Slashdot Mirror
Health Care Reform
It appears that today might be the end of a very long road to health care reform. There's been a lot of debate on the subject really leading back before the election. The mainstream sounds like an echo chamber, so I'm hoping you guys have better insight. Will this bill do what the administration claims to do, or is it as bad for the future of America as Fox says?
The most important thing is not if the government is able run health as efficiently as possible. The important question is who earns money on what. In case of 100% private health care, everybody (even insurance companies!) earns money when someone is sick. In the case of government run health care the government loses money if people are sick. So they have an incentive to keep people well and only recommend useful medications. I think that's the important incentive here to take into consideration. Do people really want a system where the doctor earns more money if you're more sick and so on?
How has private industry done so far with american healthcare? Cost more, gets less. Yup, that is a sign of success.
Oh and how has private industry been managing the economy?
It kinda amazes me that people with a healthcare system that is useless in the middle of a global recession all under the management of private industry, then dare to ask whether government can run things.
Imagine a discussion in North Korea: "Can private industry be expected to handle food production?"
Answer: "Who knows, but the question is silly when the current system is such an obvious mess".
Sometimes you got to take a chance. Do anything because when you are nose deep in shit, chances are anything is an improvement.
Can the government do a better job? It would be hard to imagine how they can screw it up even more.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
First off, this isn't health care reform. It doesn't change all that much about the health care system. It's health insurance reform.
To that end, there are some small gains: insurance companies will be forbidden from doing some seriously awful things, like retroactively revoking the insurance of patients who get expensive illnesses, on the flimsiest of possible excuses (and in some cases based on faulty data that they refuse to investigate further).
In exchange, there are a lot of parts that are a big giveaway to insurance companies: because we've focused on giving everyone insurance instead of giving everyone health care, individuals are forced to buy insurance, but with inadequate oversight to ensure that insurance companies don't just gouge prices. Further, there isn't any choice for an insurance plan governed by democracy instead of stockholders, so we can probably expect that the small number of insurance companies will behave oligopolistically and raise prices, as usually happens when a small number of huge players control the market.
There will be some savings relative to the current system -- on the government's part -- but nothing like what could be achieved by a system that allows everyone to buy in to Medicare (and couples that with Medicare reforms like more careful monitoring of doctors who prescribe medically needless tests & procedures to make more money, and allowing Medicare to negotiate lower prices for its prescription drug benefit). The present bill is probably slightly better than not having it, but only very slightly.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
That's the problem, and it is a real problem. However this bill is not the answer. The answer is regulation at the state level.
The US health insurance industry is currently regulated by individual states. Different states have different rules. However, one element to the current system is that the state government (which is more responsive to the needs of citizens usually than the federal government) tends to have offices for dealing with these sorts of complaints. Additionally, the same offices take complaints from doctors about lack of authorization for procedures. While this means that some states have better health insurance requirements than others, it means there is a clear point of contact when a problem exists that needs to be resolved quickly.
The problem with this bill is it entirely supplants the state health insurance regulation structures and replaces them with a shiny new federal system. There is no way that the main protections that the states offer against insurance abuses will work right away in the federal system. By pre-empting a fairly mature system of state regulation, this bill will not save lives but rather cost them.
The secondary problem is that the bill has inadequate cost control provisions. In Massachussets, after they passed a similar bill, health insurance rates went up. We can expect the same here. Quite frankly, I have no idea how I will afford it when the rates go up. Right now, when insurance companies raise their rates, I can drop off until they lower them again. This bill makes me part of a captive market.
The real underlying problem left unresolved is that we have inadequate consumer protections in the areas of health care and health insurance. While this bill purports to improve these conditions, it fixes, IMO, the wrong problems and leaves major issues unresolved. Why is it that I have more consumer protections when getting my car repaired than in obtaining non-emergency medical care?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP