Health Care
I haven’t written much about the health care crisis in this country basically because I looked at the problem years ago and the answer was obvious: Medicare for all.
The numbers all point at it, and no one is able to make the numbers change – Medicare is the most efficient provider of health insurance in the United States by a wide margin.
When you look at the savings from switching all of the current government systems to Medicare coverage, and then factor in all of the problems for business and the states from our current hodgepodge system, the answer leaps out at you.
If I need to drill a ¼” hole, I don’t waste my time looking at other sizes of drill bits, so why are we wasting money, time, and energy attempting to analyze the systems from private companies that have failed. Private companies cannot provide the same level of coverage as Medicare at the same price, and that has been obvious for years.
The Republicans have foisted an experiment on people attempting to involve private companies in covering Medicare recipients, and taxpayers are paying more for these plans than the traditional plan. That is a waste of resources.
One payer, everyone is covered, care providers get paid, the states are out of the Medicaid money pit, businesses don’t have to get involved with health care, only one set of forms and codes – what is the problem with the “leaders”?
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To quote a bad movie: “Follow the money.”
Those three magic words describe it all. The current U.S. “health care” system is a barely-organized system for looting that only coincidentally happens to provide any health care. And the looters are in charge.
– Badtux the Cynical Penguin
And the way the “Village” people are talking the one thing they don’t want to happen is to stop the looting, because it generates large campaign contributions.
I experienced an excellent system in Monroe Country, New York that was operated by Blue Cross/Blue Shield. If you were between jobs, all you had to do was to take two courses at the local community college, and health insurance was included, that’s how cheap it was.
I paid for a quarter when I left and moved to SoCal and it cost me under $250, and that was a premium package that covered everything with no deductibles.
BC/BS has gone the “for profit” route and that package is no longer available at any price. The whole system has broken down, going from almost everyone covered, to only about half of the people covered because the cost has skyrocketed.
The insurance companies don’t want to be in the business, but they don’t want anyone else to be in it either.
you’re almost correct. the insurance companies want to be in the business of taking money from healthy people and refusing to pay for sick people. it’s a sweet gig, can’t let the guvmint, and certainly not the little people, muscle in on that.
yeah let’s experiment on old people [medicare advantage and part d] and poor people. you’d think that good liberals would rise up in outrage, but noooooo, now they want to experiment on sick people [the uninsured].
There are assigned risk pools for car insurance, homeowners insurance, the entire flood insurance program is a government assigned risk pool. Insurance companies don’t want to risk anything; they want a guarantee of maximum profits. That isn’t what capitalism or insurance is all about.
Good liberals want single-payer; real fiscal conservatives want single-payer; business owners want single-payer; the uninsured want single-payer; the states need single-payer.
I am still waiting to hear a valid argument for not going to single-payer. I want to hear why we should continue to support a failed model. “We’ve always done it this way” is not a valid response.
The way things are going anyway, they (the health insurance companies) are going to take a huge hit anyway. Who can afford insurance? Especially with unemployment increasing.
Susie Madrak @ C&L had a post about that a couple days ago:
States Making Deeper Cuts in Medicaid”
Of course, if the Gov would just pull the troops out of Iraq/Afghanistan and stop throwing bales of money down those black holes, they would have more money for important things. 🙂 But that’s just me. 😉 LOL
It actually amazes me that Americans are so stupid they are not all in the streets screaming for the Gov to do that. Seems like a simple equation that even most Americans should understand. Guess not. And yeah, I know… most don’t actually have a clue what’s going on. *shrug* Well, ignorance is NOT bliss, as they will soon discover. 🙂
If the terms of the auto bailout are actually enforced, whoever has the contract for the auto makers’ health insurance will go belly up, as they only way to meet the terms is by eliminating the health insurance for the workers.
The numbers for the uninsured will just continue to grow, and the insurance companies will disappear because they have priced themselves out of the market.
These MBAs that are in charge of all of these corporations don’t seem to have much of a grasp of the fundamentals of being in business.