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

To: TimF who wrote (262840)	4/27/2008 1:24:02 AM
From: geode00	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

No, administrative costs don't just include things like profit and high salaries and extra perks for CEOs. Costs include things like the huge number of hours doctors spend putzing around with insurance companies asking for permission and the filling of forms required for payment. They also include transfers of medical files from one medical facility to another or even lack of file transfers and bad drug interactions. People, however, will not be willing to have a single database of all of their medical history as long as insurance companies have pre-existing exclusions and denial of insurance. They will not be willing and should not be willing. Private health insurance companies have shown themselves to be completely untrustworthy. I believe that the experience of the UK shows that most people will opt for the national system as long as it is pretty good. If people want to buy specific services (plastic surgery that isn't to correct a medical problem for example) that isn't covered by insurance, why would that cause a big administrative burden? How many people do that anyway? Centralized databases is a matter of trust and privacy. Private corporations are not to be trusted with any of it as they already abuse everything from your SS number to your purchase patterns. Negotiating for lower price is not the same thing as setting prices. You do know that don't you? You aren't following the argument. I listed things that cause increased costs in the USA. They are not all caused by private health insurance or will be fixed simply by going to a public one. The cause of high malpractice insurance is both errors (aka malpractice) and bad bedside manner. As a libertarian, you should be happy to see people slug it out in court whenever they want. Are you sure you are a libertarian? No, as with the FAA, the FDA is too cozy with those it regulates. Considering that drugs can kill people, I'm not sure how much less stringent you want the FDA to be. If you don't regulate things then how do you handle dangerous products...with lawsuits? There is a very good argument for making the health care system much more public than it is today. The one that I think most Americans would agree with is getting rid of for profit health insurance companies. Having doctors and hospitals actually be government employees and institutions may be harder for people to swallow. I don't think it matters as much as most people think it does. Responsiveness to patients and accountability can be missing from both public and private employees. The more expensive and lower quality the US health care system becomes, the more people will be willing to opt for a major change. Since cost is the most glaring problem at this point, attacking cost at the source of most funds is a very rational idea.