Opinons on the new health care bill?

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Everyone is required to purchase auto insurance, aren't they? There do not seem to be a lot of legal challenges to that law.

YET.

Obama and his cronies have non-stop talked about a public option, making changes would be easier once the initial bill was passed, etc.

So, I have no reason to believe that the public option won't be enacted in a year or so with a lot less fanfare than the original bill received in the press. Even if one PRIVATE insurance carrier handles things now, I have no reason to believe the government couldn't nationalize that company or do some other "bait and switch" routine (bailouts of 2008) that puts the government in major control of the institutions that take money from the government.

You really think they're going to start the whole process of healthcare reform over again, with all the political difficulties that entails? The current bill will remain in force for quite some time.


I doubt it, the Repubs would throw a fuss over that. And it is not "one private insurance carrier," it is a great number of private insurance companies, just as it was before the bill passed. The government is not going to nationalize any of them. Even after the 2008-2009 bailouts, the government has not nationalized the banks or even put much of anything in the way of new regulations or controls on them.

In short, your concerns are completely unfounded and unjustified by historical precedent and the facts at hand.

Universal single-payer healthcare is what we need.

Hmm, could that be an MMORPG where each player gets to be some type of medical staff member killing people with excessive and massive piles of paperwork? Or perhaps an insane doctor running around a hospital with surgical equipment killing everyone and attacking everything in general?

That is the shortest route to rationing of medical services and direct government intervention in treatment modalities.

ruveyn

Oh, sorry... you wrote single-payer instead of single-player. ... a game would still be good....

Every other industralised nation has single payer system and has better health care indicators than the US despite the US paying more per capita than the other countries. I gathered this data here from OECD.

From "OECD in Figures 2009" ( http://www.oecd.org/document/47/0,3343, ... _1,00.html )

Life Expectancy at Birth (Number of Years, 2007)

US: 78,1
OECD avarage: 79,0

Infant Mortality (per 1,000 live births, 2007)

US: 6,7
OECD avarage: 4,9

Health Expenditure (Per capita USD PPP) (PPP=Purchasing Power Parity) 2007

US: 7 290
OECD avarage: 2 984

From "Disparities in health expenditure across OECD countries: Why does the United States spend so much more than other countries?" ( http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/5/34/43800977.pdf )

Practising Physicians

US: 2.4 per 1000
OECD avarage: 3.1 per 1000

Doctor consutations:

US: 3.8 per capita
OECD avarage: 6.8 per capita

Acute Care Hospital Beds:

US: 2.7 per 1000 population
OECD avarage: 3.8 per 1000 population

In every indicator the US scores below OECD avarage but health expenditure per capita which is more than the double of the OECD avarage. I don´t know the reason you make jokes about it.

With respect to life span you are making the Usual Fallacy. Life span depends more on general hygiene (clean water supply and proper disposal of human waste), eating habits, exercise habits, stress levels, drinking and smoking habits and such like. These cultural factors have a great bearing on both length of life and quality of life. A nation in which people have a bad unhealthy diet, don't exercise, smoke excessively and drink too much will have a lesser life expectancy regardless of how good the medical system is. The same could be said about relative production of healthy children at birth. If the women do not lead healthy lives they are more likely to have miscarriages or birth of sick/defective children.

The life span of people in England was increased by five years within a decade after proper water supply and sewage systems were installed in English cities. Getting rid of polluted water with consequential cholera and typhoid made a big difference. This has nothing to do with the number or quality of doctors and hospitals.

The way to increase lifespan from say 50 years to 60 years is improved hygene. To increase life span from 75 years to 85 years (say) depends a lot on fancy treatment and and fancy medical technology, eating habits of the younger stage of life and exercise habits. People who eat sparingly when young tend to have longer lifespans than those who load it on when they are young. Once you get the population past the point that infectious diseases are killing them you get into factors highly affected by heredity, diet and to some extent extreme medical technology. Keeping a sick old codger alive from age 85 to age 87 by extraordinary medical treatment is less a benefit than encouraging good eating and exercise habits when you. It is better not to get sick then to be cured of sickness.

ruveyn

Not quite true... other industrialized nations have pretty much all attained universal or near-universal coverage, but not all of them did so through a single-payer system.


That's debatable on some counts. For instance, after you control for homicides and car crashes (deaths unrelated to the quality of medical care) the US actually has higher life expectancy than other developed nations. As ruveyn mentioned, lifestyle factors also play a huge role. If a medical system is keeping fat, lazy slobs alive for as long as another system is keeping a slimmer population alive, the first system is performing better.

As to infant mortality, those numbers are computed differently in the US than they are in many parts of Europe, making a direct comparison impossible.


This is true, and a serious problem. It is largely due to the fact that we are getting gouged by the pharmaceutical industry, and this is a problem the recent bill failed to address.

Although it is undeniable that the pharma corporations are gouging the country I would think it obvious that the health insurance people have some responsibility in the matter. At present it benefits the insurance company profits to deny as much medical expense as possible which is sensible if it is unnecessary expense but the very nature of insurance implies responsibility to prevent disaster and the stories I have heard is that medical recommendations are being made by non-medical insurance managers on the basis of insurance profits rather than medical necessities. There should be some legal recourse for that in that a denial of service which results in a medical disaster should be the basis for a heavy patient compensation that is automatic to curb illegal profit motivated denials.

The most certain way of halting the "gouging" is to put these companies out of business. Think of it. A world without drug companies. No more drugs that don't work. No more overpricing. In the Old Days, physicians would compound their own remedies. If you liked your doctor, he would fix you up with some tonic or elixir.

ruveyn

The drug companies sell to other countries at lower prices and still make a nice profit there. They aren't going out of business. And there are several alternatives to the current system of drug patents held by privately owned companies. The government already pays for a significant amount of drug research in this country. Any drugs coming from government-funded research should belong to the people as a whole, not just to some corporation. We would pay significantly less if we just had the government fund all drug research and take all the patents on the discoveries. Another possibility that has been mentioned would be for a patent buy-out system, where the government would give a cash award to any company that developed a useful drug, and then proceed to authorize the production of cheap generics.

Instant Eminent Domain exercised on drug patents? Could the drug companies refuse? It sounds like expropriation to me.

It reminds me of the Godfather. The Godfather made an offer that could not be refused.

ruveyn

If the research is funded by the government, then a private corporation should not get to hold the patents. If you want to socialize the costs, you damn well better socialize the benefits as well. Socializing the risks and privatizing the rewards is not the free market working, it is the well-connected robbing the nation.

I agree. Lets get the government totally out of the loop.

ruveyn