Socialized Health Care in the USA

[Skandranon]

Yes, I thought it was a straw man (and a plea to compassion) to assume that all illnesses were catastrophic. Yes, catastrophic illnesses are each expensive, but a million unnecessary trips to the emergency room for basic first aid are also expensive. I'm actually advocating for "something", but that the "something" be driven by the free market. It is the free market, when the government is doing its proper job (preserve liberty and remove fraud), that will create the most efficient service for health insurance. The government has no incentive to be efficient, and all the power to be abusive.

If you don't believe at all in capitalism, then I can understand why you'd advocate a state run system.

Really, not believing in capitalism is probably the weirdest accusation thrown yet. I come from the right wing of the Canadian political spectrum, and I'm quite happy to see medical procedures that respond to free-market pressures released to the free market. That's exactly what happens, by the way. It's that much of health care doesn't respond to free market incentives.

And you continue to make your argument that "if some illnesses are not catastrophic, they all aren't". I'm not asserting that they all are. You are asserting that they all are not, or that they make for a tiny proportion of illnesses. Neither is true.

Furthermore, read the goddamn article. Here, I'll post an excerpt.

For that matter, when you have to pay for your own health care, does your consumption really become more efficient? In the late nineteen-seventies, the rand Corporation did an extensive study on the question, randomly assigning families to health plans with co-payment levels at zero per cent, twenty-five per cent, fifty per cent, or ninety-five per cent, up to six thousand dollars. As you might expect, the more that people were asked to chip in for their health care the less care they used. The problem was that they cut back equally on both frivolous care and useful care. Poor people in the high-deductible group with hypertension, for instance, didn’t do nearly as good a job of controlling their blood pressure as those in other groups, resulting in a ten-per-cent increase in the likelihood of death. As a recent Commonwealth Fund study concluded, cost sharing is “a blunt instrument.” Of course it is: how should the average consumer be expected to know beforehand what care is frivolous and what care is useful?

People make terrible decisions when they are asked to ration their own health care. Genuine, good-faith effort to save the system money wind up costing way more in the long run. Unless you propose to educate three hundred million citizens with the rudimentary medical knowledge to figure out what care to forego, blanket covering anyone will save trillions of dollars in the long run, even if it means that some people who don't deserve it, in your worldview, get free care.