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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (380073)	4/24/2008 12:05:12 PM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1578133

Your solution, I suppose, would be to have government administer the program which purportedly would save money. I do not believe this, and history is on my side -- there are few, if any, efficiently run government programs, and nobody would argue that Medicare and/or state Medicaids are as efficiently run as commercial insurance companies. Without commercial insurance to prop up these programs (in more ways than just one), you simply couldn't have the quality of health care we now have. I was talking to a front office medical person the other day and she said the first function of insurance companies was to find any reason to deny a claim. That's an administrative cost on both ends, multiplied by millions of doctor visits. Then you have the insurance company profits, their sales and marketing costs, and their huge executive salaries. No other industrialized country has these costs... and their system cost half as much. Coincidence? As to Medicare and Medicaid, you say they are not efficient but that's not what I hear. Doc's get pissed off because they don't pay as much as they would like. And the overhead is much lower than an insurance company. Capping malpractice awards ON A FEDERAL LEVEL -- that's a start. No it's a non-starter. Insurance is state regulated. You might as well ask a state to amend the US constitution. We've discussed the problem with drug pricing, but that one is much more difficult to deal with, and the ultimate resolution is probably going to have to come in the form of tax policy. If a drug company can sell a drug overseas for any price above its variable manufacturing costs, from a microeconomic point of view it has to be allowed to do so, otherwise, the firm is taking the hit, which is ultimately going to stifle the development of new pharmaceuticals. Frankly most of drug research is paid for by the government, teaching hospitals or in the academic area. The drug companies mostly pay for the FDA approval process, which is expensive... but not much of the basic research. OTOH, there is an apparent unfairness in requiring the USA to take the hit on expensive new drugs. There must be some kind of equitable arrangement introduced into this situation. Agreed. The problem is that in ALL the other industrialized nations the government negotiates the price of the drugs. Here, the government is not allowed by law to negotiate drug prices even in Medicaid/Medicare... a result of the strong drug company lobby. So the solution is simple... take on the low cost model that works. What is important, IMO, is that the problems be addressed on an individual basis rather than some kind of socialized medicine approach. There is zero doubt about it -- socialized medicine will reduce the quality of the health care we receive in the United States. As long as you keep trying to change the discussion from socialized insurance to "socialized medical care" then we can't have an intelligent conversation. We are only talking about the payment system.