Universal Health Care

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Is universal health care a moral obligation on the United States? The US is the wealthiest country in the history of the world. It has more millions and billionaires than every other nation combined. Isn’t there a gospel mandate to love your neighbor and care for the sick and poor amonst us?
 
The moral obligation falls on the individual, not on the government. The US govt, as set up by the Constitution, has no business being involved in healthcare, a private industry. The role of the govt is to make sure noone is denied healthcare. If a wealthy individual has the ability to help with others healthcare, there are not-for profit hospitals and clinics in nearly every city s/he can donate to.
 
The problem that appals me is that, in the US, the most debilitating symptomn of serious illness is poverty. As far as I know, this is not the case in any other OECD country.

I don’t understand why the US voters accept this situation.
 
pkoz said:
The moral obligation falls on the individual, not on the government. The US govt, as set up by the Constitution, has no business being involved in healthcare, a private industry. The role of the govt is to make sure noone is denied healthcare. If a wealthy individual has the ability to help with others healthcare, there are not-for profit hospitals and clinics in nearly every city s/he can donate to.
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In a democratic government, the government is represents the people and is appointed by the voters. So the government isn’t some far off entity. It is you and I. Do we have a moral obligation to provide health care to all our neighbors if we have the ability to do so?
 
The people vote on representatives, the US is a representative democracy, not a true democracy. So, the government is not truly the people. As Catholics, I feel we have a moral obligation to help those in need - it is up to the individual to determine how much they can give and to whom they give it. We certainly do not have an obligation to pay for our neighbors appendectomy, but if you have extra, donating it to an organization that helps others would certainly be appropriate.

The fact is that the US has the best healthcare system in the world. We have better facilities, no waiting lists, freedom of choice, and access to the latest medicines/diagnostic tests. We also have ER’s that cannot refuse to treat you. If medicine is socialized, most of that would go straight down the tubes. The reason our system is so expensive is the fed. Before the govt got involved, healthcare was affordable. A night in a hospital wasn’t much more than a night in a hotel. Then the govt put theirs hands in it by introducing programs such as medicare and medicaid, and the prices have skyrocketed. Once the system was not a true freemarket, the hospitals were able to charge outrageous prices - and get it!
 
pkoz said:
The people vote on representatives, the US is a representative democracy, not a true democracy. So, the government is not truly the people. As Catholics, I feel we have a moral obligation to help those in need - it is up to the individual to determine how much they can give and to whom they give it. We certainly do not have an obligation to pay for our neighbors appendectomy, but if you have extra, donating it to an organization that helps others would certainly be appropriate.

The fact is that the US has the best healthcare system in the world. We have better facilities, no waiting lists, freedom of choice, and access to the latest medicines/diagnostic tests. We also have ER’s that cannot refuse to treat you. If medicine is socialized, most of that would go straight down the tubes. The reason our system is so expensive is the fed. Before the govt got involved, healthcare was affordable. A night in a hospital wasn’t much more than a night in a hotel. Then the govt put theirs hands in it by introducing programs such as medicare and medicaid, and the prices have skyrocketed. Once the system was not a true freemarket, the hospitals were able to charge outrageous prices - and get it!
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OK, but Medicare and Medicaid aren’t going away, and for whatever reason, the price of healthcare has skyrocketed beyond the reach of millions of Americans. (I think it might have to do with the fact that there now exist technologies and medicines that didn’t exist 40 years ago too. It was cheap to stay overnight in a hospital when all they could do is give you an X-ray and some penicillin). So, what now?

Sadly, if every Catholic donated even 2-3% of his or her income, we could probably cover every Catholic in this country with full medical care from cradle to grave.
 
pkoz said:
The people vote on representatives, the US is a representative democracy, not a true democracy. So, the government is not truly the people. As Catholics, I feel we have a moral obligation to help those in need - it is up to the individual to determine how much they can give and to whom they give it. We certainly do not have an obligation to pay for our neighbors appendectomy, but if you have extra, donating it to an organization that helps others would certainly be appropriate.

The fact is that the US has the best healthcare system in the world. We have better facilities, no waiting lists, freedom of choice, and access to the latest medicines/diagnostic tests. We also have ER’s that cannot refuse to treat you. If medicine is socialized, most of that would go straight down the tubes. The reason our system is so expensive is the fed. Before the govt got involved, healthcare was affordable. A night in a hospital wasn’t much more than a night in a hotel. Then the govt put theirs hands in it by introducing programs such as medicare and medicaid, and the prices have skyrocketed. Once the system was not a true freemarket, the hospitals were able to charge outrageous prices - and get it!
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The United States is not any kind of democracy. It is a Republic.
 
Appleby said:
The United States is not any kind of democracy. It is a Republic.
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👍:thumbsup:Congratulations you are one of the VERY few who knows what type of Govt. USA has. It is also VERY sad that AMERICAN people do not know or understand the differences and they should be ashamed that someone from Toronto does.
 
pkoz said:
The fact is that the US has the best healthcare system in the world. !
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Only if one has access to insurance, or the money to pay for it.

There are 47 million uninsured in America, more than 80% of them in families where the head of household works, three quarters of them making more than $25,000.
covertheuninsured.org/content/uninsured-myths-and-facts

The problem is that while a few may be people who don’t want to pay for coverage, the vast majority can’t afford it. The average annual premium for a family of four is over $12,000!
nchc.org/facts/cost.shtml

More than 18,000 Americans die each year because they lack health insurance
covertheuninsured.org/content/uninsured-myths-and-facts

What happened to the “seamless garment of life” and “whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers?”
 
Appleby said:
The United States is not any kind of democracy. It is a Republic.
Click to expand...
The US is a democratic republic. Lets review - individuals vote (democracy) for people to represent them in govt (republic). Its that simple.
 
BillP said:
Only if one has access to insurance, or the money to pay for it.

There are 47 million uninsured in America, more than 80% of them in families where the head of household works, three quarters of them making more than $25,000.
covertheuninsured.org/content/uninsured-myths-and-facts

The problem is that while a few may be people who don’t want to pay for coverage, the vast majority can’t afford it. The average annual premium for a family of four is over $12,000!
nchc.org/facts/cost.shtml

More than 18,000 Americans die each year because they lack health insurance
covertheuninsured.org/content/uninsured-myths-and-facts

What happened to the “seamless garment of life” and “whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers?”
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Again, the fact that healthcare is so expensive is, at the very least, partly the governments doing. Even health insurance as we know it today has roots in the fed. True, it is expensive, and true it is not perfect, but based on how well socialized medicine has worked it other countries (sarcasm) I dont think that is the direction we should go.
I don’t think I want the govt having any say in my healthcare decisions, and if they provide it, they will have a say, just as they do for medicare patients.
 
Appleby said:
The United States is not any kind of democracy. It is a Republic.
Click to expand...
WHAT?!?

Next you are going to tell us that the word “democracy” appears nowhere in our Constitution. Or that the founding fathers were repulsed by the idea of mob rule and calling someone a “democrat” was an insult once upon a time.
 
BillP said:
Only if one has access to insurance, or the money to pay for it.

There are 47 million uninsured in America, more than 80% of them in families where the head of household works, three quarters of them making more than $25,000.
covertheuninsured.org/content/uninsured-myths-and-facts

The problem is that while a few may be people who don’t want to pay for coverage, the vast majority can’t afford it. The average annual premium for a family of four is over $12,000!
nchc.org/facts/cost.shtml

More than 18,000 Americans die each year because they lack health insurance
covertheuninsured.org/content/uninsured-myths-and-facts

What happened to the “seamless garment of life” and “whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers?”
Click to expand...
If it needs to happen in this thread, we should trace the root of government intervention that has run the costs so unnecessarily high. Is “greed” a factor? Sure, but government has unleashed a greed that would have otherwise been kept in check by free market. So, to propose that government needs to come in and save the very people that government is beating up on in the first place is about like paying the mafia to “protect” your mom and pop store from the local thugs.

There are some definite steps the governement can take to start lowering the cost of health care while maintaining quality (I can list several). Unfortunately, these steps would also reduce the control politicians have over voters (kind of like the control the mafia has over those shop-owners).
 
Awful_Things said:
If it needs to happen in this thread, we should trace the root of government intervention that has run the costs so unnecessarily high.
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Why don’t you enlighten us then. I’d really like to hear how government intervention has “run the costs so unecessarily high”
 
BillP said:
Why don’t you enlighten us then. I’d really like to hear how government intervention has “run the costs so unecessarily high”
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Okay.

You know, when I have these conversations, especially when others think the high costs are simply the result of greed, and that government isn’t at work, I think of the Calvin and Hobbs cartoon where Calvin has set up a lemonade stand and he’s charging something like a few thousand dollars for per glass. His response, “Well, I only have to sell one.”

The joke, of course, is that he’ll never sell that one glass and, especially if competing with the kid down the street, who is selling his for a quarter, it’s a no brainer who is going to make more money.

Unless, of course, people were required to buy lemonade. And there were so many restrictions and regulations put into making that one glass that it did cost an unusually high about of money. Then, of course, whoever is looking after the lemonade-hungry people would have to provide a way for the poor to drink Calvin’s product, and if they can get it without spending much from their pocket, they’ll buy more than they otherwise would have …

The idea that health costs and insurance are run high by corporate greed should be refuted by the idea that costs weren’t always so high. Did companies just recently figure out they could charge several thousand for a glass of lemonade? Another thing that wasn’t always true was that people saw insurance as a payment plan. I have home owner’s insurance, but I don’t expect that insurance to cover my heating bills or to cover the cost for overseeding my yard in the fall. Yet, this is the way insurance is used today, with people using insurance, not to cover the catastrophic, but the ordinary, running up costs.

So … what does government intervention have to do with any of this?

Probably the root of this is in the wage and price controls during WWII, as well as the unnecessary tax on income our country has clung to. With companies forbidden to offer competitive wages (as if that is any of the government’s business to legislate), they began to offer employee-provided health care, which was not taxed, in order to attract quality employees. After the war ended, the assumption continued that employers were required to provide health insurance. The joke, of course, is that this isn’t some benefit that the employer has to shoulder since the money for premiums could have, instead, gone to the employee. I see this first hand as an employer when I see what we could be paying. In addition, since people were not paying directly, it made it a little less painful to use the doctor for frivolous things, starting the cycle of consumer abuse of insurance, which wouldn’t have happened if individuals paid out of their own checkbook each month. Studies back this up by showing that when insurance is paid for by a third party, costs sky-rocket. Now we even have proposals that businesses should be required to provide insurance, making the damage from the 40’s irreversible.

continued …
 
A necessary part of this discussion is to look at why medicine and drug costs are so high. Sometimes, this is necessary. Other times it is, again, the result of government intervention over-complicating the process and empowering personal greed. This is a whole different discussion, though we can certainly go that route.

Looking specifically at high health insurance, there are some root factors:
  1. Overuse of insurance by patients. This is partially addressed above, but the root cause is consumers who do not have to pay the full cost of the services they use, which has, over time, run up costs. The problem has been exacerbated by sloppy administration and philosophy of the government programs of Medicaid and Medicare, at the very least. I would argue that the two institutions are unnecessary to begin with and could have been remedied by less damaging alternatives, which incorporate the free market. In addition, tax laws exist that encourage individuals to have their employer purchase their medical care, rather than purchasing independent of the employer.
  2. Administrative and paperwork costs unnecessarily push up costs of health care, but the use of third-party payers trying to control costs (which doesn’t happen). Again, there is no incentive for individuals to look for their own private insurance. In fact, it is prohibited by legislation that often does not allow small business or individuals to band together for the types of large discounts that large businesses get.
  3. Fear of malpractice suits force unnecessary tests and procedures to protect doctors and hospitals, and this would be seriously curbed if courts allowed patients and providers to detail liability through market contracts, such as if I wanted to sign a document waiving my doctor’s liability in return for his not administering tests that he feels are superfluous.
  4. State regulation that requires private insurers to custom design their product to the whims of legislators, rather than to the needs of the consumers. Congress gets the opportunity to tailor design their health insurance, but will not remove legislation that prohibits it for others. In addition, regulation has driven up costs because of other factors:
    1. Mandating benefits that cover particular treatments, such as chiropractors.
    2. Creating laws that present cause of action against health plans under liability theories.
    3. Creating laws that allow direct access to specialists, rather than using the primary as a gatekeeper from frivolous specialist visits.
    4. Laws which prevent buying from providers across state lines.
    5. Requiring insurance companies to insure someone with preexisting conditions, even when that individual has turned down personal insurance all along. This has created a nightmare for the responsible insurer in places like New Jersey, where I could sign up for insurance when I discover I have cancer (saving money all along), and my neighbor foots the bill.
 
Awful,

I read your post and I find a whole raft of unsupported assertions right out of talk-radio talking points. I think you will find through investigation that, very few of the reasons you cite have any meaningful impact on health care costs.

Also I’m afraid you are quite mistaken about my assessment of the reasons for the extraordinarily high cost of health care. It isn’t greed on anyone’s part. It is primarily a result of two factors, cutting edge technology and the large number of uninsured people who receive their primary care through emergency rooms.

You are correct that businesses opted to offer health insurance to their employees because of a wage freeze by the government, what you fail to mention is that the wage freeze was a measure the government enacted to fight World War II. Even then the wage controls were removed shortly after WWII (60 years ago!!).

The “administration and paperwork” is a bit of a red herring as well. Both Medicaid and Medicare have much lower administrative costs. Only about 5% of Medicare spending is administrative compared to 9% for private insurers (17% if you count marketing and commision costs!!). So that dog won’t hunt.
cahi.org/cahi_contents/resources/pdf/CAHI_Medicare_Admin_Final_Publication.pdf

“Overuse of insurance”, I’ve never heard this one. I’ve heard that ER use is too high, generally because of the number of people who use the ER as their PCP and because insured folks often don’t find the hours of their PCP convenient to meet their “urgentish” needs. My understanding was that the rise of the “Doc-in-a-box” had largely addressed the second groups, but the first group was still a problem. Given the constant preaching about preventative care being cheaper than treatment, I’d be surprised if insurers actually wanted their insureds to visit the doctor’s less often. If you have any data on this I’d love to see it.

“Fear of malpractice suits” Oh! I remember this one! This was the one the Malpractice Insurers trotted out a few years ago when that wave of “tort reform” swept the US. Well, the cost of insurance certainly isn’t a issue accounting for less than 2% of health care costs in the US.
makethemaccountable.com/myth/RisingCostOfMedicalMalpracticeInsurance.htm
As far as defensive medicine, the absolute highest estimate I’ve ever seen is that $210B (out of total spend of $2.1T) is spent on defensive medicine, which would account for ~10% of spending, but doesn’t explain the year over year increases at all.
blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2008/04/wasted-medical.html

Now we’ve got state regulation. Here we may part company philosophically. But lets look at the best (worst?) case. Even the Heritage Foundation (a source I would imagine you’d approve of) estimates that the maximum cost of state regulation is about $2,000 per year. And of course that begs the question of who would be dong the regulating (I think even you would concede that
b some
regulation is necessary?). And what happened to this belief in “states rights” that all you conservatives were supposed to consider so sacrosanct?

So lets review the bidding. Discarding the wage control as true but irrelevant, discounting the mythical excessive administrative fees of Medicare and Medicaid, we’re left with defensive medicine at most! 10% and “state regulation” at $2,000/year.

The original quote was $12,000 per year, discounting that to 90% to eliminate “defensive medicine” we get $10,800, knocking off another $2,000 for state regulation we’re still left with $8,800 per year. In a society where 40% of households earn less than $40,000, (and the median is $50K) census.gov/prod/2008pubs/p60-235.pdf
that’s simply not affordable my anyone’s definition.

I suppose you could take the Social Darwinist position that people who can’t afford health insurance shouldn’t get health care, I suppose you could even believe that people shouldn’t have children if they can’t afford to provide them with health insurance, but I think both of these positions are inconsistent with Catholic philosophy and theology.

And none of this explains why the costs keep increasing so danged fast!

The best explanation I’ve heard cites the rise in technology (both equipment and drugs) as the single fastest driver of health care increases. Other important factors are the increase in uninsured are causing hospitals to amortize more unpaid bills (from the uninsured) to the rest of us and finally a rapidly aging population.
 
pkoz said:
The US is a democratic republic. Lets review - individuals vote (democracy) for people to represent them in govt (republic). Its that simple.
Click to expand...
your mistaken you can not have both.
 
Awful_Things said:
A necessary part of this discussion is to look at why medicine and drug costs are so high. Sometimes, this is necessary. Other times it is, again, the result of government intervention over-complicating the process and empowering personal greed. This is a whole different discussion, though we can certainly go that route.

Looking specifically at high health insurance, there are some root factors:
  1. Overuse of insurance by patients. This is partially addressed above, but the root cause is consumers who do not have to pay the full cost of the services they use, which has, over time, run up costs. The problem has been exacerbated by sloppy administration and philosophy of the government programs of Medicaid and Medicare, at the very least. I would argue that the two institutions are unnecessary to begin with and could have been remedied by less damaging alternatives, which incorporate the free market. In addition, tax laws exist that encourage individuals to have their employer purchase their medical care, rather than purchasing independent of the employer.
  2. Administrative and paperwork costs unnecessarily push up costs of health care, but the use of third-party payers trying to control costs (which doesn’t happen). Again, there is no incentive for individuals to look for their own private insurance. In fact, it is prohibited by legislation that often does not allow small business or individuals to band together for the types of large discounts that large businesses get.
  3. Fear of malpractice suits force unnecessary tests and procedures to protect doctors and hospitals, and this would be seriously curbed if courts allowed patients and providers to detail liability through market contracts, such as if I wanted to sign a document waiving my doctor’s liability in return for his not administering tests that he feels are superfluous.
  4. State regulation that requires private insurers to custom design their product to the whims of legislators, rather than to the needs of the consumers. Congress gets the opportunity to tailor design their health insurance, but will not remove legislation that prohibits it for others. In addition, regulation has driven up costs because of other factors:
    1. Mandating benefits that cover particular treatments, such as chiropractors.
    2. Creating laws that present cause of action against health plans under liability theories.
    3. Creating laws that allow direct access to specialists, rather than using the primary as a gatekeeper from frivolous specialist visits.
    4. Laws which prevent buying from providers across state lines.
    5. Requiring insurance companies to insure someone with preexisting conditions, even when that individual has turned down personal insurance all along. This has created a nightmare for the responsible insurer in places like New Jersey, where I could sign up for insurance when I discover I have cancer (saving money all along), and my neighbor foots the bill.
Click to expand...
Good summary. Fifty years ago when patients generally paid their own bills, and did not have insurance, doctors were very considerate of the financial situation of patients. My family doctor was also a family friend and he still made house calls. He had begun his practive before WWII and then went into the Army. He came back and found that he had more patients than he could handle, because people now had money to spend on doctor’s visits. Many of the visits, he found, were unnecessary, and patients often wanted assurance more than treatment. In such cases, he would simply send the patient away without paying, although many insisted on paying because they didn’t want to be charity. He had a running battle with his partner who was glad to get the money, and finally they came to blows over their different business philosophies. They came to terms and continued their partnership, but never spoke to each other without the nurse/bookkeeper in the room with them, even on a medical matter. Our doctor was vehemently against medicare, callinbg it socialized medicine. He scoffed to the costs predicted by the Johnson administration, and said that it would drive up costs out of sight, because too many doctors–like his partner-- thought more like businessmen than professionals. He himself had grown up on a farm and accumulated enough money to buy everything he had ever wanted for himself and his family. But he warned that people so wanted to stay alive that they would pay any price.
 
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