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Have you ever shopped at Costco? When you buy in bulk, costs go down. If you have 300 million people throwing into the insurance pool rather than 40 million, costs will go down for everybody.
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If it is true that insuring more people will create less costs, why is it that the CBO disagrees with you and says that the bills in Congress right now will actually INCREASE costs?

It must be those rascally right-wingers!

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And how is a public option going to stifle innovation? This isn’t a bill about funding research — it is a bill about paying for medical care.
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The reason why we are talking about innovation is because the John Stossel video shows you how a socialized healthcare system stifles innovation. The public option and the democrat’s bills in Congress right now don’t have a lot to do with that, but with any movement towards socialized healthcare (which the bills does try to accomplish) it is good to show what will eventually happen.

[quote=afx114]
The majority of research happens in universities, many of which are public. When’s the last time you heard of a corporation coming up with a breakthrough in something other than a drug to make your weiner hard? Most of the breakthroughs in cancer, stem cells, HIV, Alzheimer, etc, are happening in universities, not corporations. This bill has nothing to do with funding for universities or even corporations doing research. Yet another straw man scare tactic.
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And how do those universities get the money to do that research? The U.S. government has been decreasing the amount of money for research. Would it surprise you to know that many corporations give the universities money to do research? Government spending on drug research account for 4% of the total. Could the rest of the 96% be corporations? Maybe?

I’m always amazed at how some people here on this blog are clear on how the housing bubble worked and yet do not apply the same lessons to healthcare.

If you want to make something cheaper, increase supply or competition.

If you want to make something cheaper, decrease government involvement.

If you want to make something cheaper, let people decide how to spend their money themselves instead of allowing other people to spend other people’s money.

The bills in Congress address none of these (republican or democrat).

ucoden has got it correct. His exact model is what would work. If we had that system, every other system in the world would follow it.