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

To: Lane3 who wrote (130323)	2/6/2010 11:12:30 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541957

But there are many costs attendant to getting the profit- and I think you have to add those to the profit, because if you didn't have a profit system, you would not have those costs. I mentioned collection agencies, but there are also all the other services a for profit system has. And under National Health I saw no advertising- except for preventative stuff- you are just assigned to a group, and you go. If you need a specialist, they send you to one. If you need a hospital, you go to the one in your area. So, streamlined billing costs (because there are not multiple companies, and a zillion different rules), no collection burden on the system, no advertising. There is no over riding goal of screwing the consumer out of the health care he or she might need. We have a for profit system designed to squeeze people. Competition DOES work- and in this case, it has encouraged insurers to wring all the money they can out of the system by denying people health care when they can get away with it, and occasionally even when they can't- in the hope that the people who are too stupid to figure out they have been incorrectly denied will just die or go away or pay it themselves. In used cars we can tolerate being screwed, and many people are willing to be screwed in terms of the food our large corporations provide us in the supermarket (I can't say I think the for profit motive has done much for us in the food supply area)- but I think it's clear for profit is pretty creepy in health care. Now some people may prefer creepy over the "evils" of socialism, but I like socialism, so it doesn't bother me at all. I like a country where no one has to worry themselves to death about their medical bills. That seems so cold and inhumane to me. But, of course, it's all about personal preferences in the end. If I hadn't used the National Health and been surprised by how good it was, I might have bought some of the scary stories floated by the wingers- but as it is, I kind of have to go with my own experience.

To: Lane3 who wrote (130323)	2/6/2010 12:56:11 PM
From: Mary Cluney	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541957

<<<The cost of profit is the actual amount of profit plus whatever portion of competition is underhanded and selfish.>>> Nice try. Good imagination on your part. In other words the only thing you are willing to add to the cost of generating a profit are some intangible costs eg underhanded and selfish stuff. But by any accounting standards or methods, the cost of health care is nowhere near 97% of money spent directly on healthcare as your view would have us believe. Our argument really begins when you deduct the actual costs that goes into healthcare minus your reference to profit. IMO, for example, only about 50% of money spent on health care actually goes directly into health care - and that would include overhead. My guess is that we can not account for about 47% of the money spent. I am reminded of what Casey Stengel once said about how women ruin ballplayers. It is not that women ruin ballplayers, but it is the chasing of women that ruins ballplayers - meaning all the time they waste drinking in bars looking for women is the cause of their demise. Similarly, wrt healthcare, we do not actually know the amount of money that is actually spent or wasted on chasing that 3% profit (eg marketing, sales, executive pay, bonuses, overhead, inefficient and redundant proprietary systems needed to generate the 3% profit, intangible waste, on and on,,etc).