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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alighieri who wrote (688895)	12/17/2012 7:38:19 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574189

>> And the solution is? There is none in this political environment, imo. The American public doesn't understand the problem; they think you can just tax the wealthy more and the problem goes away, and they simply don't comprehend how huge the numbers are. I don't know how you solve the problem while maintaining that there is not a problem at the same time. Outside of political considerations the problem is easily solved. You go to the private insurance companies and tell them you're prepared to give them the Medicare program to run for profit as part of their regular lines of business. But that PMPM payments will be limited to established amounts over a ten year planning horizon. By doing so, you would at once eliminate the market convolution that began with the government takeover of Medicare in the 60s (although, Medicaid would still face a problem that would have to be resolved somehow, but it is much smaller). It is necessary to comprehend that government price controls caused the problem to begin with. Once the country "gets" that, it is easy to see that the first step to solving the problem is to get government out of the health care finance business. Suppose government came into, for example, the gasoline market, and said, "We're going to price control half the gasoline sold in the country, effective immediately -- it will be fixed at $2.00/gallon." What would happen to the prices of the other half? How many new gas stations would be built by private enterprise to sell government gas? What would it do to the supply model? The answers to all of those questions are, "It would wreck the entire system." You can't just price control half an industry without destroying the other half. And if you price control all of an industry, you're going to supply problems out the ass -- as has always happened when we've tried price controls. And it isn't possible for our government to do it any other way; government run health care is always price controlled -- some governments can tolerate it better than others.