idiggory, King of Bards wrote:
You're right. An actual universal healthcare system would eliminate our dependence on for-profit insurance systems, which subsequently would remove the insurance/hospital contracts that lead to our inequitable system that allows the wealthy to gain access to the same treatments for lower costs than the poor can.
It's also something which the US public has consistently rejected as an ideal or objective for 80 years or so. So perhaps instead of breaking our existing health care system in order to make it "kinda like socialized medicine", we should focus on making our free market health care system work. The left in this country wants something that the overwhelming majority of the population does not. But instead of just accepting that, they work to try to force the rest into adopting something they don't want anyway. What happened to freedom?
How does anyone look at the mandates in Obamacare and think this is about rights of any kind? The means violates the defined end. If one were being honest about fighting for "health care rights", and not just fighting for "government run health care", that is. But then, there's nothing honest about how the left is proceeding with this.
(Meaning, the cost of paying for insurance for a year is less than the cost of paying for the treatments yourself, assuming you are actually using doctors as frequently, which you aren't, because you cannot afford it without insurance).
This cannot be true. You get that, right? Let me let you in on a secret: It will always cost more to pay for health care with insurance than paying for it directly
. Always. When you say it costs less, you really mean it "costs less for some people". It must cost more in total. Even if the insurance company is non-profit, it has operating costs. The total cost for the total care covered by that insurance *must* cost more than it would cost for that same care if it were paid directly by the total people who pay for the insurance.
Use your brain. You should be able to realize that this must be true. Always. You don't save money by buying insurance. You spend more money. Most people will spend far more money buying car insurance over the course of their lives then they would ever need to cover their car(s). It has to be that way, or the insurance fund will run out of money. There's no magic here.
The issue with our system is that people are forced to choose between paying a flat cost, which is huge and barely offers them real coverage, or paying up-front, which means they won't seek medical help outside of emergencies, and will likely be destroyed economically should anything severe actually happen.
No. The problem is that we have, over the last 40 years, used the government to force people to pay for things they could pay for directly via insurance. You only need insurance to cover things that are rare and expensive. Regular checkups are (by definition) regular. Birth control is used regularly (presumably). Mammograms are performed regularly. These things should *not* be paid for via insurance. It's stupid to do so. All you accomplish is increase the total cost for those things.
But this is precisely the kind of coverage that the left has used the government to foist on us over the last several decades, and it's exactly the kind of coverage that Obamacare makes a huge point to provide. It's "comprehensive coverage". Meaning that instead of just covering you if you're in an accident or get a rare medical condition, it covers you for everyday things as well. IMO, that's when health care in the US went in the wrong direction and we only make things worse by expanding that.
The system we have, with medical costs being inversely proportional to your wealth, is absurd.
How do you figure this? Are you honestly trying to suggest that it costs a rich person *less* money to buy health insurance than a poor person? Or are you playing games with relative costs? The hospital is going to charge the same amount for a given procedure no matter how wealthy the patient is. The only question is how that bill is paid. A free market system would simply charge the patient for the cost of that person's care. A universal health care system would have the government pay the bill, but with a progressive tax paying for it (so a wealthier person pays more for the same care). The current US system has the insurance company pay, which they passes that cost on to the pool of payees. But since *some* of those payees have their costs paid for by the government (medicare, medicaid, various state health care plans, etc), the wealthier person is paying full price for his insurance *and* paying more total taxes for the government paid portion *and* the system will charge more money because it has a large payee with no motive to keep costs down.
That's what's wrong with the US health care system (part of it anyway).
Furthermore, when I'm being forced to choose between the right for someone to not die from a simple infection, because they couldn't pay the medical bill for the hospital stay, and someone else paying a few hundred extra a year (when they would already be paying less overall, because of the elimination of the profit motive for the middle man), I'm definitely going for the latter.
That's one huge freaking false dilemma. A "simple infection" should not cost that much to treat. It's only because of the government intervention into the system, and the mass of bureaucracy and paperwork that brings coupled with the "free money" aspect of government payments that causes costs for what should be simple and cheap procedures to be monumentally expensive. We've created a "buy-in" cost for health care. Used to be, if you got sick, you showed up at a doctor's office, and got treatment and the doctor charged you (and had the leeway as a private business to adjust costs based on the ability of the patient to pay). Now, the doctors don't bill you directly. They are paid by a health care association or hospital, who charge the insurance companies (or the government) for various services, and pad the bills for all the overhead that is involved, and they pass the cost on to employers, who pass it on to their employees (but often hidden from them so it's hard to know how much is actually being charged).
The result is a massive increase in costs. How much do you think it would cost for a single doctor in a small office to treat a "simple infection"? $20 maybe? It really should be that cheap. And it is that cheap (or cheaper) at the occasional free clinic type operation. It should be that cheap everywhere. But it isn't because nearly every practicing physician in the country has to operate as part of one of these big health care providers. And the cost to get care from them requires a huge up front cost. We've eliminated the direct pay for health care option almost entirely from our system. That's why costs keep going up. When you separate the buyer from the seller, there's no incentive for the buyer to demand a low price or the seller not to charge a higher price.
Imagine if you bought your food the same way you pay for health care in the US. It would be insanely expensive. Ok. It would just be insane.
I also like how you have to try and act like we are talking about Obamacare whenever we discuss universal healthcare. Obamacare is a bandaid on a bad system--it is not, nor has it ever been, universal healthcare. You can scream about it all you want, but that's not what the rest of us are discussing.
And yet, the same people who praise the idea of universal health care also support and defend Obamacare. You'd think they'd oppose it, given that it increases costs, and put more money in the hands of insurers. But they don't.
Given that this thread is about an attempt to change just one aspect of that horrible health care law, I think it's fair for *me* to point out that what we're talking about isn't universal health care. It's not anything remotely close to it. Yet, the same people stubbornly defend Obamacare anyway. I can't figure that out.