Free, Public Healthcare

Well, I am vehemently opposed to a government heath care insurance program. Therefore, I need to seek alternatives that will allow for health care for those that need it. Our health care system, as it is, is in dire need of financial restructuring. Until that happens, I simply do not see how an insurance program will alleviate the issues we have.

I believe a system as I have basically outlined is far more feasible and would actually help fix the system. This way, people have a choice about their health care and not imposed to get "mandatory" insurance only to continue propping up what I see as a corrupt health care system. The amount of money the current admin is looking to spend is just a gross waste IMO.

That works for me!

I wish i could get more of that cheese. It was great.

I'm not against public services. I'm against simplistic arguments for public services. My "by the same logic ..." point was directed, not so much against the conclusion FreeDuck had reached, but against the logic by which she had reached it. If she supports the same conclusion with sounder logic, I'll be satisfied.

What happens if a person who owns a business gets so sick they cannot work? Let's say that person is single and no one else can (or will) pay their bills. What happens if that person runs out of savings and cannot afford their insurance premiums? I can tell you what happens - their insurance company cancels their policy and they have no health coverage and end up losing everything. A productive member of society ends up dead or on public assistance. I have meet too many people that this has happened to.

It's also time for Americans to stop depending on the Nanny Corporation. Anyone who thinks they can suckle off their corporate job for benefits needs to take a look at what is happening to companies like GM.

Americans need to start investing in the security of their health system or we will all end up broke at some point in our lives due to health and age issues.

Green Witch and Water Dude...the polarized US personified....sigh

ummm...

you mis-spelled Dupe, dude.

One of the biggest problems with healthcare today is that many uninsured people end up going to the ER for everything.

I have proposed a solution to that a long time ago.

We set up what are basically aid stations.

We have the military set up aid stations, staffed 24/7 by at least 2 medics and an MD.
These can be set up anywhere
If you need simple care, such as stitches removed, BP checked, a cast removed, a sprained ankle or wrist, etc you can go to one of these aid stations.
If its something that cant be handled there, then you go to the ER.
But since medics can handle everything from childbirth to minor surgery, that would take a huge strain off the healthcare system.

There would be no drugs stored there, except for some local anasthetics.
There would be an xray machine at each station, to ensure that a sprain wasnt actually a broken bone.

There would be no records kept as to patient names or ages or addresses, to protect privacy.

These could be set up anywhere there was an active military base, reserve or national guard facility, and would require no additional spending by the govt.
The active duty people get paid anyway, and the guard and reserve could do it on their weekend drills and their 2 weeks during the summer.
But it would require shullfing around of drill schedules, to insure that the stations were continually manned.

The supplies could come from current military supplies, so there would be no extra cost there.

It seems pretty clear to me (apologies to her if I get it wrong): This public service would lower health care costs and expand health care coverage. That it is appealing in health care and not food (as in your example) is obvious. There is a untenable health care problem that it would solve and there is not an untenable food problem that needs solving. Therefore the benefits outweigh the downsides unlike in the free food scenario you compared it to.

Perhaps I am daft but I don't see anything wrong with her logic at all. Could you point out the deficiencies in it?

Yes, but more and more Water Dudes are showing up at my single payer healthcare meetings. The Water Dudes are losing their jobs at a greater rate than tree-hugging liberals like myself, so suddenly they are changing their perspective as to what freedom and security really mean. Nothing changes a person's beliefs faster than when they live the problem they once thought didn't exist.

AFLAC

lol...I was thinking along the same lines.
It's not funny, really.

There is such high unemployment around here in construction...and you know those hard hats that get laid off don't have any insurance...and you know that the first time they have to pay $10,000 out of pocket for a kidney stone they're not gonna be so unfriendly towards revamping health care.

Shared pain is not a bad thing. The "let them eat cake" mentality has been pervasive for a long time.

I like MMs concept of aid stations, although there will be an increase in materials costs (and probably personnel costs) based simply on the increase in work/patients.

A single-payer system is a government-run health care system funded by tax payer dollars.
We are now living the problem known as socialism and it's forcing more hard working entrepreneurs
out of business daily, but that is exactly what Obama's progressive socialist movement is designed to do.

Witchypoo, Obama's progressive socialist movement is designed to make more
and more citizens totally dependent on government for all of there wants and needs.

It could be done with a small variation, such as allowing more freedom for pharmacists and pharmacies to provide basic treatment.

Here in Costa Rica pharmacies are everywhere and are the first line of medical aid for most people.

I think this premise is false. To my knowledge, no economist who has looked at health care is claiming that there is significant market failure in providing healthcare, as opposed to providing health insurance. Therefore, government-operated health care providers (like doctors, hospitals, rehab clinics, etc.) would not be cheaper than privately operated ones. Just as government-operated farms wouldn't produce cheaper food than privately operated ones. (That's the reason I made that comparison.)

The same is not true of health insurance, because of the problem with adverse selection that I mentioned before. Which is why my solution would be to expand Medicare to everyone who wants it, and leave the rest of the system unchanged except for technical upgrades. (Open, uniform standards for electronic medical records would be an example for such a technical upgrade.)

It is true that FreeDuck's and McGentrix's proposal would expand coverage -- but so would a subsidy for those people who couldn't afford the Medicare-for-all plan I propose.

Okay, so the bottom line is that I don't object to FreeDuck's logic, I object to the premise that goes into FreeDuck's logic. Government-employed doctors, government-operated hospitals, etc., would not necessarily run more efficiently than privately operated ones.

The only way we could do this is to drastically redefine Medicare. We may have to drastically redefine it anyway because we simply can't afford to continue to pay for it.

The concept of universal health care has to include revamping the current health care practices. Costs are too high in general, insurance companies have too much say in care decisions, and the quality of care standards that have resulted in an expectation of perfectionism from health care providers all must be on the table.

Why? Why would a Medicare-for-all system be more unsustainable than the system America has now? People who switch from the private system to the public system pay more in taxes, but less in premiums. And if the British, Canadian, French, and German precedents hold in America, America's savings in premiums would outweigh the tax increases. This is true with or without redefinition.


That part I agree with -- but it's a constraint on any health care system, public or private.

Because the cost of providing universal health care to the uninsured would not be borne by those who are currently uninsured but by those who are currently working in jobs that pay enough to already get medical coverage. More in taxes? Those uninsured in minimal wage jobs can't afford more taxes. They aren't "switching", they're becoming insured for the first time.

In the current system, the uninsured get their health care in emergency rooms. This is a) generally inefficient compared to the prevention they would get if they were insured, and b) already paid for by the rest of us, in our capacities as tax payers and insurance clients. I don't see that insuring them would be such a terrible burden on the rest of us. Certainly it wasn't back in Germany, where I come from, and where we did have universal healthcare.