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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (7515)	7/14/2009 6:26:18 AM
From: Lane3	1 Recommendation Respond to of 42652

"Indeed, it is not well appreciated on the left how dependent Medicare is on private insurers to tell them what the competitive price is for the treatments and products it pays for--if the private sector went away, Medicare would have to develop some sort of pricing system, and so would all the health care systems abroad. " I have brought this up multiple times when arguing about overhead costs. This is a function where Medicare now piggybacks on private insurance. If there were no private insurance, it would have to find a way to price things. That's a significant function that has to be included in the cost of single payer. So, first, there's the problem of finding a mechanism to do it in the absence of a market and, second, the cost of actually doing it on a sustained basis.