American Health Care System.

It is too expensive; millions don't have access to it; and society is piling all of the cost on individuals--employers, who used to pay for most of it, either can't afford or will not pay the high premiums.

In this case, the Americans have a lot to learn from the French! As much as they would hate to do it...

The American medical care system is based upon money.  The more you have of it, the better the care.  Anytime anybody objects or proposes an alternative system, they deemed a liberal, a socialist, or a kook.  National healthcare insurance, which was proposed in the 1990s, was shot-down with an expensive, emotional charged, smear campaign.  Hillary Clinton, even if she was elected Senator, was been suffering from this ever since.

If it isn't profitable, it won't be cured here. 

Mord.

What cruelty:

Little children have to die because the U.S. cannot figure a way to provide affordable medical insurance.

Why isn't the "pro-life" movement for universal health care too?

Is it that poor people deserve to die?

And of course such attention to costs will be important to our future competitiveness.

I liked Bush's idea that he proposed but never went through with in office of having a $2000 per year deductible, and then coverage for expenses after that for lower monthly costs.  If our health insurance system was applied to automobile insurance, it would be like getting your car insurance company to pay for an oil change.  I know it's not all that needs to be done, but I think a deductible high enough to cover everyday expenses like shots, medicines, check ups, occasional visits, etc. along with catastrophic coverage would reduce costs a lot.

Originally posted by Genghis I liked Bush's idea that he proposed but never went through with in office of having a $2000 per year deductible, and then coverage for expenses after that for lower monthly costs.  If our health insurance system was applied to automobile insurance, it would be like getting your car insurance company to pay for an oil change.  I know it's not all that needs to be done, but I think a deductible high enough to cover everyday expenses like shots, medicines, check ups, occasional visits, etc. along with catastrophic coverage would reduce costs a lot.

$2000 dollar deductable?  Just where am I going to get $2000 put aside if I should injure myself or if anybody in my family is injured?  What the deductable means is YOU HAVE TO PAY FIRST--So, tell me with a mortgage, a car payment, heating payments, electrical payments, etc., we're supposed save more money just in case. 

I am not a car--but I do have high blood pressure.  Visits to the doctor are pretty much quarterly these days.  A $2000 deductable would pretty much literally kill me after it sent me to the poor house.

Please get a better idea personal economics.  Bush's idea is crap.

Mord.  

How can you say a national health care system will work?  People in Canada and such wait months for surgeries and the cost of health care in this country would be somewhere around $300 billion in new taxes.  Even significant tax increases won't pay for all of it, and the cost will just get higher as the baby boomers age more, and even more so unless malpractice lawsuits are not put under control.  Here the doctors of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons argues against socialized medicine (http://www.aapsonline.org/newsletters/apr97.htm).  Even in 1977, they said that 25% of the costs of hospitals in New York was attributable to government interference, now I'm sure it's much, much greater.  We can't regulate our way out of a problem regulation caused. 

Furthermore, just transferring the costs of health care to the government instead of trying to reduce costs will not reduce the amount of money Americans pay for health care, it will just make them pay it indirectly and probably not very effeciently through a very large bureaucratic agency for health care.  Allowing choice in the use of health care would allow people to choose the best balance of affordability and quality in doctors , but in a national system, there is no incentive to reduce costs and it would be very difficult to control wasteful spending.

The problem I think needs to be addressed before the number of uninsured people can be reduced.  That's just my overall opinion on socialized medicine. 

Now, I admit I'm no expert on this, none of us really are.  The specifics of any plan to reform health care should be made by health care professionals and employers who are in a position to know.  Not people like us who don't practice medicine for a living.

Based on your all personal experiences, what do you think the problems are?  What has personally satisfied or disappointed you with your health care plans?

Hugoestr,

I don't know if you're trying to be patronizing or not, but I'm aware of what medicare is and what medical insurance is.  I'm not writing these posts from the inside of a cave on Mars.

I agree with you about the old people, that's just a bullet we'll have to bite until they all die off. 

What I was saying is in regards to the high prices of medicine.  Much of it caused by new technologies, but much also much is caused by malpractice lawsuits and government meddling in our system.  If we want to reduce costs, the industry must be made competitive. 

As I was saying earlier about insurance plans that allow fee-for-service health care up until some deductible with reduced premium catastrophic coverage, in the realm of pharmacies this principle of taking insurance companies out of routine medical expenses like medicines.  This article published in Health Care News (http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=16437) talks about how several pharmacies have begun to not accept insurance payments for prescription drugs and have been able to reduce prices significantly.  Furthermore, they reduce prices for consumers even more than Canadian bulk purchases of prescription drugs and price controls of the same drugs.

For prescription drugs, the unintrusive principle of free market exchange has proven itself more effective at reducing drug prices than restrictive price controls which disincentivize drug sales and the massive bureaucratic apparatus that would theoretically purchase drugs in bulk.

Universal health coverage can look the way it does today. The worker will pay an affordable price and the government can pay the rest of the premium.

Where does the government get their money?  From the people in the form of higher taxes which would have otherwise covered expenses like health coverage.  You're not making them pay any less, you're just making them pay part of it in the most wasteful way.  Not too mention a lot of that money would now also have to be spent on the massive amount of overheard assosciated with such a system.

Canadians themselves are expressing less and less satisfaction with their system, citing delays in getting quality healthcare and long lines for medical operations, and not surprisingly the system is financially unsustainable.  Here's an article from CBS about it ( http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/03/20/health/main681801. shtml?cmp=EM8705).

Here are some highlights from the article:

hospital administrators constantly having to cut staff for lack of funds

teenager was advised she would have to wait up to three years for surgery to repair a torn knee ligament...the Ottawa family opted to pay $3,300 for arthroscopic surgery at a private clinic in Vancouver, with no help from the government..."Every day we're paying for health care, yet when we go to access it, it's just not there," said Pelton

at present rates, Ontario will be spending 85 percent of its budget on health care by 2035

The federal government and virtually every province acknowledge there's a crisis: a lack of physicians and nurses, state-of-the-art equipment and funding. In Ontario, more than 10,000 nurses and hospital workers are facing layoffs over the next two years

Genghis,

I was stressing that the nation is already paying for the medical care of most Americans.

From what you say, it sounds like you never had to pay for medicine without having insurance. It is very expensive; almost punitive.

If a visit to a doctor is about $100 without insurance, paying for the medicine is $100 or even more. This means that a visit with medicine can cost about $200-$500.

Let me explain to you how the market works with medical care. Let's assume that the main purpose of medical care is to maximize profit. The insurance company has access to a service that people need; in many cases, urgently. People have the choice of paying or facing death for their themselves or their children. This is not a choice at all.

Since people have no choice, this means that demand is high. When demand is high, it is time to jack the prices up. What happens to those who can't pay for it? They die. After enough people are wiped out of the nation, the demand for insurance will lower, and prices will finally fall.

This means the <b>the unrestrained market maximizes medical profits by killing people. Only when millions of people die will insurance premiums go down.</b>