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Originally Posted by RatherBNtheWoods
The problem I have with providing insurance or legislating coverage for all ... We pay for quite a lot of the medical expenses for those who can't/don't by means of higher fees at hospitals and higher premiums ...
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One of the tangible benefits of a not-for-profit universal single-payer system* is that people have immediate access to primary-care clinics. Once such a system is implemented and people get accustomed to it, they use primary-care clinics for routine medical care instead of emergency rooms, and that obviously drives costs down.
* such as proposed by Rep. John Conyers' H.R. 676, or a hypothetical "Medicare for All", or a Canadian-style system, but NOT the current HillaryCare-style proposal being pushed by the Obama White House and Senator Max Baucus.
Quote:
Originally Posted by RatherBNtheWoods
Now (here's my problem), am I to believe I'm going to see some cost savings when the need for me to pay goes away? Or do I believe the medical corporations and insurance company's will pocket that much more profit? hum...
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That's part of the problem with the system we currently have.
Medical fees started rising fasted than inflation, just because they could. Individuals didn't fight the cost increases because "someone else was paying them", and insurance corporations were more than happy to see rising costs because it meant they could take their percentage of an ever-increasing pie, and it meant that medical insurance would become more and more necessary, assuring them of an ever-increasing customer base from whom to extract percentages.
We need to face the fact that certain sectors of the economy do not behave according to Friedmanian free-market supply & demand theory, and medical care is one of them. In response, we need to implement either a not-for-profit system, or a carefully regulated and audited system, or we're going to continue to suffer the kind of abuses we now suffer.
