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StumbleLETTER TO THE EDITOR:
Single-payer system is simplest, best way
Sunday, May 24, 2009 | 2:02 a.m.
Good for Cynthia Shiroky, who hit the nail on the head in her May 17 letter to the editor in the Las Vegas Sun supporting a single-payer health care system. We have a universal health care system with Medicare.
Medicare’s overhead is a minimal 3 percent, and it has an excellent, established distribution system throughout the country. How do I know this? I worked in Washington for Rep. John Conyers in 2003 when his health care bill, HR676, was totally overshadowed by the impending war in Iraq.
President Barack Obama’s plan has too many paths for people to use to obtain health care, and will become much too confusing to oversee, regulate and fund. Employers should not have anything to do with health insurance, as that’s exactly how the American automakers got into the trouble they are now mired in — having tremendous health care costs for both current employees and retirees that they had to add on to the cost of each car, rendering them noncompetitive with foreign car manufacturers.
Don’t listen to opponents of the single-payer system who tell you that your medical care will be in the hands of bureaucrats. That’s not true, and isn’t your care now in the hands of heartless health insurance company administrators who are just interested in the bottom line?
We could slowly add more and more Americans by age groups to the current Medicare system in a comparatively short time until we include everyone, and as Cynthia Shiroky wrote, the billing to one entity in a single-payer system will keep costs down as well as add innovations such as putting everyone’s medical records on a computer database accessible only to medical clients.
A single-payer system will for the first time give every American access to affordable and good health care. That is our right and don’t let public relations firms and lobbyists tell you otherwise.
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We see how well government does when they run out of money. Who receives care when the budget runs out of cash? No one? When the hospital can lose the cancer center and government is cutting everything, do you really want your health care in the next budget plan from government?
Single payer will be worse than our current system which is very similar. Both health insurance and government health care are Third Party Provider Systems.
They seperate the buyer and seller by a disinterested third party. The buyer does not care to get the best price and the seller does not care to give the best price (or care). The result is a system whose prices continue to increase well beyond inflation.
Government single payer health care will not stop this increase, even if they lower doctor salaries and begin to ration health care like preventing care for the elderly (as is currently done in socialized medical economies) or for those who smoke or drink (as is also done in those medical economies).
Also medicare is NOT as efficient as this woman states. It pretends to be efficient but it operates at a loss, requiring taxpayers to heavily subsidize the system. This makes the country poorer than it otherwise would be without it.
We can make things better by encouraging health savings accounts and removing restrictions on health insurance purchases (allow us to purchase health insurance from any out of state policy). Reducing mandates will also help.
"We have a universal health care system with Medicare.
Medicare's overhead is a minimal 3 percent, and it has an excellent, established distribution system throughout the country."
The problem is It is broke.
That is not the "best way"
Ude,
Maybe you can explain how socialized medicine manages to avoid all the problems associated with "free" services - no rationing, no waiting, no out of control growth, no lack of innovation.
Why does everything else in the market suffer from these problems when the government takes complete control and takes market forces out but not medicine and health care?
Patrick, and others, are missing the most important truth about single payer vs. an insurance-based health care system: Under single payer there will be no costs associated with advertising, marketing, product development, stock options, profits, or lobbying, and the costs associated with billing will be dramatically reduced. This will allow us to provide quality services to everyone at a lower cost than we do today.
The problem of overutilization related to services being free has been studied in many contexts and just hasn't proven to be a problem. The bottom line is that people don't like going to the doctor, and making it free doesn't result in overuse of unneeded care but does result in better compliance with needed care, hence lower costs for severe illness and disability, less time missed from work, etc.
Doctor Aaron,
This same exact argument was given to us in the 1930s when people demanded more centralized control over the economy. We got government arranged cartels and near monopolies as a result. That meant high prices.
What people forget is that advertising dollars aren't a waste. That is money companies spend trying to prove to you they have the best product at the best price.
Getting more government involvement means less competition. That means a shoddy product at a higher price. There has been no good examples to show that NO competition leads to better service and lower prices. Period.
On top of that, the good doctor missed the point about government care and our current insurance system being virtually one in the same - they are both third party payer systems.
I'd also like to see these studies that suggest their isnt an overuse of medical services when its "free" all indications in socialized countries suggest lengthy waiting lines and weeks if not months for treatment in some cases.
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_...
Yes, rationing of health care exists in socialized medicine countries. Its not the utopia they promise.