He needs to accept the consequences of his position.
Well, one would hope so. He's not showing much sign of doing that though. I was more hopeful of the softer approach than full-on confrontation, but maybe nothing will do it.
Just saying "there has to be another answer, I'm sure we can work something out" isn't going to cut it. But there's nothing any of us can do if he refuses to think beyond that.
So he need to look at what the "Stossel Solution" is.
Actually, there isn't a "Stossel Solution" [TM]. Stossel didn't even pretend he had an answer. It was Dan who
claimed that Stossel had an answer. (Though I note that Dan referred to him in the other thread as "my boy Johnny" and things like that, so it would seem he's something of a devotee of this charlatan.)
Stossel maintained that an insurance policy with a high excess, where the excess was also made available to the client and the client had control of how that was allocated, was advantageous in reducing frivolous claims. He may well be right. However, the frivolous claims thing seems to be a unique feature of the American insurance-based system anyway. I don't know why the insurance companies don't disallow the frivolous claims in the first place. (Actually I suspect they do, and that Stossel is essentially making that bit up.)
So, he's presented a solution to the (possibly entirely fictitious) problem of frivolous medical insurance claims.
At the price of costing businesses quite a lot of money, sequestering part of their salary away from employees into a dedicated healthcare fund, and providing a disincentive to people to have something that might be minor or might be very serious checked out at an early stage.
Way to go, Stossel.
His other genius brainwave was to save on insurance overheads by operating entirely cash-payment first-opinion primary care practices. This doubtless reduces the cost of such care quite a bit. Good system if you have a condition costing less than about $200 to fix, and you actually
have $200.
This is actually how veterinary practice operated in the 1979s and 1980s, and still does in areas where people don't go much for pet health insurance (usually the poorer areas). It's OK, if you have
some money and your needs aren't great.
It's absolutely useless if you have something that needs referral to a specialist and a battery of lab tests and fancy imaging investigations, and maybe major surgery. Also pretty useless if you don't have any money in the first place (the consultation fee is about $40, so it wouldn't take much treatment to get your bill up to the $100 region).
There's nothing there that could
possibly be extrapolated to reduce costs of big-ticket items to the level where people on the minimum wage could afford these.
Stossel was making a TV programme. Entertainment, spiced with a bit of promotion of his own ideological agenda. He was able to link items that were only very loosely connected in such a way that the uncritical viewer might pick up the impression that something profound was being said. But it doesn't take much critical thought to realise that the dots don't join up. He's either not very bright, or very dishonest. Probably a bit of both.
But he was making a TV show, not trying to solve one of America's most pressing social and political problems.
Maybe, but it seems like nothing will get him to face the real effects of his postions.
Well, it is the JR
EF. We can but try.
Rolfe.
