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Politics : A US National Health Care System?

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To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (1313)	9/27/2006 10:10:34 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) of 42652

To an extent it probably will keep up. Medical care will be an increasing part of the economy as we grow richer. The more expensive forms of medical care are "luxury goods" in an economic sense (demand grows more than proportionally as income rises), and while the rest of the economy grows more efficent/productive medical care lags behind. Part of that might be subject to change, but your still going to have expensive highly trained specialists (doctors) who can't greatly scale up the number of patients they treat. If you get a fully socialist system, or a single payer system, or just national health insurance without outlawing private insurance all these factors will continue. Rationing might demand a bit, but thats mostly a one time reduction, the growth trend should continue from the lower point and the long term problem remains. Also rationing isn't likely to be really effective in reducing demand. It will be hard enough politically, to say "the federal government insurance won't pay for your treatment", or "you have to wait 9 months for that surgery". It will be even harder to say "you can't have another form of insurance to pay for it", or "you can't pay for it out of your own pocket".

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