You know that, as the law is currently written, you gotta do the high-deductible insurance thing in order to qualify for the savings account, right? That tends to smooth over the unexpectedly high expenses.
Well, you were talking about a utopia as well, where non-profits are acting for the best interest of society rather than the interests of those running the non-profit.
No, not so much. I'm just giving them the same benefit of the doubt you want to give to corps because they don't have the requirement for self-interest that corps do.
regulation
Nice rant about regulatory capture. Unfortunately its not terribly relevant to the issue of whether corps should get a say in social policy.
I really thing a medical savings account kind of plan is the right idea.
I sincerely dislike them because they are yet another way for your private medical treatments to end up in someone else's database where you have no control over them. I think it is profoundly wrong that one must sacrifice their medical privacy (especially to a bank) in order to get a tax break on medical treatment.
Yeah, maybe in utopia. When it comes down to the profitability and particularly the survival of the corp society will lose every time. After all, no matter how healthy a society, it doesn't mean jacksquat to the investors if the corp is bankrupt. From that the rationalization just keeps moving up the chain and instead of fixing internal problems it becomes easier to ignore that they have internal fixes and instead just take from the public commons to try to compensate. Before you know it, you've got something like BP's oil spill.
I stil use a circa-2001 cell phone on t-mobile and 100% of my calls are through google-voice (both incoming and outgoing), been using it since it was grandcentral, and I haven't experienced an excessive delay. Now most of my calls are through Ooma's VOIP but I still occasionally use the cell phone too.
What if there is real debate as to whether the non-profit's stated goal will not improve society but will actually harm society?
Not particularly relevant. We are free to disagree about what is good for society. But corps are essentially required to not give a damn which suggests that they ought not to have a say either.
There is certainly the potential for "puppet" non-profits that exist merely to do the bidding of corps and if disclosure requirements for non-profits weren't enough to stop that from happening in most cases I'd be willing to consider restricting the right of non-profits from participating too. That's an IF that would only follow from empirical evidence though.
Free speech means you can say unpopular things, things that disagree with the "establishment", things that are inflammatory, things that are downright disgusting (in some segment of the populations opinion)..
Baloney. If the intent of the 1st amendment was to restrict freedom of speech merely to inflammatory speech then it would have said so. The copyright clause is simply a restriction on the natural right to express ideas - including those that originated with other people.
Yes they are, in the way Greenpeace, the American Red Cross, or the FSF are "people". Corporations are simply groups of people acting together. Why should one group of people be allowed to pool their resources and influence, but not others?
Perhaps because the intended purpose of all the groups you've cited is to improve society while the official purpose of the typical corporation is to shield the individuals running it from the repercussions of being purely amoral profit generators?
Wow - the biggest criteria of them all - typical salary - isn't even on the list.
I'd rather have a lot more bucks and crappy benefits than a bunch of 'great' benefits which I may never even use but also serve to tie employees to the employer and reduce upward career mobility.
I mean the fact that french specialists are free to charge what they want and the patients are free to shop around for better deals because their coverage only goes so far, thus the costs for specialist procedures is kept in check making them affordable for more people in general. That's the major aspect that the french system has over most other socialized systems.
There all kinds of reasons that people will not seek out care that have nothing to do with money. That ex-boyfriend with the funny rash may just be in denial. Or maybe he's concerned that the doctor has a legal requirement to report him to an STD registry and doesn't want to be on that list for fear of other consequences. Even when healthcare is delivered it isn't necessarily less contagious -- I know someone who was recently diagnosed with herpes - she refuses to contact previous sex partners to let them know out of shame and fear that they will tell everyone in their social circle that she gave them herpes.
Your dismissal of the option of a more free market is, like so many other posters in this thread, rooted in the problems of the current system. The first two - equal power and full information are feasible to meet as they currently are for elective surgeries which have always been free of 'insurance' company meddling. As for there being no externalized costs - well that's an impossible goal for practically all markets, but healthcare can certainly get pretty close.
This is the "elephant in the corner" that is usually missed in American discussions of medical pricing. With almost any other commercial "product", you can easily price shop, and people do. But with most American medicine, the medical system does something to you, and then writes down a number, and that's the price you have to pay. You can't learn the price beforehand,
I'd say that the pricing transparency problem is precisely because of the current insurance system. It sure wasn't that way 40 years ago before the insurance industry was so prevalent. That's one of the goals of having people be responsible for the majority of the payments of cash or vouchers themselves - the more skin they have in the game the more incentive they have to get the best value for the money. My expectation is that if we went (back) to a system where people have personal responsibility for the cost of their healthcare we would quickly see standardized price lists - just like we currently see in the market for cosmetic surgery and stuff like lasik where people are generally 100% on the hook for the costs.
I'll note that this would be an *annual* deductible. Once you meet it, the plan pays out 100%
No, I don't think so. However I think it is entirely reasonable to consider chronic conditions a single 'event' and thus only subject to a single deductible per year.
but you still have a system where the wealthy can get better health care than everyone else.
Nothing you can do will 'fix' that - that's a fact of life in all things, not just health care.
Allowing everyone autonomy in healthcare is more of a mess than anything else
Bullshit. Seriously - like the current system of fairly restricted autonomy isn't the worst mess in the developed world? Of all the socialized systems the one that is the most effective is the one in France which is also the one with the most autonomy.
Like I've already said - the chronic condition should be treated as a single 'event' each year - you pay the deductible for it and if you are too poor to afford it, vouchers are used to make up the difference.
Chronic conditions are like having a catastrophe every month when the bill for the next month of drugs comes due.
So you end up paying the full deductible each year. And if you are poor, the vouchers cover most or all of it. Where exactly does this fail at humanity?
Your suggestions tells poor people who happen to have a handicap or chronic condition to get stuffed.
That's a baseless assertion. If you can't explain your reasoning then it is meaningless.
I'm pretty confident that you are wrong, but until you say how you got from point A of catastrophic insurance to point B of chronic conditions not being treated there is nothing to say in response.
Re:also: more doctors, less pay, more compassion.
on
What US Health Care Needs
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
We need to take the direct money out of front line medicine, or at least pay it much more cleverly. For example, if you pay doctors by results (percent patients cured) they will only work on easy cases. Almost any such system I can think of can be gamed.
Which is yet another reason to dump the entire concept of prepaid medicine to begin with. Sure, keep true insurance around for catastrophic events, but otherwise let each person decide how to spend their own money on their own regular health care. If you want to subsidize the poor, give them vouchers and let them spend their own vouchers on their own health care the best way they see fit. The idea being that since there is pretty much no optimal 'command-and-control' style solution, you might as well put the responsibility for the spending back in the hands of the people with the most to lose or benefit.
FWIW, I practice what I preach - I carry the closest thing I can get to true catastrophic insurance (and have not needed it yet) and pay cash for everything else. When I think a doctor is jerking me around for money (like the time they convinced me to do strep and mono tests despite being asymptomatic just because they could do them in their in-house lab so they were super-profitable) I dump them and move on. On the down side it is getting harder and harder to find doctors who are cash-friendly. Its like they've all just caved to the system and forgotten how to do business the normal way - even though the overhead of dealing with 'insurance' companies can easily equal 50% of the bill.
Last year they started installing cameras all around (very visible effort - you could see cameras all around you) - and the crime rate (atleast the mugging rate) went down immediately.
As I recall from the reports in England and other places that have done the same thing an initial drop in crime is common. But unless there are other efforts made to keep crime low, the effect wears off and crime rates return to nearly the same levels. My impression from what I read is that it's due to the novelty wearing off and to the criminals realizing a camera can't arrest them or stop them or really do anything until long after they've left the scene. Especially if the camera feeds aren't even monitored in real time - which is apparently where the interest in having the cameras recognize when a crime being committed comes from, so they can alert a human in real-time. I say good luck with that.
It is very likely the customer service representatives who are offering those service blocks to better accommodate those customers are the better representatives who are actually trying to do a good job. And people wonder why customer service for some companies is so horrible, it is because of policies like this.
Its the bean-counters' fault. Revenue losses from service blocks and credits are really easy to measure. Profits from customers made happy by good customer service are really hard to measure. So, as is frequently the case when organizations become hyper-focused on metrics, decisions get made that maximize metrics but don't make good business sense.
Slashdot Mirror
You know that, as the law is currently written, you gotta do the high-deductible insurance thing in order to qualify for the savings account, right?
That tends to smooth over the unexpectedly high expenses.
Well, you were talking about a utopia as well, where non-profits are acting for the best interest of society rather than the interests of those running the non-profit.
No, not so much. I'm just giving them the same benefit of the doubt you want to give to corps because they don't have the requirement for self-interest that corps do.
regulation
Nice rant about regulatory capture. Unfortunately its not terribly relevant to the issue of whether corps should get a say in social policy.
I really thing a medical savings account kind of plan is the right idea.
I sincerely dislike them because they are yet another way for your private medical treatments to end up in someone else's database where you have no control over them.
I think it is profoundly wrong that one must sacrifice their medical privacy (especially to a bank) in order to get a tax break on medical treatment.
Yeah, maybe in utopia. When it comes down to the profitability and particularly the survival of the corp society will lose every time. After all, no matter how healthy a society, it doesn't mean jacksquat to the investors if the corp is bankrupt. From that the rationalization just keeps moving up the chain and instead of fixing internal problems it becomes easier to ignore that they have internal fixes and instead just take from the public commons to try to compensate. Before you know it, you've got something like BP's oil spill.
I stil use a circa-2001 cell phone on t-mobile and 100% of my calls are through google-voice (both incoming and outgoing), been using it since it was grandcentral, and I haven't experienced an excessive delay. Now most of my calls are through Ooma's VOIP but I still occasionally use the cell phone too.
What if there is real debate as to whether the non-profit's stated goal will not improve society but will actually harm society?
Not particularly relevant. We are free to disagree about what is good for society. But corps are essentially required to not give a damn which suggests that they ought not to have a say either.
There is certainly the potential for "puppet" non-profits that exist merely to do the bidding of corps and if disclosure requirements for non-profits weren't enough to stop that from happening in most cases I'd be willing to consider restricting the right of non-profits from participating too. That's an IF that would only follow from empirical evidence though.
Free speech means you can say unpopular things, things that disagree with the "establishment", things that are inflammatory, things that are downright disgusting (in some segment of the populations opinion)..
Baloney. If the intent of the 1st amendment was to restrict freedom of speech merely to inflammatory speech then it would have said so. The copyright clause is simply a restriction on the natural right to express ideas - including those that originated with other people.
Yes they are, in the way Greenpeace, the American Red Cross, or the FSF are "people". Corporations are simply groups of people acting together. Why should one group of people be allowed to pool their resources and influence, but not others?
Perhaps because the intended purpose of all the groups you've cited is to improve society while the official purpose of the typical corporation is to shield the individuals running it from the repercussions of being purely amoral profit generators?
Dragons wearing kimonos?
Or Dragon Ladies. Probably the most sexy racist term ever.
neither system requires that doctors join the government programme,
That's not what I meant. French specialists stay in the program and charge what they want. The customer just has to make up the difference themselves.
Unlikely. Horse meat can not be kosher. Presumably unicorns don't chew their cud or have cloven feet.
Wow - the biggest criteria of them all - typical salary - isn't even on the list.
I'd rather have a lot more bucks and crappy benefits than a bunch of 'great' benefits which I may never even use but also serve to tie employees to the employer and reduce upward career mobility.
I mean the fact that french specialists are free to charge what they want and the patients are free to shop around for better deals because their coverage only goes so far, thus the costs for specialist procedures is kept in check making them affordable for more people in general. That's the major aspect that the french system has over most other socialized systems.
There all kinds of reasons that people will not seek out care that have nothing to do with money. That ex-boyfriend with the funny rash may just be in denial. Or maybe he's concerned that the doctor has a legal requirement to report him to an STD registry and doesn't want to be on that list for fear of other consequences. Even when healthcare is delivered it isn't necessarily less contagious -- I know someone who was recently diagnosed with herpes - she refuses to contact previous sex partners to let them know out of shame and fear that they will tell everyone in their social circle that she gave them herpes.
Your dismissal of the option of a more free market is, like so many other posters in this thread, rooted in the problems of the current system. The first two - equal power and full information are feasible to meet as they currently are for elective surgeries which have always been free of 'insurance' company meddling. As for there being no externalized costs - well that's an impossible goal for practically all markets, but healthcare can certainly get pretty close.
This is the "elephant in the corner" that is usually missed in American discussions of medical pricing. With almost any other commercial "product", you can easily price shop, and people do. But with most American medicine, the medical system does something to you, and then writes down a number, and that's the price you have to pay. You can't learn the price beforehand,
I'd say that the pricing transparency problem is precisely because of the current insurance system. It sure wasn't that way 40 years ago before the insurance industry was so prevalent. That's one of the goals of having people be responsible for the majority of the payments of cash or vouchers themselves - the more skin they have in the game the more incentive they have to get the best value for the money. My expectation is that if we went (back) to a system where people have personal responsibility for the cost of their healthcare we would quickly see standardized price lists - just like we currently see in the market for cosmetic surgery and stuff like lasik where people are generally 100% on the hook for the costs.
I'll note that this would be an *annual* deductible. Once you meet it, the plan pays out 100%
No, I don't think so. However I think it is entirely reasonable to consider chronic conditions a single 'event' and thus only subject to a single deductible per year.
but you still have a system where the wealthy can get better health care than everyone else.
Nothing you can do will 'fix' that - that's a fact of life in all things, not just health care.
Allowing everyone autonomy in healthcare is more of a mess than anything else
Bullshit. Seriously - like the current system of fairly restricted autonomy isn't the worst mess in the developed world?
Of all the socialized systems the one that is the most effective is the one in France which is also the one with the most autonomy.
You are stuck in the paradigm of today.
Like I've already said - the chronic condition should be treated as a single 'event' each year - you pay the deductible for it and if you are too poor to afford it, vouchers are used to make up the difference.
Chronic conditions are like having a catastrophe every month when the bill for the next month of drugs comes due.
So you end up paying the full deductible each year. And if you are poor, the vouchers cover most or all of it.
Where exactly does this fail at humanity?
Your suggestions tells poor people who happen to have a handicap or chronic condition to get stuffed.
That's a baseless assertion. If you can't explain your reasoning then it is meaningless.
I'm pretty confident that you are wrong, but until you say how you got from point A of catastrophic insurance to point B of chronic conditions not being treated there is nothing to say in response.
So what do you all consider catastrophic?
A deductible in the range of $5K-$10K.
We need to take the direct money out of front line medicine, or at least pay it much more cleverly. For example, if you pay doctors by results (percent patients cured) they will only work on easy cases. Almost any such system I can think of can be gamed.
Which is yet another reason to dump the entire concept of prepaid medicine to begin with. Sure, keep true insurance around for catastrophic events, but otherwise let each person decide how to spend their own money on their own regular health care. If you want to subsidize the poor, give them vouchers and let them spend their own vouchers on their own health care the best way they see fit. The idea being that since there is pretty much no optimal 'command-and-control' style solution, you might as well put the responsibility for the spending back in the hands of the people with the most to lose or benefit.
FWIW, I practice what I preach - I carry the closest thing I can get to true catastrophic insurance (and have not needed it yet) and pay cash for everything else. When I think a doctor is jerking me around for money (like the time they convinced me to do strep and mono tests despite being asymptomatic just because they could do them in their in-house lab so they were super-profitable) I dump them and move on. On the down side it is getting harder and harder to find doctors who are cash-friendly. Its like they've all just caved to the system and forgotten how to do business the normal way - even though the overhead of dealing with 'insurance' companies can easily equal 50% of the bill.
Last year they started installing cameras all around (very visible effort - you could see cameras all around you) - and the crime rate (atleast the mugging rate) went down immediately.
As I recall from the reports in England and other places that have done the same thing an initial drop in crime is common. But unless there are other efforts made to keep crime low, the effect wears off and crime rates return to nearly the same levels. My impression from what I read is that it's due to the novelty wearing off and to the criminals realizing a camera can't arrest them or stop them or really do anything until long after they've left the scene. Especially if the camera feeds aren't even monitored in real time - which is apparently where the interest in having the cameras recognize when a crime being committed comes from, so they can alert a human in real-time. I say good luck with that.
It is very likely the customer service representatives who are offering those service blocks to better accommodate those customers are the better representatives who are actually trying to do a good job. And people wonder why customer service for some companies is so horrible, it is because of policies like this.
Its the bean-counters' fault.
Revenue losses from service blocks and credits are really easy to measure.
Profits from customers made happy by good customer service are really hard to measure.
So, as is frequently the case when organizations become hyper-focused on metrics,
decisions get made that maximize metrics but don't make good business sense.
You totally discount
Apparently you not only believe you are entitled to your own facts, but you also have difficulty with the concept of "close to."