'Nuff said.
What a maroon
Anyhow, a thing need not be perfect in order to be good. It would be far better to have an embarrassment of choices, like wheat bread or canned peas at the typical supermarket, than to be stuck with the one “state” brand.
People on the Democrat plantation may be too stupid to decide...
If we’re not equipped to make healthy choices on our own, how can we be trusted to vote in elections?
End liberalism NOW!
“But research shows that competition in health care cannot be made to work effectively.”
Fortunately for us, “research has shown” that the geniuses who run our government are so much better equipped to know what we need than we ourselves are. And you can see as much due to the fact that they are doing such a wonderful job of regulating our healthcare industry.
This guy is educated to the point of ignorance.
There are more than a few good points in the article. It is exceedingly hard to pick good professionals outside one’s area of expertise. I may be a doctor, but picking good lawyers, accountants, etc is very difficult and I have made my share of mistakes. Being a good accountant doesn’t mean you can pick a good endodontist. Price may be important; cheap but wrong advice can be disastrous. Docs willing to tackle really difficult cases may have worse outcome statistics than a weak one that cherry picks the easy cases. I see docs with devoted followings; sometimes this is a triumph of marketing and personality over skills. Some of the surgeons with the best judgement and outcomes are lacking in the bedside manner department.
At the end of the day, these are very difficult decisions, and one is fooling oneself by thinking the Consumer Reports approach will solve all problems.
Surely they don't mean THE Harvard whose grads are responsible for every single problem this country faces today?
so...basically, he’s been hiding from the real world his entire life.
Is that old socialist windbag still alive?
I may or may not be smart enough to make the correct decisions.
However it is my moral right to make MY decisions that affect MY life.
The government provides no added value to health care (it actually reduces its value). It only imposes unneeded cost. Cut out the middleman, and stop government monopolization of healthcare.
...stupid people constitute the grand overwhelming majority of this and all other nations...
However, it's wrongheaded to punish the balance of the population by denying them some autonomy and participation in a market-based health care delivery model. Not a surprise coming from an elitist snob like this ass clown. I say throw him under the Obamascare bus as a kind of consumer guinea pig. He can then write up an outcomes (these sorts loves this methodology so much) oriented review of his experiences...if he survives the experiment.
choose (health care, abortion services, adoption services, career, investments, education for our children, appropriate foods). Is there anything we can really be trusted to choose under fascist rule?
Uhhh, choosing insurance plans is not the same as making medical decisions. Never mind. If the author has to be told that he couldn't possibly be capable of understanding it.
Of course he gets it wrong.
The reason health care competition can’t work is that health care (I mean what that English phrase denotes, not health insurance, but actual health care, the provision of curative and palliative treatment for disease and injury) is provided by government created monopolies: licensed physicians in each state function as a guild monopoly (”reasonable and customary” is price-fixing), while all medical advances are for many years sold by commercial monopolies under monopoly grants called “patents”.
The restriction of provision of medical services to licensed physicians is obviously necessary for quality control, just as the restriction of water, electric or natural gas service to one provider is necessary to prevent massive infringement of property rights to create multiple easements. In the latter case, there being no effective market competition, the several states regulate prices. In the former case, physicians are permitted to collude with insurance companies and more-or-less charge whatever the market will bear for services for which demand is quite inelastic. Likewise there is no regulation of prices when the government grants a monopoly in the form of a patent.
I would welcome suggestions for ways to actually produce market competition in health care (the problem is much easier in health insurance, but that won’t fix the cost problem), but I have never heard any convincing ones, and regard the recognition that health care is provided by a guild monopoly and that the most effective drugs and medical devices are sold by monopolies, and thus, if the monopolies cannot be broken, their prices must be regulated, as the only way to fix the problems with both Obamacare and the status quo ante to which repeal of Obamacare would return us.