KMA troll
When the federal government ends all mandates surrounding health care, then we’ll see good things happen, and prices drop.
It is never, never, ever a good thing for the federal government to take over a share of the private sector.
What’s next, the conservatives case for free food? Geez.
China does not have Universal Government wide Coverage
And do you really want to argue in favor the European Economic model?
Single Payer is a failure waiting to exhaust the resources that sustain its mirage of success. The solution to our dysfunctional health care system is to require every consumer of health care to pay their own bills with their own money.
In reality, our health care system is the world’s finest. It is the payment system that is broken and I lay the blame directly on government intrusion starting in WW II when government changed the income tax law to allow the premiums for health insurance to be exempt from taxation if the employer paid them directly.
First and foremost, we must require that everyone pay their own bills. We may want to allow all health care costs to be tax exempt, but it must be at the personal level so the proper financial incentives are rebuilt and retained. This can be done by allowing everyone to open a Medical Savings Account.
Having everyone pay their own bills then puts the right incentives on government to properly recognize the core issue with health care costs- how to pay for the health care of the indigent, no matter what their age or legal status. This must be funded somehow. That is the only debate issue for the public to address. But you would be surprised at how much regular health care expenses will drop when people are spending their own money out of their own accounts.
You’re a moron.
This guy might as well write, “I’d like to make a pro-life case for abortion on demand. It’s not as heretical as it sounds...”
Yes.
It.
Is.
Healthcare is no different as a product than say, hair care. It needs to be treated pretty much the same, regulation wise.
Master Goebbels would be so proud!
"health care costs burden our private sector in ways that inhibit American competitiveness abroad. Our competitors in Europe and Asia don't have to worry about health insurance costs."
Yeah, I heard there's lots of other free shit over there too.
"We can continue to let escalating health care costs drag our economy down or we can have single payer health care."
They escalate, because of the particulars of govm't interference. They're designed to run up the costs deliberately to consolidate the monopoly. If you like single payer so much, why don't you just step up and volunteer to be that individual!
There is NO “conservative case” for single payer healthcare.
Just the opposite — there should be many health insurance providers, and it should be allowed to purchase insurance out of state, which is not currently allowed, as well as multi-tier options, such as allowing people to purchase just catastrophic care insurance, etc. Allow more competition, more options, do something about frivolous lawsuits, and we don’t have to worry about out of control healthcare.
Socialism is NOT the answer.
Of course we are all paying for the healthcare of
Nothing is ever more expensive than when it’s free and we have way too much debt to be able to afford it. Just look at what’s happening in Europe and then say it’s a good idea.
1. Prepaid Medical Care plans (which ignore individual risk) and
2. Medical Care insurance (which accounts for individual risk).
Compound that with erroneous cost comparisons that fail to account for the cost of using the courts and the criminal code as your primary vehicles for enforcing payment (when folks end up cheating the tax system).
The proponents usually end up puffing their chests out and telling us just how smart they are and we'd better listen.
First of all, they aren't that smart. Secondly I do not want to pay their medical bills. Third, if they need government medical care there are plenty of other countries to bother.
The problem is that all prescriptions which focus on health insurance, rather than actual health care, are certain to lead to bad outcomes. In some ways Obamacare managed to combine the worst features of single payer health insurance with the worst features of an imperfect market.
The problem with health care costs is that everyone seems to operate under the delusion that we have a free market in health care. Government regulation creates an economically artificial oligopoly (called the medical profession), which actually functions more like a monopoly (”reasonable and customary” is price-fixing).
Yes, such regulation is needed for the public good. We do not want quacks opening up medical offices. But, as in the case of utilities, the creation of a restriction of suppliers in the public interest should be combined with a regulation of prices in the public interest. (I would actually argue that rates charged by any profession the exercise of which is restricted to state-issued license-holders should be subject to regulation.)
Likewise, most advanced medical technology, including drugs, are sold under government grants of monopolies called “patents”. Yes, there is a socially useful purpose in granting such monopolies (on actual devices, or artificial substances, not on business plans, not on algorithms) enshrined in our Constitution— to encourage invention and discovery — but in the case of products for which there is inelastic demand (like the best available treatment for some disease), the grant of a monopoly should come with regulation of the price.
Fix these problems, and an insurance market, and folks paying for their own health care as they did before FDR’s wage freeze pushed companies into offering health insurance benefits and further distorted the imperfect market created by state-granted oligopolies, should be able to deliver good health care at reasonable cost.
Medical insurance is a completely flawed industry and will never have any basis in sound economics. The "natural" influences of the different players (patients, doctors and insurance companies) drive the entire industry to one or both of these inevitable ends: (1) increases in cost, and (2) reduction in quality of care. Changing the system so that a single government-run "insurer" replaces private insurers doesn't change this.
He is making an indictment of the employer based health care which is pretty easy to do. One thing he misses, without a government mandate employers don’t have the burden he describes.
The alternatives to that are : market based consumer health care or socialized government run single payer health care, a medicare or medicaid for all. The first means each individual negotiating with a private health insurance company much like auto insurance, not a pretty option either. I don’t see voters going for that as they would have to compete with the massive medicare insurance pool which would crush them.
Not to worry, Obama-care leads to socialized medicare. It destroys the current system with all it’s mandates.
A RAND study from 2009 found that companies with higher levels of participation in employee health insurance benefits had much slower economic growth then those companies and industries which had lower health insurance costs or participation to deal with.
The simple conservative solution is to separate employment and insurance. Require all employee benefits to be simple payment with no benefits.