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I'm curious to see how, in this situation, you think someone with a rare medical illness that needs expensive treatment would be treated.
Say... treatment/medication etc. costs around $250,000 a year and there aren't enough people with the disorder to create any sort of competition to lower the price.
These people didn't cause their disorder (it's entirely genetic and not routinely tested for) so it's not like they could have done anything to prevent it. How would people like this survive on the free market?
You don't understand what single payer or third payer mean, you used invented terms, and you don't seem to have any understanding of how health care works in a market. Or what the basic problem with US health care is really.
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Originally Posted by pnwmdk
Single Payer or third party payer: A third party agrees to pay, within limits, for all services consumed. When the funding runs low, either compensation is limited, or services paid for are limited, or a combination of both. Eventually, the system results in rationing, poor quality, and often very inept management which is entrenched by political power and is unresponsive and unaccountable.
This seems to be whre you are most confused. Third-party payer can cover both insurance and tax funded systems: It is all about the party bearing the costs not being the provider or consumer. Single payer is when health care is funded from a single actor -normally the government, but a single fund or monopoly insurance would qualify.
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Originally Posted by pnwmdk
Socialized: The government provides services voted on and managed by politicians. This results in politics determining asset and resource allocation - not need. Misallocation and mismanagement is inevitable. Since governments often face budget problems, eventually rationing and shortages. Politicians eventually find a comfortable political groove where more and more services are promised, yet resources enrich the political allies and those who aren't politically favored suffer.
The government do not provide services. The government funds a health care system where the medical professionals allocate the resources provided.
There is actually no such thing as "socialized healthcare". That is a made-up term. I think what you mean is the Beveridge type single payer model. One of the reasons this is a very effective model is that the population tend to be very sensitive to to problems in a public healtcare system, and so mismanagement is a very heavy voteloser. This feedback system makes the system more sensitive to customer needs than a market-based one, as the market-based system contains too many factors leading to market failiure.
Also, obviously, letting medical professionals allocate resources according to medical need is intrinsically vastly more efficient than allocating them according to the employment of financial status of the patient.
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Originally Posted by pnwmdk
Free Market: Profitability and the customer's ability to pay determines allocation and prices. Few services outside the customer's ability to pay are offered. Shortages create higher prices and profit motives results in investment to meet needs and demands. It's not perfect or orderly, but given time, it works better than any other system.
The problems with market-based provision of healthcare has been known since the 1960s. Health Care Economics is an actual field of economics. Kenneth Arrow won a Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on uncertainties, including his work on how health care functions in a market. You can read it here. It is quite short and understandable for such a seminal work.
Additionally, market provision in health care suffers from third-party payment, information assymetry, externalities, and no price elasticity.
We can easily observe that market-based healthcare systems have the lowest efficiency per dollar spent of any system.
This isn't actually the subject of debate. It is economic orthodoxy, supported by the way things have observably worked in the real world for decades.
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Originally Posted by aneftp
Lower cost is all relative.
The taxpayers of socialized/single payer all contribute MORE in terms of taxes to the health system.
"However, the overall level of health spending in the United States is so high that public (i.e. government) spending on health care per capita is still greater than in all other OECD coutries except Norway and the Netherlands"
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Originally Posted by aneftp
Have you seen our defense budget compared to other countries? I think USA defense budget outstrips countries 2-5 combined spending.
Yes, but just the waste in US healthcare is still twice the military budget. That is how much money is wasted.
And all have the government making the healthcare decisions instead of the doctor and patient.
Sort of like how my insurance company makes healthcare decisions now instead of my doctor? I was forced to take a significantly less effective chemotherapy (looking at a 75% 5 year survival rate versus upwards of 90% for my late stage cancer) because my insurance company would not cover it, despite two oncologists at two of the top cancer centers in the nation disagreeing with my insurance. My insurance company also makes decisions about my follow up care, frequency of scans, and types of medication based on cost, not based on what is best for me or my health.
It's insane to me that so many people think that insurance companies are benevolent and have your best health in mind. They don't.
Of course, I could have tried to go it on my own and pay myself. But at a month after my 23rd birthday, I couldn't image putting myself into $500,000 of debt in 6 months. That wouldn't be a life worth living.
I'm curious to see how, in this situation, you think someone with a rare medical illness that needs expensive treatment would be treated.
Say... treatment/medication etc. costs around $250,000 a year and there aren't enough people with the disorder to create any sort of competition to lower the price.
These people didn't cause their disorder (it's entirely genetic and not routinely tested for) so it's not like they could have done anything to prevent it. How would people like this survive on the free market?
kidkaos, please answer this. There is no way the free market can adequately serve people in this situation, and whether we like it or not, every one of us is potentially IN this situation. THAT'S why healthcare is fundamentally different than anything else.
The food analogy is absurd on its face. Food is not scarce, doesn't rely on professionals to deliver, can be obtained by anyone for very little money. People can go without the expensive stuff simply as a matter of choice--no one will die for the lack of high-end gourmet treats. But a diabetic who can't afford supplies or insulin will indeed die of the disease. And there is no low-end, affordable dialysis or chemotherapy. How could that possibly work on the free market?
As the person who inspired this thread, I'll copy my response from the other one:
Cost-sharing, catastrophic coverage, HSAs, unions, plans and laws that vary according to the size of your employer, and of course the ludicrousness of having a state-based regulatory system--there is nothing defensible, in my eyes, about the current mishmash of systems that we now have. It's lose, lose, lose all the way around. Obamacare is an attempt to get the needle moving again, toward a more rational system. We have a long way to go.
The idea that Congress can improve on that boggles the mind.
The idea that Obamacare is "a start" toward something rational can ONLY be propaganda. There is nothing reasoned, rataional, logical, or factual about the idea that it somehow is any improvement at all.
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What you seem to miss, or just ignore, is that healthcare is FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT than any other commodity.
Only because your mindless ideology says so. There is absolutely NO difference.
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You can choose not to drive. Choose not to own a home. Choose not to insure your life. Choose not to purchase a product that you don't need. Of course. But you can't choose not to have a body, and you can't choose to ignore a broken leg. Until costs for emergency, major, and even routine care are somehow managed, many many many people can't afford even a basic visit to the doctor. Many medications are astronomically expensive.
You can choose to not to spend your money on health care. It seems you forgot that option. By being dishonest in your diatribe, you demonstrate you don't actually care about health care, you only care about agendas of empowering politicians to be more corrupt and government to have more power to force what it wants.
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I agree Obamacare is NOT the answer. But a free-market system for healthcare isn't either. Profit and competition are not a rational way to manage access to and delivery of healthcare, period.
It is the ONLY answer. There are no other answers, and there never will be. NOTHING ELSE WORKS.
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The only way that ends is that people die because they can't afford the care they need--which is, I guess, your preferred endgame?
So, it's ok that people die because government can't afford their health care, but not ok because they choose to spend their money elsewhere, which means government must make them do what government wants, because we all know that politicians and government employees are SO much wiser and more effective than individual choice.
These questions were answered in the other thread.
No, nobody's answering anything. Nor can you.
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