Mend Your Diet

Health care or health insurance which would you prefer?

This is a simple analogy for those who don't understand the difference Health Care : Health Insurance Car: Car Insurance Basically, health care is the hospital and the doctors and nurses and pharmacists and drugs in the hospital which help to cure your illnesses. Health Insurance is from a third party which pays for some or all of the cost of the health care while trying to make a profit. H.I. companies have the power of the purse which gives them the power to deny medication or treatments if they cost more than the patient pays. For the purpose of this question it must be accepted that the health care system in the United States must be changed. So, is it better to have hospitals that are run by the government and paid for out of everyone's taxes to provide adequate care for all patients or health insurance where hospitals are businesses and must still make some profit using an insurance fund which must be shared by everyone?

Public Comments

1. You make a good case for government healthcare....except when has the government EVER given us a domestic program that is actually adequate. Just one will do really.
2. The answer will be a two tiered system. Gov't managed Hospitals will be more effective at managing costs than the tug o war between Insurance companies and health care providers. As it is insurance companies are always billed the max possible for everything because that's the way it's played to make up for people with bad or little insurance. Incentives will be different in a fully covered hospital. Then people with enough money can still have insurance and private clinics. Basically what has to stop though is the 1500 dollar bill for an ER visit or 1000 plus for an ambulance ride. Costs are ridiculous.
3. There isn't enough money on the planet for it to begin with.
4. yes that's what i want,.....a hospital run like the, "Dept Of Motor Vehicles",.....remember the $600 dollar hammers and things, found out about years ago??,.....do you really thing Government can do it cheaper??,.....
5. That's a false choice--there is a third option which is the way things used to be done: health care was affordable enough that people got what they needed and only if there were a catastrophic event did they NEED insurance. THAT is the best way. A plan that would make that comeback possible is here: QUALITY, ACCESSIBLE, AFFORDABLE health care for all. That means preventative care (physical with follow up). Real medication (no Medicare "donut holes" the really ill are ripped off again.) No bogus ridiculously low "caps" on needed medical procedures. No abuse of the ER. No paying for the silly with the sniffles to go to the doc for free. No more bankruptcies over medical bills. I want THIS plan that ends abuse of the taxpayer, takes the burden off employers, provides price transparency, and ends the rip-off of the US taxpayer at the hands of greedy insurance CEOs (which has been repeatedly documented). http://www.booklocker.com/books/3068.html Read the PDF, not the blurb, for the bulk of the plan. Book is searchable on Amazon.com Cassandra Nathan's Save America, Save the World UHC does NOT work. World: ...Another sign of transformation: Canadian doctors, long silent on the health-care system’s problems, are starting to speak up. Last August, they voted Brian Day president of their national association. A former socialist who counts Fidel Castro as a personal acquaintance, Day has nevertheless become perhaps the most vocal critic of Canadian public health care, having opened his own private surgery center as a remedy for long waiting lists and then challenged the government to shut him down. “This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week,” he fumed to the New York Times, “and in which humans can wait two to three years.” And now even Canadian governments are looking to the private sector to shrink the waiting lists. Day’s clinic, for instance, handles workers’-compensation cases for employees of both public and private corporations. In British Columbia, private clinics perform roughly 80 percent of government-funded diagnostic testing. In Ontario, where fealty to socialized medicine has always been strong, the government recently hired a private firm to staff a rural hospital’s emergency room. This privatizing trend is reaching Europe, too. Britain’s government-run health care dates back to the 1940s. Yet the Labour Party—which originally created the National Health Service and used to bristle at the suggestion of private medicine, dismissing it as “Americanization”—now openly favors privatization. Sir William Wells, a senior British health official, recently said: “The big trouble with a state monopoly is that it builds in massive inefficiencies and inward-looking culture.” Last year, the private sector provided about 5 percent of Britain’s nonemergency procedures; Labour aims to triple that percentage by 2008. The Labour government also works to voucherize certain surgeries, offering patients a choice of four providers, at least one private. And in a recent move, the government will contract out some primary care services, perhaps to American firms such as UnitedHealth Group and Kaiser Permanente. Sweden’s government, after the completion of the latest round of privatizations, will be contracting out some 80 percent of Stockholm’s primary care and 40 percent of its total health services, including one of the city’s largest hospitals. Since the fall of Communism, Slovakia has looked to liberalize its state-run system, introducing co-payments and privatizations. And modest market reforms have begun in Germany: increasing co-pays, enhancing insurance competition, and turning state enterprises over to the private sector (within a decade, only a minority of German hospitals will remain under state control). It’s important to note that change in these countries is slow and gradual—market reforms remain controversial. But if the United States was once the exception for viewing a vibrant private sector in health care as essential, it is so no longer." http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_3_canadian_healthcare.html US: "California Senate Panel Rejects Health Coverage Proposal JESSE MCKINLEY AND KEVIN SACK SAN FRANCISCO — In a blow to universal health care coverage in California and possibly to its prospects nationwide, a State Senate committee on Monday rejected a sweeping plan by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that would have offered insurance to millions of uninsured residents. The Senate Health Committee defeated the plan 7 to 1, with three abstentions, as Democrats and Republicans alike said they found it too nebulous and potentially too costly for a state facing a $14.5 billion deficit. “This bill is not only not perfect, it is flawed,” said State Senator Sheila James Kuehl, Democrat of Los Angeles and chairwoman of the committee, who voted against it. ... But last Wednesday, as the California Senate committee heard testimony on the bill, Massachusetts announced that spending on its health care plan would increase by $400 million in 2008, a cost expected to be borne largely by taxpayers. Shortly after the vote, Assemblyman Michael N. Villines of Fresno, the chamber’s Republican leader, praised it as a rejection of “a massive government-run health care scheme.” On the Democratic side, there were concerns about the so-called “individual mandate,” which would have required all Californians to carry and pay for insurance, except those in economic hardship...." http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20080129/ZNYT02/801290745 Last modified: January 29. 2008 5:03AM Also note: "L.A. County may close most of its clinics Facing a deficit, health officials want to pay private centers to take up the slack. Critics say the plan's logic is faulty. " http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-me-clinics14feb14,1,5252458,fu ll.story?ctrack=1&cset=true Also note the info re: Taxachusetts and their increase of $400 million for 6.5 million residents after Mitt did his Hillarycare for MA: "Massachusetts announced that spending on its health care plan would increase by $400 million in 2008, a cost expected to be borne largely by taxpayers. " http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20080129/ZNYT02/801290745 Last modified: January 29. 2008 5:03AM
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