I gotta say I favor a free-market approach to health care, where you can choose

your own providers, and where you don't get punished for being taken to the wrong hospital by the wrong ambulance while you're unconscious. You know--a system where the good providers get lots of patients and the poor ones get driven out of business because word gets around and nobody will go to them. A system where you and your provider decide what's needed for your care.

Our present system isn't free-market like that. Your insurance company dictates what doctor you can see, what hospital you can go to, and whether or not you're going to get that expensive test or procedure. As long as you are well, you are a profit source for them. If you get sick, you become a problem. If you get too expensive to them, they're pretty good at finding ways to dump you. And, as a side-effect of our ingenious employer-based health care payment system, if you get too ill to keep your job, you will automatically end up on the discard heap.

Very few of us can actually afford the kind of care that we might someday need--bypass surgery, say, or cancer treatment. We have to have a system in which relatively small payments from the many who do not need expensive interventions help to pay for the relatively few who do need expensive care. That means that the young and healthy need to pay in to the system during those periods of their lives when they aren't using much health care so that their elders can be cared for--and so that someday they too can be cared for in their time of need.

No for-profit insurance scheme will ever provide free-market health care. By their very nature, insurance companies are structured to make profits by denying needed services. They reward the providers who cost them the least, not the ones who save or improve the quality of the most lives.

The great paradox of the Western world is that only way to provide a free market for providers is through universal, tax-funded single-payer health care. In this system, the government serves as the collector and disburser of health care funds. You pay into the health care system--ideally through income taxes--and when you need health services, you go to your doctor, he treats you, he submits his bill to the government, and they pay.

where corrupt elites extract 'rent' in this case in the form of health insurance premiums and use their stranglehold over the legislative branch of the national government to block all attempts to reform this system to provide decent moderate cost health care for all.

Thanks for showing another way in which that which we call a "free market" system is really very expensive-- millions in campaign contributions are required to sustain our privatized for-profit medical care, and millions in care denied to those who are not rich enough to participate.

Similar to our "free market" economics that requires gigantic military budgets to sustain it.

Teddy Roosevelt's progressive reform of the robber baron cabals saved capitalism, and allowed the prosperity of our mixed economy - "democratic capitalism" - which has been the economic basis for liberal democracy.

Single Payer healthcare, such as Medicare-for-All, is what is needed to restore competition among actual healthcare providers.

Where they go on and on about how government health care would eliminate your choice of doctors, make you wait for treatment, and deny you treatment.

Okay, I'm sitting there watching them say this, and then the question pops in my head...

Who with insurance now, isn't told which doctors they can see, hasn't had to wait weeks for an appointment, and isn't told what isn't covered?

Then I think, are there people with insurance now, really dumb enough to fall for the Insurance Industry's propaganda anymore and can't see that the Insurance Industry is the one who decides which doctors you can see, makes you wait for treatment, and limits your treatment?

I always presume that they are people who haven't tried to use their plans.

not see how absurd it is? :banghead:

Thanks for the lucidity, instead of mass stupidity.

Cheerio!
Agony

edit: the Warren/Stinky mashup

Excellent!	RaleighNCDUer	Jul-05-09 11:24 AM	#1
K&R: what we have here is a rentier state	Warren Stupidity	Jul-05-09 11:25 AM	#2
K&R !!	Overseas	Jul-05-09 11:27 AM	#3
K&R - Single Payer is the pro-competiton, free enterprise solution to predatory corporate medicine.	Faryn Balyncd	Jul-05-09 11:30 AM	#4
I often wonder when the Insurance Industry commercials come on tv...	Kansas Wyatt	Jul-05-09 11:36 AM	#5
--and all the people who, in polls, claim to be satisfied with their health plans.	Jackpine Radical	Jul-05-09 11:43 AM	#6
Bingo! It's absolutely infuriating to hear people make this argument -- and how can anyone	scarletwoman	Jul-05-09 12:04 PM	#10
Hear Hear, Sir!	The Magistrate	Jul-05-09 11:44 AM	#7
A perfect, lucid, rational, reasoned summation.	Stinky The Clown	Jul-05-09 11:49 AM	#8
It's so simple. K&R	Agony	Jul-05-09 12:03 PM	#9
k&r -- you're brilliant as always!	scarletwoman	Jul-05-09 12:21 PM	#11
You're kind--	Jackpine Radical	Jul-05-09 11:02 PM	#16
Hah! I have impeccable taste and I know quality when I see it.	scarletwoman	Jul-05-09 11:29 PM	#18
Well stated	mzmolly	Jul-05-09 02:02 PM	#12
Thank you, dear one.	Jackpine Radical	Jul-05-09 11:03 PM	#17
K&R	varelse	Jul-05-09 07:21 PM	#13
K&R - Get thee to thy greatest! nt	Sunnyshine	Jul-05-09 07:52 PM	#14
I gotta say, I agree n/t	slipslidingaway	Jul-05-09 09:04 PM	#15