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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (2906)	11/15/2007 10:32:26 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Assuming that each new insured person consumes no more health care than the previous customers, unit costs might go down. If you have underutilized MRI machines and other expensive devices you will save money there. Buying more materials would probably at best be only a very small change, buying an extra 10% or whatever might not result in any per unit savings. Its not like the orders would typical double. But a very large part of the cost is the cost for the labor. Its hard to get significant economies of scale on this type of service cost, unless the labor is currently very underutilized, which I don't think is usually the case, or unless you accept more rushed, lower quality service. You would probably also get longer waiting times, both for time with the doctors, and for medical equipment. Sure you might get a situation where the equipment is used at 50% capacity and now you are moving to 60%, with no significant wait time increase; but you would get a lot of cases where capacity is already near the limit, and you either have to buy a second unit (thus increasing costs, even per patient), or you have to accept longer wait times.

To: Road Walker who wrote (2906)	11/15/2007 9:47:06 PM
From: Ilaine	Respond to of 42652

Business 101 for manufacturing, not for personal service. Let's take something non-controversial, a barber shop. Once the barber has filled all his chairs every available minute of the day, he can't handle more volume, has to buy more chairs and hire more assistant barbers, rent more room or buy a bigger shop. That's a business decision (a series of business decisions) that only he is qualified to make. If he guesses right, he gets rich, but not because his costs didn't go up.