Maybe belongs in politics section and you can move it if needed but it is not really that serious of a thread. I think they should have everyone go in for a health examination and you are taxed on your lifestyle choices. Something like the base is $50 a month for someone who is at healthy weight, who does not smoke and can run/walk a mile in under 10 minutes. Smoking add $100 a month Moderately overweight add $50 a month obese add $100 a month. obese kids add $50 per month per kid. (seriously how f'd up do you have to be to let your children be obese). of course nobody would go for this because half of America is overweight, obese or smokes.
Yeah, screw freedom. Let's let the government penalize us for our lifestyle choices. Because that's exactly the point of taxes, right? Real health care reform involves re-assessing the role of "insurance". The average person should not need health insurance. Health insurance should only be used to pay for catastrophic events. There's no reason why a 10 minute doctor visit should cost thousands of dollars. Reform medical liability, allow virtually all drugs to be bought without a doctor's prescription, and allow health insurers to be more discriminatory as to who they will take into their coverage (thus having pools of low risk people with low premiums, and other pools of high risk people with high premiums).
I just think it sucks to be a healthy person and for health care to be so expensive when I try to take care of myself.
Yeah, that's why insurance companies should be able to deny people more freely. Then you and I could choose insurers who only deal with "low risk" people. The insurance industry has far too many rules, regulations, and barriers to entry. This, among other things, keeps it from truly being a free competitive market.
I can understand where Lee is coming from, but ultimately this will only make the problem worse. When people have less money, they resort to cheaper food, which is often less healthy. They also are more likely to become depressed and turn to substance abuse (which alcoholism and tobacco addiction is a part of) to cope. But that's not to say that there isn't a way to improve things. One of the great things about public schools is that the state does have complete authority to dictate how they run. That means they can eliminate all junk-food from schools, and require all students to participate in regular athletic activity. Most people who are fat don't spend their childhoods being skinny. The solution to the obesity problem really has to begin with how children are being brought up. The education system has (or should have) a huge influence on this. Of course there are medical reasons why some people are fat. But it can't be denied that the US has a far bigger obesity problem than the majority of developed countries, or that obesity levels in other countries are rising now as they accommodate American lifestyles into their own culture.
Everyone is personally responsible for being fat, nobody is personally responsible for being poor. The new authoritarian "progressive" mantra. I think people are, by and large, personally responsible for both.
Why should the average healthy person not need health insurance? The point of insurance is to minimize risk. Expressed with utility functions this means that, even if the $EV of purchasing insurance is $0, it still results in a +utility decision. Insurance companies are in a much better position to negotiate prices than individuals, which is why it is smart to go through them on matters of all magnitudes.
Hopefully we can use Ted Kennedy and Jesus Christ to push through UHC. Less hope, more audacity please.
Nolan's plan is awful. Virtually all drugs to be bought without a doctor's prescription? That's completely ridiculous. And I fail to see how allowing insurers to be more discriminatory will do anything to help the huge numbers of people who can't afford decent health insurance, especially since the poorer you are the more likely you are to be a higher risk. So that situation will end up with large numbers of very poor people having higher premiums than they currently do. I also don't see how it will address the equally large problem of insurers refusing to cover people who already have a policy. To say that the problems with the US healthcare system can be solved through less regulation is utterly laughable.
In the case of insurance markets, it isn't so much that the market CAN'T find a solution that works. It's just that the solution that the market finds is one that violates most people's sense of morality. If you believe in anything resembling an obligation to help - for example, saving a drowning kid if you can - then chances are you should not be satisfied with the current state of healthcare. There is serious doubt as to whether the market solution is optimal in insurance markets, since without government intervention there is no clean way around adverse selection. If you force everyone to get health care, insurance companies don't have to jump through a bunch of hoops to ensure that they aren't getting taken advantage of (i.e. you can think of the people who apply for your insurance as being statistically the same as the population as a whole).
my employer does blood health tests every year, if you do 'better' or stay 'well', you get a discount next year. $10 or so per month. enough to get people trying!
This article provides some information that debunks a number of arguments made on this forum about healthcare: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/21/AR2009082101778_pf.html
As several people have argued on several occasions, it's simply ridiculous to suggest that deregulating a system which is already weakly regulated compared to the healthcare systems of every other developed country would do anything to fix the problems with the current system.
Define "weakly regulated". Any and every regulation, regardless of how big or small has the potential for huge changes to the market equilibrium.
I simply mean the fact that the US insurance industry is for-profit, whereas no other health system in the western world exists for the purposes of making profit. In that sense it's weakly regulated because it allows healthcare providers to set profit, rather than the health of US citizens, as their motivating factor. Compared to the rest of the western world the US insurance industry is therefore weakly regulated.
Yes, but still regulated none-the-less. Profit motive provides incentive for innovation, cost-cutting, and providing a balance between high quality service and low prices for consumers (different value propositions for different companies/customers). Companies that do not meet customers needs or expectations will suffer and not be viable. The insinuation that somehow being "for profit" makes something bad or inefficient is completely misguided and wrong. The profit motive is the greatest force for progress in the world. The only way that force can be properly utilized/realized is in a completely free and competitive environment. That currently is not the case, so to pass judgment against free-market health care based off of the current system is wrong, since it does not currently exist.
The flaw in the current system is that insurance companies know that it's economically inefficient to insure everyone since some people will be more burdens than benefits. They set their premiums at the level that's most economically beneficial for them, and that means that a lot of people aren't covered. It also means that the company takes every chance it can to deny people care even when they have been covered, since that cuts costs. For your argument to be plausible you need to explain how in a truly free market (1) everyone would be covered and (2) you'd be able to avoid insurers refusing to treat whenever they can. Otherwise you can argue that in a truly free market situation not everyone would be covered, but that's okay since it's not the case that everyone should be covered. You seem to have taken this line a few times by saying that most people who can't afford insurance don't deserve it.
Holy crap.. [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKBa9K_vAm8"]YouTube - Town Hall Protesters - Aug 29 2009 Healthcare Debate[/ame]
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeXJNUIq3UM"]YouTube - Hispanic man refuses to speak English at Health care townhall[/ame] excellent IRL trolling. a tip of my turban to you, sir.
I have American friends who get absolutely insane prescriptions already, the diagnosis and then prescription of treatment for things like ADD which has no definite test is three times higher in the US than Europe so stuff like Ritalin is incredibly easy to get hold of. I've also seen codine, vicodin, amphetamines etc. carried by completely healthy people because they have either a very suspect diagnosis and/or money and/or a doctor who does what they are told which is unfortunately more prevalent in a system where doctors exist as businesses instead of a public service. In the UK a patient would find it very hard to move doctors without good reason and there is considerable peer review because all doctors work with colleagues therefore there isnt the same requirement to keep the patient happy and the doctor can do what is right for the patient like denying access to medication like antibiotics for a cold where an American doctor from my experience of talking to people would give the prescription just to keep their customers happy. I'm not saying other systems are perfect, anything but in the UK, but a medical system working for profit and as a business will not work for the simple reason that a doctor is the only person qualified to decide what is best for you and handing some of that control other to the public results in the medical professionals losing control. Getting rid of prescriptions and advertising drugs to patients directly is also a massive disaster waiting to happen, people are complete idiots when it comes to evidence based medicine and will try anything a commercial tells them despite there being no placebo based large scale trial to prove any benefit.
Yep, agreed on all points. I can't possibly understand why anyone would want to make it possible to buy 'virtually all' drugs without a prescription unless they blindly followed a free market ideology wherever it took them.
1 - the outcries of the freepers really show how skewed people in this country are. In countries like Iran, China, and Egypt, bloggers and others expressing their opinions can be jailed. In Russia and China the gov't can step in at any point and start to skim profits from big businesses. Sudan will free a pantslady but it won't stop killing the people of Darfur. Israelis are conscripted into an immoral war. It goes on and on and on. Over here, the government is working hard to improve the healthcare services provided to the public. In so many countries the government has it's boot on the people's throat... but here the government does something like this to make people's lives better and they get called fascists, socialists, and nazi's. Talk about first world problems. The issue is how people will get the best healthcare available in the world and people act like this. So goddamn spoiled! 2. I did not really like Obama's speech. Very cocky. He made some great arguments... in particular, he made a good case for why healthcare SHOULD be improved and what should be improved about it. But his actual proposal needs a lot of work and I feel like he didn't even acknowledge the compromises that will have to be made. He discretely mentioned that certain "high risk" people would be required to have health insurance, and that for people on the public option, certain examinations will be mandatory. This sounds wrong. What does that mean to the multitude of homeless? What does it mean to people with certain religious beliefs? Or the guy who wants to deal with his health problems his own way (non-Western medicine, for example?). This whole "team of doctors" thing is vague and more than a little scary. Second, when you're talking about the level of government involvement in the industry, you better address the elephant in the room... profits. As he rightly said, healthcare is 1/6 of the GDP. So what happens when you introduce this level of regulation? The insurance and healthcare companies have been able to generate huge profits, and inefficiency can put money in their pockets. I don't think it's right and I think we need to move past a corporate greed driven system, but you can't propose all this stuff without tackling that issue head on. You can't just gloss over the fact that multibillion dollar businesses will change completely. These companies employ many Americans and have strong lobbying ties to many politicians, and I think that a bill that makes them give up some of the pie probably won't go far. Fuck politics because in principle it shouldn't be about passing bills that are great for the corporate profits, but in practice it always is. Here we really don't know. Is this gonna hurt them? Or are things like the "government regulated insurance exchange" actually going to fill their pockets at our expense? Some pretty big questions were introduced and left unanswered. I really think that the reason why there is this republitard outrage is because industry aligned people have been incredibly successful at generating a hysteria that will protect their profits with the appearance of being for ethical/political reasons instead of the true monetary one.
Well, while I personally want UHC/"Medicare 4 All" since it's a lot cheaper than any of the other ideas, I like the idea of a "trigger," which at long last introduces regulations on the industry. If they don't compete for our business, then it is their fault if/when the public option is triggered.
Good post. To be honest I don't really see how a good system of healthcare provision can be profit driven. Unless that's addressed it's only papering over the cracks.
I agree with you and the fact that it exists in pretty good form elsewhere suggests it's possible. I'm mostly addressing the reality that it will take some changes for us to get from here to there, and that some of it has to come out of industry pockets since "reducing inefficiency" often means more time spent on prevention (low profit) and less on treatment (high profit). We're potentially talking about giving up a lot of industry profits at a time when the economy's already hurting, so I feel like this needs to be addressed in the most direct way possible. There is almost a healthcare bubble similar to the mortgage one. Instead of having lax lending standards and abundant capital you've got docs pushing for expensive treatment and ins. companies jacking up the premiums.
I think Obama's idea was pretty much spot on for what can be achieved. I believe it showed compromise and some forward thinking. I personally think a single payer system would be the best, but at least in Obama's plan we will have a non profit government option, that hopefully will open up a dialogue for a single payer option in the future. Also: I am tired of people who don't want reform. God, I hate you people. Fuck you all, you selfish, scared, ignorant ass holes. I hope you all get fired and then get cancer, and then are fucked. Or better yet, I hope you all get cancer while you have health insurance, and then get fucked by the scum bad insurance companies, and have to live out on the streets. That is all.
The funny thing is those ignorant freepers are all old farts anyway and will soon be on the mother of all government-run health systems, Medicare.
From a European point of view this debate is both highly entertaining and quite laughable. I do, however, understand the scepticism against state control. I believe we could learn a bit from this over here in Europe and particular in the Scandinavian countries where large parts of the population believe that state intervention is necessary in as many fields as possible and solely a positive thing. However, in this particular case it's beyond me that those who opposes a health care reform aren't receptive to rational arguments and that ideology means more to them. State health care is cheaper for society and getting a healthier populations simply means a competitive advantage in the long run. And that medicine could be acquired without prescription is simply a horrible thought. Even though I normally believe that people can decide what's best for them, it's not the case here.
I wish people were like that in the UK. Or at least, if they are like that, they would vote for people who believe that state intervention is necessary in as many fields as possible. I mean, it might be overkill, but it'd be better than what we have at present. The UK is moving closer and closer to the US all the time. It's just our politicians are far less overt in their 'fuck poor people! yay free market for the wealthy!' sentiment than they are in the US.
You really believe that? I agree that state intervention to a certain degree is necessary in most fields. It's just the uncritical view of the state that (some) people here have that bugs me. This is in my book exactly as damaging for "planning things" as not wanting any state intervention at all out of principle. If we for instance take a thing such as privatisation of former public tasks. Left-wingers are against it out of principle because they don't trust private firms as much as they trust the state. Right-wingers are out of principle for it because they believe it is more "right" that any task is carried out by private firms. For an outsider as me without those debates seem like a kindergarten because none of the sides are willing to listen to other sides arguments and none of them are willing to listen to rational arguments or to look at what is best in the given situation. However, I can't think of an area where the state doesn't play a role. It's more about the degree of state intervention really.
