I have yet to see one good reason not to do what is done in Canada and a lot of Europe: a government-run single-payer system. Everybody acts like this is so mysterious. It isn't. We have successful examples to choose from by simply looking at every Western country in the world but our own.
I am not sure health care is an inalienable right. The question though seems different if phrased a different way. Should anyone be denied life-saving treatment based on their ability to pay? That's the question that needs to be debated. If a man is shot in the chest without health insurance, is a hospital obligated to do everything it can to save that man's life? If someone has a curable cancer but is poor - should they be allowed to live or die? How much does the right to life over rule our capitalist society? How is it that liberals and conservatives are at odds when it comes to abortion and life issures there and yet completely swap positions here?
I think screenings should be considered basic, especially for disease like BC that seem to be so lethal and common... of course there's a cost effectiveness matrix of conditions, their lethality and commonality, which would make it easier to deem certain things "basic" and others not.
btw, the reason i'm focusing on breast cancer is because of the issue of when women should get tests and how often. that became a hot topic in the overall debate on this bill.
I don't really believe in "inalienable rights." But, insofar as our government is a social contract between people for our mutual governance, I would like to include healthcare as something we promise to provide for one another.
One might say the right to life is a right to healthcare. Is it our responsibility to care for those who can't care for themselves? I'd say so. Is it our responsibility to care for those that won't care for themselves? I'd say no.
A decrease in innovation and quality. If you have the money, you have access to the best medical care here in the US. If you don't have the money, a growing group in this country, then you are better off in a government ran system.
Socialists do not care about innovation - in their r****ded, backwards minds real progress is not "progressive". Canada and a Europe leech off our medical advances, not to mention the wait times for MRIs etc.
No it is not. Health care is a privilege. No one owes me a damn thing, and I don't owe anyone a damn thing. No doubt that the system needs obvious reform, but socialized medicine is not the answer. The last thing we need is more bloated government bureaucracy.
Then never call 911 since nobody owes you police or fire protection. Kudos to you for your all-private school education too and especially for driving only on private streets that you paid for yourself. You must be really rich.
And, for the record, the "last" thing we need is a zillion dollar industry whose main earning strategy is denying care to people that need it.
Anything and everything I've done re: education has been paid for by me. Same with the rest with the taxes I (and you) pay. If you're anti-capitalist, fine. We're not going to agree. But the model is to create competition which leads to lower costs for the consumer.
but the health insurance industry has an anti trust exemption that does protect them from competition in different states.
I ask you a sincere question then - what is the answer? If your answer is, more privatzied and less regulated, you should be aware that health care economics is not like building widgets, due to issues with information, elasticity, etc, it's fundamentally not the kind of market that is going to come to efficient outcomes when left to its own devices. This in and of itself is not unusual, there are many industries/markets that have structural features that means the traditional invisible hand/laissez faire approach will lead to a worse outcome. This isn't really a controversial assertion...Kenneth Arrow (not exactly a liberal, in fact the opposite) wrote what most considered to be the definitive paper on this back in 1963. I mean that was almost 50 years ago. Any solution to efficient allocation of healthcare costs and benefits is going to involve some form of marketplace regulation, which you term generically to be "socialized". There's simply no alternative. It doesn't really help to advance the discussion when people automatically reject any form of health care regulation as socialist/marxist blah blah blah. Basically when they are doing that, they are basically rejecting every tenable solution.
