Rationing Health Care - it's a lie!

[kellyb]

Another way to look at the problem is, as more health care advances are developed, not everyone will be able to afford them. Not everyone can afford a yacht as well. Who refers to yachts as rationed?

Who NEEDS a yacht to not DIE?
What third party payer decides who gets their yacht they need to stay alive and who is declined a yacht that would keep them alive?

 

[Matthew Best]

Why I love Britain's socialized healthcare system: common decency

As my blindfolded daughter slept in the incubator’s eerie violet glow, I would take occasional strolls through the ward. It was the most egalitarian place I had ever seen. The yuppie woman honking into her newfangled cell phone, the young Pakistani mother who always seemed to be surrounded by a half-dozen gift-bearing relations, the self-sufficient older woman desperate to get home to look after her other children -- all of them were cared for in exactly the same manner. Whoever needed help got it. When a terrified Afghani girl arrived, rumored to be only 14 and apparently abandoned by her family, several nurses dropped what they were doing to teach her the rudiments of child care. The rest of the mothers waited patiently until they were finished. Other wards were the same. There was no private wing with champagne service. Everybody was in this together. If you were a woman and you were in labor and you were in our part of London, this is where you came. If things went wrong, skilled doctors appeared with the latest technology. Nobody asked about insurance or co-pays.

This, I learned, is what the NHS is about -- common decency. It is about the shared belief that all the people who live in the United Kingdom constitute a society, and a decent society provides certain necessities for its members. Freedom from hunger is one. Police protection is another. Free healthcare from the cradle to the grave is simply one more item on this list.

 

[Ziggurat]

You are claiming that if as a self employed person I should get a tad more back on my health insurance deduction magic will encompass the country. Earth to Ziggy, that deduction already exists in the tax code.

No, that's not what I'm saying. There are no magic solutions, and that's a position that you are much closer to than me. Furthermore, you fundamentally misunderstand the tax issues. It isn't just about self-employed people. As it stands now, the tax code provides massive incentives for me to buy health insurance through my employer and not on my own. And if my employer doesn't offer health insurance, I do not get the same or even similar tax breaks at all. There is no good reason for this, it's an artifact of WWII wage freezes. Leveling the tax playing field would not create heaven on earth, but it would increase competition among insurers. That's not a panacea, but it's an improvement.

How does that make the deadbeats pay for health insurance?

It wouldn't make anyone do anything. But it would make health insurance cheaper for those who are not self-employed but whose employers do not offer a healthcare plan. What generally happens when you lower costs for a product?

Or are you buying the koolaid that says just give people the money via our taxes

Taking less of someone else's money is not the same thing as giving them yours.

who in turn stuff said money into the coffers of the insurance companies, because after all, we have seen how efficiently they take their cut off the top and make that health care system work so efficiently.

Why are insurance companies so inefficient? That doesn't happen in a free market: competition drives out inefficiencies. Surprise, surprise: health insurance doesn't really resemble a free market, because government intervention largely serves to stifle competition.

Of all the worst things that could come out of this health reform initiative, a windfall for the health insurance companies is the absolute worst outcome I can think of.

Large companies don't like competition. Opening up the markets for more competition isn't doing them any favors.