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

To: Road Walker who wrote (8168)	8/11/2009 8:10:06 PM
From: Little Joe	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

"Health care costs HAVE TO go lower... or this country is in big trouble." So how do you get costs lower. In my adult life there has probably been more laws passed by the Federal and State Government in health care than any other area. All that has done is drive the cost higher. What is the Government going to do to lower costs. What is the plan? Your statement is equivilent of saying I must have more money or I am in big trouble. Without a followup plan such as I will get aa 2nd job or a better job, what use is the statement.You have no workable plan. You are listening to people in Washington who have all sorts of motives that have nothing to do with saving money, or your best interests. The fact is that if you make more health care more available more people will use the benefits. When is the last time you asked your doctor what he charges the insurance company for a particular procedure. I bet you never do. When is the last time you bought anything else without knowing what it cost. I bet never. lj

To: Road Walker who wrote (8168)	8/18/2009 5:40:20 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Health care costs becoming significantly lower, or going even slightly down in a durable way, is an unrealistic hope, if your talking about costs in terms of nominal dollars, or real dollars, or nominal or real dollars per person. Its possible the costs could go down as a percentage of GDP, or in other words grow slower than the economy as a whole, but there are a lot of factors working against that, several of which I mentioned in my last post. The factors I mentioned will mostly continue (well we might stop getting fatter, and we might even temporarily stop getting older on the average if you have a lot of births or baby boomer deaths during a period of a few years). But reducing the rate that health care costs are growing (by any measure, esp, by % of GDP) might be possible, and might even be possible without slowing the improvement of health care services.