Fiscal Cliff

For starters the government won't do it as well, and the process will cost far more than when done by private sector insurers working to enforce the terms of their policies. Secondly such a government program would quickly be politicized by the verious interest groups involved - just as they have politicized current government medical programs.

Finally, this seems a very strange remedy in that a central argument for ssurrendering our freedom to government management of our health care was to rid us of all those bad insurance companies enforcing the terms of their contracts,



I agree. That's why Medicare fraud is so much greater than that done on insurance companies. It is also a very good reason to be skeptical of the promises of savings associated with a government run system.

That's interesting. The cost to administer Medicare is much lower than the profit taken out by Insurance companies.

I think the central argument was the cost added by insurance companies.

georgeob, I didn't know until now that your comprehension of the English language posed difficulties for you. Selling me a bridge isn't necessary, but your ability to read and understand what I wrote needs improvement.

I agree with you, but I was specific about recent events about the budget and the GOP.

It's NOT a conflation, when viewed as a percentage of GDP. Where did you study economics?

Will it, though? America's next opportunity to vote on this conviction is two years in the future. That's two years of Republicans accusing Obama of brinksmanship, two years of Obama accusing Republicans of brinksmanship, and two years of spineless he-said-she-said reporting by the press corps. If things go to ruin later this year, I think it quite likely that in November 2014, Americans will vote on very different narratives on how they went to ruin and who is to blame.


Thanks for the link, but I'm not buying it. The platinum coin would have clearly been legal tender, according to the letter of the law (see subsection (k)). The Treasury would have deposited legal tender in its account at the Fed. What legal power would the Fed have had to reject the deposit? What legal power did it have to kill the platinum coin? The Week's story simply doesn't hang together.

Please provide some real data to back up this nonsensical claim.

Government accounting is profoundly diffeerent than that required of businesses. Governments manage processes and budgets in structures derived from the legislation creating them. The government Medicare program doesn't manage or pay for a very wide range of closely associated, necessary actions that insurance companies do pay for. These include; employee benefit programs and pensions; legal investigation and enforcement actions, mail service, security, liability, often building & office costs, etc. Moreover, it has no business development costs, no competition and it doesn't have to bill its clients for money.

Most importantly, as a government program it doesn't have any competition: it doesn't have to please its customers at all. Moreover its users have no alternative to what it offers and can't simply fire it and go somewhere else without being made to pay twice for the same service.

The GSA is the government's agency for "efficiently" buying a wide range of commodities and service. Perhaps you should read up on its record of lean efficiency and dedication to accountabiliuty and public service.

Georgeob, I suggest you look at single-payer insurance systems around the world. Their administrative costs generally run around a quarter of those in the American so-called health system, as do Social Security/Medicare in the US. The insurance companies in the US were often enriching themselves at the public's expense, which is why the US now requires at least I think it's 85% of the premiums they receive actually go to patient care, rather than into buying the execs a second yacht. Government systems get higher patient satisfaction rates, they don't have multi-million dollar executive salaries, they don't have to have huge advertising budgets. Remember too administrative costs include costs to doctors. In the US, that means they have to employ people to deal with the byzantine complexities of a dozen different insurers with a dozen different sets of forms and different policies as to what will be covered and what will not, and how much they'll get for each one, plus the inevitable negotiations when patients are denied coverage for what the doctor thinks is necessary and they've got to go thru the insurer's bureaucracy (and if you've ever had to deal with that, private bureaucracy is far more opaque than government, and far less accountable). Parados is right.

There's no doubt about it: you are absolutely right. We should further extend these principles to take advantage of the greater efficiencies and customer satisfactions attendant to top down, centrally planned government enterprises for a much greater range of economic services.

The potential here is enormous. Instead of having all these automobile companies constantly wasting energy competing with each other; making and distributing duplicate products; each company with its own duplicative human resources, accounting, advertising and even engineering organizations, we could have a single government-run company wisely providing energy efficient well-made cars to the whole population without all that duplicative waste and without all those executive yachts. Perhaps we could call the new vehicle the Lada or something like that.

We could move on to the clearly over exploited area of clothing. Who needs all these ephemeral new fashions and duplicative competing products with only minor differences between them, each supporting distinct administrative structuyres and distinct groups of greedy executives. We could replace them all with a single government run clothing corporation that would produce quality, standardized products that we all could wear. Moreover they would be led by dedicated public servants of the highest integrity who would never stoop to the greedy behavior of those yacht owning executives.

The economies and social improvements realizable from a centrally planned an administered economy are boundless. It's amazing that no one has yet tried it.

But wait. It has been done before. Indeed the late, unlamented 20th century was polluted by the tyranny, poverty and inefficiency that these systems invariably create. They were finally cast off by all the populations subject to them. The ongoing transformation of China is one of the most amazing changes in human history.

Could there be something wrong with the ideas you are advocating?

Some things are more easily said than done. That's what Aesop's fable about the mice belling the cat was all about. Your sappy ideas have been tried before, and they yield only misery and the loss of freedom.

The argument tactic you are putting forward here is known as Appealing to Extremes, and it's a logical fallacy. Just because something works well and is shown to be efficient in one area, does not mean it's the right solution for other areas; and the converse is true as well.

I would submit that the major difference between what the conversation is about (Health Care) and the examples you proposed lies in the fact that Health Care is simply not a commodity in the way that automobiles or clothing are.



In fact, the countries in the world who report the highest levels of happiness and satisfaction with their lives in polling almost universally have a greater deal of central planning than the US does. Naturally, I expect that you will discount this fact immediately.

Cycloptichorn

MontereyJack was correct in what he posted.

The balance of your post did nothing except reflect on you.

a couple of universities and a college. how about you?

For the second time, where is the evidence to support your opinion?




(I just came out of an SIU meeting - we talked about some of the numbers - I'm curious what you're going to provide as evidence)

Your source for this claim? Are you saying Medicare gets free office space that is paid for with a different government agencies funds? I would love to see that in writing somewhere.

I'm not inclined to waste any energy educating you about how the government accounts for civil service pension and medical costs; or how the Justice Department and the FBI pursue investigative and legal actions for all government agencies; government's free use of the postal Frank; or even government's ability to impose unilateral mandates on their suppliers and customers without recourse to counteraction; or even the occasional occupation of an office building or part thereof by an agency other than the one paying for it. You can do that yourself.

Now there's a persuasive argument !

Just what, praytell, did it reflect?

Cyclo calls it the "fallacy of the argument to extremes" - an overused relic of something he heard in some undergraduate course: one which he uses a bit indescriminately (but always with a triumphal air) . In fact testing an hypothesis to extremes is a fundamental and frequently used way of demonstrating its limits, used very frequently in Philosophy and Mathematics. In itself it is no fallacy at all. The fallacy comes in assuming the existence of limits denies the proposition in all cases. I did not do that. Instead I offered meaningful analogies to suggest my point.

Cyclo asserts that there is a categorical difference between health care and other commodities and services we consume. Unfortunately, he has not specified what constitutes those categorical differences. Perhaps he will say that health care is essential for life. If so then he should also agree that the production and distribution of food, water, and medicines must also be centrally controlled. In cold climates, then the same must apply to clothing. By now you should get the point.

It strikes me George that what you are trying to say, without going to any extremes, is that health provision has the capacity to use up all the resources of a nation and then still not be enough and that a balance has to be arrived at in order that there be any health provision at all.

I suggest, George, before you get all snide and start trotting out the unexamined right-wing memes, you do a little real-world investigation. There are on the order of twenty single-payer health systems in developed countries now, most with at least a half-century of real-world experience, some (Germany) with over a century of actual work, with a wide variety of models, including ones (Germany, for example, again) with largely private insurers supplying the actual medical coverage.

What they universally show is that full medical care is provided at a cost per capita around HALF the American cost; that they cover everybody, not the millions left uncovered by the American "system"; that patient satisfaction is higher; that widely used public health measures are better than the US; that longevity is greater in every country than the US (we rank usually down in the 4os in longevity ratings by country); that personal bankruptcies caused by catstrophic medical costs--the majority of personal bankruptcies in the US, and the majority of those cases occurring among people WITH US medical insurance--are essentially unknown; that people with pre-existing medical problems are guaranteed coverage, that insurers cannot impose lifetime caps on particularly expensive problems, common in America; that insurers cannot cancel coverage for unreported medical treatment (the paradigmatic American case reported in Congressional hearings was of the woman whose private insurace company refused to pay for cancer treatments because she had not reported in her application treatment for acne decades before) (these last three, common practice in the States, have been outlawed under Obamacare).

When 60% of Americans get coverage thru their employer, and when they have to take the coverage their employer chooses and provides, there is not esstential difference between that and having the government provide a system. Except that experience proves governments do it better.

There is a huge amount of real-world experience, as opposed to ideological presumptions, and the American system comes off extremely poorly.

Your failure to understand simple economic theory has me wondering. The cost of the US defense budget is the largest in the world that eats up a greater percentage of our federal budget. You seem unawares of simple budgetary matters.
All I can say is that your university failed in educating you about economics.

the real world experience in developed countries does not support your opinion