Re: Re: Re: 2008 -- Dem do's and dont's
patnray said:
8. Drop the national health plan nonsense. Instead, work on programs to reduce the cost of health services. Promote new technologies and research to improve the quality of health care. A bit of a balancing act, since part of the rising cost is due to the expanding technologies... Stirke a compromise on stem cell research by allowing funding for the research as long as federal dollars are not used in creating or acquiring the stem cells.
Maybe you don't work in healthcare. I do. The problem is only partially technology, and it's only
tangentially addressed by tort reform. There are two main problems that no one wants to address. #1, new procedures are being created all the time to make those last 5 minutes, or 5 days, or whatever, longer. Procedures like chopping off the bottom half of your lungs to make emphysema kill you more slowly. These procedures are very expensive.#2, doctors are in major short supply. Corollaries to these are the Baby Bulge getting ready to squeeze itself through our system as old people, who need healthcare the most, and furthermore as old people who frankly have taken really lousy care of themselves vis-a-vis smoking, drinking, and generally living it up. Reference point #1 to see where I'm leading with that.
People who are terrified of national healthcare try to point out its "failures" in other countries but are apparently incapable of turning their eyes inward to watch the collapse of our own. Hospitals are by their very code of ethics prohibited from turning away sick people. Most of the uninsured turn up at the emergency room to be treated. This is causing a cascade of emergency room closures as hospitals burn their resources on people who can't pay. As the number of uninsured grows, something which the election of Bush is just going to excaberate, more and more pressure is going to be put on these facilities until they simply collapse. Hospitals will go bankrupt (they already are). Major illnesses will run wild through the population. What will probably do it in will be an epidemic of something like the flu.
The sensible thing to do would be to create a government program for catastrophic insurance, and take those costs out of the pool of the private insured. Anything over $7,000, or some reasonable threshold, would be covered under this program. Secondly, businesses should be ever-so-gently discouraged from offering insurance benefits anymore, unless they are transferable in some way. This will force insurance companies to offer real free-market plans for sub-catastrophic coverage at competitive prices. Because what we have right now is neither free nor a market.
However, I doubt such a plan will be implemented, especially since Kerry advocated something similar. Instead, we'll run along until we bankrupt our system, and in a major political tidal wave we will introduce a system cloned wholesale from Canada's. Libertarians and conservatives will scream and gnash their teeth, and in 10 years we'll all be used to long waiting lists and rationed healthcare (as if we don't have them now) and no out-of-pocket costs, deductibles, or other horsesh*t.
So if we
wanted to ensure the rise of socialized medicine in the US, we couldn't have chosen a better course than to put the most clueless man on the planet in charge of our nation when our private system was at its maximum distress.
