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

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (130318)	2/6/2010 11:01:15 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 541944

You have to have a wild imagination to believe that the profit component only adds 3% to overall costs. It's not wild imagination. It's critical thinking--in this case the ability to differentiate between profit and competition. The cost of profit is the actual amount of profit plus whatever portion of competition is underhanded and selfish. Y'all keep attributing to profit that which is not a function of profit. You can use the points you made to argue for single-payer. Using them to argue against profit is off base.

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (130318)	2/7/2010 4:50:29 PM
From: Cogito	Respond to of 541944

>>The goal has to be to make healthcare as efficient as possible. There is no way possible for a profit incentive to make the system more efficient. You can spin it all you want but profit is anything that takes away from providing health care. Worse than pure profit is what the profit motive brings to the table. Take away graft, corruption, marketing, sales, and related G&A expenses you still have duplication of effort in billing and keeping records straight. Every provider has to have their own proprietary system. Just think of the extra costs besides the inability to share information and mistakes being made by adding to the layers of unnecessary complexity. How can you possibly believe that somehow a profit motive can bring efficiency to this type of system.<< I agree completely. Given all the duplication among the various insurance carriers, competition alone can't create the efficiencies a single payer system would have.