turbo-1 said:
You are free to propose your own fix. The government has not proposed taking over private insurance companies by force. If you have support for this neo-con idea, I would like to see it.
They don't need to. A universal healthcare program will drive private insurers out of business, and thus move all of America onto the government system, which is the idea, to move us to single-payer. The Democrats are fully aware of this, and so is the insurance industry.
When President Obama says that you will be able to keep your own private insurance, he is lying, because eventually everyone will be forced onto the government program.
The government program will be cheaper, although not any better, and thus many people will make the choice to switch to the government program.
The other big lie is when President Obama says, "If the free-market healthcare is so good, then it will be able to compete fine with the government option." Yeah, if it was free-market, that would be true perhaps, but it is not free-market. Not anywhere ever close.
50% of healthcare is already government essentially, Medicare and Medicaid. The other 50% is privatized but it is so heavily regulated that it is not anywhere even close to being a free-market. Insurance companies control it.
People with Medicare and Medicaid can only been charged up to a certain amount of money by hospitals and so forth. Because of this, hospitals and insurance companies have to make up that lost money by yanking up costs on people with private plans.
However, then there are laws that restrict insurance companies from yanking up prices on this and that. This results in direct rationing, as the health insurance companies essentially flat-out deny care to people.
There are other enormous problems with universal healthcare:
1) The cost will be astronomical, this is according to the CBO. And that is assuming the program would be within its projected cost range, which government health programs never are. There are trillions in unfunded liabilities for Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security alone. The only government healthcare program to actually cost less than initially projected is the Medicare prescription drug program that was enacted by the Bush administration, and that is because it employed free-market principles (increased competition between drug manufacturers which has driven down costs).
And since the country is short of $$$ right now, the only way to pay for it will be to borrow most of the money, which will skyrocket interest rates, which will drive us into an all-new recession (or depression if we are not out of this current recession).
Although one way they are talking about helping pay for it is also to tax people's health benefits, which was McCain's plan during the campaign which then Senator Obama criticized highly at the time.
The neat thing about this is that if they decide to tax only the health benefits of non-unionized workers, it would result in people scrambling to get into unions and make it far easier for anyone to form a union. It would be one of the biggest pay-offs to organized labor in history.
And it would be a nice way to get the effect that the Orwellian-named "Employee Free Choice Act" (which takes away a worker's right to a secret ballot vote) seeks, only without actually enacting that legislation.
2) Quality in a government-run healthcare system sucks. Even in France, where they are far more socialist than in the United States, they have a separate privatized healthcare system for the bureaucrats.
3) If the country moves to single-payer, the government gets an enormous degree of control over the economy. Healthcare is 16% of our economy as is.
When the "government is paying" for your healthcare, then they can do things like say levy a tax on this, or levy a tax on that, or regulate this, regulate that, make a law restricting this, make a law restricting that, because otherwise "it will increase healthcare costs."
If you want to bandy the word "socialist" as a negative to denigrate any publicly-finance health insurance, you are free to do so, as are Rush Limbaugh and all the hacks bought by the insurance companies.
Rush Limbaugh is no hack. He is one of the few who actually bothers to talk about real issues.
President Obama is bought and paid for by the unions and the trial lawyers, however.
I ask that you provide some cost-benefit studies to support your assertions, though. Our country needs a publicly-finance health insurance plan that ensures ALL our citizens, not just the ones wealthy enough to afford coverage or those with no pre-existing conditions.
Yeah, it would be nice if we could actually discuss these things, wouldn't it, instead of our President working furiously to ram his healthcare agenda down our throats with no real debate.
The truth is that we CAN'T cover everyone the way you want, because there are simply not enough doctors and nurses nor enough money to finance such a program. Rationing will occur. When they say they will "control costs" (never heard of a government program that does that), they are talking about rationing.
Currently, private insurance companies can reject anybody (Rationing Care! - a big neo-con rallying-cry) because they have a pre-existing condition or cannot afford coverage.
And you think the government program will not? Furthermore, what makes you think the GOP supports health insurance companies? Health insurance companies controlling healthcare and government healthcare are two evils, one lesser than the other. With the insurance companies, at least you have competition and multiple choices.
But you are still at the mercy of bureaucrats, just corporate bureaucrats. Corporate bureaucrats do everything at a profit, which in general is good but with healthcare it depends. I do not want corporate bureaucrats or government bureaucrats in charge of healthcare.
With government healthcare, you're at the mercy of government bureaucrats, and they tend to spend far too much money, wasting it. Medicare and Medicaid are monuments to waste, fraud, corruption, etc...this leads to massive inefficiency and wait times.
Insurance companies only dominate because of already massive government interference into the economy. Areas of healthcare that are truly free-market see costs going down, not up. Medicare and Medicaid are two prime drivers of increasing costs in private healthcare.
One thing we could do to really bring down some healthcare costs is tort reform. But that means going against the trial lawyers, which the Democrats will NEVER do.
Taking care of these people on a too-little, too-late basis costs our health system billions ever year and ensures poor outcomes for too many. Preventative care, regular exams, and decent follow-up can avoid the most expensive emergency procedures and the (entirely expected) failure to provide favorable outcomes. Care delayed is care denied, and we ALL pay for it.
True, but I have never seen a government program do these things better. It is like a religion to the Left that government can do healthcare better when they cannot even run AMTRAK or the postal service properly.
