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

To: Katelew who wrote (52024)	3/6/2008 12:34:04 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 540820

yup. A big problem is that when you suck profit out of a system, you are by definition taking money out of the system to distribute to other people, outside of the system. So if we keep our for profit system, the pressure will be to cut costs- by restricting service (boards allowing only certain procedures and drugs, but not others- for all patients, regardless of what the doctor wants), or giving poorer products (as we've seen in off shore dental labs, or lab techs in foreign countries), or to raise premiums, to increase profits- or do both at the same time, as HMO's do (and aren't THEY just a bundle of fun!). Those pressures are somewhat relieved in a not for profit system. Profit systems almost never give you the best product at the best price- not for long, anyway, so for a system you'd like to have stay stable and accessible to people, I think you have to go to socialization. Now people can argue that you don't get research and innovation without profit, but I've seen no evidence of that at the CDC, or the UK or EU research establishments. Things will get done if you fund the organizations that do the research. People like the prestige of working for the big government labs. I think the cost is the only big problem with single payer, that, and the number of people who would be thrown out of work if we could eliminate the tangle of insurance, and HMOs, health benefits specialists at companies, etc- because the situation is such a mess, we're employing many many people in the big mess of a system. They'd all have to find new jobs if we streamlined the system and cut them out. :-) If you look at food, what capitalism gets you is the crappiest product companies can get away with, for which they can either generate demand, or trick the consumer in to buying using false claims, or heavy advertising. The health claims companies make are ludicrous. Look at the boxes of sticky "fruit" snacks- the ones that rot kids teeth worse than candy, since they stick to the teeth. The ones that often have almost no fruit. Capitalism is a lot of things, but responsible, it's not.