Q & A on american healthcare

Todd wrote:
There are always going to be lawyers, period. Nationalizing one industry is not going to stop Tort cases, nor will it even begin to lower the costs of lawyer fees (especially if those lawyers continue to work on a contingency). All nationalizing it will do is mask those costs by distributing it over a wider base. I prefer to control the costs in the first place.

In a profit driven system, there are substantial incentives for administrative build-up. Insurers invest millions in trying to deny their clients insurance. They hire investigation agencies to follow their clients around to see if they're actually hurt. They sue whenever they think they might be able to convince a court not to support their denial of claim. The most important issue, however, is that there are literally thousands of these companies doing the same thing. This is why administration costs are so ridiculously high.

Quote:
You forgot the single biggest market: Patients suing doctors. That's precisely why Doctors carry malpractice and liability insurance (which, to the best of my knowledge, we are not suggesting to nationalize), and a SIGNIFICANT reason that the cost of healthcare has skyrocketed. Are you honestly suggesting these kinds of suits would dissapear by nationalizing it? The only way that would be true is if you blanket the industry with sovereign immunity, which doesn't solve the problem at all, it just makes it impossible to seek retribution.

This seems to be a uniquely American problem. Unless changes are made to your legal system, its unlikely that this would ever be solved under any system. This, however, does not change the fact that administration costs would fall substantially if you switched to a single-payer system.

Quote:
There is nothing to suggest that this would change in the slightest just by nationalizing the industry. You'd still have all the above claim scenarios, with equally many lawyers.

You wouldn't have near as many lawyers or near as much administrative redundancy.

Quote:
Yes, it's called "Claims". It'd be hard to run an insurance company with no department to determine coverage and claim processing.

I'm not talking about insurance claims, I'm talking about lawsuits.

ieatfood wrote:
I think that this report is kinda pointless. It looks at things like waiting times in emergency room. Wow. I mean wow. When you're sick, is that all you care about? Waiting times?

How bout measuring the actual care you get? How bout seeing who gets the more advanced procedures? Who develops the better technology? When people get sick, do foreigners come to America to get state of the art care or do Americans goto foreign countries?

Do you have any evidence that you'd like to put forward to support these claims? Are you certain that Canadians and Germans and the French and Swedes and Norwegians flock to the United States for every medical procedure? I, personally, don't know a single person who has ever had to leave Canada for any sort of treatment whatsoever. Sometimes, here in Canada, there is cross-province transfer of patients, but this is usually an efficiency issue. If you live in a small province, there are certain procedures that are very costly to provide. It is therefore more cost effective to provide extremely specialized services in larger centres and bring the patients to them.

Quote:
How about loooking at the waiting times that actually matter--like how long you have to wait to get an MRI.

First you say that wait times don't matter, and now picking and choosing the wait times that are important? What is your rationale?

Quote:
THe US has the best healthcare system in the world. It's not perfect. But it's the best.

This seems like one of those pie in the sky beliefs based on misguided patriotism.

Potemkin wrote:
I think the biggest single obstacle in the way of socialised health care in America is ideological rather than technical or economic.

This is definitely true. The Uwe Reinhardt excerpt that I started the 'Huge Debate' thread with speaks to this directly. Everyone in America with a brain knows that they need some sort of socialized, universal health insurance system, but everyone has their own conception of what it should look like. In typically American fashion, if each individual can't have the exact system that they desire, they default to the current non-system.

Quote:
Because of the perceived equality of opportunity in America (which does not exist to anything like the same extent in Britain), the assumption is that the poor deserve to be poor - they aren't smart enough, or didn't work hard enough, or something. The British do not make that assumption - there are too many examples of stupid aristocrats and intelligent workers for that assumption to stick.

Reinhardt actually speaks to this as well, in that same excerpt. He cites these as the two main reasons for the American refusal to improve their health system: 1) the perception that poor people don't deserve help because they chose to be poor; and 2) policy makers won't reform the system unless the new system looks exactly like they want it to.