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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: quehubo who wrote (118918)	8/19/2009 10:51:46 PM
From: Sam	Respond to of 543106

It appears you identified how care will be rationed. Less service providers and more people entitled to services. Q--this "rationing' business is just amazing to me. First, we ration care now--it is done on the basis who has enough money, insurance and/or connections. Second, every system "rations" care in some way or another--no country has enough money to cover everything that goes wrong. Triage is a necessary part of medical care. Would you consider that shrinking the medical industry and increasing coverage is perhaps what is motivating the public to be so active? What will happen is the there will be less money paid to providers. And there will be fewer health care insurance companies. Or at the very least they will be smaller as people shift to the public option. Sure, they are fighting it. And sure some of them are riling up the public against the public option. That doesn't mean that it would be wrong to enact it. Your option appears to be one where treatment is more equal around the nation and the producers who pay all the taxes in this country are also equal but receiving much lower quality of service. This is standard Republican stuff, Q--the unworthy or not-very-competent- or diligent- poor want to steal from the worthy-virtuous-productive few. The Ayn Rand tale. It is astonishing nonsense, but the fact that something is nonsense certainly never stopped anyone from believing it. First of all, I am not aware of any plan that will make having private insurance illegal. If someone is unhappy with their service, they can pay for the whatever care they find meets their needs. As it is, many people who can afford it pay for insurance that supplements Medicare. Second, the fact that people in the medical care system will generally get less money than they do now doesn't mean that the system will shrink. At least not in the long run. It will change. It has to change. In fact, it will change whether or not some reform plan is passed. The only real question is, how will that change take place? Will it be left to the "marketplace," the "invisible hand"? Or will the change be guided, as it is more or less in every other country that can afford to do so? There is no other country that copied our employer-based health care. You should ask yourself why that is.