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

To: Katelew who wrote (214482)	1/24/2007 7:50:30 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

The uninsured may not spend as much on their healthcare as the insured, but when they become injured or truly sick they get treatment, oftentimes at emergency rooms. I'm not arguing against everyone being insured, just that the money must come from somewhere, and preferably in a pretty short loop from those getting the service. There must be a feedback loop which makes careful consumers out of the sick. For many reasons, that does not exist right now. I'll give you two pieces of anecdotal evidence about problems with the current system: 1) Several people I know, have had stomach surgery for obesity. They are on welfare and have no private insurance. The state picks up the tab ($20K+). They don't change their lifestyles. 2) My inlaws who are retired have good private insurance coverage including eye & hearing. They buy $2K/ear hearing aids ($4K per person) and are allowed to do this once per year. They have for the last several years lost these hearing aids each year, so repeat the procedure. There is no deductible for this nonsense. Also the insured are now greatly subsidizing the uninsured. With a universal single payer system, everyone pays in. Most of the uninsured can afford some amount of premium...even more so if the coverage is only for catastropic illnesses. That is an argument for requiring everyone to be covered, not an argument for single payer. Do you understand the difference? As for 'wealth transfer', in theory, every change in the tax code would constitute a transfer of wealth from one group to another. Deficit spending by a government negates that. That makes no sense at all. Deficit spending would only negate it if an inverse tax structure applied during the years of repayment including full accounting for time value of money, etc.