Attention, high school drop-outs! Free debating lessons here:
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Before answering the question above, please read my answer below. If you disagree with my facts and logic, please tell me why I am wrong. Then I will tell you why you are wrong. That is the way grownups do it. If you only want to type a sound bite, go away.
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Profit-making is incompatible with the prevention and cure of sickness. Healing sick people is not a service in the same sense that fixing a car is a service.
The auto-repair industry serves its customers profitably in a free market for several reasons that do not apply to the health care industry:
1. The cost of an auto repair rarely exceeds 50% of the cost of acquiring an equivalent vehicle and is usually less than 5% of that cost.
The patient cannot acquire another body. The cost of an illness may exceed the combined cost of a buying a home and raising a family of university graduates.
2. Garages stay in business by making good decisions and providing good service.
Health care providers stay in business (retain their medical license) by conforming to industry standards. The health care industry (as opposed to the health care INSURANCE industry) does not want customers. They do not have to attract customers. There is no point in advertising for customers. The doctor regrets that the patient needs his help. The patient regrets being a patient.
3. Auto repair is based upon commodities: widely available parts, repair manuals, tools, and mechanics. Costs are well known and prices are regulated by competition
Health care equipment is highly technical and very expensive. Doctors are mostly specialists, often researchers with few students. They sometimes build their own equipment. The customer’s life may depend upon finding the right doctor. If that doctor does not have a contract with the patient’s private insurance company, the claim will be denied. (http://www.creators.com/liberal/froma-harrop/free-market-death-panels.html)
4. All drivers can afford to drive – until they can’t. If too many drivers can’t afford to drive, some garages may suffer or fail. It’s tough on the ex-drivers and ex-garage owners, but that’s the free market.
Patients must be served whether they can afford to pay or not. If they cannot pay, the cost must be shifted to others.
In particular, children and students cannot afford to pay for their own care. But they must receive the finest possible health care (and education) regardless of the wealth or poverty of their parents.
This requirement is enshrined in our Constitution’s Preamble which vows to “promote the general Welfare and to secure the Blessing of Liberty to ourselves and to our Posterity.” Posterity is our nation’s ONLY product. We MUST do it right. Spending large public funds on the postponement of death for a few very uncomfortable months is an irrational betrayal of our heritage and our national interest.
For the above reasons, universal health care costs can only be met by payments of deductible claims made through an insurance system financed by premiums that are subsidized for the poor. Costs are paid from the insurance pool. For statistical and administrative reasons, the larger the pool, the lower will be the premiums. The risk is spread over a larger population. That is why single-payer policies are the least expensive: everybody is in the same pool. This is a mathematical CERTAINTY.
Breaking the insurance pool into a hundred different pools adds important costs: financing, administrative, advertising, customer selection, claims denial, high executive salaries, and profits. These additional costs (over 25% of the total current cost and over 33% more than the single-payer costs) represent a “tax” paid to private insurance companies by all its customers with no benefit to the consumers.
The usual objection to single-payer is government inefficiency. And reduction of Medicare and Medicaid costs are part of the legislation before Congress. But the Veterans Administration provides excellent care to millions of veterans suffering a wide range of problems at a very reasonable cost compared to private industry.
Government rationing of health care is another objection. But, without exception, every private health care insurance company has a large building with an entire floor or two devoted to a department that does nothing else but ration health care. These claim deniers are answerable only to their highly paid management, not to Congress or to a State Legislature or to the voter. The only recourse to denial of a claim is to file a suit through the court system and pay the lawyer.
There are now insurance solutions approximating single-payer before Congress. They need your support.
General answers:
Success means that, with relatively few exceptions, everyone is served as well as possible within the available resources regardless of previous history or ability to pay. Of course, some will be served better or worse than others. It’s the intent that counts.
We have two excellent VA hospitals in the Chicago area. I receive excellent service in my clinic. The brouhaha at Walter Reed was solved by firing a general. There are problems at all hospitals, VA or not.
Most of the VA problems arise from PTSD cases. No civilian hospital has that problem.
I can’t believe how many high school drop-outs skipped reading my carefully thought out essay and just dropped a sound bite. That’s rude. I begged you guys to go away.
For those who got ripped off at a garage, welcome to the free market. If you were treated that badly in a hospital, you might want to hold off on tort reform.
jwoody88: The USA has a private (not public), for profit, health insurance system. It is neither successful in economic terms nor universal. Many people, including me, have been very well served, whether private or public. I am on Medicare and have no complaints, nor have I ever heard a senior complain. The problem lies with those who are not served.
Texas Tre. The US Army, Navy, and Air Force are models of efficiency. Expensive, yes, but efficient in the sense that they do their best and are held accountable.
That is somewhat like the USSR, which could beat us into space but couldn’t make bumaga (that’s toilet paper).
The civil service people in our government are excellent. The problem is the guys like Brownie, who did a hekkova job at Katrina. Bush tried to run Iraq with born-again Christians just out of Bob Jones college. He tried to replace federal attorneys from the same source, which is getting Karl Rove into trouble now.
