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

To: Road Walker who wrote (10021)	10/1/2009 4:00:50 PM
From: Lane3	2 Recommendations Respond to of 42652

Can you name some? You betcha. Regulation. Calcified bureaucracy. Creeping entitlements. Day-late-and-a-dollar-short decision making. Popular rather than business-minded decision making. Influence peddling. Lobby pressure. That's just off the top of my head. in the next breath say if there was a public option it would drive all the private insurers out of business. I never said that. I am on record as saying the privates would mop up the public if it were a fair fight. The problem is that it wouldn't be because the government would prop up the public and/or cripple the privates. I am on the record as not being opposed to a public option if it were done as a demonstration project. But there's no hint that it would be done that way. If it's bad people won't choose it. If it's artificially cheap, people will choose it.

To: Road Walker who wrote (10021)	10/5/2009 2:16:15 PM
From: i-node	1 Recommendation Respond to of 42652

If often strikes me how some on this thread constantly talk about how bad and inefficient government is, and in the next breath say if there was a public option it would drive all the private insurers out of business. If it's bad people won't choose it. I don't think you can have it both ways. Government savings in the current government plans (MC, MA) are not a matter of "efficiency" at all. They are a result of government being able to mandate payments for services, in effect, to mandate the subsidization of government programs by other insurance and others. There is no evidence at all that government could run a "competitive" insurance operation as cost effectively as private insurance. Nothing at all would suggest such a thing.

To: Road Walker who wrote (10021)	10/8/2009 5:21:25 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

If often strikes me how some on this thread constantly talk about how bad and inefficient government is, and in the next breath say if there was a public option it would drive all the private insurers out of business. There is no contradiction between those two points. Efficiency isn't the only criteria about who succeeds in a business competition. Subsidies or other forms of tilting the playing field can cause the less efficient provider to dominate.