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

To: geode00 who wrote (215904)	2/1/2007 10:38:49 PM
From: neolib	Respond to of 281500

I'm telling you that Medicare COULD BY LAW WIPE OUT PRIVATE HEALTH INSURANCE....TOMORROW. Only if the law gets passed by both houses of Congress, is signed by the President, and not later found to be Unconstitutional. The same can be said about the reverse. Congress and the President could abolish Medicare and replace it with private insurance. What is your point? Where do you get this? 60% (I think it is) of Americans are overweight, I wonder if even 20% of Americans eat the RDA of vegetables and fruits. Responsible behavior is discouraged by the funding of things like corn and the ignoring of things like locally grown green vegetables. Excellent! It was you who brought up ROI and some fuzzy "outcome" as a metric (after you tried "critical" and "urgent"). I'm merely pointing out that if ROI, and average quality of life are your metric, than to hell with health care. It delivers very poor ROI compared to healthful living. In fact healthful living does an excellent job of illustrating that health care, like insurance, is largely about risk averaging across the population. Not everyone gets brain cancer, but the system devotes a lot of technology to solve that problem for the few who get it. What a lousy ROI! The only medical technology that has a really excellent ROI (AFAIK) are immunizations and antibiotics. A step down from that is dental care. If ROI normalized to life expectancy is your metric, then healthful living, immunizations, antibiotics, and dental care is what we should restrict health care to. Try analyzing your own ideas. You might have something. That is by the way a good point. Perhaps someone needs to make a could economic estimate of the ROI for all the various medical procedures that are available, and this should be published. Then we can vote collectively on who should die. Why leave it the hands of the government or insurance or drug co., or medical professionals. Lets all accept responsibility and sign on the dotted line! There is a SINGLE ENTITY deciding whether or not we go to war. It should be more than that but apparently we're down to the unitary president. We have SINGLE ENTITIES deciding on the future of laws (Supremes), interest rates (Fed), etc. So, given how you rail at the powers of Bush, why are you wanting to further expand the single entity to cover all medical issues?