(11-18-2016, 04:31 PM)Galen Wrote:(11-18-2016, 03:12 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(11-18-2016, 02:43 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:(11-18-2016, 12:56 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(11-18-2016, 11:41 AM)Warren Dew Wrote: For those of us who care about societal efficiency and the financial stability of the health care system, though, private insurance does a very good job on cost controls. Perhaps you don't look at your insurance statements, but I do, and typically private insurance pays about 1/3 of the health care providers' "normal" rates.
If you want health care costs to rise several times the rate of inflation, then private insurance is your cup of tea.
The only way to avoid that is to ration or to have the people who are getting the medical service to pay for it themselves. I agree that the current system that ties health care to the employer has problems in that respect. Better would be for the employer to pay that money to the employee and for the employee to choose his own health care freely.
Why would that way be the "only way?" Only because you don't believe in "socialized medicine." No, single payer is the way to "avoid that."
Probably because he understands economics enough to know that having a third party payer is about the worst way to do things. If the consumer is the one paying then they will weigh the costs and benefits of the treatments they are getting. The current system that ties insurance to employment is a direct consequence of the wage controls implemented during the war and making such benefits non-taxable.
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The idea was that medical care for employees was a good thing for employers who needed not concern themselves with desirable workers dying because they chose death over draining the family savings. But if people are obliged to pay -- considering how miserable my parents' last six months of life were, and how much nursing-home care wrecked my hopes --
I would have been money ahead had they died in an automobile wreck. That is how life goes at times.
One can no longer buy insurance for nursing-home costs. One can instead put one's kids who have sacrificed much to take care of their elders into destitution, a fate that I fear. In an economic order that will soon have no priority other than the indulgence of people already filthy rich I might have very little to live for except to protest the insane policies of our dictator.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.