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Many of the luxuries include mortgage and car payments or rent and adequate food for the kids and gas to get to work.
Why don't we have a system where everything is subject to price competition starting with Dr.'s fees and Hospital charges? Build duplicate or triplicate health facilities to insure price competition. Open more medical schools and de regulate drug companies.
That would make the owner's scream when competition destroyed their guaranteed returns.
Compared to Europe we also have a different set of morals. They guarantee health care. We guarantee stock holder's profit. We make the world safe for dictators and oil monopolies. They make their countries safe for their citizens. Indeed we have different morals and priorities. Ours are just not a civilized or as good.
They do pay via taxes over there, nothing is free to be sure. But They pay far less than we do per capita for health care, far, far less. Some of the countries don;t have great care for everyone, some do. Of course, their costs are rising as well, but will probably never equal ours. Our system is overburdened by enormous administrative costs, which do include administrative profits. The
Many Americans that love UHC or simply Single Payer, actually think it's free and lovely. It is not free. I'd much prefer the system in France to what we have in the USA, but I know it isn't free, or perfect.
I just want everyone to be able to pay for their own health insurance, or medical care, out of their own pockets. Health Insurance isn;t really insurance at all, except instances of unexpected, large health care bills. You take your chances with your own $$$.
This is free will, Free Market, No Government. I would have thought that with all the conservatives posting about health care, this plan would be their number one priority.
Just slightly higher than $200 bucks a month, I'd say
But here's the deal ... healthcare is NOT A RIGHT .... you have a right to take care of yourself, and an obligation to take care of your own family. It's not everyone else's responsibility to do it for you ... they have their own obligations for which they cannot fulfill if all of their resources are sucked up to provide for others. The very idea of this cradle to grave socialist mentality demands that if you have enough food for your family, but someone else needs it, well, the government will just take some of yours to give to them, leaving you short. That's just flat out wrong in so many ways.
The "SickCare" system wants everyone enrolled so that it can increase it's profits through a broader customer base. It cares not a tinker's damn about your actual health. You want to run to the Doctors office every time you have a runny nose? YOU PAY FOR IT.
Trauma based medicine is another matter, and a civilized society needs some method to address the necessity of aiding those in crisis, and that used to be what "Healthcare Insurance" was all about. It was called "Hospitalization" and covered trauma, accident and catastrophic illness ... not Doctors office visits ... not dental .... not eye ... not prescription medications ... just Hospital costs due to unexpected or unanticipated catastrophe. General health and common illness is not unexpected ... it's part of life, and it's an individual responsibility.
Over the years, all of this individual maintenance medicine has been stacked onto "Health Insurance" primarily at the behest of the medical establishment to increase it's profits, but we have not seen a subsequent increase in health. The reason is, much of the "maintenance medicine" is causing more illness ... creating it's own lifelong customers needing long term prescription drugs ... screening for every conceivable disease, and treatments for pre disease situations that are destroying health via pharmaceuticals that simply address symptoms, while creating other, unintended consequences. Maintenance medicine is a disaster, and the primary culprit of these astronomical cost increases.
The Pharmaceutic industry generates over a Trillion Dollars in revenue, annually, and that makes them the largest private business enterprise in the nation ... couple that with the Billions upon Billions for research and fraud going to the various "associations" ... the AMA, ACS, etc., etc, ... the Billions going to University research studies .... not to mention these Hospitals that literally look like the Taj Mahal ... marble floors, expansive atriums that look like resort hotels ... administrators and boards of directors making obscene amounts of money .... and we haven't even talked about the Doctors and the Insurance Companies yet, or the Medicare and Medicaid debacles.
This entire system is irreparably corrupt and broken, and is literally sucking the life out of the country like a vampire, yet the only "reform" that is proposed is how to include more victims, and how to force them to pay more.
Unfortunately, nothing of any real benefit will change because the public is too stupid, and the purveyors of the system to greedy to do what should be done.
But eventually, a self-correction will occur, because once the bankruptcy becomes universal and the economy and the dollar crash totally ... the only thing people will become preoccupied with will be food and water and shelter ... and the medical establishment will collapse into the dung heap it has become.
geeoro, Why should someone elses wallet replace self sufficiency? Stop Gap is highly affordable, and we'd be better off as a nation had Employer Health Insurance stayed in its 1975 model, similar to Stop Gap.
Costs for basic health care are astronomically higher in 2012 than they were in 1975.
Costs for basic health care are astronomically higher in 2012 than they were in 1975.
That is because people with uncurable illnesses want medical delivery industry to spend millions of dollars to prolong the life of people who are going to die anyway. Give them something to manage the pain and send them home to their family.
Except for exceptional circumstances, like being 70 and having 3 types of cancer, health insurance is available and affordable. I have shopped around for the hell of it using several different states for comparison and all of the plans were quite affordable. (ie. $80-250 month). Is it the best insurance on the planet? Not neccessarily, but with out of pocket maximums, it's much better than nothing.
Are there exceptions? Of course. But I don't buy the whole "its not affordable" argument. It's all about priorities. If insurance costs $250 per month, and you really need health insurance, then you prioritize your spending accordingly.
Millions of American's don't even know how to budget. That they also don't understand their priorities is of no concern to me.
Oh yea, the "I found it on the internet" so it must be true.
Wait until you actually try and buy it. Ever had a surgery, for anything, ever had a biopsy on anything?
I had a routine colonoscopy, which found one polyp, removed and biopsied as non-cancer. Otherwise perfect health, normal blood pressure, BMI, non-smoker, etc. etc. etc. and the best quote I got was $1850 per month and it would not cover any digestive tract illness or procedures.
Wife had successful back surgery 10 years prior, no back problems since, and she could not get insurance on the open market at any price.
Many of the luxuries include mortgage and car payments or rent and adequate food for the kids and gas to get to work.
Why don't we have a system where everything is subject to price competition starting with Dr.'s fees and Hospital charges? Build duplicate or triplicate health facilities to insure price competition. Open more medical schools and de regulate drug companies.
That would make the owner's scream when competition destroyed their guaranteed returns.
Compared to Europe we also have a different set of morals. They guarantee health care. We guarantee stock holder's profit. We make the world safe for dictators and oil monopolies. They make their countries safe for their citizens. Indeed we have different morals and priorities. Ours are just not a civilized or as good.
Wish I could rep you but "they" say I need to spread the love around. So I will have to content myself with saying that I agree with you 100%.
Because UHC is free. They pay huge taxes on everything they buy in Europe, to fund government health care.
The problem is that Europe is not the US, we have different systems of government, different legal systems, different regulatory agencies, with different laws and regulations, and we have different approaches to taxes and a much larger and diverse population.
No. Hell, no.
First off, like I keep pointing out, the average European pays less taxes for government health care than the average American. I don't think you've fully grasped just how far out there American health care costs are, or how much cheaper UHC is to run.
The red bars are public money, coming from taxes. The pink are what citizens spend privatly after that. Notice how Americans pay more tax money towards government health care than the average European?
Today, government health care in America includes Medicare, Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program, Veterans, IH, etc. Each with their bureaucracies, bureaucrats, forms and schemes. Many of which not only do redundant jobs, but often billing and credit checking that is simply not relevant in other first world systems.
For this massive duplication of effort the American tax payer pays -unsurprisingly, more than the average European tax payer does for their single government program and its one set of bureaucrats.
Basically, having loads of departments with different procedures doing the same job each for a limited number of people is much more expensive than having one that does it for everyone. Extending one program to cover everyone costs less than having umpteen different ones to cover umpteen limited groups.
This should not come as a surprise to anyone, since one program covering everyone is a popular strategy in many of the nations that get good results at half the cost.
Second, the US is hardly that different. UHC works in Iceland with 300 000 people. It works in Denmark with 5 million. It works in Germany with 80 million. It works in Japan with 125 million people. And China seems pretty confident it'll work for them too. It obviously works better in bigger nations, but that is how economics of scale works.
Also, UHC works fine in less diverse populations than the US, such as Norway or Finland. It also works in counties with a far more divere population, like Australia or Switzerland.
Do you seriously think the US is far more different from the UK and France than Japan, Taiwan or South Korea is? So much more different that the laws of economics do not apply?
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