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

To: Brumar89 who wrote (8757)	8/27/2009 5:36:39 PM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 42652

an oil companies funds available for paying exploration, development, and production costs comes from payments by energy consumers. Insurance companies gather premium payments from policy holders for the sole purpose of redistributing them to the policy holders based on medical need. The insurance company doesn't manufacture moeny. Energy companies, OTOH, don't redistribute payments back to consumers. Energy companies take their profits out of consumer payments, manufacture more product, and then sell that product to consumers. Not at all the same. So we should accept government rationing of gasoline, housing, food, - after all rationing is happening so we should let the government do it "fairly". OK. Let's take gasoline. Oil in the ground belongs to whoever owns the ground. If the ground is a shared resource, such as oil under a national park or the ocean, then there is a government function on how to distribute it. It goes to this energy company or that energy company based, typically, on a bidding process. The process is how this shared resource is distributed. The money the energy company pays for the oil rights is spent by the government on behalf of the shared owners, the taxpayers. The oil that comes out of the ground, whether privately owned ground or common ground, is the property of the energy company, which manufactures gasoline from it. It is no longer a common resource. Gasoline is bought and sold like any other product. Government rationing is not in play. Re acceptance. You keep conflating the manufacturing business paradigm and the shared resource paradigm. We use both in this country for different things. Sometimes we use a bit of each. Each works in it's own way. We need to apply the paradigm that fits the problem. I would prefer that we use a manufacturing paradigm for health care. The medical system manufactures the treatment and we pay for it, just like we do gasoline at the pump. But the country is well on the road to treating health care money as a shared resource both via group health care policies and government programs. If we can't change that back to a manufacturing paradigm, then we have no choice to accept that the shared resources will be rationed by the designated functionary, be it the insurance company or the government. You think money is scarce because you're viewing the government as the provider of the money to pay for health care and the government has financial problems and its willingness to spend money is limited. No, I think money is scarce because the people who get their health care coverage via group private insurance or via the government are unwilling to pay the escalating price of medical care and are constraining the size of the pools. That makes the pools smaller than the demand for payouts, which is the very definition of "scarce." Do you really think that people are willing to up their premiums/taxes to accommodate all this demand? They're bitching already, those who actually pay premiums and taxes, that is. Of course, for those who don't pay premiums and taxes because they can't afford to, money is even scarcer. It's zero. For the folks of means paying their own medical bills, no, money isn't scarce. But they are a drop in the bucket. Whats happening now is the government is trying to step in and handle those issues for everyone. That is inevitable when the government covers most of the country's health care and wants to cover all of it. We lose our autonomy even to change from one insurance functionary doing rationing to another. For whatever [misguided] reason, there is a large demand for government to take charge. It could sell the park if it wanted and the land would then be private property. Sure, but until they do, they will have picnic tables and tennis courts that they need to ration. Medicare is a special case. It's not a special case. It's a harbinger of things to come. Look, I fully appreciate your aversion to government involvement. I am most certainly not advocating that. I'm only saying that when in England, you drive on the left side. There is no alternative when you're in England. If we have government-provided medical care funding, then we have a rationing scenario. It's pointless to rail against the rationing in that scenario because it's inevitable, inextricably linked. If you want to rail against something, rail against the problem, not the symptom. The problem is government-provided medical care funding, not rationing.