Also, Mark Steyn did his usual inimitable job dissecting the proposed health plan and shredded it in his article in National Review.
The Minyanville article was inarguably short of facts and the constant comparisons to the European, British or Canadian models are, like all comparisons, odious.
50 million uninsured? Really? Do you have the percentages that make up that number? How about 20% of the 50 million being illegal aliens? How about another 20% being in the upper 10% of income earners in the US who are intentionally “opting out” of insurance and choosing to pay their own way? How about another 20% in “transition” between jobs and insurance programs at any given time? Yet another 20% in their early 20s who are either single and childless or married and childless and have not chosen to participate in insured healthcare yet?
There is no doubt that reform is needed, however, not the way it’s being offered now. Look no further than the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) for an objective look at the “real” costs of the program(s) and then make a decision based on facts.[/quote]
Allan,
Let’s address some of the issues from that article:
1. That medicare has massive unfunded liabilities.
Nobody will deny this, but consider for a moment what the private market would look like if private insurers were only able to insure mostly unemployed people over 65 years of age. They would be instantly insolvent. The reason current public healthcare plans are so distressed is because the govt is responsible for the most expensive patients: the elderly, the indigent, and the very young (especially the poor) who require more visits and where many lifesaving procedures are done on children who may not make it to adulthood.
What we’ve done is socialized all the losses by dumping the expensive patients on the taxpayers, while privatizing all the profits by gifting all the healthy, employed (most likely, because they have health insurance), most able-bodied people to the the private insurers. Gee, I wonder why that’s not working out so well for the taxpayers…
2. That under a govt plan, healthcare providers would not be compensated “adequately,” especially considering the fact that they are so deeply in debt because of their education expenses.
You can thank the AMA for their high debts, and the potential “shortage” of doctors:
Bottom Line: One reason we might have a “health care crisis” due to rising medical costs, and the world’s highest physician salaries is that we turn away 57.3% of the applicants to medical schools. What we have is a form of a “medical cartel,: which significantly restricts the supply of physicians, and thereby gives its members monopoly power to charge above-market prices for their services.
In his classic book Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman describes the American Medical Association (AMA) as the “strongest trade union in the United States” and documents the ways in which the AMA vigorously restricts competition. The Council on Medical Education and Hospitals of the AMA approves both medical schools and hospitals. By restricting the number of approved medical schools and the number of applicants to those schools, the AMA limits the supply of physicians. In the same way that OPEC was able to quadruple the price of oil in the 1970s by restricting output, the AMA has increased their fees by restricting the supply of physicians.
If we want an effective public healthcare program, we should open up many more medical schools, and help pay for the providers’ educations. To compensate, they would work for a minimum number of years at a public hospital that provides healthcare to all citizens of the U.S.
The private insurers would be kept out of the most basic level of healthcare insurance (which is 100% govt-run and provided by govt employees in public institutions), so that the “needs-based” care is completely socialized. The private insurers could offer coverage for “upgraded” care and facilities, and/or the patients could pay out-of-pocket for whatever they could possibly want. All prices in the private and public markets should be fully transparent, so that people could comparision shop, and do their due dilligence.
Seriously, there is no evidence that shows our system is in any way superior to a “socialized” system. To the contrary, everything I’ve ever seen shows that socialized medicine is superior to our for-profit system. If you or anyone else has **evidence** to the contrary, I’d love to see it.
