Riots! Brother against brother! Mayhem at the Town Hall!

I say all Americans on Medicare and Medicaid voluntarily give up their benefits as a symbol of their dedication to the fight against demon Socialism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_surgery

so why not introducing competition to the health care system by putting an appendicitis up for auction? Never mind that the patient might die while the betting goes on as long as it would be a sure way to lower prices.

And what about the vast battalions of lawyers who defend the insurance companies? What about the ones who make a living suing them? And what about THEIR support staffs?

And how about all the people in billing departments at hospitals who negotiate with the insurance companies? And all the HR people in companies who negotiate with them?

Who will stop the catastrophic deflation in the price of health care if these people engage in other productive activities?

I am not an expert on the economic impact of single-payer, but it seems to me that there would be lots of new jobs created that could easily be filled by the displaced workers at insurance companies. I haven’t heard any discussion of this idea.

I’m wondering if you can address an issue about the economic impact if this country actually did create universal healthcare and put health insurance companies out of business. Many people would lose their jobs and that would be an issue, esp for regions where health insurance companies are major employers. Would it be like the impact of shutting down a military base? Can the methods used to manage base closings be applied to manage the shut down of health insurance companies? The reason I ask is that genuine health reform threatens health insurance companies, which threatens the people employed by them, and which gets in the way of this country having a fully informed debate about all options for achieving universal healthcare. Our political leaders won’t touch this issue but citizens can ask about it. What would be the impact of this country losing for-profit health insurance companies? Can that impact be measured and can the transition be managed? On the upside, health insurance employees might lose their jobs but with universal coverage they wouldn’t lose their healthcare :-)

The author thinks he sounds smart and is on to something…Yes we need health reform. We need to get the Government out of health care. That is the type of reform we need. (By the way, the government is the reason we have health coverage dispensed by employers in the first place).

The author tells us we do not have health insurance. He is correct about that, but for the wrong reasons. What we have that is referred to as health insurance, is actually a health maintenance plan. Meaning every little thing we could possible have wrong with us is a covered visit to the Doctor (this is one of the main economical problems we have with uncontrollable costs). The reason for this is due to Government mandate. In the 80’s I helped start a managed care plan here in Jax. The Federal government mandates requiring the plan to offer an extensive array of benefits were incredible as well as limitations on what the plan was able to charge in premiums and list as exclusions.

It has been illegal to sell real health insurance (meaning coverage for unexpected high cost health issues, while the insured handles all expected smaller costs, you know individual responsibility) in all of the States for almost 20 years. That is the main driver for health care cost being out of reach of actuarial stable programs…Check with the States that have tried Government backed health care, they are all bankrupt and going down fast. Oregon tried this a few years ago and has been struggling ever since.

Our Government politicians knew exactly what they were doing in mandating first dollar coverage. It was to actually ruin the private health insurance marketplace, and they succeeded. I would have expected the economist to pick up on these real causes of the problems with health care.

Also, the nonsense about helping out the uninsured…is a fraud. The current House health care reform bills being pushed admits that under the plan they will still have something like 30 million uninsured after 10 years. If this is to take care of the uninsured, how is that possible?? Make no mistake this has nothing to do with making sure everyone has health insurance. This is all about transfer control of health care over to the Government. We already have government sponsored programs to assist the uninsured or people at the poverty level. The sad part is that there are many people who could qualify for assistance but don’t bother to sign up. They actually have to make the effort to get their government program but they don’t bother.

While the statement about difficulties with private individual insurance policies and the cobra issues are out there, the main reason for those difficulties are government coverage mandates. The actual solution to this huge problem was and is the individual health care accounts (which will be outlawed under the proposed “reforms”). Again the democrats/Marxists do not want the people having the power to decide what to do with their money.

Bottom-line, people want someone else to pay for the health care they should take personal responsibility for. Heck, why do that when you can get some politicians to force someone else to pay it for you???

Rich and Kim Brew