einhverfr - Be careful what you wish for, especially if you have strongly held opinions and like to make them known. Remember single payer is also single choice.
BBC reported in May about an elderly Englishman, who displayed pictures of aborted fetuses at a hospital. Besides pressing charges and getting him 28 days in the slammer, the hospital is denying him all care unless he has a life threatening condition. They removed him from the waiting list for hip replacement. |
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elements, but not of a whole system. Plus we need well-written price controls on pharmaceuticals which discourage the current practice of using high prices in the US to subsidize cheap prices in, say, Canada.
Currently, the way it works is similar to insurance. Everyone accepts joint health care insurance for the poor, but this only ocmes into play when someone gets really sick (i.e. a heart attack due to previously undiagnosed diabides). The poor American goes to the hospital, runs up a bill of, say $50,000, and gets out. Unable to pay, they turn to the bankrupcy courts for protection (not that this matters since you can't get blood from a turnip). Hence everyone else pays more for medical care because we have to pay for expensive care that should have been preventable in the first place.
So, what do we do? I am not in favor of relacing private insurance companies, or in having the government offer competing plans to those who can't pay. Instead, I would suggest that all standard, preventative medicine ought to be paid via a single payer system aimed at that goal alone (preventative care). That way, hopefully we only pay a few thousand instead of fifty thousand (or more) for the diabides patient. Private insurers continue to provide for expensive health care, since people still want to protect their assets. And poor people who get seriously sick continue to get their bills paid by the rest of us whether we like it or not but hopefully at least that will be less.
As I say, a second major problem is that countries with price controls force drug companies to raise prices in the US to subsidize their sales to Canada, the UK, and so forth. We ought to pass a law that says that if you sell a drug in these countries, you cannot charge Americans more for it. The goal is not to encourage price controls but discourage them by forcing some drugs out of the Canadian and European markets until laws are changed. Of course developing nations are different in large part due to real income issues and should not be included in these lists.
We also need some sort of malpractice reform aimed at reducing the overall ways in which so many common cases go to court as a matter of routine. Routine cases should not go to court. Let there be a schedule of payments in these cases. Keep them out of court, where discovery and lawyers' bills raises the cost to the rest of us.
In the end it shouldn't be either/or but an intelligent policy to provide quality care for all Americans so that we don;t have the structural inefficiencies of today (due to late treatment of serious illnesses by the uninsured). |
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