****Re: guess what....

[Vaughn Treude]

Craig White wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-08-02 at 19:16 -0700, Vaughn Treude wrote:
>   
>> Lisa Kachold wrote:
>>     
>>> On 7/30/09, JD Austin <jd at twingeckos.com> wrote:
>>>   
>>>       
>>>> The 'other' model isn't working any better.  My wife works in an Urgent
>>>> Care; tons of Canadians come here to get the health care they need.  I think
>>>> the whole industry needs to be more competitive; most things in health care
>>>> shouldn't cost what they do.
>>>>
>>>>     
>>>>         
>>> Inefficiency in preventative care, diagnostics, errors in surgery, the
>>> truth is incredibly expensive.
>>>
>>> But just because Canadians come here for care doesn't mean it's not working.
>>>   
>>>       
>> <rant>
>> If by "working", you mean the majority of Canadians people accept it, 
>> and even think it's a good thing, I suppose it is. They're just very 
>> lucky they have a "safety valve", that is, a large semi-free country 
>> whose borders are within 100 miles of 90% of their population. 
>> Single-payer is, IMHO, the biggest piece of economic foolishness ever 
>> devised. Let's give an absolute monopoly to the most inefficient, 
>> corrupt organization ever invented by humans (government.) As for the 
>> notion that socialized medicine is cheaper, I don't believe it for a 
>> second. Governments can shift their costs to other agencies; the 
>> Pentagon does it all the time. I assume, for example, the cost of having 
>> "premiums" collected by the CRA doesn't get counted in the balance 
>> sheet. Not to mention the fact that a huge portion of the overhead costs 
>> of private insurers in the US is red tape imposed by government 
>> bureaucracies.
>> Not that I'm necessarily endorsing the current system. There were a lot 
>> of good not-for-profit medical insurers in this country until Richard 
>> Nixon changed the tax laws, causing a massive takeover by greedy HMO's. 
>> I'd like to see a system of decentralized medical cooperatives with 
>> for-profit companies as a supplement.
>> BTW, I don't blame the immigrants, but I do blame the lawyers. :-)
>> </rant>
>>
>> No offense, just my two cents. :-)
>> There, I feel so much better.
>> Vaughn
>>     
> ----
> seeing as how the political discussions do not die off, I am going to
> sound off here.
>
> The entire premise of the Canadian health care system was to provide a
> single tier of medical coverage for all and no amount of wealth would
> provide a better level of health care. You cannot devise a system that
> is more fundamentally fair to everyone.
>
> The people who come here from Canada are doing elective surgeries either
> not covered by the health care system in Canada or prioritized in a
> manner that does not suit the person with money to pay elsewhere.
>
> The language that you use Vaughn is loaded and inaccurate...
> - we are not a safety valve, we provide elective medical care to those
> who want to pay and go elsewhere.
>   
By that, I mean the proximity of the US ameliorates the biggest flaw in 
the single-player system - the fact that it's a monopoly.
> - the issue of a monopolized health care run by the government happens
> to be that which is practiced in all other western nations. We spend
> more per capita on health care than any other industrialized nation and
> yet approximately 25% of our citizens do not have coverage.
>
>   
No, the UK allows people whose procedures are not covered by National 
Health to pay for it out of pocket, unless that's changed in the last 10 
years or so. (Admittedly, a lot of people think that's "unfair".) I 
suspect they're not the only nation that has this option. In Canada, 
that option is illegal.
> - the insurance companies do worse managing the health care than
> government could ever do. They practice murder by spreadsheet. They
> invent rules for exclusions. Someone in this country WITH health
> insurance goes bankrupt in this country every 30 seconds because of
> exclusions, deductibles, etc.
>   
Socialized medicine "works" only because of rationing. People with heart 
conditions will be told to wait, if government doctors judge this to be 
an acceptable risk. Some will die while waiting. Don't kid yourselves, 
governments do the same thing private insurers do, it's just somehow 
nobler because profit isn't involved.

> - blaming the government red tape for the profits of insurers is absurd
> to its core.
>
>   
No, I'm not saying red tape causes insurance companies to profit. But it 
does add a good portion to the costs. It's like the signs in stores 
about shoplifting, it's a cost ultimately borne by the consumer. I'm 
actually advocating a return to the earlier system in which many if not 
most of the country's insurers operated on a not-for-profit basis.
> An American citizen visiting Canada can get free health care if needed.
>
> Any solution short of single-payer will fail and we will be back here
> again, with more people excluded from coverage by insurance companies,
> more people bankrupted by illness only because the companies with
> profits at stake...insurance companies and drug companies will spend
> unreasonable amounts of money to influence public opinion and elected
> candidates.
>
>   
Why does monopoly supposedly "work" when government does it and not when 
private companies do it? How many people enjoyed their last visit to the 
DMV or the Post Office? I'll admit that these have improved a bit over 
the years, but only after major public griping, and in the case of the 
Postal Service, the threat of privatization. If these were private 
businesses they'd have been bankrupt years ago.

> Craig
>
>
>   
Sorry guys, I do enjoy a good argument, and I have a real hard time 
restraining myself, but I'll try to make this my last salvo in this 
particular flame war.
Vaughn