The Bomb Buried In Obamacare Explodes Today-Hallelujah!

Choice and competition, like any other industry.

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Believe it or not, I typically do get a check from my auto insurer (USAA) for unearned premium. I even got during a policy period during which I had a couple of claims (1 my fault, the other not).

 

Fantastic news - a textbook example of regulation adapting in an attempt to solve problem areas where free markets have failed.

 

No, before this bill passed health care insurance companies would not allow people with pre-existing conditions to purchase health insurance.

 

except you are empirically wrong. The way to cut cost is to say hey doctors you don't get to make 500k. Hey drug companies you don't get make 80% profit margins. That is what other countries do to contain costs. That is why every country spends less than us.

If you want a more free market approach you go to india and let all their doctors in for lower salaries. Most doctors here are already indian so that won't be much of a difference.

Drug companies are one of the biggest problem. Socialize the cost privatize the profits.

 

no one is stopping you from starting a company that does

 

how is the failure of private companies fantastic news?

 

There are so many things wrong with this. For one, the doctors salary is not what is driving health care cost through the rough. Also doctors deserve the high salary that they are paid for the work they do. You want to deregulate the quality control we have on physicians so there can be a free market approach to medicine? Seriously??

 

That company wouldn't make money which is why insurance companies never did it before. Health care was not always a right.

What you're suggesting is sacrificing health for profit. That was the system we had, and it wasn't right.

To act like it's reasonable to assume someone would start a company to insure pre-exsiting condition patients is ludicrous.

I prefer a more moral system.

 

Price ceilings create shortages by definition. Leads to rationed care and long waiting times and yes, death panels.



It's kind of annoying the OWS types who bleat about nonviolence don't understand the means by which we compel private companies to do what we tell them to, and have absolutely no qualms about it.

No argument here.

privatize both

 

we have, doesn't work

 

Compulsion, even to achieve utopian ends, is never moral.

 

That doesn't work in the medical industry for a huge number of reasons. For example, when you have a heart attack, you're not going to spend time checking out all your choices, get price quotes, etc. Also, the people paying for most insurance - employers - are not the beneficiaries of the product. So their agenda is different than would be in a free market environment.

Choice and competition might work in a system where you blow the whole thing up and eliminate employer-based insurance (something I'm in favor of), but neither party is particularly interested in that. You'd also have to have much more access to quality of service ratings as well as costs. And, of course, the result would be that poor people are limited to crappy quality care, which is something that I don't believe society would reasonably support.

 

A single payer system or govt. run health care would be preferable. But this is definitely a step in the right direction.

Major did a good job explaining the differences in the health care "market"

 

Eh maybe, but that doesn't mean it doesn't apply to non emergencies.

Their agenda is to attract employees with a satisfactory benefits package, (who are the beneficiaries of the product).

But we should eliminate the tax incentive for employer provided health care.

Paul Ryan is

So you're saying consumers have a demand going unfulfilled in the marketplace. I wonder if there is a mechanism which caters to that. My provider has an online system like the one you mentioned.

Crappy is relative.

 

So do we have to purchase our "rights" of speech, religion, and protest?
Oh no the right-wingers are coming!

 

Your view of the world is far too simplistic to accurately diagnose problems, let alone solve them.

It's like you're trying to fly a mission to Mars using nothing but an abacus.

 

People against socialized medicine are behind the ball in so many ways---

The only defensible argument for a pure market-oriented health care system is perhaps the innovation drive on patents, and I still haven't given up the ghost on a world of Jonah Salks.

Empirically speaking, if you look at the data, it just makes sense to have socialized medicine. America has the highest per capita health care costs in the world---it doesn't even come close, yet it has some of the worst OCED health care outcomes.

Couple that with the moral imperative of the 45,000 or so uninsured dying a year, and I'm not quite sure why people would defend such a system.

 

Because now that Republican/fiscal conservative economic ideology has fallen flat on its face for the last 12 years, they can't admit the older plans they originally proposed (and Obama is borrowing) has any merit.

Their current recourse is resorting to simplistic pre-high school economic models, plus bits and pieces of Rand, and super-glued with a blind faith in the gaps.

 

Neither is allowing people to die simply because they have committed the sin of being poor. National healthcare is inevitable, because most people don't want to be one catastrophic illness from being financially wiped out, nor do they want to waste precious time and energy trying to force their insurance company to uphold their end of the bargain, especially while they are critically ill.

I know it sucks when the public starts to look out for their own interest the same way insurance companies and banks do, but we'll learn to adapt.