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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cnyndwllr who wrote (51827)	3/5/2008 2:55:19 PM
From: Katelew	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541912

Wonderful post, Ed. To it I would add the fact that healthcare costs in the US have been rising at a rate more than double that of inflation. To a great extent, insurers, hospitals, docs, etc., all players in the industry are free to raise their prices with impunity. There are few countervailing influences to keep these costs down. The end result of this is that our large corporations, most of whom strive in good faith to provide excellent health benefits to their employees, are burdened with a cost of doing business that is greater than their EU counterparts. In terms of doing business with the rapidly growing emerging economies, our companies compete every day with EU and Japanese corporations. EU and Japanese corporations, with their single-payer systems, pay considerably less to provide their employees with the same level of health benefits that employees of US companies have.

To: cnyndwllr who wrote (51827)	3/5/2008 3:04:56 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541912

...but what we're now discussing is expanding the concept of subsidized health care and attempting to make the system more affordable for all. Hooray, finally. <g> That's the system you want to protect as an efficient free market system? Why would you assume that I'm trying to protect the current system? That's quite a leap. What I'm trying to do is get to the essence of why folks are so keen on jumping to a universal single-payer system. When we design systems, we look at the old system and identify problems to see if modifications to the old system will do the trick. If not, we identify all the functional requirements and design a new system around them. It appears to me that some folks have euro-envy or some such so they are skipping those key steps and jumping on this universal single-payer bandwagon because the cool kids across the pond do it that way or because it just feels right. I don't know if that's just ignorance coupled with ideology or if there's something else going on there and I'm curious about it. That's part of my interest in this. Another part is that I'm a retired war horse who just can't help trying to build solid systems and who just can't help being professionally offended by what's going on. And yet another part is that I love my country. The reasons for revamping the system are many. They are, indeed. So let's not do something precipitous without so much as articulating a rationale. It's too important.