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Stossel Solves the Health Crisis with Capitalism

Would you want to do that? Or would you rather just go without insurance?
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I don't see what good it would really do if it also said this:
CoverTN plan benefits are very limited compared to traditional insurance. For instance, these plans do not have an out-of-pocket maximum, so they do not protect against the potential of catastrophic medical costs. In other words, there is no limit to the amount of medical bills a member might have to pay for a major illness or injury, such as disease treatment, or injuries sustained in an automobile accident for example.
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DaN K. StAnLeY said:
I don't see what good it would really do if it also said this:
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It pays up to $25,000 in hospital costs per year, though. It's fairly rare that one individual will rack up more than that per year, even with hospital costs.
 
Either way, so you'd rather just go without health insurance?
 
kellyb said:
It pays up to $25,000 in hospital costs per year, though. It's fairly rare that one individual will rack up more than that per year, even with hospital costs.
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Yes it would save people who have moderate health care needs in a year from having to go bankrupt.
 
Toke said:
I think you got it the wrong way around.

Assuming that a x-ray mashine cost a fixed amount from the manufacturer, the cost would be a lower percentage of your money if you were richer.

Payscales tend to be higher in richer countries, but I would expect it to follow GNP giving you the same percentage.
Unless you have a more uneven distribution of income, where hospital staff in general get a smaller share of GNP than in the UK.
Then you would end up with a lower percentage.
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That's a good point.

From what we see of the US system, it's either complaints about the lousy quality of state-funded care, or complaints about the rocketing cost of insurance cover. None of that sounds like extra voluntary spending by the affluent to me.

I suppose Dan's idea does chime to some extent with the scenario of the insured patient "grabbing everything he can get" because it's "free" (or rather, paid for in higher premiums), but I'm pretty sure neither that, nor Daddy Warbucks choosing to have his quadruple bypass done in the most luxurious private clinic in Florida, explains a doubling in healthcare spending right across the board.

Rolfe.
 
DaN K. StAnLeY said:
I was just thinking that there are a bunch of programs you can get on if you have a sick baby, so it seemed like HC wouldn't be a factor.
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Just returning to this one. Excellent. Truly civilised. Sounds terrific.

Except - this is "soc HC"!! This is compelling you and others to pay for someone else's healthcare! Goodness, the mother may have been improvident! She may have spent her money on junk food and makeup instead of saving so that she had $10,000 a week (wild guess) to buy a special care neonatal cot! The baby may even have been premature as a result of the mother spending her money on cigarettes!

Even worse, once the baby is born and needs care, the mother may expect the need to be taken care of! She needs to be taught that nobody owes anyone a living! Tell her she got what was coming to her and let the brat die!

OK, I'm going over the top a bit here, but do you see how the same situation can be presented in two completely different lights depending on the point you want to make at the time, or even the mood you happen to be in?

Rolfe.
 
Rolfe said:
Remember, we spend 7.7% of GDP to cover everyone, you spend 14.8% of GDP not to cover everyone.
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DaN K. StAnLeY said:
Could this have anything to do with our per capita income being higher? [ . . . ] My reasoning here is that since we make more money, we are more inclined to spend it on our health care.
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Well that would explain it if healthcare was a luxury good, which is the type of good that people don't buy at all if they are dirt poor, and spend an increasing proportion of their income on as they get richer. Typically that is the case for Gucci handbags, caviar, yachts and country mansions.

Except that this is about government spending on health not individual spending. So that would be the US government deciding that health is a luxury not for the poor.

The alternative explanation is that the US has been suckered badly into myriad market failures and path-dependent policy stasis.
 
DaN K. StAnLeY said:
If everything is truly like you say it is, it sounds like a great system. I don't have a new position, just a couple questions.
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Look, it's not perfect. Stuff goes wrong. Right-wing politicians like to promise tax cuts, then underfund the system. A huge, monolithic bureaucracy can make some absolutely stonking big mistakes - like commissioning IT systems that cost millions and don't work. Internal bureaucracy can result in the tail wagging the dog, and administrators having too much power to tell consultants what to do. It's not a panacea for utopia.

Bear in mind that the NHS, which is what most people here are talking about because we speak the same language and that's what we're familiar with, isn't even the best system based on international evaluation criteria. Nevertheless, everyone will close ranks and agree wholeheartedly that whatever its faults, it's so massively better that the situation in the US that we go hot and cold all over at the very thought of having to put up with what goes on in the USA.

Rolfe.
 
Well that would explain it if healthcare was a luxury good, which is the type of good that people don't buy at all if they are dirt poor, and spend an increasing proportion of their income on as they get richer. Typically that is the case for Gucci handbags, caviar, yachts and country mansions.

Except that this is about government spending on health not individual spending. So that would be the US government deciding that health is a luxury not for the poor.

The alternative explanation is that the US has been suckered badly into myriad market failures and path-dependent policy stasis.
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What about a procedure like gastric bypass? It would seem like this type of procedure would be more common in the US and would be more likely to be performed on someone with good insurance or extra cash. I'm not saying gastric bypass is the entire reason, just one example.
 
If you catch your government admitting that it wants to spend a bigger chunk of taxed national income on health than other governments do because it wants to give luxury treatments to the richer ones and nothing much to the poorest, let the thread know.
 
DaN K. StAnLeY said:
What about a procedure like gastric bypass? It would seem like this type of procedure would be more common in the US and would be more likely to be performed on someone with good insurance or extra cash. I'm not saying gastric bypass is the entire reason, just one example.
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Why is that an example - as far as I understood a gastric bypass is usually carried out for medical reasons?
 
DaN K. StAnLeY said:
I don't see what good it would really do if it also said this:

CoverTN plan benefits are very limited compared to traditional insurance. For instance, these plans do not have an out-of-pocket maximum, so they do not protect against the potential of catastrophic medical costs. In other words, there is no limit to the amount of medical bills a member might have to pay for a major illness or injury, such as disease treatment, or injuries sustained in an automobile accident for example.
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That's a very interesting plan KellyB refers to. Like so much of what has been brought up in this discussion (including a couple of Stossel's suggestions), it's a clear improvement for US citizens on what they have at the moment, but at the same time it still leaves them massively worse off than people with universal healthcare entitlement.

It probably would benefit a lot of people. I think Dan would be mad not to take something like that if he left his job to set up his own business. The problem is that it still leaves fairly obvious cracks that some people will slip through. And you don't know if it's going to be you.

I note that it says the cover continues during brief periods of unemployment. So you better not be out of the job market for too long by the sound of that.

If you have a catastrophic event while you're on the plan, you're screwed, then and there. And this is going to happen to some people, guaranteed.

Perhaps worst of all, it seems to leave people wide open to the trap that caught the woman in the Stossel film. Young, healthy, expecting to go on and earn more, and be able to afford a better health plan - then she gets something catastrophic that leaves her uninsurable. The limited cover she had was never designed to deal with something like that, and doesn't. And now she has it, she can't insure against it.

It's better than nothing, and it's going to make life a lot easier for people who don't have catastrophic health events. But it's still going to leave a minority in a very bad place.

Rationally, the best cover for all eventualities is something with no (or a very high) ceiling. The trouble is that such plans tend to have very high premiums. And the only way to mitigate that is to accept a very high excess. So you end up still having to budget for all realtively routine items to be paid for out of pocket, and the cost of the premiums. A bit like Stossel's preferred insurance plan. It's life, Jim, but not as we know it.

Rolfe.
 
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DaN K. StAnLeY said:
It will be interesting to see what happens in the next 10 years with this issue. I wonder how it will be to revisit this thread after living under a soc-UHC system. I'm sure that it's going to be tried soon and I think I remember hearing someone suggesting it would be done on the state level first.
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I think there's a lot to be said for a country as large as the USA operating UHC on a state-by-state basis. You should still benefit from good economies of scale, and there's a limit to how big you want one employer or one bureaucracy to get. Arguably, the NHS as it stands is too big. You can then implement complete reciprocity, in a similar way to Europe, so that all citizens are covered.

You might also benefit from competition or rivalry between states. If one state provides a crap system, there will be political pressure to do better from citizens who see that friends and relatives in other states are getting a better deal. If one state tries out something a bit off-the-wall and it works out, it will be easy for others to implement it, with the trial run example before them. If on the other hand it doesn't work out, then the cost/damage of the unsuccessful experiment will be limited to one state. And the people whose baby it was are unlikely to be able to hang on to the failed initiative if the examples of neighbouring states are showing it up for the daft idea it is.

Should be interesting to watch!

Rolfe.
 
I suspect in the USA one of the changes would be the power balance between employees and employers shifting in favour of the employees.
 
Erm, now??

(Jobless rate)

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Just returning to this one. Excellent. Truly civilised. Sounds terrific.

Except - this is "soc HC"!! This is compelling you and others to pay for someone else's healthcare! Goodness, the mother may have been improvident!
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Okay, there isn't going to realistic way to completely eliminate the need for programs for low income people and the disabled and elderly. I think the US recognizes the need to provide at least some services to everyone, but a lot can be done to minimalize the expenses in a soc program like medicare/caid. Thats why we have the post office, public school, etc. The alternatives would be worse than a semi-soc system. The thing that has worked for us is free-market choices, with a semi-soc way to provide for all.

In a perfect world nobody would ever lose their job or get cancer, and saying 100% any type system (capitalist,socialist,etc)
 
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