Replies to post #85294 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[wbmw]

I went to your link and saw the percentage of cuts, but I didn't see the rationale for why the cuts were made. Could they have been inflated to begin with? It sounds like these arguments can be made independent of the decisions in the health care bill. If people are specifically worried about the Medicare cuts being proposed in the bill, then someone should put out the facts, show the trade offs side by side, and then people can make sense out of it. All I see is that the "College of Cardiology" has a problem with cuts on cardiological procedures. Well, of course. :-)

Re: I question whether the end result of health care reform will be more or less functional then it is today? If the private sector plans bear the brunt of increasing fees they will quickly fail.

Have you ever seen a break down of the costs going into the private health insurance agency...? Given the "service" that they provide of connecting you with your doctor, they should be able to be very lean. And yet, about half their costs are administrative - spending their money on things that aim to deny you coverage. Just think of all the "cost savings" this industry can bank on if the government makes denial of coverage illegal. :-)

And on top of that, these companies are extremely profitable today. They are making BANK on being a rather simple middle-man. I don't believe for a second that competition from the government will cause them to fail. I think the private industry can do better than the government, and that having a high quality Public Option will set the standard for better service.

Look at FedEx/UPS against the USPS. The private industry beats the government easily, but we have the government to thank for setting the standard of service, on top of which the private industry can compete. If we let FedEx and UPS become monopolies, and they charged us 5x more for sending our mail, and on top of that occasionally fail to deliver a critical parcel, it would quickly become unbearable.

We demand good service and good prices for our mail system, and that's just a matter of sending packages and letters. Health care is about our LIVES. We owe it to ourselves to set up a similar competitive model.

[fuagf]

n48 .. seems to me that the tie of health insurance to employment creates problems. In your mind is that set-up a good one, or not?
I don't know, just a sense it isn't. Yep, it would take years and incremental stages to unravel. Is it a good set-up or not so good?

In Australia the universal scheme covers all and many many have private insurance for personal reasons. The conservative line in the US now that private insurers would go out of business with a universal is, on the Australian experience it seems to me, just a right wing furphy. It was an opposition debating point here before our universal, but has not proved to have been true, so it is obviously just to protect profits of the privates. How else can you read that in light of the Australian experience?

Aside, some analysts say that the involvement of private suppliers makes overall health costs in Australia more expensive.