PLAYER57832 wrote:Its plain and simple. The MEDICAL care I recieve, as well as my personal beliefs about that care and just not my employer's business.. PERIOD.
Hiding behind your pocket book as if paying me for WORK somehow gives you the right to dictate my personal life is repugnant.
Perfect, we are in agreement that when forcing employers to provide healthcare, that is something that should not be any of their business. It should be similar to car insurance where you find your own policy. Keep your employer's preferences and deals with the big insurance companies out of the mix. Let you make the deal so you can be sure to get what you want.
taking a break from cc, will be back sometime in the future.
mrswdk wrote:It's a fallacy to suggest that a choice between two very similar parties once every four years means that the American government is hog-tied and at the mercy of the will of the people. American politicians are just as good at betraying election pledges, passing bucks and kicking cans down the road as the leaders of any other country.
Didn't public approval of Congress drop to something like 10% recently? And did Congress pull itself together, change the way it operates and usher in a new era of politics? Did it do so much as shed its most unpopular members?
Congress approval is always horsecrap yet something like 90-95% of incumbents get re-elected. "All of the congressmen, except the one that brings money to my district, are horrible"
taking a break from cc, will be back sometime in the future.
mrswdk wrote:It's a fallacy to suggest that a choice between two very similar parties once every four years means that the American government is hog-tied and at the mercy of the will of the people. American politicians are just as good at betraying election pledges, passing bucks and kicking cans down the road as the leaders of any other country.
Didn't public approval of Congress drop to something like 10% recently? And did Congress pull itself together, change the way it operates and usher in a new era of politics? Did it do so much as shed its most unpopular members?
Congress approval is always horsecrap yet something like 90-95% of incumbents get re-elected. "All of the congressmen, except the one that brings money to my district, are horrible"
90-95% used to be true, until 2010, our incumbent re-election rate was the lowest since 1970.
Last edited by Phatscotty on Sat Jul 19, 2014 4:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.
mrswdk wrote:Voting in American elections implies that you believe you are actually being given a choice about how America is run, which doesn't sound very smart to me.
Imagine having a US president and Congress that didn't need to hold elections. Since the former constraint of voter feedback is completely dropped, would you expect the US government to act more aggressively or less aggressively?
You mean, behave aggressively towards other countries?
mrswdk wrote:It's a fallacy to suggest that a choice between two very similar parties once every four years means that the American government is hog-tied and at the mercy of the will of the people. American politicians are just as good at betraying election pledges, passing bucks and kicking cans down the road as the leaders of any other country.
Didn't public approval of Congress drop to something like 10% recently? And did Congress pull itself together, change the way it operates and usher in a new era of politics? Did it do so much as shed its most unpopular members?
That's why the House of Representatives is so important. We can check and balance the Executive branch, unless of course the Executive branch just ignores Congress and auto-pens and issues Executive orders and signing statements. Heck, just declare yourself King and do everything on your own.
Just remember, it's almost always the case every King has more power than the previous King.
mrswdk wrote:It's a fallacy to suggest that a choice between two very similar parties once every four years means that the American government is hog-tied and at the mercy of the will of the people. American politicians are just as good at betraying election pledges, passing bucks and kicking cans down the road as the leaders of any other country.
Didn't public approval of Congress drop to something like 10% recently? And did Congress pull itself together, change the way it operates and usher in a new era of politics? Did it do so much as shed its most unpopular members?
You're just wrong. Sorry. If it meant nothing, then we'd see greater resources being spent in rent-seeking. We'd get much closer to 'full-rent dissipation' where the expenditures of rent-seeking equal the benefits received. We're at roughly 10% (which is an overestimate).
Try explaining why democracies hardly ever attack each other.
Although you think the constraint of voter feedback is weak, it's much stronger than nothing. You're setting up ridiculously high standards. Even if people don't like Congress in general, it doesn't follow that the constituents believe that their own Congress members are at fault--everyone else's Congress members are perceived at fault. That easily explains why you don't get earth-shattering change in Congress. There's also status quo bias at play.
If voter feedback didn't matter, then why do so many politicians use so many resources to play in conformity with public opinion? If voter feedback didn't matter, then you wouldn't see presidents impose controversial policies AFTER their re-election campaign. They'd do it whenever they felt like it, but that's not how democratic politics works.
Last edited by BigBallinStalin on Sat Jul 19, 2014 4:11 pm, edited 3 times in total.
crispybits wrote:Just a quick 7 and a bit minutes about why healthcare costs in America are so high:
Economies of scale and mass bargaining are probably too much like socialism for 'Muricans to understand the places where it is appropriate to centralise things tho - Obamacare is evol! How dare they use a system that actually lowers costs for both those who use it and those who don't!
If we had to go the socialist route, I'd go with Hong Kong's program, but that's not how politics works. It's not a process for picking the best policy.
Oh, it's easy to lower spending on healthcare--just supply less of it (make people wait in longer lines, e.g.). That's not a great innovation; it's pretty backwards, but somehow it impresses a lot of government advocates. Probably because they don't bother to think about the unseen costs...
centralization is one of the main reasons why healthcare's cost are so high. It's the all too predictable outcome of what happens when we go the route of 'everyone deserves healthcare'. My uncle works at a hospital, I hear the stories, people come in with 6 kids, speak no English, and they bring them to the ER because they have a cough. Same with tuition. same with housing. same with every single thing the government declares a 'right/entitlement' to in the future. You guarantee demand for all, you are guaranteeing higher prices/less access. It ends up with you being thankful that today you are 7th in the bread line during a slight drizzle.
And supplying less healthcare isn't the only way either. We can also cut demand for healthcare by ending redistributive and wasteful government programs. Maybe it's starting to click for yalls now that you see the results. Giving everyone else benefits and entitlements didn't fix the problem, it made the problem worse, not just for the poor, but for everybody.
So you're saying the problem is over-use then PS? Funnily enough that's one of the first things he deals with in that video and Americans on average go to hospital less than Europeans do. There will always be anecdotes of unnecessary visits but they exist in every country.
Also covered in that video is the fact that if you're uninsured the ONLY option you have is the ER - the most expensive option. If there were primary providers like GPs available to uninsured people it would save a huge chunk of money too because you wouldn't have an ER doctor with ER equipment using their time, you'd have a GP with a much cheaper and minimally equipped local surgery it would end up cheaper.
But the main point is that if a single hospital goes out and says "we want one hundred fake hips for the year" they'll get a duff, expensive price because they have little or no leverage. If a country as a whole goes in and says "we want one million fake hips for the year" they get a much better price. Obamacare, much as you hate it, actually has the lowest cost per unit by far on healthcare supplies and drugs of any health provider in the US.
So, you can either support a healthcare system that costs MORE tax dollars per person per year than any of the "socialist" european models, or you could say "what are they doing that we aren't" and accept that for SOME things having large centralised bodies can make a lot of sense. Not ALL things, but SOME things. It wouldn't even need to be government run, the private hospitals could all club together and create a private supply chain company they all own equally and buy everything through that company to get the benefits of economies of scale. Centralisation isn't always about the feds...
PLAYER57832 wrote:Its plain and simple. The MEDICAL care I recieve, as well as my personal beliefs about that care and just not my employer's business.. PERIOD.
Hiding behind your pocket book as if paying me for WORK somehow gives you the right to dictate my personal life is repugnant.
If it's not your employer's business, why is he forced to pay for it? It's a complete fallacy to argue that this is something new when it comes to health insurance coverage. Every business that offers health insurance as a job benefit has always picked what would be covered in their plans. There are no plans out there that cover every single medicine and treatment that exists, that means EVERY employer plays a role in your personal medical care. This is just fake outrage to gather votes from ignorant people.
crispybits wrote:So you're saying the problem is over-use then PS? Funnily enough that's one of the first things he deals with in that video and Americans on average go to hospital less than Europeans do. There will always be anecdotes of unnecessary visits but they exist in every country.
Also covered in that video is the fact that if you're uninsured the ONLY option you have is the ER - the most expensive option. If there were primary providers like GPs available to uninsured people it would save a huge chunk of money too because you wouldn't have an ER doctor with ER equipment using their time, you'd have a GP with a much cheaper and minimally equipped local surgery it would end up cheaper.
But the main point is that if a single hospital goes out and says "we want one hundred fake hips for the year" they'll get a duff, expensive price because they have little or no leverage. If a country as a whole goes in and says "we want one million fake hips for the year" they get a much better price. Obamacare, much as you hate it, actually has the lowest cost per unit by far on healthcare supplies and drugs of any health provider in the US.
So, you can either support a healthcare system that costs MORE tax dollars per person per year than any of the "socialist" european models, or you could say "what are they doing that we aren't" and accept that for SOME things having large centralised bodies can make a lot of sense. Not ALL things, but SOME things. It wouldn't even need to be government run, the private hospitals could all club together and create a private supply chain company they all own equally and buy everything through that company to get the benefits of economies of scale. Centralisation isn't always about the feds...
OR, we could be Free to chose our own destiny as well as deal with the consequences and not chain ourselves to everybody else.
.....of course speaking for the current American system and not the rest of the world. When you have a healthcare system dominated by 'guaranteed' payments from the government, there aren't going to be negotiations to reduce costs, rather the negotiations will be for how much the bureaucrats can filter into their own pockets, how many jobs can be created from it (useful or not) and how much business can be mandated/forced to friendly special interests. It takes a heart of gold to look at a pile of hundreds of billions of dollars and not wonder how you can get a piece of it for yourself. That is something humanity does not produce very often, if at all. What America has now is without a doubt out of control cost wise and therefore less and less access is granted. Guaranteeing everyone insurance only increases the demand, while we are short at least 50,000 doctors to even deal with the situation. So what happens to the cost of the doctors time? It's gonna increase. And this doesn't even get into how much debt that doctor had to accumulate to graduate medical school, which is getting more and more expensive every year (hey, didn't government guarantee everyone access to college too? hmmm) to the point the doctor has to work longer and longer just to break even, not to mention the government asks more and more every year in taxes with food and energy costs rising. My friends dad is a surgeon, now for Homeland Security. Last time I talked to him about 15 years ago, he said he needed to live on the cheap for the first 8 years while raising 3 children but making almost $100,000. Guarantee you that number of years to service your debts for medical school today has at least doubled (tuition increases rise 4-6-8-10% annually, and that's WITH government payments to 'keep increases down') My long time best friend is sending her daughter to Arizona State University this fall, her bill for the first year is just over $25,000 (dorm) which means she's gonna graduate with at least 100k debt. How is she ever going to buy a house? The economy is still stagnated, heck, how long before she finds a job? Guess she will just have to move back home with her parents after she graduates for 2-3 years while she looks. My friend and her husband do not qualify for financial aid, and they don't want their daughter to graduate with a 6 figure debt, so they are thinking about getting a divorce and she is thinking about giving up her exceptional career to take a non-relevant job with the university, because employees of the University get a 70% discount (probably the actual cost) but all the education debt from the past that go unpaid if factored into the cost of the tuition today with the promise that with more unserviced debt in the future will drive those costs higher. I told her to take her family to Mexico and cross back into America and only say "no Ingles", sadly only barely kidding, since she is uberLiberal but being on the border like she is she knows what's up. And we haven't gotten into how the value of our money buys less now than it did a year ago. I did not address every single reason why tuition and healthcare and government are the way they are, but these are some of the main factors why they increase in cost annually, usually at rates higher than anything else, and most certainly higher than wages. slap an interest rate on those things that we have to borrow for more and more often, and yes of course we are going to have the situation we are in. That's how we went from the cost of a doctor's visit being half a dozen eggs from your chicken to $8,000 a day just for the cost of a room in a hospital and $12,000 for the ambulance ride just to get there. Technology plays a role of course, but doctor visits to the home today are not really that much different, and technology/electronics are one of the most deflationary things on the planet.
That's one thing our founders had right (limited government power) and tried to prevent as much as possible. Of course it's debatable, but it's a lot like fire. You have to control it, and if you don't, it controls and consumes you.
'If men were angels, there would be no need for government'
How did you just jump from "economies of scale should be used in your favour, and they don't have to be federally mandated, administrated or legislated" (paraphrased I admit but that's basically the gist of what I was saying) to "big government is the cause of all these problems"? I am solely pointing out that the way the US healthcare system is run handicaps the goals of the system itself (1) because no single corporate healthcare institution can use comparable leverage to the country-wide healthcare systems of countries where the buying is done centrally. I haven't said "the government should step in and run it". I specifically said "it could be done by a private company".
Private corporations use economies of scale all the time. You only have to glance at the price tickets on any random shelf in Wal-Mart to see that centralisation of buying power and economies of scale keep prices low, and then look at the prices in small independent shops to see the comparison. Centralisation is not a purely governmental tool.
The US government, much more than any comparable western government, has stayed out of healthcare to a large extent. It has been the responsibility of the individual to provide for their own healthcare, and there have been no large scale efforts to build national federal healthcare institutions such as chains of publicly owned hospitals. The result of that system is that while healthcare prices are relatively low and stable under the european models, both through taxes and voluntary insurance plans, in the US both the taxpayer costs and the voluntary contributions are much, much higher.
Now I understand why you don't want government involvement. I actually agree with some of the reasons why you don't want government involvement (though I think where we ultimately draw the line and why would be quite different). What I don't understand is why when someone clearly suggests private centralisation of healthcare buying power as a potential part of the solution to rapidly rising costs, you go off in a rant about government spending, tuition fees and the rest of it.
What would be so wrong with looking at other systems and cherry picking the good bits of them out to make your system run better? I'm not suggesting you say "we should adopt an identical system to Denmark in all ways" I'm saying you should be saying "in Denmark they do this really well, we should alter our system to incorporate that kind of best practice".
Edit - (1) This assumes the goal of the healthcare system is to keep the population healthy, which is dubious given that corporate interests lie in maximising stable profits. A customer healed is a customer lost. A customer stuck in long term care plans that treat the symptoms while avoiding the cure is a customer for life...
crispybits wrote:How did you just jump from "economies of scale should be used in your favour, and they don't have to be federally mandated, administrated or legislated" (paraphrased I admit but that's basically the gist of what I was saying) to "big government is the cause of all these problems"? I am solely pointing out that the way the US healthcare system is run handicaps the goals of the system itself (1) because no single corporate healthcare institution can use comparable leverage to the country-wide healthcare systems of countries where the buying is done centrally. I haven't said "the government should step in and run it". I specifically said "it could be done by a private company".
Private corporations use economies of scale all the time. You only have to glance at the price tickets on any random shelf in Wal-Mart to see that centralisation of buying power and economies of scale keep prices low, and then look at the prices in small independent shops to see the comparison. Centralisation is not a purely governmental tool.
The US government, much more than any comparable western government, has stayed out of healthcare to a large extent. It has been the responsibility of the individual to provide for their own healthcare, and there have been no large scale efforts to build national federal healthcare institutions such as chains of publicly owned hospitals. The result of that system is that while healthcare prices are relatively low and stable under the european models, both through taxes and voluntary insurance plans, in the US both the taxpayer costs and the voluntary contributions are much, much higher.
Now I understand why you don't want government involvement. I actually agree with some of the reasons why you don't want government involvement (though I think where we ultimately draw the line and why would be quite different). What I don't understand is why when someone clearly suggests private centralisation of healthcare buying power as a potential part of the solution to rapidly rising costs, you go off in a rant about government spending, tuition fees and the rest of it.
What would be so wrong with looking at other systems and cherry picking the good bits of them out to make your system run better? I'm not suggesting you say "we should adopt an identical system to Denmark in all ways" I'm saying you should be saying "in Denmark they do this really well, we should alter our system to incorporate that kind of best practice".
Edit - (1) This assumes the goal of the healthcare system is to keep the population healthy, which is dubious given that corporate interests lie in maximising stable profits. A customer healed is a customer lost. A customer stuck in long term care plans that treat the symptoms while avoiding the cure is a customer for life...
Private centralization has already been done by the industry and it's derivative services and products. Think Medtronic, Boston Scientific, St, Jude. You know those companies are looking for ways to maximize profits, and they did that on a microeconomic scale. I'm saying the government doesn't work like that, and most of the time works the opposite to it. Again, only speaking for America. Denmark may do it very well, but we have different principles. I can accept that. I'm not telling anyone to be like us, everyone else is telling us to be like them. I can only say America strives for Freedom and Liberty. Not that we always win, and not that we haven't been losing our values and principles and Freedoms and Liberties, but there is one direction and there is another direction. Freedom requires that if you drop your weekly paycheck at the local roulette table, it's not everyone elses responsibility to come up with $500 dollars for you. If you smoke 9$ cigarette packs every day for 60 years but blames being poor on everyone else, you are very likely to get cancer, and it's not everyone elses duty to guarantee they get their fair shot at a 15% chance burn/cut/poison survival rate of Not if we claim ourselves to be Free and value Independence. Of course there are plenty of things that society can do together than cannot realistically be done individually, and you guys wanna do that go for it, whatever works for ya, whatever you like. No way I can pretend that the road my country is taking is down the road to serfdom. Turn over more and more responsibility to the government, thereby guaranteeing the government will grow in size and power and authority. Just can't get behind that feeds the beast like this. Not expecting you to fully understand the thought process or morality or principles and values of a significant chunk of average American's either. Many say flat out and can see clear as day; our government is way too big and spending dang near twice as much as we take in, no matter how good our intentions or ow compassionate we believe our deeds are, spending like this cannot last forever. And we know one thing in our gut, printing money that we can't back up to try to paper over a problem only gets worse.
Not that there is nothing to be said to your point about some government works in the area of centralization, but not his government..we just absorbed the last stinking pile of mess that 'your insurance rates will drop saving the average family $2,500/year in premiums.....Like BBS said it most certainly is a problem of trust and credibility in our current government, and especially after Obama and Obamacare and stimulus package 1 and 2 and quantative easing and near 0 overnight interest rates on banks who basically now have to take orders from the government...we are more than half way into America's lost decade. Things are heading in the way wrong direction when it comes to limited government in size and power, not to mention those who exceed and abuse power are rarely held accountable. Like Hamilton said 'the greater the responsibility of government, the greater it's authority' I doubt you believe at all that America is a responsible nation, look at our spending levels, that we pawn it off on the next 2 generations that will have to pay 25% of every dollar they earn just to pay the interest on our debt, if we don't want to default. That day is within sight down the road, and like I've always said, what I say and what I do is gonna cover my ass because when 'Generation ZERO' hits, and they find out the old people spent all their money and opportunity and a college education is something only the richest 1% can afford and they cannot have order or know justice and we left them holding the bag, they're gonna some pissed off prime aged young adults. Words like 'compassion' and 'understanding' are not going to be in their lexicon. They will have been 101% completely sold out by their less distant forefathers, and probably won't know anything about our orignal forefathers except they were ALL slave owners. The ending of 'Idiocracy comes to mind'
Think I'm kidding? Let's just pretend for a moment my country is ready to do what's right RIGHT now at this very momeny, live within our means and not take out loans while we laugh while signing on the dotted line how this money can never be repaid. Taxes would have to just about double by tomorrow morning, and the overwhelming majority of Americans would not have much money left after food and energy, which have also skyrocketed because as you know, every link in the chain from the exporter bringing their products into said country, state, and city (all gas taxes) double would have double taxation and fee rates and excises and tolls and user fees, so would all the super warehouses and all their employees, so would all the local distributors, and all the superstore grocery chains, and all the local markets and family owned chains. Obviously my people would not stand for that, nor would it work for a minute. So why do we keep spending even more? We are not headed down the road to make it right and pay what WE owe, we are burdening the future as exponentially higher debt service payments.
Shit has to stop and we need to get our own house in order. The longer we continue to ignore our money problems at the root of the virtually everything, the worse the reality is gonna be when the final bill comes due.
When it gets to the government asking for more money and more power for this and that and mandated birth control and everything else under the sun, we have to look at it's track record (education, poverty, opportunity and economic mobility, keeping promises, telling the truth, and coming in even CLOSE to the estimated budget) and we have to put up the sign.
crispybits wrote: Edit - (1) This assumes the goal of the healthcare system is to keep the population healthy, which is dubious given that corporate interests lie in maximising stable profits. A customer healed is a customer lost. A customer stuck in long term care plans that treat the symptoms while avoiding the cure is a customer for life...
That is exactly what I am saying, just up a couple levels at the government. If health costs plummeted, the government would be out of a lot of power and a lot of jobs and therefore a needy citizen ready to vote their personal angers at 'ITS THESE PEOPLES FAULT!' is lost as well. We as Americans should not assume it's someone elses job to take care of us, that's not our tradition or our history. I didn't go off on a tangent about 'government' I started with the fact that through medicare and medicaid and government insurance and social security and government virtually free medication/drug coverage is just slamming a bunch of artificial demand into the system, and I bet you agree the multinational pharma companies and health care delivery industry LOVE IT. The idea that we even need health insurance in the first place is historically new and only a result of an obvious truth that with our current system people could never afford the doctors bill without insurance, but that also is historically new. While it is true that the ever growing list of medical 'problems' continues to grow, especially mentally, we have to all admit that most things do not have a cure. Many are treatable, and the efficacy varies from 'it's better for now' to 'total waste of time and money doctors don't know shit', but just because you have something does not mean there is an answer at the hospital. And we have to admit that we are not immortal and we are all going to die someday, and no amount of the best health insurance ever EVER is going to change that
Our truth is that we, for the majority of America's history, HAVE been able to afford doctors visits as problems come up and we have always found a way to deal with problems while making our problems other peoples responsibility has historically been frowned upon. It's mainly because of the great depression that anyone besides ourselves is responsible for ourselves and our families. When we practice our traditional values, we come together and we do what we gotta do and what we can get others to voluntarily do, we should not force everyone else to do what we think is best for ourselves or what we think is best for total strangers. Chaining ourselves to everyone else is the exact opposite of the idea of Liberty, enslaving ourselves to everyone else is the exact opposite of Freedom. I fully understand those ideals will never be perfect, and proponents of Socialized medicine should admit the best system on the planet isn't perfect either, and it never will be. It's about moving in the right direction. Of course that means other people have other ideas about what direction is the right direction, but when it comes to Liberty and Freedom, be clear about it. Either you believe other people owe you a living and they should be forced by penalty of law with threats of spending a significant portion of our too short lives in Federal prison if you don't provide it for them, or you believe that workers deserve the fruits of their own labor, and that the worker alone has created/helped create that value, and that labor is the true standard of value, and forceful value redistribution without any real representation is a cancerous disease against true value, and in my humble opinion, this is all about value and values. There is a middle way here, but that doesn't mean that is the way. To each their own, more one way, more the other...who knows where is best when people have completely different priorities, perspectives, and preferences? And after that it's either one direction or the other, and in the extreme the two beliefs are diametrically opposed and absolutely impossible in practice and even in theory.
The downfall of forced and unrepresented/unendorsed value redistribution is if you really do feel strongly that you are being abused and find yourself providing the very substance with your live's work (sometimes through unbelievable toil and unimaginable adversity) directly aids and enables outrageously unjust wars, pillaging foreign countries resources, forced abortions/killing of babies, breaking all the promises made to the one's who deserve it the most, and ripping off your own citizens by forcing them to pay for a shell company that will get to the top 1% so long as they provide millions in kick backs all the while to the ONE who mandates, well, frankly......IT DOESN'T MATTER HOW YOU FEEL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The beauty of Freedom and the blessing of Liberty is that if you really do feel so strongly that the sick man down the street deserves help in it's many forms, then you are FREE to CHOOSE to help that person, and meet up with other like minded people and form a group that is dedicated to doing the Lord's work or doing exactly what you want to do. You can manage waste technically to virtually zero and spend that money efficiently and personally guarantee that the jobs you create are useful ones and getting as much help as humanly possible. All the while, nobody has initiated force upon another soul; nobody has stolen the time, labor, or wages of another for themselves.
BigBallinStalin wrote:crispybits, what confidence do you place in government when it comes to optimally planning the lives of 300+ million?
That's why I never suggested that government was the solution (whatever PS wants to convince himself I'm arguing and go off in huge irrelevant rants about). I've quite specifically stated several times now that I'm arguing in favour of centralisation and economies of scale, and that these are not necessarily government owned, administered or legislated for. I'm arguing for people to look at examples of things that work from all systems, build best practice models, and cherry pick the things that will improve their systems, preferably for maximal benefit and minimal cost.
About the only thing I've said about government getting involved in healthcare in this thread (and you really have to squint between the lines) is that I'm not convinced that profit seeking corporations have their interests aligned with their consumers (long term expensive palliative care vs quick cheap cures)
Fer chrissakes! I haven't ruled out private corporations, I just said I'm not sure I entirely trust their motivations when those directly clash with the best result for their consumer.
Regardless of that there are NGOs and non-profit organisations that could be used to fill that role. The landscape is filled with a variety of models that could be adopted where the goals of the service provider could be more closely aligned with the needs of consumers within this sector than in the profit vs permanent cure dichotomy.
I'm not saying this as some sort of anti-big pharma rant, but it is a rational thing for a profit seeking corporation to maximise profit, and it is a fact that palleative care over many years is more profitable than a one-off cure. Corporate research dollars get spent on improving the palleative care and make that more effective over developing cheap permanent cures for things because a cheap permanent cure that brings a single pay-off per disease is less profitable than multiple palleative treatments that diminish the symptoms whilst leaving the underlying problem intact to generate more demand for your ongoing treatment.
If you limit your thing to just "government or profit" you ignore many other models for viable organisations that could, if implemented properly, better serve both the industry and the consumers. And that's not just in healthcare, but in a variety of different industries. The only people cut out of the picture by them are the shareholders. Industry professionals like doctors still have jobs that could still pay the same rates. problem is it's the shareholder element of society running things to a large extent and cutting them out of anything is difficult.
PLAYER57832 wrote:Its plain and simple. The MEDICAL care I recieve, as well as my personal beliefs about that care and just not my employer's business.. PERIOD.
Hiding behind your pocket book as if paying me for WORK somehow gives you the right to dictate my personal life is repugnant.
Perfect, we are in agreement that when forcing employers to provide healthcare, that is something that should not be any of their business. It should be similar to car insurance where you find your own policy. Keep your employer's preferences and deals with the big insurance companies out of the mix. Let you make the deal so you can be sure to get what you want.
I have always said having insurance provided through an employer is about the worst way to do it. It was WWII hiring restrictions that gave us that system.
Up until now, employers have happily bought into the system because tax savings meant they were effectively giving employees a higher wage for far less money than if they were required to just increase wages so people could buy their own insurance. Recently, insurance has become expensive and so employers are using all kinds of tactics to claim immunity.
The irony in this particular case is that it takes away some of the most basic protections workers and employers both have had.
BigBallinStalin wrote:crispybits, what confidence do you place in government when it comes to optimally planning the lives of 300+ million?
That's why I never suggested that government was the solution (whatever PS wants to convince himself I'm arguing and go off in huge irrelevant rants about). I've quite specifically stated several times now that I'm arguing in favour of centralisation and economies of scale, and that these are not necessarily government owned, administered or legislated for. I'm arguing for people to look at examples of things that work from all systems, build best practice models, and cherry pick the things that will improve their systems, preferably for maximal benefit and minimal cost.
About the only thing I've said about government getting involved in healthcare in this thread (and you really have to squint between the lines) is that I'm not convinced that profit seeking corporations have their interests aligned with their consumers (long term expensive palliative care vs quick cheap cures)
heard you man, we aren't getting anything close to that with this government, and we have too much debt to even try something like that. Our government is too hell bent on growing bigger,they just got a ton of power concerning healthcare and health insurance. I have some people in my life that taught my a great many things and I look up to, but when we disagree, it usually goes "Scotty, ITS OVER! We just have to let it all crash man! Who knows exactly when, but one thing is for sure it will happen" I will not agree with him there, maybe it will crash and everything he said is true, but that doesn't mean I keep my mouth shut or try to show why we should do what I think is the right thing. Our gov't is way too involved in healthcare to even go down your road. Not in the way that 'govt owns it' but in the way that gov't owns the demand, where all the people get their money to afford it. Americans now look to gov't to solve their medical bills.
I know another major problem is that in principle, if you don't like the price of something, you refuse to buy it. That's not realistic here, and that's why prices are out of whack too. The consumer has no say, and usually it goes down the way the bill comes, to how much your insurance company thinks you can afford.
You want an answer to the question "how about something with less government" okay, YES, that sounds like a start.
Last edited by Phatscotty on Mon Jul 21, 2014 8:51 pm, edited 2 times in total.
crispybits wrote:Fer chrissakes! I haven't ruled out private corporations, I just said I'm not sure I entirely trust their motivations when those directly clash with the best result for their consumer.
Regardless of that there are NGOs and non-profit organisations that could be used to fill that role. The landscape is filled with a variety of models that could be adopted where the goals of the service provider could be more closely aligned with the needs of consumers within this sector than in the profit vs permanent cure dichotomy.
I'm not saying this as some sort of anti-big pharma rant, but it is a rational thing for a profit seeking corporation to maximise profit, and it is a fact that palleative care over many years is more profitable than a one-off cure. Corporate research dollars get spent on improving the palleative care and make that more effective over developing cheap permanent cures for things because a cheap permanent cure that brings a single pay-off per disease is less profitable than multiple palleative treatments that diminish the symptoms whilst leaving the underlying problem intact to generate more demand for your ongoing treatment.
If you limit your thing to just "government or profit" you ignore many other models for viable organisations that could, if implemented properly, better serve both the industry and the consumers. And that's not just in healthcare, but in a variety of different industries. The only people cut out of the picture by them are the shareholders. Industry professionals like doctors still have jobs that could still pay the same rates. problem is it's the shareholder element of society running things to a large extent and cutting them out of anything is difficult.
The problem with 'non-profits' are similar to corporations--they need money to continue existing, so there's really no such thing as a non-profit enterprise.
There used to be many mutual aid societies which had their members pay a fee. They pool the money and distribute the funds as needed. This is your 'non-profit' organization. There's three problems with this approach:
1. Businesses through government have made them obsolete (e.g. medical practioners teamed up within each State to established barriers to trade through health regulations. National policy reinforces this problem).
2. They're not as efficient--e.g. you can get more from a (godforsaken) profit-seeking entity called an insurance company.
3. Governments and voters have a tendency to centralize administrative activities, so the overbearing top-down approach becomes heavily subsidized and eventually quashes the demand for local community centers funded voluntarily through charitable people. The government builds them instead and does their traditionally crappy job at providing goods.
