@MidnightVoice wrote:
Well, maybe we could do with improving our health care system - did you know is is currently the 36th best health care system in the world? Does that make you proud?
Most of the countries (Sweden, Denmark, et al) that have better health care and social systems were able to do so ONLY because they were relieved of spending their GNP on military because we protected the world for over 1/2 a century.
I would not care to have the 'best health care' in the world if it meant we stifled production, if we went back to 90% top tax rates, if we settled for mediocrity instead of excellence.
What is the standard for great health care? My friend in the UK has free catastrophic coverage, but has to wait 18 months for a hip replacement. There is no fuzzy math about it, providing affordable full-spectrum health care is an impossibility.
Do you think the problem is with 'greedy' Doctors and 'greedy' Insurance companies? Much of the blame for the health care crisis is the same as what I have alluded to earlier; lack of personal responsibility and a sense of entitlement. Health Insurance as a private sector business is a very brilliant and win-win business; they have actuarial tables for diseases in population based on age/gender, and charge a healthy population a monthly premium that will cover the care for the diseases the know a certain portion of the covered will be afflicted with.
When we added 'community care', i.e. 'it is not fair for people with pre-existing conditions so pay more' the cost of the care for everyone had to go up, again, no fuzzy #s, the $ that was paid in had to cover the cost of care. The cost of care was going up (more of the population was sick or would be getting sick) so the cost was spread around. More young healthy people looked at the rising cost and found it was not to their benefit to spend that money on health care htey didn't need instead of say, investing in their eduction, future, innovations, travel, family. So a greater % of the insured population was or would be sick, so, of course, the premiums went up again, and, you guessed it, more healthy people dropped out. More healthy people that were uninsured because the cost went up became sick as they got older, creating costs for hospitals which were in turn added back into the general cost of insurance, and so on and so on.
Doctors SHOULD make money, and a lot of it. Insurance companies should make money, and a lot of it. If you want a system where people are not held accountable for their lifestyles (obesity, smoking, drinking, drugs, unprotected 'dangerous' sex) and should be subsidised by people who do not make unhealthy choices, then don't be surprised when the cost of insurance goes up, and Drs are less motivated to provide care while being rewarded about as well as their local bartenders, and insurance companies, who are routinely defrauded in ways large and small by the insured scrutinize and disallow as many procedures as possible.
Instead of punishing healthy people by forcing them to get coverage (or penalizing them with tzes) as Romney did and Clinton wants to do, we should 'punish' the people who are and will burden the system through their lifestyle choices. Oh right, who are we to tell people how to live? We should just pay for it. If lifestyle choices directly affected the cost of one's health care, you can bet, just as excessive cigarette taxes did, people would modify that behaviour or be forced to pay for those choices with higher premiums/deductibles/etc. And that would reduce the cost to healthy people, and to people who did not choose to be 100 lbs overweight, did not choose to smoke 6 packs a day, or drink their liver into oblivion.
Instead of forcing employers to pay health care (!?) which makes us less competitive in the global marketplace (e.g. GM) we could have a system that recognizes that the most critical care people need is catastrophic, base coverage on choice based pre-existing conditions, and provide incentives for preventative care, i.e. reward people for being and staying healthy.
Instead of the ridiculous # of entitlement programs we have, we could concentrate on essentials; education and health.
Social Security could easily be solved if we a) removed the salary cap on ss taxes and b) made it a need-based entitlement, much like unemployment. Not everyone gets unemployment even though we all pay into it, only those who are unemployed, and the for a set period of time. SS should not be paid to people whose networth/income exceeds a certain cieling, just because 'they paid in'. It was an insurance policy and should be treated as such.
Bottom line is you just can't have it all; Social Security, Mecicaire, Medicaid, Universal Health Care, Education, etc so forth so on. Something has to give, and the longer we pretend it does not by printing more and more useless money and creating runaway inflation (which we have if you look at the *actual* CPI) the longer we will avoid that. As many arguments as i have with republicans (stem cell research, abortion) at least they recognize those realities.
