Quote: (10-22-2012 12:02 PM)speakeasy Wrote:
Tenderman, you're oversimplifying. Not all nations with universal coverage centrally plan and ration health care. It's way more complex than that. Some countries have a decentralized system. Some use a mix of both public and private service. Some have universal coverage but private insurance companies are contracted by the government.
http://www.businessinsider.com/best-heal...012-6?op=1
And you can always cherry pick failures. You can do the same with our system. But the thing is, nobody other than us wants our kind of system. And it's misleading to think that just because ours is a private system that it's more efficient or effective. We aren't even close to the top on efficiency. Some nations with universal coverage spend less with better results. See the link above.
Btw, believe it or not I used to be pretty right wing, so the same arguments you are using I'm quite familiar with as I recited them to liberals at the time.
After I wrote what I did I noticed that you said "some form of public option" so your point is taken.
The fact is, though, we DO have some form of public option here -- Medicaid and Medicare.
But I would argue that our system is bad because it provides perverse incentives.
--Tax-free employment insurance disincentivizes individuals to find health care based on the price-quality tradeoff. Price becomes irrelevant.
--Government mandated pricing for the services IT funds requires providers to charge differentially for other consumers. But the other consumes don't care because they never SEE the price they pay.
--There is zero -- ZERO -- incentive for the obese in this country to control this problem, the #1 problem driving our health care costs. If fat individuals had to pay more for health insurance and health care, we might see this obesity epidemic slowed.
--Rent seeking supply restrictions by interest groups dampens choice. Recall that the AMA tried desperately to regulate Wal Mart's attempt to open low cost clinics.
--Finally, think of the products and services that, over time, have become higher quality AND lower cost -- computers, cell phones, TVs. And it's happened in some areas of heatlh care -- LASIK surgery, non-invasive ligament repair. If you open the market to real competition, and keep regulation and central planning requirements to the barest minimum, prices will go down and quality will go up.
Bottom line, most of us spend more time figuring the out the cost/feature equation for a flat screen TV than we do for healthcare. I don't know how old you are, but if I were say 25 and on my own, I would want the cheapest highest deductible insurance I could find. If I was unlucky enough to have a pre-existing condition, then a government guaranteed risk pool makes sense.
But with Obamacare, and centralized health care markets, you are going to have a very hard time finding those kinds of high deductible low cost price alternatives for those who want them. It will be one size fits all with all of its attendant distortions.