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

To: Alighieri who wrote (16190)	4/6/2010 5:20:11 PM
From: Lane3	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

maybe you don't understand the concept of one variable at the time to understand the effect of THAT variable I understand the concept just fine. I preach it regularly. What I don't understand is by what logic you are applying it. Plan B has two cost variables. The PO and 32M additional people on the rolls. If you still don't get it I give up. Plan B as you're labeling it is apparently "the PO," the program drafted drafted but not put forward. It had many features, each with cost variables. I suppose we could try to isolate them. The reason for doing so would be to see which features had the greatest effect on overall cost. (Lordy, I'm tempted by the analogy demon here. But I'll try to explain it without one. <g>) Some examples of cost variables would be the actuarial values chosen, the range of policy pricing allowed, the size of any subsidy, etc. The cost of the PO would be the overall cost of the program including all its features at whatever value was assumed for each of the variables. I do see what you're doing. You're trying to separate the program mechanism, its infrastructure, from the policy-holders that would populate it in operation. Conceptually, that segregation is easy. Calling them "variables," however, does not compute. They are program components, not features and not variables. You have the infrastructure and the occupants. You don't have a PO program without both. You can't cost either of them without the other. How in the world would you cost a mechanism, an infrastructure, that wasn't populated? If you just established the mechanism and never let anyone sign up, then the cost would be whatever administration and materials necessary to establish it. Not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. Some staff, some office space, some computer hardware and software. Maybe a few million bucks. Not a cost savings, as you claimed, but cheap. So what? In order to determine whether the PO would save money, as claimed, you'd have to put into operation, if not in real life, at least in a simulation. You'd have to populate it with all the policy-holders likely to make use of it (the number of policy-holders would be a variable.), which is what I did. I projected the cost of an operational PO, the system occupied by its cohort. That's what budgets do. Makes no sense to cost the empty and unused system. You're welcome to try, though. How would you even begin to cost the PO without taking into account the likely participants? Inquiring minds want to know.