Gingrich

[germloucks]

Camaro, you keep saying its illegal, but that isnt the case. Every single challenge to the law in federal court, except one, has lost. After all there is lots of legal precedence for telling everyone not to buy something for their own good, how is that qualitatively different from telling them they HAVE to buy something for their own good?

[Malicious Wraith]

QUOTE (germloucks @ Dec 7 2011, 05:46 PM) Camaro, you keep saying its illegal, but that isnt the case. Every single challenge to the law in federal court, except one, has lost. After all there is lots of legal precedence for telling everyone not to buy something for their own good, how is that qualitatively different from telling them they HAVE to buy something for their own good?

Uhhh... because one ensures the protection of civil liberties, the other infringes upon them?
That should be pretty clear.

[Camaro]

QUOTE (Adept @ Dec 7 2011, 06:45 AM) This is the bit where Libertarianism (and people skirting the fringe of it like Camaro) is like a cult.

The Constitution is a sacred, flawless document, and the founding fathers were geniuses, titans among mere mortals.

That seems to be the only exception to the other part of the creed which states that governments and taxes are inherently evil.

I swear it's a religion, and like all religions it doesn't really need to make sense.


Sorry Camaro

Naw, I ain't really a Libertarian, I favor far to much government intervention. *GASP!* Yes its true, I am more of a moderate at the State level, but all you guys ever hear me talk about is the Feds. No, I am a Constitutionalist not a Libertarian. I favor States & Localities writing laws rather than the Feds. The States have far more control over the lives of their people than the Feds do anyways. And if the Feds write a law, then, that is it... its the law of all 50 states, you can't escape it.

Anything you want to do, you can. It just needs to be done at your own local or state level so you don't bug me with your *likely* crappy ideas (unless your a Californian)

QUOTE (NightRychune @ Dec 7 2011, 09:32 AM) i don't have much intricate knowledge of the health care system, but my general of knowledge of things leads me to ask these questions:

Is there a market for providing general health care services - prescriptions, physicals, blood tests, etc. - at low cost? Is it possible to create a profitable business model that does exactly that?

if the answer to those questions is yes, well, the solution to the inflated health care cost problem probably lies somewhere in that direction - not in government subsidies, regulation, and oversight.

@#(!, the government itself making the necessary investments to build and implement a program like that would probably be more effective at solving the problem than arguing about and implementing convoluted laws and policies.

Of course there is a market, however you will need to check with your own local laws regarding the legalities of trying to do so. It may not be allowed.

There are practices that run profitably on nearly exclusively Medicare patients!!!

I would focus my efforts on hospitals and medical providers... insurers have this capability, but their customers tend to leave when they start playing real hardball with the providers and especially when they start to say "go to this provider instead."

QUOTE (germloucks @ Dec 7 2011, 01:46 PM) Camaro, you keep saying its illegal, but that isnt the case. Every single challenge to the law in federal court, except one, has lost. After all there is lots of legal precedence for telling everyone not to buy something for their own good, how is that qualitatively different from telling them they HAVE to buy something for their own good?

Telling someone NOT to buy something... well... as you would guess it, I would say shouldn't be up to the Feds

... but in all seriousness, there is a large difference between saying you can't buy this, and... Oh yeah, you gotta shell out $15,000 a year to a private company for a family plan that, over the course of a decade, will probably cost $30,000.

Insurance reform is pointless... it really is... AT BEST, you might save a tad-bit on administrative function. So, neat, you just accomplished a ONE TIME savings of 1% of your premium. Your rates will continue to rise indefinitely.

HMO Redux with the Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) is something that was in-process prior to Obamacare, however Obamacare does encourage the development of these (which is a good thing). However even Medicare/Medicaid was investigating these on their own.



One nice thing about Obamacare, however, is that it shifts a lot of medical costs away from states & localities onto the Feds. Good for State budgets, bad for Federal budgets... will get even worse once our debt is downgraded because no one can agree on massive spending cuts & tax hikes.



And lastly, Mr. Germ, I believe that a Single Payer system could probably get past Constitutional muster. I don't agree with it, but you could achieve your Universal Coverage that way through the tax code. And Obamacare may skate by the same way, you don't HAVE to purchase medical care, you just pay a tax penalty if you don't. So who knows?

QUOTE (Malicious Wraith @ Dec 7 2011, 04:04 PM) Uhhh... because one ensures the protection of civil liberties, the other infringes upon them?
That should be pretty clear.

Actually both instances infringe upon civil liberties. One just adds monetary distress to the equation.

[Malicious Wraith]

QUOTE (Camaro @ Dec 7 2011, 08:22 PM) Actually both instances infringe upon civil liberties. One just adds monetary distress to the equation.

Ahh crap. I misread what he said.

You is right.

[germloucks]

I think im getting trolled.

[Camaro]

QUOTE (germloucks @ Dec 7 2011, 05:43 PM) I think im getting trolled.

What? You think I'm completely unreasonable?

Its a cynical look on my part, but I believe it would pass Constitutional muster via the twistered interpretation of Interstate Commerce as well as the general welfare clause that allows the taxes to be levied.

[Duckwarrior]

Why the NHS works for us, but wouldn't for you. By someone who doesn't really know.

We want it. Very, very few people here would consider dismantling it. If a party put that in their election manifesto they would be committing political suicide. The few attempts at killing the NHS because of political ideology have been backdoor, starving it of funds and via attempts at part privatisation, such as the dentistry debacle enacted by Mrs Thatcher's govt. You don't want it. The model cannot succeed in the US because you just like your way better.

It really is as socialist as socialist gets though, virtually Soviet in fact. You can't hide that fact, and socialist anything would never gain popular support over there.

It is a product of its time. 1946 was very different to today. Europe had just emerged from a war that left it bankrupt. People wanted change. If it hadn't been born then it was never going to be. Big business and its political allies would kill it stone dead with propaganda if you tried to launch it today.

Economy of scale. We get great medical care for relatively little cost. Not the best, but it is very good, and we get what we are prepared to pay for. we do very well for the amount we contribute, I would venture to say as well as any healthcare system anywhere, dollar for dollar.

Latest available data from WHO's website for the US:

Code: Select all

Total population    314,659,000
Gross national income per capita (PPP international $)    46,790
Life expectancy at birth m/f (years)    76/81
Probability of dying under five (per 1 000 live births)    8
Probability of dying between 15 and 60 years m/f (per 1 000 population)    134/78
Total expenditure on health per capita (Intl $, 2009)    7,410
Total expenditure on health as % of GDP (2009)    16.2

And for the UK:

Code: Select all

Total population    61,565,000
Gross national income per capita (PPP international $)    36,240
Life expectancy at birth m/f (years)    78/82
Probability of dying under five (per 1 000 live births)    5
Probability of dying between 15 and 60 years m/f (per 1 000 population)    95/58
Total expenditure on health per capita (Intl $, 2009)    3,399
Total expenditure on health as % of GDP (2009)    9.3

The NHS produces comparable figures to the US system for about half of the cost. These stats obviously don't tell the whole story. The States is geographically very different from the UK. We are a compact nation of sixty million, due to our small size you are never far from a hospital, just because you are never far from anything here. Someone who has a heart attack in rural Montana isn't going to get into a hospital and treated as quickly as a Brit, because rural here would be suburban to a lot of America.

Mythbusting some misconceptions:

If you decide you want to top your care up to the highest level possible here, then you are free to buy insurance.

NICE isn't a death panel. It decides what drugs the NHS can afford. $100 dollars buys only so much. Obviously 100 $1 treatments or 2 $50 treatments. This doesn't mean cutting edge drugs are unavailable on the NHS. The vast majority of medications are. If a brand new med is too expensive, it isn't long before the pharma companies drop it to a price point that it becomes available to NHS patients, simply because sixty million people represent a lot of sales. Are all drugs and treatments available on all insurance policies in the US? So often the discussion seems to be a comparison between the best level of care that you could receive versus the level of care that everybody gets here.

You are free to register with any doctor, provided they cover your area. Obviously a doctor isn't going to want to be treating patients a hundred miles away. But you definitely don't have a doctor appointed to you by the state. If you don't like your GP, register with another.

You are free to be treated in any hospital in the country that you choose. Big waiting list for a non emergency procedure? Get on the phone and find a hospital with a shorter one, get referred, jump in your car and get fixed. Waiting lists are nothing like they were. Labour increased the funding that the Conservatives starved the NHS of. We needed a change though, because Labour can't stop spending, it's how our political system works. Labour get in and repair the NHS, the Tories get in and repair the economy. It is a never ending circle.

The NHS is Europe's largest employer, and the world's largest publicly funded Healthcare system. QUOTE It employs more than 1.7m people. Of those, just under half are clinically qualified, including, 39,409 general practitioners (GPs), 410,615 nurses, 18,450 ambulance staff and 103,912 hospital and community health service (HCHS) medical and dental staff.
Only the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, the Wal-Mart supermarket chain and the Indian Railways directly employ more people.[/quote]
Like the US DOD's spending, the money that this vast machine spends doesn't simply go away, it is circulated within the economy. Profits aren't syphoned off by foreign investors and taken out of the country, sick people aren't paying for bankers yachts. It is largely retained within the economy, providing real jobs with real benefits to cleaners, IT staff and all of the other support functions that are represented. The Conservatives have just installed a private management company into a hospital for a trial, and you just know that any savings are going to be made via crappy short term agency jobs with minimum benefits and people with zero interest. God forbid the public buy into this junk. They are trying to fix something that isn't broken.

If you're honest, doesn't not having to worry about a medical bill or what level of coverage your job provides or you can afford for you and your family, ever, sound like a pretty good thing? If the care was horrible or massively expensive I could fathom the reasoning. As it is, it just seems like whenever healthcare reform is mentioned, smoke and mirrors are employed on a massive scale to deter you from considering any level of change. Why would that be?

In conclusion, if you are going to use the NHS as an example of how horrible public healthcare is, find some actual facts, don't use hearsay and received opinion.

[MrChaos]

I'm so happy for you Duckie ~cg

[Raveen]

On a personal note I've recently had my longest contact with the NHS of my life through the birth of my son. I have to say that everyone at the hospital was excellent as is the aftercare we're still receiving (and will receive for the next 5 years). Despite being clearly very busy the hospital staff attended to all our needs in a very timely fashion and the support they offered after the birth could not have been better.

I know that this is not even remotely scientific and is obviously just one impression of a massive organisation but I have found the NHS to be worth every penny.

[Camaro]

QUOTE (Duckwarrior @ Dec 8 2011, 01:09 AM) In conclusion, if you are going to use the NHS as an example of how horrible public healthcare is, find some actual facts, don't use hearsay and received opinion.

Woah, sorry I wasn't implying that you had a horrible system. I was just pointing out that there was at least one American system that was comparable to NHS on cost and quality (and in California even!).


The US actually has at least two other totally awesome systems... the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic. These two organizations provide their service for so much less than other providers and provide superior quality... its not even funny. System such as those should be encouraged here.

Because as it stands right now... our healthcare will become completely unaffordable to most Americans in the next few decades... at which point we may see some real change.