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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (28150)	4/28/2008 2:13:35 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

"We pay more. That much is not something that can reasonably be doubted." Correct. The numbers are very obvious. "What is doubtful is that most plans of greatly increasing government involvement in health care would be on the net beneficial." I agree that an over-weaning governmental role can produce serious negative effects --- even new ones, totally apart from the negative effects we are currently suffering from under our current miss-mash of a system. But, 'one size' does not fit all, and I have NOT suggested any particular federal response nor 'socialized solution' to our current difficulties. What I would suggest is that we look to the experimentation that has been done in our 'peer group' of similarly wealthy, Capitalistic, and most-developed industrial nations... to see what has worked in other places where it has been tried out, and what has not worked. Taiwan (one of the examples I mentioned) tried such an approach a decade or so back --- appointing an expert committee to travel the world and examine the health care systems of some 20 or 25 different nations, to see what was working and what not. Then they came home and designed a system for Taiwan that synthesized some of the best ideas they had encountered, and proposed (was then adopted) the new system for Taiwan. Most most measures, the health care resultants there (and per-capita expense) is vastly superior to what the US suffers under now. Switzerland, too, reformed it's national health care system fairly recently --- keeping in place large measures of Capitalist incentives (as, in a different manner, had Germany in it's earlier reform) and, although certainly not perfect systems, they appear to be performing better then ours (and, again, much more cost-efficiently) then our's.... And, their big Pharmaceuticals companies do not appear to have been commercially damaged... at least, not by any obvious measure of profitability. :-) MANY, MANY bits of reform are needed to craft an efficient and better-performing system. Pharmaceutical reforms, insurance reforms, patent law reforms, government reforms, legal reforms, tax reforms, technological & other safety reforms (barcodes are mandated on all prescriptions in Taiwan, for example, and hospitals use wireless handheld scanners on ALL prescription units at bedside before administration. Prescription error caused deaths have fallen far below the massive US death rates), etc.