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

To: Lane3 who wrote (130243)	2/5/2010 5:37:31 PM
From: Jeff Hayden	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541923

"For profit health insurance is FOR PROFIT. Not for yours or my health. Is that hard to understand?" (Me) No, not hard to understand, on its face. Seems to me, though, that it's not as simple as "profit is the root of all evil." That's an ideological reaction, not an analysis. (You) I didn't say that profit is the root of all evil. But now that you bring it up, a profit-based health insurance system is inappropriate. It leads not only to government-protected inefficiencies in the third party insurance providers, but adds profit to the overall cost, neither characteristic of which adds to effective health care. Government-protected competition doesn't work when all the government's teeth have been removed.

To: Lane3 who wrote (130243)	2/6/2010 1:38:16 AM
From: Cogito	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 541923

>>Sure, profit takes something off the top. I think it's about three percent for health insurance.<< There's the profit, plus the cost of advertising and promotion, among other things. Then there's the department full of people whose only job is to find rationalizations for denying claims and to cancel the policies of sick people. I think you have to ask yourself why it is that a country like Canada can insure all of its citizens with a full-featured plan that covers checkups, maternity care, mental health, and so forth, without having to spend even half of what we spend on healthcare. Why is it that they can do that and we can't? I know one thing. Canadian doctors don't employ as many people in billing. So that reduces costs. In Canada, there's an organization that is designed to cover the costs of healthcare for all the people in the country. That one organization has some pretty effective bargaining power. Here, we have lots of organizations designed to make a profit by coming up with all kinds of different health insurance plans, advertising and marketing them, and then making sure that they never pay out too much. The Canadian system efficiently does what it is designed to do. It pays for healthcare for all Canadian people. The American system also efficiently does what it is designed to do. It makes a profit for the insurance companies. I guess it's just a question of deciding what the goal is. I know what I would prefer it to be.