posted on Nov, 18 2013 @ 06:10 PM
I'm happy to see people talking about healthcare outside just the routine talking points favored by one side or the other. I believe that no change,
single payer or otherwise will be any more successful than Obamacare unless the underlying causes of why healthcare costs so much in the US are
addressed. I've seen some great suggestions and observations so far in this thread.
Contrary to the left's talking points, we do not have a free market healthcare system in the US. What we have is a patchwork of government provided
health like Medicare, Medicaid, VA and various State programs that are built to serve certain groups and then the for profit system that the rest of
us use. Calling it for profit is entirely appropriate, but it is far from a free market health system. Crony Capitalist, Monopolized, Over Regulated,
and Cartel Controlled are far more appropriate descriptors for the US health system than free market. The healthcare industry routinely does business
in ways that were they to be tried by any other industry would be felonious- Opaque pricing, monopolies, and cartels of doctors/pharma/hospitals that
get to decide who offers services in a given area are just a few examples of practices that would be felonious in other industries.
Any reform that doesn't have driving down costs as it's main goal is as doomed to fail as Obamacare. A single payer system without the reforms
necessary to drive down prices is probably even worse than Obamacare as it will simply extract in taxes the exorbitant prices for medical services
currently in place. I can't really get behind anything the Republicans put forward because a decade ago, Republican health reform would have looked
an awful lot like Obamacare, and they should be thanking whatever dark gods are in charge of them that the Democrats passed it and not them. When I
hear them talking about using the Sherman Act or Taft-Hartley against hospital companies, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and other
monopolist/cartel actors in the US health system, I'll pay attention to what they say.
I believe that if you were to break the monopolies and cartels; force all providers to post price lists that are transparent and valid regardless of
method of payment (that being, same charge for insurance, medicare, medicaid or cold hard cash); not allow the AMA to set the number of medschool
seats each year (limiting supply of doctors); repeal bans on reimportation of medicine; and other things that make healthcare less crony capitalist
and more free market, you could collapse the cost of most medical services by 60-80%. There are already some doctor owned surgery centers doing this
accepting cash only and billing 20% of what a hospital that takes insurance charges.
Any healthcare reform that is truly effective will of course cause a massive hit to GDP as healtcare spending is currently around 20% of GDP. The
reforms I proposed above, if successful, would cause an immediate recession solely from lower healthcare costs. However, that 16% of the economy would
fairly quickly (1-2 years) find its way into other more productive areas than the pockets of insurance CEOs, pharmaceutical execs, and politicians.