing people to purchase their own (privately owned) insurance, doing so either through their employer or of their own accord.
Didn’t read the whole thread (it’s a Zep thread), but rather than asking who’s gonna pay for it, I think we should probably start by asking why it costs so much in the first place (hospitals charging $7 per alcohol prep pad; $1.50 per 325mg acetaminophen tablet, $84+ per bag of saline solution, $150+ for a CBC, etc.).
Again not a mensa candidate but here’s how I think it would go: The cooperatives would have to be large to reach economies of scale and they would buy commercial insurance on a B2B level. So when you pay in you’re paying last year’s average cost per insured (coop member) plus inflation. In your dues would be the cost for the coop to buy a large catastrophic umbrella on everyone. The actuaries could underwrite the whole pool at once. The doctors in the coop could possibly push wellness and discourage extra tests and such to push costs down.
I predict that it would be messy and coops would go out of business and care might suck at some. But that’s the free market, hopefully the crummy ones lose all their customers and go out of business.
Why I really like this model is that the insurance or government is an adjunct to the process, not the one controlling access and payments. The way I understand it:
Now: consumer->insurance->provider
Coop: consumer->provider->insurance
Eventually if you tried it in enough places, a paradigm that consistently works might emerge. Then you have franchises and end up with an Oligopoly with 4-5 major players.
I think running one like a mutual life insurance company could be very interesting. The patients own “shares” and are financially incentivised when costs are kept low.
That seems crazy until you trace the path of that item and all of the rigmarole required to obtain then administer it.
There are like 20 hands and a pile of paperwork that a single tablet passes through before it touches a patients tongue or before that swab gets ripped opened, dabbed for a moment, then thrown in the trash.
And yet, there’s that “oral administration fee” that gets tacked on for these pills, too. That’s the cost for the nurse to bring them over and hand them to you in a little cup.
I mean, it’s generic Tylenol. I can buy literally 1,200 of them for 10 bucks.
And they don’t swab just to swab. They’ll stick you with something too, and charge for that.
I mean, it’s an alcohol prep pad. I can buy literally 2,000 of them for 30 bucks.
For reference, I just bought a CBC through LEF for about 35 bucks. That included the physician’s order, the kit being mailed to me, the postage, and the lab fees.
And even if that’s true, 20 hands and a pile of paperwork being required to give someone a single tablet of an OTC painkiller isn’t exactly not crazy.