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

To: geode00 who wrote (214413)	1/24/2007 4:39:54 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Geode, get real! Look at these two consecutive sentences from you: We 'declare' wealth* all the time. We declare it in every tax law which transfers wealth from one individual to other individuals.* declare does not equal transfer. What is your problem? Where is the proof that providing universal healthcare will cause healthcare use to rise? If I can't pay for something, I don't use it. If somebody pays for me I do. Are you seriously claiming that by providing insurance coverage to those who don't currently have it, their use of medical care will go down? Lets see, 1) For those who do currently have medical insurance, will their use of medical care go up or down if others get insurance? 2) For those who currently don't have medical insurance, will their use of medical care go up or down if they are now covered? Rather simple math I would say. 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. Total BS. Profits can be a fine way to keep efficiency in a system. You should instead compare the same task if performed by a non-profit. Replace for profit insurance companies by non-profit insurance companies. My bet would be that all else staying equal (i.e. policy coverage remaining the same), the non-profits will end up providing less cost effective coverage in the long run. Profit is not the issue. Feedback loops are the issue. If the patient has no incentive, other than the very long and indirect loop of increased policy premiums, for containing costs, and the system has so many biases against containing costs, (why do many states require a written estimate for auto repairs, but almost no doctor can tell you the cost of his proposed treatment of you) then you should expect the sort of cost problems we see. Nothing magic here at all. The idea of insurance shouldn't be PROFIT but the sharing, over a large population, of RISK. This is the idea behind national healthcare. As pointed out above, the profit portion has to do with one of several ways of implementing any system, and generally speaking we have a wealth of economic data that says for profit systems work better than non-profit systems. Not always, but in general. You are correct in noting that insurance sole purpose is to spread risk. You fail to note that must of the discussion on health care never states this. In fact, the sole purpose of insurance should be to spread the risk of statistically unlikely health issues across the population Instead, many view insurance as wealth transfer. I suppose that is OK, if society so decides, but don't do it via insurance which is less efficient at it. First do your wealth transfer via tax policy, then restrict the insurance to its statistical function. The way you can see how totally screwed up insurance is as viewed by the general population is to discuss the merits of deductibles with people. If you meet someone who thinks a good insurance policy is a zero deductible one with a limit of say 50K, you are talking to an absolute fool. Yet the USA is full of such.