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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (214407)	1/24/2007 3:00:17 PM
From: geode00	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

We 'declare' wealth all the time. We declare it in every tax law which transfers wealth from one individual to other individuals. We declare it in services offered up to businesses and individuals in the form of services and grants. It happens every single day to all of us. Just go outside your front door and look at the sidewalk, the road, the electricity, the water...who pays for all of that? Who pays and why? Where is the proof that providing universal healthcare will cause healthcare use to rise? Right now, US healthcare costs about double and provides less care and less health than that of other industrialized nations. Much of what passes for 'healthcare' spending is the overhead of inefficient, ineffective administration and 'insurance' profits. Medicare has about a 2% admin cost while private insurance has as much as 10 times that. As with anything else, a small percentage of users hike up costs dramatically. Most people need less than $1K/year of healthcare. A few need more than $25K. People in the last few months of life need the most. Why not look at the actual problem rather than the imagined one? The problem with health insurance is the same problem we're now confronting with global warming and home owner's insurance: profits. Insurance companies want to make maximum profits while driving risk as low as possible. The idea of insurance shouldn't be PROFIT but the sharing, over a large population, of RISK. This is the idea behind national healthcare. When homeowners along the Atlantic seaboard lose their insurance, whom do they turn to? The government of course. In that case, boot the private insurers in the first place. Ditto national health care. Private insurers are simply middle men who provide NO HEALTH CARE. Their purpose is to DENY health care which is really unhealthy. I heard Bernie Ward on KGO this week talk about this quite eloquently. He noted that the President could, with an executive order, make Medicare available to everyone tomorrow. Now wouldn't that be amazing. We should all write him a letter telling him how he could salvage part of his legacy. :) Oh yes, boot the AMA's monopoly, they actively campaign to keep the number of physicians artificially low, most recently by cutting in half the number of foreign physicians allowed to practice here.