Universal health care wouldn't be that bad if...

[constituent]

better yet, I can't find the link... but the PBS series AIR did an awesome story
on the way drug testing for the FDA plays out in real life...

if you can find that program, watch it and tell me if you think we can
expect more or less of that in the future if things stay the same
or move in the direction of "univeral healthcare"

worth watching.

 

[JosephTheLibertarian]

...we weren't trillions of dollars in debt.

What do you guys think?

Universal health care is better than what we currently suffer in.....

but not as good as a free market (open) health care "system"

that's my opinon

the way I see it:

We all suffer together in universal health care, not just the poor and a chunk of the middle class That's why people from other countries look down on the elitist system we have. They may not like their own (or may they know nothing else) but they look at ours and are glad for what they have, and none of them know of a free market system, they probably assume that's what we have. We have corporatism style health care... if you can produce for the corporations, you get your health care. Can not? You get nothing. You get cancer? You die. It's pretty simple. Doctors and patients are both enslaved by corporations. If you seen as a "valuable asset," you are covered. If you are not, well, better hope you don't get something like...cancer. Or good bye. This is not a free market system

 

[angelatc]

Universal care might be better for you, but it's not better for me.

Stop this "we" stuff.

 

[JosephTheLibertarian]

Universal care might be better for you, but it's not better for me.

Stop this "we" stuff.

Oh, you must be an elitist. You prefer corporatism over universal? I'd rather everyone suffer together than only the poor and middle class

 

[angelatc]

No, I also prefer a free market system. Did you see the article Stossel did about the effect of the WWII labor shortages being the reason that insurance was even originally offered as a benefit to the labor force? I made that same observation when I wrote my sophomore 10-page essay on the very same topic and that was 20 or so years ago.

However, as it stands, universal care is not better for me than what I currently have. It may be better for you, but it is not better for me.

I believe that everyone suffering together is socialism.

 

[JosephTheLibertarian]

No, I also prefer a free market system. Did you see the article Stossel did about the effect of the WWII labor shortages being the reason that insurance was even originally offered as a benefit to the labor force? I made that same observation when I wrote my sophomore 10-page essay on the very same topic and that was 20 or so years ago.

However, as it stands, universal care is not better for me than what I currently have. It may be better for you, but it is not better for me.

I'm not asking you if you prefer free markets, what the hell do you think I prefer? So you prefer elitism, gotcha! That's why the system never changes the elites like what they have! No health care bills. The elites are insured, the rest are filtered out, it's all good.

 

[richard1984]

...we weren't trillions of dollars in debt.

What do you guys think?

I haven't read through all of the posts on this thread, but here is my quick opinion:

Centralized government is inefficient and ineffective. You don't have to try very hard to find of examples to support that claims--everything from 9/11 to Katrina, from the Department of Education (e.g., "Every Child Left Behind") to Department of Defense and Homeland Security. The more centralized government try to do, the worse everything gets.
Why do you think that socialism fails? Politicians and other power-hungry people simply cannot run our lives as well as we can as individuals on more local levels.

One thing that has made American health care and medicine the best, most advanced in the world (up until recently) is the free market.
In medicine especially, competition is key to progress and success. How is medicine going to advance when it's completely under the control of the government?
You wanna find a cure for cancer? I really doubt it would ever happen under government controlled medicine. Even if someone found the cure, I wouldn't put it past the corrupt centralized government to classify and bury the findings and lock up the doctors involved. A cure for cancer would not be "good for business" in the eyes of a greedy government.
When you take healthcare and medicine out of the free market and under the control of the federal government, you essentially (and eventually) stop progress in the field.

This push towards universal healthcare scares the shit out of me.
Our country won't have a very long future if we implement such a dangerous policy.

The sooner we turn things like medicine and healthcare over to the federal government, the sooner we lose our country.

Universal healthcare would be a huge step towards total socialism in America. Once healthcare goes, everything else will follow.
The Fed is destroying our economy as it is. So why in the Hell would we give them more power and more control?

I mean, it seems pretty obvious to me: excessive government control and regulations over healthcare and medicine (and just the economy in general) is what is causing these problems to begin with! So why would be just give the whole system to them?! It doesn't make any sense at all!
You might as well try to win a race with your feet nailed to the ground. You'd be about as successful as universal healthcare would be.
Also, once healthcare and medicine become centralized, there will be no going back. The government won't let us take back responsibility. Big Brother knows what's best, and if you don't agree He has plenty of brand new prisons for you to live in. Can't deny universal healthcare when you're locked up in prison, can you? (Can't deny being experimented on either....)

I could say more, but I have a paper to write.
I just hope Americans aren't so ignorant that they actually decide to try universal healthcare. If we had any sort of decent education at all, we'd realize that it's been tried before, and it always fails...miserably.

 

[angelatc]

Courtesy of COngressman ROn Paul, circa 1988: Take a look at the health care on Indian Reservations if you want to see what socialized medicine looks like.

And I believe he's right.

Also, If you look at the number of vets who would qualify for treatment at the VA versus those who actually use those facilities , which is higher? If the economy crashed and all the working veterans turned to the government for their health care, that system would crash.

 

[constituent]

^yup. neither of my grandfathers used the VA.

 

[angelatc]

I'm not asking you if you prefer free markets, what the hell do you think I prefer? So you prefer elitism, gotcha! That's why the system never changes the elites like what they have! No health care bills. The elites are insured, the rest are filtered out, it's all good.

No it's not good, but it's preferable to everybodu suffering together. At least in the current system there's a way out. Look in the list that Forbes publishes every year of the best places to work, and make it a goal to get a job at one of them.

You have choices, even if it's just easier not to make them.

I want to change the system to make it better for everybody. You want to change the system to hurt me at your benefit.

That's just petty and selfish.

And in a free market system, there will be people lacking care. There will be have nots. That's a fact that even Congressman Paul acknowledges.

 

[angelatc]

^yup. neither of my grandfathers used the VA.

My husband's family is a military family. My husband, his brother, his mother and father, 3 of his uncles and his grandfather. (some now deceased).

The only one who used the VA medical benefits is my brother-in-law, and that's because he's a non-functioning alcoholic, with cancer.

My mother-in-law fought cancers for 20 years, and never used the VA . She was a nurse.

 

[fletcher]

...we weren't trillions of dollars in debt.

What do you guys think?

I'd rather not have the government steal my money and control my life.

 

[trispear]

An awful LOT of people use emergency rooms the way they should use primary care physicians.

The day my cousin went was a Sunday, his doctor was closed. I am told that many doctors in our area would not provide this service anymore anyway -- as the state has the highest malpractice insurance anway (another factor I know).

The emergency room was empty. 3 other people waiting for hours in a room that could seat 50. But I agree, we would have gone to a normal doctor if we had that option.

To further illustrate the price gouging of the uninsured at emergency rooms, I consider my previously mentioned cousin's trip to the hospital for stiches taking 20 minutes of a nurses time, 2 x-rays (no doctor), and a tetanus shot for $4,000+ compared to my trip in January to a oral/maxillofacial surgeon to get my wisdom teeth removed (also in America).

There, I had an initial consultation of 30 minutes (nurse and surgeon there, 3 X-rays taken), the actual surgery (3+ hours, 1 tooth had taken root and was a problem, included 2 nurses, a surgeon, and an anathesiologist who put me under), and a follow-up of 15 minutes. Cost: $1300 Cash (I'm not insured for teeth).

Dentistry and Mallofacial surgury are at my convenience, and I can shop around most of the time unless my teeth are really killing me (even then in that unlikely event as I take care of my teeth, I have a developed relationship with my dentist so he won't extract my wallet along with my teeth).

I can see market forces at work there and the price versus services recieved were fair. Just not in the emergency room example. The hospital my cousin visited and the doctor's suite where I went are 20 minutes apart in comparable neighborhoods.

 

[Corydoras]

The concept of a "primary care physician" comes from managed care corporo-government fascist medicine. Do you mean family doctor?

No, I mean primary care doctor. There are no children in his practice, and I see specialist doctors about 20x more often then him. If anyone needed to see a doctor more than 2-3x/yr, he'd send them to a specialist. His principal role is to keep track of my specialists, basically, by keeping in touch with them and monitoring their treatments' effects on the whole body. If you want to avoid the term pcp and use "internist," I'll certainly agree.

 

[Corydoras]

3 other people waiting for hours in a room that could seat 50. But I agree, we would have gone to a normal doctor if we had that option.

I'm not saying your cousin went to the emergency department improperly. I'm saying that the ED has overhead costs for a big load, going by the size of the waiting room. They have to maintain the human resources, physical plant, equipment, and supplies for when that room is filled. You saw it when it was nearly empty. But the bill amortizes when it is filled.

Emergency care is extremely costly precisely because the patient load is unpredictable. Emergency rooms have to rotate fresh supplies, maintain equipment, and schedule staff on call for when there's a huge influx, say an industrial accident.

Compare it to 24-hour supermarkets; such stores lose money overnight. They choose to do it as a courtesy to their customers that accustoms the customers to going to them during the daytime. But an ED can't close down overnight.

In contrast, a dentist can schedule when patients arrive and the hours he wants to see them. He doesn't have to work nights or weekends if he doesn't want to. This lowers his overhead immensely. Your cousin's personal doctor has the same advantage due to low overhead costs precisely because he runs business hours.

What I advocate is the growth of urgent care, where there are NPs on staff to take care of the huge number of patients who don't actually need to see an MD, and non-emergency MDs on staff to see the other patients whose lives aren't at imminent risk. It would have helped your cousin by lowering the overhead for the emergency department.

 

[dude58677]

One of the main reasons health care is so expensive is because of the Federal Reserve. It prints too much money so the value of a dollar goes down and prices go up. We can't have cheaper homes, health care, college tuition, cheaper food, gas, etc till we get rid of the Federal Reserve and get back on the gold standard. You can call the Federal Reserve a seperate issue from health care but it isn't.

 

[axiomata]

I don't understand why so many people are falling for universal health care. I should note that I am personally for childrens' health care.

Hillary plans to pay for such universal health care by taxes on cigarettes. Meanwhile, cities are banning cigarettes in public as well as private buildings (even your own apartment in one Californian city!) Furthermore, anyone with a basic understanding of microeconmics knows that increased taxes will cause more people to quit smoking, and the revenue from such taxes will drop.

Eventually, we will be forced to either raise income taxes or cut the program. How many politicians will have the courage to cut health programs? It's a trap!

 

[Corydoras]

I don't understand why so many people are falling for universal health care.

They think it's a human right, and they refuse to believe that like other products and services, health care costs serious money even on a nonprofit basis, and the more so given that much of it requires the most intricate, highest technology most of them ever come into contact with, and much of it in low production runs.

 

[Eryxis]

universal health care

Simply put, only cash customers have any idea what medicine/medical services cost. People with insurance have no clue, they get an explanation of benefits after visiting the doctor and toss it right in the trash can or their filing system after barely a glance. Even if they do look at it they don't care because they only paid 25 dollars for their copay. I am a pharmacist and I see it all the time. People will get that brand name drug because "it's better" when it costs them 10 dollars (with their copay) as opposed to $5 with a generic. Never mind that the brand drug actually costs 300 and the generic is 15 overall. It's out of pocket expenses that matter to them (which I don't blame them for it's the systems fault). Insurance (as i believe has been mentioned) should be for catastrophic events such as a trip to the emergency room for a severe chainsaw cut, heart attack, major surgeries, cancer, etc. If people's health insurance were comparable to their car insurance this problem would not be what it is today. There would still be those that are uninsured, but it is THEIR responsibility. Simple catastrophic insurance would not be outrageously priced as the $25 copay for everything insurance so many of us today enjoy is.

Ery

 

[Corydoras]

Exactly, Eryxis, I couldn't have put it better. High-deductible insurance has got to become more widely available.

And in addition to the low copays, something that makes it harder for people to understand is that employers often carry a substantial part of the actual premium. If it's as much as 80%, it's a shock when they go onto COBRA and find out how much the insurance really costs-- they don't realize that the portion the employer was carrying is part of their compensation.