Arandur;5504058:
So give the businesses who’s first priority is to make a profit the benefit of the doubt?
The point of healthcare is treatment not profit which is why the free market is not well suited for it. Remember the first goal of private insurance is NOT to cover you. I have a great job for a major corporate entity in the medical field. I have insurance through the largest private insurance provider in the nation. And honestly I still pay out the nose for treatment and meds, in addition to paying out the nose for the coverage. Even FSA’s are getting picky about paying for things these days.
Basically private insurance is about on par with the LC’s “protection” racket. You stay terrified about what will happen if you don’t have it, but while you have they don’t really give you much protection.
The free market at least has real accountability and immediate alternative options. If it were actually allowed to work in health care it would produce better results–as another poster mentioned earlier, the problem right now is that government actually restricts our insurance options and medical options. If we could just shop around, insurers would be forced to provide the coverage we wanted. The problem is right now we’re often forced into either limited employer options or to expensive individual options that don’t have the group discounts. But it will be disastrous to have just essentially one giant federal, federally-run option to buy into. We need many options competing, and we need the option of buying very limited coverage if that’s what we want.
That’s not to say that government doesn’t have a role. Government exists to provide stability and rule of law, which involves preventing fraud–preventing companies from taking advantage of you by saying they’re providing protection that they really aren’t. So yes, government should have a hand in making sure that insurers provide very clear and complete coverage particularly for emergency/catastrophic costs, the sort of stuff that could cause serious financial hardship even to people who have been responsible enough to put thousands of dollars into savings for medical expenses.
All this fear mongering on the horrors of affordable healthcare just blows my mind. We’re the only country in the 1st world that hasn’t figured this out. Its about time we catch up.
Show me a system that truly works better than the U.S. system–in terms of solvency, supporting research and development of advanced techniques, availability of advance techniques, and rapid availability of quality treatment. And then show me how the U.S. government has provided an acceptable alternative.
When the U.S. government can make the V.A. and Medicare and Medicaid both solvent and top-notch health institutions, then I’ll believe it may be able to provide a viable solution in the form of some kind of universal health care. Until then, while those institutions are disasters, how is it anything other than utter insanity to believe that the government can be trusted to do better than the V.A. and Medicare/Medicaid if only they’re allowed to force us all into it?
My point is that the failure of existing government systems suggests that the real motive behind universal health care ISN’T to provide a superior health care system (since existing government health care systems are so poor), but rather to push some other agendas.
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