Commentary: "Coronavirus shows again why 'Medicare for all' is a bad idea"

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Seems unfair to blame Italy’s healthcare for having to choose who to take off ventilators and die to save someone more likely to survive due to a lack of ventilators when the US has less per capita and is several weeks behind Italy, will the same posters blame our healthcare system when we have to remove people then, or blame Bernie or Biden instead? Sure won’t be blaming Trump, who wasted precious weeks fiddleing while Rome burned, and even released the Tweet marking the occasion.
 
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Neithan said:
And we don’t have a federal healthcare system.
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You might want to tell that to my doctors and nurses at the Veterans Administration Hospital I use. 😁

Ah - on second look are you in Canada?
 
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Hightop said:
Sure won’t be blaming Trump, who wasted precious weeks fiddleing while Rome burned, and even released the Tweet marking the occasion.
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Considering the howling that occurred when he started to restrict flights to the US - is this a “da&*ed if you do and da&*ed if you don’t”?
 
Anicette said:
There is some appointment where you wait for a year, such as to controlled your eyes/vision. But they are due to a lack of physicians not state health care!
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Isn’t it just possible that more physicians would be available if state health care didn’t exist? Here in the States, we have quality physicians in all specialties, coming from all over the world, because here they can practice medicine, not kowtow to socialist nonsense.
 
boldlygo said:
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Anicette:
There is some appointment where you wait for a year, such as to controlled your eyes/vision. But they are due to a lack of physicians not state health care!
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Isn’t it just possible that more physicians would be available if state health care didn’t exist? Here in the States, we have quality physicians in all specialties, coming from all over the world, because here they can practice medicine, not kowtow to socialist nonsense.
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Who can then charge you what they like to cure you of whatever ails you. Without having to ‘kowtow to socialist nonsense’. If you can afford it, then at least you’re ok.
 
steph03 said:
The US resistance to universal healthcare blows my mind. But hey, whatever makes you happy. Each country runs the way they want to run.
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The US has “universal health care”. It is for Veterans, and anyone familiar with the system knows that prior to President Trump taking on the vast bureaucracy knows the high failure rate to provide care to vets.

The Federal Government runs the VA. the Federal Government - including legislators who control funds - and that is the bottom line for any universal health care system. Someone is going to be making the decisions of what is or is not “necessary” - their decision, not the doctor or the patient.
 
I’ve been a patient in a model of what Socialized medicine might look like someday int he U.S. with GHealth Cooperative/Kaiser.
The first visit is the visit to to determine that you need a visit. (unless you are in for your well patient care. I’v e found myself in a two month quuee for screening when feeling seriously ill and after having survived a previously life threatening condition, fearing a resurgence. I spent two weeks one summer working phonelines all day to find a place within a 4 hour drive that could get my scanning done earlier.
We used to joke about Group health being really group death because by the time they would Cat scan you, you’d be at stage 3.
The joke became real, when I lost a family member to cancer. they wouldn’t screen him until he showed up in emergency almost unable to walk.
I have friends in Canada and the waiting lists are a problem there too.
And the socialized medicine countries seem to be warming up to euthenasia for all sorts of reasons.
It seems to me that in every country, health care is rationed. Here, the elderly and the poor have coverage and the working class is rationed by ability to pay.
In countries with socialized medicine, rationing looks different, but still exists in the form of wait time for services, choices about which services the Government is willing to prioritize, and rising support for “medically assisted dying” for various populations.
 
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otjm said:
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steph03:
The US resistance to universal healthcare blows my mind. But hey, whatever makes you happy. Each country runs the way they want to run.
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The US has “universal health care”. It is for Veterans, and anyone familiar with the system knows that prior to President Trump taking on the vast bureaucracy knows the high failure rate to provide care to vets.

The Federal Government runs the VA. the Federal Government - including legislators who control funds - and that is the bottom line for any universal health care system. Someone is going to be making the decisions of what is or is not “necessary” - their decision, not the doctor or the patient.
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It’s rarely the doctor and the patient now even with private insurance.
 
A federally managed single-payer health system to lower health costs would be a good idea if the federal government had a history of competence in controlling costs. It does not.

A federally managed single-payer health system to lower health costs would be a good idea if the heath care industry had excessive costs that a monopsony would likely reduce. It does not.

Single-payer systems, known as mynopsony in economics, lead to reduced wages for workers. Do we want doctors, nurses and hospital workers to face pay cuts? The brightest and best will leave the industry.

If one thinks that the federal government can squeezee the profits of the health care industry, think again. Lobbyists for pharmaceutical companies already have 90% of the House members and 97 of the 100 U.S. senators on their payroll.

Do politicians who push for a single-payer health system have your interests in mind or their own?

From 1998-2018, the pharmaceutical/health products industry spent more money on lobbying than any other industry, with a spending total of more than $4 billion, while the insurance industry came in second with $2.8 billion of spending.
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Freddy said:
Who can then charge you what they like to cure you of whatever ails you. Without having to ‘kowtow to socialist nonsense’. If you can afford it, then at least you’re ok.
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I’m sorry but that shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how markets work.
 
Anicette said:
There is some appointment where you wait for a year, such as to controlled your eyes/vision. But they are due to a lack of physicians not state health care!
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If the physicians could set rates, perhaps more people would choose to become physicians and people would be able to see an eye doctor in less than a year?
 
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Anicette said:
There is some appointment where you wait for a year, such as to controlled your eyes/vision. But they are due to a lack of physicians not state health care!
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I’m lucky in that case. I made a routine eye exam visit and found out I was going blind. Luckily they were able to save my good eye from going down the same road as my bad one.
 

A new survey shows that health care remains a dominant issue in most provinces across the country — but Canadians are giving their provincial governments mixed grades on how well they’re handling their health care systems.

The quarterly survey by the Angus Reid Institute interviewed 5,043 Canadians between Feb. 24 and 28, providing detailed results about how Canadians viewed the top issues in their own provinces and how well they think their governments are handling them.

(As the survey was conducted online, a margin of error does not apply. It should also be noted that the survey was taken before the recent developments in the COVID-19 outbreak.)

Health care topped the list in six of nine provinces (the sample size in Prince Edward Island wasn’t large enough to make a reliable measurement), but only in Saskatchewan and British Columbia did a majority of respondents think their governments were doing a good job on the issue.
 
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StudentMI said:
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Freddy:
Who can then charge you what they like to cure you of whatever ails you. Without having to ‘kowtow to socialist nonsense’. If you can afford it, then at least you’re ok.
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I’m sorry but that shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how markets work.
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Here’s your opportunity to explain how they do. Don’t waste it.
 
Perhaps a warning to us all that the threat of authoritarianism can come from either the right or the left?
If things get too out of hand, I betting a few more people will be returning to supporting the 2nd Amendment.
 
Also from Hayek:
The Road to Serfdom, pp 148-149

“There is no reason why in a society which has reached the general level of wealth which ours has attained the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom. … [T]here can be no doubt that some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody. … Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individual in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision.

"Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance – where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks – the case for the state’s helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong. There are many points of detail where those wishing to preserve the competitive system and those wishing to super-cede it by something different will disagree on the details of such schemes; and it is possible under the name of social insurance to introduce measures which tend to make competition more or less ineffective. But there is no incompatability in principle between the state’s providing greater security in this way and the preservation of individual freedom.

"To the same category belongs also the increase of security through the state’s rendering assistance to the victims of such ‘acts of God’ as earthquakes and floods. Wherever communal action can mitigate disasters against which the individual can neither attempt to guard himself nor make provision for the consequences, such communal action should undoubtedly be taken.
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We need to distinguish between micromanaging consumer goods and insuring risk through underwriting risk pools.
 
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Eh, there has been lots of criticism of Hayek for those words. Not to mention in the Constitution of Liberty his essentially social democratic vision of society. I believe it was that or maybe Law, Legislation and Liberty. Never said I agree with Hayek on everything.
 
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