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

To: geode00 who wrote (215035)	1/26/2007 2:36:24 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 281500

How many times must I point out your errors? 1. Medicare's administrative and overhead costs versus that of private insurance. I'll skip on this one, because I lack data, but still doubt your claims. 2. The growing number of uninsured which, according to your theory, should have been gobbled up by insurance companies by now. Where have I said this? IF medical insurance were mandatory, THEN insurance companies would love it, and not have any problem with preexisting conditions. How do you go from what I say to your nonsense above? 3. The very real concerns of people like Schultz, founder of Starbucks, who is alarmed that health insurance costs him more than the coffee he peddles. Ditto GM and steel. Exactly how is the for profit model working for either company? I freely admit that health care cost are going up, for some very clear reasons which I have repeatedly stated. Those reasons have NOTHING, repeat for you, NOTHING, to do with for-profit/non-profit, single payer/multi-payer per se. I see the same dynamics at play in any combination. (Actually, not quite true as I noted that aggregate business increase is a factor for-profit entities, and most likely not for non-profit, but I see that as a more minor issue). I keep asking you to tell me why you think the way you do, and you keep giving me nonsense. PLEASE, give me an argument for the following: 1) Why non-profit systems are necessary in health care as opposed to other commerical fields. 2) Why single-payer systems are necessary in health care as opposed to other commerical fields. Now you're making absolutely zero sense. I'm talking about why the insurance companies SPECIFICALLY and PURPOSEFULLY exclude the high risk people whenever and however they are legally able. Because ALL people are not REQUIRED to buy insurance. That simple. If all people are required to buy insurance, then insurance companies can agree on mechanism for swapping similar risk clients, as I have pointed out to you, the auto insurance system already does. Nothing new here. Do you work for an insurance company? No, I am engineer. What I'm saying is that, with a stroke of the pen, Bush could make every single person in the US of A covered....tomorrow. That's what I understand. I agree. But you seem to think that can ONLY happen if it is a single payer, non-profit system. Why? PLEASE answer that question. Perhaps we are just misunderstanding each other for some reason I cannot fathom, but your failure to explain why 100% coverage = single payer, non-profit is what has me totally stumped. Try getting that to happen with the current system of for-profit, deny-care insurance companies. TRY IT They would love it for reasons I have already stated. Perhaps you think that the sum total of uninsured, preexisting conditions is a barrier to the insurance companies agreeing to this. Not in the least. Those preexisting conditions are temporal, and averaged over the pool of uninsured are a very minor issue. Without detailed numbers, I'll allow that a very small hit to income for the first quarter or so might show up on the bottom line, but this will be totally swamped by the boost in business. Remember a large fraction of the population is not insured, and their medical statistics are not going to be much different from the insured population, but even if they are, the insurance companies don't care, as they will recompute their averages, and adjust premiums shortly to make up for it. You continue to confuse insurance methods, with the methods used by customers to obtain insurance. These are totally independent. If the government requires all people to carrier insurance, the insurance companies would love it, and there most likely would be some overall cost benefits because of increased volume. But there would remain the issue of how the poor would pay for their insurance. As I have stated before, the only way I see that happening is through taking tax money from better off people and giving it (as efficiently as possible) in insurance payment assistance to the poor.

To: geode00 who wrote (215035)	1/26/2007 2:57:06 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Let me try one other way of clarifying this. Many poor people in the USA receive food & housing assistance. Lets look at food assistance. Food assistance is not single payer. There are federal and state assistance, and it varies by state. The assistance does come from state & local taxes, so it is wealth redistribution. AFAIK, most of such food assistance is in fact non-profit. So this is the combination of multi-payer, non-profit using tax wealth redistribution. It should be further noted that food production as well as most of food distribution is not much affected by the assistance programs. I say not much, because food stamps are typically used like money at normal food sales points. There is some effect, because some Bureaucrat determines what can and what cannot be purchased with food stamps. This actually does affect upstream food production somewhat, how much I don't know. I do know that farmers like getting on the approved school lunch list, and that can impact crop prices a little. Now, please note that food is MUCH move vital than health care. Most our monkey cousins live their lives with zero medical care, but nobody lasts long without food. So 1) Food is more vital than health care 2) Some Americans can't obtain adequate food on their own. Therefore the government should implement a single payer, non-profit system to pay for all food used in the USA, to insure the best system at the low cost. My view of your arguments on health care are similar to my views of the above conclusion: they are incorrect. Don't come back arguing that health care is different because of risk, whereas food consumption is known. If you try that, it just means you don't understand that first and foremost, insurance specifically handles that, it converts the infrequent into known budgeted amounts. Fundamentally, insurance is for Accountants. Accountants cannot deal with the unknown and risk. Everything must be squared up on the budget and balance sheets. Insurance does this with great mathematical precision. Accountants happily pay some premium for this tidying up. They don't care in the least that those performing this accounting house cleaning make a little profit on the side, although nobody would complain if somehow some kind soul did it for free. That is not the issue. What I see you doing is spending all your time arguing that the organization that converts infrequent and unexpected expenses into bounded certainty, should for some unknown reasons provide this service for free, as though it is inexplicably different from other commercial services. Why?