Ok, but at some things are already taken out of your check, and although you don't want healthcare that is not the same for 99% (Well that is a guess of course) of Americans.
No one said I don't want health care, and not having insurance has not interfered in my ability to get health care, and in general has been drastically cheaper than what I would have paid had I been trying to get both insurance and health care. There is no logical reason for me to stuck paying a middle man that will then pay my medical bills, when I can go directly to the doctor and pay my medical bills. Whether I end up paying the dentist quickly, with out losing future opportunities, or end up slaving eternity for an insurance company is up to me. Of course, the later option will ultimately cost me more than paying the dentist immediately.
It would actually not be the case. You would be able to eliminate all the advertising, collection departments, medicare/medicaid, the people they pay to find loopholes to deny care, and salesmen that are in all homes and businesses selling individual care.
Which means that your proposed solution is not a free market solution, because if it truly was a free market solution then advertising would be required. You are also neglecting to explain just what is going to happen to the hundreds of thousands of small insurance companies, and the millions of employees at insurance brokerages, and small insurance companies. Your solution trades my liberty and my freedom, and their jobs, for a system of involuntary servitude to the insurance companies. No thanks, I'm already sick of having to slave for the government and thus the last thing I feel inclined to do is have to slave for yet another person.
As we should all be reminded, no man can serve two masters. You can either be your own master, or you can allow the government to be your master. It is a sad to see that you are willing to follow the latter course.
The middlemen would change from all the individual businesses and people to a single purchaser. So it would be dramatically less.
We don't need more government bureaucrats invading our lives, and making decisions for us. They (as recent events have shown) are corrupt, venile, and base. They have no understanding of the principles that this nation was founded on, (thus being ignorant) or they are willfully attempting to destroy this nation (which makes them traitors.)
They have consistently used public monies to help private interests under the guise of helping the nation, when the course of action that would best help the nation would be to let the market work things out, and allow the market to dictate that Americans once again learn that most valuable of lessons, how to live with in their means, and to be self-reliant, independent people that do not scrape before any one's boots like curs.
I heard that this morning too in regards to the single payer system, but it is in regards to different systems, they have not done a actuarial look at this (as it is nothing).
I believe this was a comment about the CBO reports that it would increase the cost. One doesn't need a actuarial report regarding the actual costs. One can only look at real world examples. For instance, the fees paid out by Medicare/Medicaid are consistently the lowest reimbursement rates for doctors, because the government originally drastically underestimated the costs. Of course, the explanation for that is easy to grasp, once one realizes that when people perceive a commodity as being free it loses all value to them and they are going to overuse it, and abuse it, leading to costs going up. Unfortunately, the government is full of lawyers and career politicians instead of economicists and mathematicians, and the people that belong to the latter group are subject to an unquantifiably high level of bias in favor of government programs because they draw their paycheck from the government.
And the big businesses would have a monopoly since they would all be bidding against each other. An idea since it would be a state by state buying would be for those states to give preference to the businesses located in them. And the government won't and can't get out or everyone with and without insurance would be really screwed.
Do you have any idea how many jobs your idea would cost the United States? I can estimate the figure at 1 Million at the minimum, and 10 Million at a high. Are you really willing to impoverish that many people in this economy?
They take that float and invest in securities that yield very good profits for them. Again though no more middlemen, it would be far less, and lest operating costs (due to advertising, sales, ect cuts).
Once again you admit that your system removes all competition, and thus is not a true free market solution. Your system relies upon coercement at the hands of the jack-booted thugs of government to dictate to everyone what they must or must not do.
And they already cut corners, benefits, and pass everything to the customers. The government would never stop them from investing, it may stop the type of investments (like no junk bonds that can lose all the premiums money leaving everyone out of healthcare due to the company going bankrupt) like they have always done.
The government should not be in the health care industry to begin with. The corruption of the term "Provide for the General Welfare" is a disgusting destruction of the core principles that built this nation. There was no intention for the government to be stealing public money for private benefit in the United States. We were not supposed to become another Europe with a class of nobles that surrounded themselves with insipid sycophants that have no true intelligence, but an avaricious desire to expand their power and dictate to the citizens what they must and must not do. The phrase was meant to concern the nation at large, and not intended to have anything to do with the population. I am sure that Jefferson, Washington and Jackson are all rolling over in their graves wondering why modern Americans appear so willing to allow themselves to become slaves and serfs in the land of their ancestors who rejected such a policy placing their lives, fortunes and sacred honor on the line to do so.
That would work, but as you like to say healthcare is not health insurance. And it is not the doctors that make the care expensive, it is every aspect of the medical system.
Then why not impose tort reform to lower malpractice insurance costs, which would drastically decrease the costs for surgeons of all types, thus allowing them to pass on their savings to the consumers.
We just tried that experiment with banks and it didn't end well (deregulating and allowing to cross state lines).
Actually the problem was government interference in the markets. CRA, Creation of a Monopoly, Pressuring of Banks by ACORN to make subprime mortgages.
The problem with a la carte insurance systems is when people try to get the cheapest possible the companies tend to go bankrupt when they have enough claims. And the alt is to use the big 'safe' names that won't go out of business but can wrap you up in legal system w/o paying. We need an instant care/pay system that doesn't allow for this.
Actually you're incorrect, if the insurance company is only limited in what they have to cover then they are not going to go bankrupt. If they have accurate actuarial tables then they are not going to go bankrupt when people choose to only have this, that and the other covered.
A better example would be to look at Auto Insurance, which offers several degrees of coverage, but ultimately covers against catastrophic risk. Health Insurance should be allowed to adopt a similar tact, where it collects premiums to cover against catastrophic events, and uses behaviorial information to gauge what premiums it will charge an individual.
Sure it would off the top of my head, say Blue cross Blue shield had women 20-40 for the state of south carolina. They want to split up their risk and sells shares of it to a few other companies. Letting their money be able to be reinvested or get out of the market all together.
Besides, your tiered system ignores the fact that everyone is different, and thus your one size fits all system will ultimately fail. Maybe the government mandates that only 21 - 40 are eligible for birth coverage, and refuses to allow those that are 16 - 21 (or younger) or 41 - 60 (or older) to get it, thus depriving them of services that they might want.
Or maybe some one has a higher risk of prostate cancer and wants to have prostate exams covered earlier than 40. Instead, due to the insane level of requirements, paperwork and hoops that must be jumped through they aren't able to get prostate exams covered until they are 40. Then it turns out that had they been able to get such a thing when they were 35 they could have been saved from a more drastic treatment down the road.
Besides, this system would rapidly devolve into a system of epic failure like the Education System. You would subject doctors to continuously having to jump through additional hoops, add additional paperwork requirements onto it, because they would have to report to the government everything that they would do. So not only are you violating the general population's 4th Amendment rights, but you are now forcing doctors to open up their books to the Federal Government and thus violating their 4th Amendment Rights.
Your system reeks of tyranny, corruption, greed, and force and as you have repeatedly stated would destroy competition, which is the hall mark of the capitalist system. Your proposed solution is fascist/socialist in the extreme.
But all your information is out there anyway, there are databases with all your info on the private market internet searches, magazines or papers you get, credit card purchases, loan info ect. We are in the information age and it won't go backewards.
So, you're solution to privacy issues is to make all information public domain. Fuck that, if individuals want to release their information it should be at their discretion. Besides, the fatal flaw with your single payer system is that it creates a single point of epic failure, and the government central repositories for all this information would make a tempting target for hackers, people that intend to use this information for their own private benefit, and for unscrupulous bureaucrats that would sell it to corporations for their own benefit.
Perhaps, you aren't aware of the fact that Health Insurance Fraud is the fast growing form of fraud in the country right now (It is of course a form of Credit Fraud.) Your system ultimately would make it easier, because it would make the incentives that much greater, and guarantee the criminals pursuing it success. Your system is a gigantic target just begging to get capped.
And even if you don't like it the science that can be gained you can't deny. Having a couple hundred people as a test group who have had this vaccine, what is the iccident rate. If it is high it needs to be evaluated, ect. That information could be invaluable.
There is no reason why side-effects experienced from drugs could not be sent to the pharmaceutical companies or the government less personal private information.
I am not sure why those two being interchanged bothers you so much, but no matter. With everyone having health insurance they would be gauranteed health care. The insurance company would work directly with the hospitals, the hospitals would work directly with the patients, so you wouldn't have to deal with any buerecrats at all, just show up and get your healthcare on.
Let me try to explain this to you in the nice simple terms I consistently use. Health Care (Surgery, Exams, Etcetera) are not Health Insurance. Health Insurance does not guarantee access to medical care. Having a doctor available to provide health care does guarantee access to health care.
Besides, once again, I must reiterate that the real solutions are simple
1. Limitations on Malpractice Claims - this would allow for malpractice insurance costs to go down.
2. Train more doctors, as more supply would lead to more competition between doctors in a given area resulting in prices going down and care going up. Also, with more doctors you would likely see a larger pool of capital being formed that would allow for more construction of clinics, hospitals, and other medical facilities.
Yes I have worked for a few small businesses. One that was 3 people (landscape) where there was no insurance, one that had 8 people and the owner had to take time out of working to deal with healthcare issues when they arose that he had no clue what he was doing and got taken advantage of, One with 50 people that had a girl working for the owner that had to waste a couple days every month (she was also the bookkeeper aka: human resources department) dealing with healthcare for everyone.
The idea is to have gold star coverage, because that is what we pay for as Americans anyway, how can we pay more for healthcare than any other country and still be below 30th in the world? All the insurance companies would be forced to do is what they are there for, to use the money they get and pay for the healthcare they sold. Unfortunantly that is not what they do now, and it would only get worst without any guidelines in place.
Your gold star coverage is an epic failure. The reason why health insurance premiums are so high in some states is because the employers are forced to cover elective surgeries such as sex change operations and plastic surgeries that do not contribute to actual health.
Call up the insurance company that you would like to have and see if they would be willing to pick up your coverage. Your S.S. # would then be switched in their systems and the collection on your account would be switched. Basically the same as what would happen now if you company had more than one healthcare provider (which lets face it they don't). You already have little to no say in who you get through the workplace anyway.
I don't want to have to deal with any insurance companies, nor do I want to be obligated to have to deal with them. All you are doing is forcing me to pay for a service that I will not use, do not desire, and will routinely ignore. Even if you subject me to servitude for an insurance company, I will openly laugh in your face, and continue to pay out of pocket while continuously filing lawsuits against the government for failing to live up to its contractual obligations. I would deliberately attempt to bankrupt it, and destroy it, because it is a violation of freedom.
Alas nothing is uncorruptable.
The coverage would all be the same, total. And it wouldnt be just based off age, but sex and size of the city they live in since that also affects the cost that insurance companies charge now. Basically we would use the systems they have in place, but instead of wasting money collecting/denying millions/thousands of people it would be centralized.
Do you not think that everything already is entered in the actuarial tables that the insurance companies use. I am sure that they have more data than you can imagine to determine what premiums should be. There is no need to have a central repository for this information, and your attempts to force insurance companies to share this information would violate their rights to trade secrets. Often times the actuarial data that insurance companies use is kept private and not released into the public domain, because it would entail giving away information that they are not obligated to share.
In theory it would not be the same, the money saved in all the collection/lawyer fees/ sales/ advertising/ paperwork/ ect would equate to several less layers and many less middlemen (you are between the hospital you go to and the middlemen at the insurance companies as it is anyway).
Collection fees would not fall, you're just introducing a layer of bureacuracy, and more middle men, and any time you add middle men you guarantee that costs will go up. Why do you think that there is consistently a difference between the MSRP and the cost as specific dealerships on vehicles. Why do you think that mail-order catalogs of whole-salers consistently offer lower prices than retailers. Your system doesn't make for a more efficient system, it makes for a less efficient system, because insurance companies would have to have people waste their time dealing with government bureaucrats.
Your system would be vulnerable to catastrophic failure at a few points, leading to highly attractive targets for hackers and Denial of Service Attacks. Your system would add hundreds thousands of bureaucrats onto the public payroll, and ultimately cost more than the current system. While you may not be able to see this, I assure, that this is in fact based on sound economic logic.
But that is why the internet is so cool. All the people that are pulling out the obscure facts about Obama and Sotomwhater would do the same with insurance. And if the position of the state insurance purchaser is an elected official they would be accountable to the people and criminal action. But it would be a very simple fix, the companies name accompanied with the bid price, followed up by the demagraphic they are bidding on. Clean and consice. If they started to lie and hide it there would be a internet revolt. We really are the hounds now.
You really don't understand that my major problem with your entire bloated scheme is that it is a socialist/fascist attempt that weds giant corporations with the government, which as recent examples would show, does not benefit tax payers, and would cost the economy easily millions upon millions of jobs, because you would destroy the smaller insurance companies that would not have the resources to compete with the giant insurance companies that would be guaranteed to get the contracts.
Again many less people between hospitals, patients, and insurance companies that would cut the costs. I don't want to dicate anyone, but that being said health insurance is something that eventually people that don't carry will screw people like me. We pay are forced to pay for them when they cannot. The costs they incur don't disappear. And even if thy pay in the short term eventually it will catch up to them and they won't be able to pay unless they are super wealthy, and if that were the case they would have the insurance.
No, you've actually multipled the people between me and my healthcare provider.
Me -> Insurance Bitch #1 -> Insurance Bitch #2 -> Government Bitch #1 -> Government Bitch #2 -> Provider Bitch #1 -> Provider
Right now, it's nice and simple, me, maybe a billing specialist and the actual provider. There is no layer upon layer of bureaucratic fat that I am obligated to cut through to get something as stupidly simple as a root canal or a filling. Your system would consume countless man hours, slow down the process of getting healthcare, increase wait times, punish small insurance companies (for being small) and create a bureaucratic nightmare full of thousands of hoops that have to be jumped through, forms that would have to be filled out to satisfy the government's insatiable demand for information that is none of its fucking business, and would increase costs by adding bureacrats, paperwork, requirements, legal fees, and so on and so forth.
Your system fails to address the issue of rising costs, and hands over control of the insurance industry to giant corporations. It is an antiCompetitive system that does nothing to ensure competition, and reeks of the kind of cooperation between corporations and the state that took place in Soviet Russia from the 70s through the 80s, and Nazi Germany during the 30s and 40s.
Your system is gigantic failure waiting to happen due to the concentration of sensitive information in central repositories. Every hacker in the country that is attempting to get access to that information would be able to get access to EVERYTHING in one feel swoop. And make no mistake, no level of safe guards would protect these central repositories from being vulnerable to social engineering, man-in-the-middle attacks, and database corruption attempts. Your vaunted central repositories are Chernobyls waiting to go critical.
Unfortunantly this is not the case in aggregate. Most uninsured don't ever go to the doctor/hospital. And when they do it is for a devistating reason,
And why should I be obligated to pay for their stupidity? Why should the rest of the population be enslaved for their benefit? Why should any one, except maybe their family, feel obligated to help them.
If they are acting like whores and getting STDs then it is clearly imbecilic to insist that the public should have to pay for their negligence of sound rational behavior.
which they simply cannot pay for (a few thousand to hundreds of thousands). Even worse is if they try to get insurance at that point they will get denied. So they fall back on medicare/aid and then we all pay anyway.
Yes, and maybe after suffering for their incompetence, stupidity and imbecility they realize that they can not continue to live life with out insurance.
And actually the system that they would fall back on is Medicaid, not Medicare. Medicare is for geriatrics.
So if we could make them all responsible and get in to see the doctor/dentist reularly it would be very cost efficient. It is much cheaper to fix a cancer/issue/disease before it is out of hand then to wait until it is far along.
More health care providers, lawsuit reform, and get rid of government programs. It is the perception that health care is free for the beneficiaries of government theft that has resulted in the increase in costs, because when something is perceived as free people will overuse it, and abuse it, and decrease the availability of it for everyone.
Thank you for responding, I was beginning to think this thread was going to die, at least I have some feedback.
