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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (196110)	7/28/2004 11:54:58 AM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576187

re: Unhappy with WHAT? Medicare, for underpaying for their services, effectively shifting costs to private insurance. For Medicaid, which pays NOTHING and in some states is such an administrative nightmare you couldn't get paid anyway. Many, many are almost as unhappy with the private insurance companies. I heard a guy speak a long time ago, an overview of the health insurance problem. I'll try to paraphrase: He thought that the real problem started after WW2, companies were competing for employee's and started offering health insurance as an employment "benefit". If you think about, why should employers pay for employee's health insureance? They don't pay for car insurance, or homeowners insurance. Why should health insurance be a benefit? His contention is that that was where the whole system started going down hill. The insurance companies, instead of offering products that were tuned to the needs of the end user, tuned their products to benefit the employers, who were picking up the bill. At the same time, when the end user didn't pay for the insurance, when it was a benefit, he naturally took advantage of the system to an extreme. And because you had all these players, the end user, the insurer, the employer mixed up in the system, the health providers didn't have an incentive to keep cost down. It's an artificial economic system, without direct quid pro quo, and that will usually make it inherantly inefficient. I agree with him. Imagine a world where no employer offers health insurance, where every insurance company has to compete, on an individual family basis, for each policy. Where they had to offer different products for different people. How does that influence insurance companies and providers? I suspect everything gets more efficient and less expensive. If you bring the producer and the consumer closer together things always work better. And for your 14%, the government could subsidize, or pay completely, those that are unfortunate. Unfrotuantely, I don't think there is any way to get back to point A from point B. Can you imagine a politician recommending that we do away with employer paid health insurance? He couldn't get elected dog catcher, unless there was a rabies epidemic. Sorry if I sound conservative on this issue, I know you would rather rank about "liberal ignorance". John