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KathyF
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2 dage dage siden
in ABQNews: Health Care Debate: Day 2 on ABQ CitySeeker
This article in the Boston Globe explains some of the alternative options other countries, France and The Netherlands, offer their citizens, which are a lot more like what America will one day end up with. (Neither single payer, a la Canada, nor socialized medicine, a la Britain.)
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/article...
Both systems sound pretty good to me.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/article...
Both systems sound pretty good to me.
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3 dage dage siden
in ABQNews: Health Care Reform: An Online Debate on ABQ CitySeeker
Paul: I'm wondering why the marketplace isn't already empowered to solve the problem, and if so, why haven't they. I suspect because health care isn't like hamburgers, where the cheapest and best hamburger will win out over lesser hamburgers. Can you agree that the marketplace, ie patients, are incapable of choosing and buying health care the way they would a hamburger, especially when most health care plans are prohibitively expensive for many Americans? And when insurers are free to deny coverage to the sickest, or to deny payment for treatments when it suits their bottom line?
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Paul Gessing
Thanks Kathy. The great myth is that we have something like a marketplace right now. Approximately 50% of all health care spending is done by the government and most of the rest, as I pointed out earlier, is done (for tax reasons) by third-party-payers. Advocates of more government intervention love to blame every problem with our current system on the "free market," but we have nothing of the sort in the USA. It is marginally freer than most European nations, but the Swiss system is arguably much more free: http://www.abqjournal.com/opinion/guest_columns...
True, buying health care is not necessarily as simple as buying hamburgers, but that is even more the reason that consumers need to be empowered with pricing information that they currently lack and that some are trying to eliminate entirely.
Lastly, if we used insurance for what it was intended (emergencies, not day-to-day treatments) and we, not our employers, paid the bills and were therefore the customers, many of the issues with insurance would disappear.
True, buying health care is not necessarily as simple as buying hamburgers, but that is even more the reason that consumers need to be empowered with pricing information that they currently lack and that some are trying to eliminate entirely.
Lastly, if we used insurance for what it was intended (emergencies, not day-to-day treatments) and we, not our employers, paid the bills and were therefore the customers, many of the issues with insurance would disappear.
For an explanation of even more alternate health care systems (Britain, Japan, Germany, Taiwan) see PBS's Frontline "Sick around the World" which discusses the pros and cons of each system. And the cons seem a lot less onerous than the ones we deal with here in the USA!
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaro...
Yes, you occasionally hear of people who come to the US for treatment, but these are anecdotes, not significant statistics.. People in these countries have longer life spans, lower infant mortality, lower rates of obesity and disease, and spend a lot less than we do. None of these systems are perfect, but we can't stymie change for the better looking for (unobtainable) perfection.
Kelly