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Politics : Actual left/right wing discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cirrus who wrote (102)	9/6/2006 12:50:16 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10087

Your still not seeing that the cost is still paid. If Medicare doesn't bill, it still gets its money and there is paperwork involved in that. Single payer might mean lower total paperwork but it doesn't intrinsically mean less paperwork even if you don't consider additional possible paperwork that isn't filled out by the consumer or is filled out by the consumer of health care but not as health insurance paperwork. Some of the additional paperwork is from government requirements. If your going to change the system, than you can change it to remove a lot of those requirements. Its likely some of the additional paperwork is to act as a non-cash cost to reduce demand. If you reduce this non-cash cost, and also reduce the cash paid out by the consumer you increase demand. Increase demand combined with a federal guarantee of payment can be problematic. The likely response is rationing, either explicit rationing or rationing by waiting times. When my dad was ill, the local Blue Cross agency insisted on sending every bill to the Black Lung Administration (he was a former coal miner) for review and possible payment - even if the treatment had nothing remotely related to Black Lung. I called up the agency myself and spoke to a woman who explained that, yes, the Blues do that. "And yes, we have a floor full of people who do little more than reject claims and send them back." That's very likely a government requirement. It might be a law, it might be a regulation, it might be a judicially impose result of some law suit. I disagree - there are costs than can and must be busted out of the system. I'm not saying that the system is perfectly efficient and you can't reduce costs, or even that you can't reduce costs without reducing services. I was pointing out that the specific costs I mentioned don't go away just because the government handles it, either as something like Medicare (in parallel with private insurance) or as part of a single payer system. The costs don't get counted as costs of the system, they are put in to other areas of the budget, but they are indeed costs of the system. More generally I have no reason to think that socialized health insurance would be more efficient than most socialized systems.