Lane, re: "I'm not even asking (yet) for the advocates on this thread to offer a tight rationale for going universal, single payer. I'm just asking the simply preliminary question--what's unique about health care.
Let's see, what's unique about health care.....
Well, it's not like owning a car, or a television or going on vacation. It's not like having good clothes or a nice watch.
There's something about it though...what is that...oh, I know;
Without health care you could easily die a painful, protracted and entirely preventable death or suffer a long illness. Without health care you could spread disease among those who come into contact with your undiagnosed and untreated illness. Without health care you could be forced to utilize privately subsidized or government funded treatment ultimately paid for by the rest of us, just as universal health care would be subsidized, but much later and much less efficiently.
Some would say that proper medical care is one of the basic necessities of life.
Most of us understand that the private market can be both inefficient and intolerably heartless when it comes to allocating the necessities of life to the less fortunate among us. We subsidize food purchases, rent payments heating bills and, yes, even health care because of that fact.
I think the principle in play is that if you're poorly equipped for financial success in the economy, or if you have poor fortune, or even if you've exercised terrible judgement, we don't care if you live in a nice neighborhood, drive a car or own nice things like llaine, but as a society we do care if you're starving, freezing, or rotting your way to an untimely and painful death or suffering through years of misery because you couldn't afford decent medical care.
That is the principle behind providing subsidized health care for the very poor but what we're now discussing is expanding the concept of subsidized health care and attempting to make the system more affordable for all.
The reasons for revamping the system are many.
One is that many of us believe that there are large numbers of us who are too poor to afford health insurance but not poor enough to qualify under one of the medicare programs and the result is that that significant group of us too often don't get the health care that we need and, when we do, we qualify for it by going bankrupt.
Yet another is that many of us believe the insurance industry is not an efficient free market industry but rather is rife with bureaucratic inefficiencies, a history of antitrust collusion and favorable protective laws promoted and guarded by one of the most powerful lobbies in the country.
In fact, if you take a look at insurance the big picture is sadly comical.
Medical providers have to fight the insurance companies for every dollar, waiting for payments that are late in coming and dictated to pennies on the dollar by the insurance companies themselves. All the while those same providers get notices that their malpractice insurance rates have gone up, along with a letter telling them that the insurance company has no choice but to raise their rates because their patients are poised to sue them for everything they own. In the meantime insurance industry profits on everything from malpractice to homeowner's insurance to health insurance are rocketing and the barriers for new companies to enter are formidable.
That's the system you want to protect as an efficient free market system? Ed |
