National healthcare is a good thing - get rid of all these insurance scams.....my wife cut her finger, went to one of those small emergency clinics.... They are trying to charge $5k for looking at the finger and putting a band aid on it...the band aid tray was $2k.....I mean we have insurance but they are fighting this outrageous fee.... Healthcare should not be FOR PROFIT! DD
When you socialize risk and intertwine governmental regulations and funding, it creates these strange scenarios with inflated prices, differentiated pricing for different groups and the like. Take the fast food industry which is probably the most competitive field as we are all keenly aware of pricing differentials and that competitiveness has brought down prices net of inflation over the last 30 years. As has the prices in smartphones, televisions, clothing, internet access, cell phone service and virtually every very competitive that is not overly regulated. Yet healthcare has never been a free market and that quasi regulated scenario has allowed groups to oversee, regulate and forced standards on something which less regulation will ultimately drive competition and bring down prices. But there has to be differentiated models as everyone cannot eat at Ruth's Chris daily, drive a Mercedes and live in a mansion, other's must eat at Applebee's, drive a honda and live in a smaller house. When we try to have everyone receive equal service for unequal payments then we're going to achieve a collectively lower quality product at a higher cost.
CEO compensation is a red herring. There are maybe 1000 CEO's in the country who make big money, just as there are 400-500 NBA players that each make millions. They are for whatever reason considered the best and a finite resource and there is a very competitive market for them. They are usually only in that CEO position for 3-5 years, just as the average NBA career is about the same. It is a lot of money but these few thousand people out of over 300 million Americans are not going to make a dent. What is atrocious is the 9 of the 10 highest paid salaries in this country are Doctors. Even CEO's are only like 8 on the list and a Doctor makes that income virtually uninterrupted for 30+ years, whereas people work for 25-30 years and become a CEO for 3-5 years (nearly one out of a million as most companies global). So why are the 9 of 10 highest paid professions physicians? The unemployment rate for them is less than 1/2 of 1%, so they have a job for life making the most of any other profession by far and are one of the largest inputs in the health costs in this country? Government fiddling and regulatory power funded by lobbyists created a dire shortage of physicians that is driving up the cost of healthcare in this country and reducing the ability for rural and poor Americans to get access to healthcare. We solve that problem and healthcare costs decline significantly across the country as we have over a million Doctors in this country when we need 3 to 4 million which will dramatically lower their salaries but will improve healthcare across America.
It is not a Red Herring, HEALTHCARE should not be a business, it should be a right, our taxes should go towards keeping our citizens safe, providing them services, and keeping them healthy. Every other CIVILIZED country in the world has national healthcare - making it For Profit was a major mistake. DD
it can be both like food or school. the problem you have is you dont know how to create a healthcare entitlement without destroying the private market because you don't understand economics. Its why we end up with Obamacare.
I was always unsure if this POS legislation was designed to fail. If anyone believes it was designed to fail, they should be supporting a cause to prosecute the administration, much like everyone thinks Bush should be tried for war crimes. Liberals are very often naive in the unintended consequences of their actions, so its very hard to say. If liberals still think they have a chance to get single payer passed ... they are just as naive as ever.
Anyone want hold their breath until the GOP put forths anything they'd put to a vote on in Congress. Sabotaging the country is pretty pathetic.
Great sound bite. Except that the profit motive...as dirty a concept as that must seem to you...has brought forward the vast majority of progress in our history including in healthcare. Its flaws are inherent and your outrage is not completely misplaced...but ignoring the benefits it has produced is also silly. Or do you think all those canadians coming to the US for their health care is just a coincidence?
The AMA did a good job of serving their members. That is why getting into medschool is so hard. Even crappy med schools have like 5% acceptance rates.
What exactly do you want the Republicans to do? The liberals already "sabotaged" healthcare. You're only definition of an acceptable Republican policy is to fall in line with Democrats. Any plan, whether it has a D or an R beside it, that does not entail removing power from the insurance companies is pointless. This is why the public option is a failure coming out the door just like Obamacare. Right now the only policy that does this is repealing Obamacare. Repeal Obamacare. Let pre-existing conditions buy into medicare (re: Public Option).
Nothing in the world is free. All you get is higher taxes and fees then an inefficient re-allocation by the government and you lose personal choice. And if typical government bureaucracy is any indicator, it will be very inefficiently run, cost more and produce less like our public school system. It's never been a free system in the last 50 years. It's always been a highly regulated and government intertwined system. If government was out of healthcare the problem would fix itself very quickly. The government and private charity should have free hospitals for the veterans and then a lower standard for those who want free but very low quality healthcare.
I want Republicans to actually put forth plans that they can vote on in Congress. Otherwise, stop wasting time and sabotaging this country with their impotence.
I think people also forget ACA shored up Medicare, GOP have a plan for making medicare financially solvent?
middle ground and compromise usually just kicks the can down the road (three-fifths compromise, the Missouri compromise, etc.... )
When trade unions are given governmental power to restrict the number of their profession it is an abuse power. Its over-regulation that creates these silly monopolies, cartel economies and strange non-rational outcomes. Half the reason many of the Pharma companies were dragged in front of Congress recently was due to them taking advantage of a silly governmental rules allowing certain monopoly power in rare medications. Government bureaucrats make bad laws and give power to the wrong people and we as a population suffer. Healthcare is a prime example of that. We spend more per capita than virtually any country in the world on healthcare and education yet our ROI's are terrible.
There are alternatives to Obamacare plans that cost significantly less for the healthy. Email me for details
The supply is low for a reason. The primary reason is not some big AMA conspiracy, it's money like everything else. The number of seats in med schools is not arbitrarily hashed out in some dark room at the AMA headquarters. The two main drivers are funding and clinical volume. Funding is more an issue at in-state schools because the cost of educating medical students in incredibly high. In particular, Texas subsidizes each medical student around $51,000 per year (~$200k over four years) to bring the individual instate tuition to around $16-18k per person per year. At UTMB (~230 students) alone, that's $11.7m per year. Add in 5 other UT med schools, 2 Texas Tech programs, A&M, and Baylor (private but state-subsidized) and the amount that the state of Texas is shelling out is an extremely significant amount of money. Clinical volume is the other thing every single medical school and graduate medical education (residency) program has to account for. Simply put trainees that see less volume and less complex cases are more likely to be shitty doctors. Patients are the best teachers. Personally, I went to Galveston a few years after the hurricane and the clinical volume for 230 students was nothing. I can tell you I delivered a single baby (the absolute minimum) and nearly failed the OB-GYN rotation because I just hadn't seen enough different cases and different presentations of the same thing. -------------------------- Getting back to your stat though, that number is stupid. The AAMC reports about 50,000 people apply per year for around 20,000 seats in the first year of med school. By random chance you have 40% chance of getting in. If you apply for 3 application cycles, your % chance of getting in goes up to between 50-60% from what I recall. People who want to be doctors have a good chance of becoming one as long as they're not r****ded.
LOL. 3/5s compromise? So you aren't in favor of the House in Congress? Or you still mad they counted black people as 3/5 of a person? Or you mad the anti-federalists lost?
