Greenspan Chides Republicans For Pushing To Extend Bush Tax

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Certainly private insurance also has its problems. As you allude to, federal rules that tie it to employment are problematic, and of course outsize malpractice awards drive up private insurance costs just as they do medicare costs. We just haven't discussed those issues much in this thread because they're not really related to the deficit, since private insurance is mostly privately paid for.

Also contrary to popular belief, private insurers actually have a very small profit margin compared to most businesses. A lot of their price increases are due to having to pay ridiculous amounts so people can get medical treatment. Doctors have to charge ridiculous amounts so they can pay their liability insurance, which is due to all the frivolous lawsuits.

Anyone ever stop and consider that maybe the insurance company is being forced to pay ridiculous amounts for your doctor visits and that's why they up the amount you have to pay.

A massive chunk of it goes to the middle-men, i.e. privately contracted bureaucrats.

My point is, the insurance companies are actually getting shafted too.

And a universal single payer system gets rid of all the complexity and waste in the current system. The problem with the health insurance industry is that the arms race is increasingly going towards paying more and more private bureaucrats and actuarial middle-men to skillfully cherry-pick recipients and treatments. They aren't even trying to expand their coverage base.

The same treatment doesn't work for everyone, sometimes you have to use a different treatment. Also I trust the Government even less than I trust an insurance company with my health. You want waste fraud and abuse, the Government would make the Insurance companies look like Saints.

Unsubstantiated paranoia doesn't substitute for an actual argument. That's always the fallback of people on the right. Talk about using standard partison talking points.

Look at the United States Postal Service and Compare it to Fed Ex or UPS...

Fed Ex and UPS need access to USPS crafts to achieve their goals. It's more government subsidies that benefit FedEx and UPS over the USPS.

Actually, the United States Postal Service is outsourcing to them cause they can't keep up on deliveries. The Postal Service is losing money while Fed Ex and UPS make money.

Doctors and hospitals have to charge rediculous amounts because for every patient that doesn't pay, they are forced to eat the cost. This is a large part of the reason why the current system is completely unsustainable. Uninsured people cost the system dearly.

my cat is more of a capitalist than i ever was. what i had was through scrimping, of wearing holey shoes and holey threadbare clothing and driving jalopies and never going out to eat or see movies, etc. the sharpies always will see me as having a giant "SUCKER!! !" sign on my forehead. nowadays, what i have left is managed by OTHER people [NOT me] who know what they are doing [edward jones].



my last job [that shrub considered surplus] WAS being a coder [among other jobs]. but government hospitals use a different system not shared with civilian hospitals. i would have had to go back to school, which would have taken more money than i could spare at that time, or now.



it is all about the rich, so it might as well also be "all about me." what's fair is fair. self-preservation applies to a disposable worker like me even more than it does daddy warbucks, 'cause i have no financial wiggle room whatsoever, unlike mr. moneybags who can just shrug off such as pocket change. when a hospital or medical provider hurts somebody, they need to do whatever it takes to make that person as whole as possible given the current medical state of the art, not just stiff-arm them without even an apology, as is the current way of treating the medically wronged here in america. repubs see nothing wrong with this. limiting damages only means the injured parties will never be made whole. ruined finances are only part of the malpractice victim's problems. at the very least, medical providers guilty of malpractice should be willing to take care of ALL of the injured party's medical needs for the rest of that person's life.
in a better country....

what are you talking about? repub types have called me that to my face.

The evidence is against that. From the PDF I linked to earlier:



Evidently a government run system allows costs to inflate even faster than private insurance does. The speed of increase for both will be higher under Obamacare, of course.

With respect to administrative costs, by the way, actual administrative costs per patient are about the same for medicare and private health insurance; it's a lower percentage for medicare only because the total medicare costs per patient are more than twice as much as that for privately insured patients, probably mostly because the medicare patients are older.

Uncompensated care is part of the reason for high medical costs, but not that large a part. It was only 11.5% in 2005, and the trend was declining.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m ... n18744951/

How is that an argument against what I said? That projected statistic has nothing to do with efficiency. The projected demographic shift towards more older people explains the quoted discrepancy.


I would expect the administrative costs to be higher for people on medicare because the people on medicare are older and less healthy than the people on private insurance. The fact that the private insurance still has a higher percentage despite this says something.