Walter Hinteler wrote:USAFHokie80 wrote: this is a free market society. the incentive of the insurance company to treat patients well is that if they don't, the customer can always find another provider.
Correct. There's a lot of competition between the 300 health insurance companies which take part in the mandatory universal health care system.
(Which led to the fact that about 2.000 smaller companies couldn't stand this and became incorparet in bigger companies during the last couple of years.)
I find this to be a very strange concept - a government enforced mandate for all people (or citizens, or residents) to purchase health insurance from one of a list of presumably government-approved providers.
This, of course gives the approved insurers both a guaranteed market and a powerful inducement to lobby government for favorable (to them) terms & conditions.
In addition it could lead to the organization of medical providers into competing service groups (such as with current HMOs). This of course creates significant limitations on the ability of individuals to freely choose their own medical providers - even if they are willing to pay for them themselves.
Thirdly, it adds yet another layer of administrative cost and profit to the delivery of medical care. The only social benefit of this layer of added cost is the illusion of the distribution of risk in an insurance scheme. In fact in the information age there is virtually no such thing as pooled risk, given the ability of insurers to profile their customers and accurately forecast the probable cost of new applicants based on readily obtainable information. Indeed the insurance premiums that corporations pay today are based on the nearly real time claims submitted by their employees, plus a surcharge for administration and profit.
It also requires the government to subsidize the insurance coverage of individuals whose earnings might not enable them to pay the cost of insurance - as determined in some political/bureaucratic process. This, of course, opens the door to widespread manipulation by people with large assets, but low incomes, and, more significantly, by various lobbying groups seeking to benefit from yet another unbounded government "entitlement".
It reduces medical care to a commodity with very little left of the market incentives for buyer and seller which otherwise would fit supply and cost to demand, and automatically provide meaningful feedback with respect to customer satisfaction.(Some here will likely counter that in this or that country citizens have broad latitude in choosing their providers. However, I suspect the role of their insurers in capping fees as a means of rationing service will go unacknowledged.)
Finally it opens the door to government management (or at least limitation) of virtually all aspects of medical care from the training of providers to research for new drugs and treatments. The dead hand of government bureaucracy is a well-established method of producing universal mediocrity and shortage.
There are no examples extant of open societies that can successfully accommodate large scale immigration and adaptation, which, at the same time attempt to operate such closed and bounded social systems. indeed it is as yet far from clear that the European practicioners of these social systems will be able to long sustain them in the face of the demographic challenges before them and their contradictory need for more and more imported workers and chronic inability (or unwillingness) to accommodate large-scale immigration.
Freedom is better than the ant hill.
