In the GOP debate in Jacksonville, Florida, Rick Santorum beat the snot out of Mitt Romney on one of the biggest policy issues fueling the persistent if frustrated Not-Romney vote: health care. Pressed by Santorum, Romney made clear that if he is the nominee, conservatives can kiss ObamaCare goodbye as a debate issue. Check out the transcript from CNN:
SANTORUM: What Governor Romney just said is that government-run top-down medicine is working pretty well in Massachusetts and he supports it. Now, think about what that means --
ROMNEY: That's not what I said.
SANTORUM: -- going up against Barack Obama, who you are going to claim, well, top-down government-run medicine on the federal level doesn't work and we should repeal it. And he's going to say, wait a minute, Governor. You just said that top-down government-run medicine in Massachusetts works well.
Folks, we can't give this issue away in this election. It is about fundamental freedom. Whether the United States government or even a state government -- you have Amendment 1 (ph) here offered by Scott Pleitgen (ph), who, by the way, endorsed me today, and it's going to be on your ballot as to whether there should be a government mandate here in Florida.
According to Governor Romney, that's OK. If the state does it, that's OK. If the state wants to enforce it, that's OK. Those are not the clear contrasts we need if we're going to defeat Barack Obama....
ROMNEY: Rick, I make enough mistakes in what I say, not for you to add more mistakes to what I say. I didn't say I'm in favor of top- down government-run health care, 92 percent of the people in my state had insurance before our plan went in place. And nothing changes for them. They own the same private insurance they had before.
And for the 8 percent of people who didn't have insurance, we said to them, if you can afford insurance, buy it yourself, any one of the plans out there, you can choose any plan. There's no government plan.
And if you don't want to buy insurance, then you have to help pay for the cost of the state picking up your bill, because under federal law if someone doesn't have insurance, then we have to care for them in the hospitals, give them free care. So we said, no more, no more free riders. We are insisting on personal responsibility.
Either get the insurance or help pay for your care. And that was the conclusion that we reached.
SANTORUM: Does everybody in Massachusetts have a requirement to buy health care?
ROMNEY: Everyone has a requirement to either buy it or pay the state for the cost of providing them free care. Because the idea of people getting something for free when they could afford to care for themselves is something that we decided in our state was not a good idea.
[...]
SANTORUM: Just so I understand this, in Massachusetts, everybody is mandated as a condition of breathing in Massachusetts, to buy health insurance, and if you don't, and if you don't, you have to pay a fine.
What has happened in Massachusetts is that people are now paying the fine because health insurance is so expensive. And you have a pre-existing condition clause in yours, just like Barack Obama... [GOP debate, CNN transcript, Jacksonville, Florida, 2012.01.26].
Romney is left so out of ammunition that he has to resort to sneaky debate tactics and condescendingly say to Santorum, "It's not worth getting angry about." I know that trick: when you're losing, try to portray your opponent's passion about an important issue as irrational emotion. Heck, Santorum could naked through Disney World screaming "RomneyCare = ObamaCare!" and his momentary lapse of judgment would not negate the fact that a majority of voters will not recognize any meaningful distinction between the individual mandates embraced by Governor Romney and President Obama.
I don't mind if ObamaCare is an issue in this Presidential election. It's good policy. President Obama can defend it and win on it. If you want to challenge the President on that issue, then Santorum makes clear that you'd better not send Romney to make your case.
Alas, Santorum is not going to Disney World. He's going home, tired and broke, to do his taxes.
Why do you feel it is a good policy? I feel repelled by counter-competitive laws that basically tell insurance companies they have to dumb down a little and get rid of their cost algorithms, tell them that forgetting to do risk analysis isn't just okay, it's required.
Healthcare is another sector of our economy, and just that. There's nothing special about the medical sector, nothing that requires such crazy regulations as PPACA lays down. The anti-discrimination bit that kicks in in 2014 is the equivalent of not allowing banks to check people's credit scores before they loan them money. So no, I'm not a huge supporter of "Obamacare." But I'd love to hear your reasons for supporting it, Mr. Heidelberger, because I'm certainly quite isolated from the other side on this subject.
Breaking from CBS: Americans want a Democratic Congress.
"I know that trick: when you’re losing, try to portray your opponent’s passion about an important issue as irrational emotion. "
A lot of that going on in South Dakota and this blog.
... ObamaCare is an issue in this Presidential election. It’s good policy. President Obama can defend it and win on it.
What if the Supreme Court declares the individual mandate unconstitutional?
Obamacare, in my opinion, is a mess, like trying to clean up barf with poop.
We need Kucinichcare, plain and simple.
Stan, Dennis is still my man. And McGovern: Medicare E... for Everyone!
Elliot, health care is not just another sector of the economy. Like education, we have a keen public interest in making health care available to every citizen, not just those who can afford it... and actually, almost no one can afford it. That's why we have insurance... and that works poorly on a for-profit basis. What do your French hosts think of turning their health coverage over to private, for-profit corporations?
Cory:
This came in an email from Alan Grayson today who is garnering support and donations for Kucinich. Maybe you knew about this. I did not and find it shocking.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1861526/posts
Most of them aren't fans, obviously, I'll take Steven Levitt's empirically backed side in just about any issue he has data on (Dr. Levitt is a University of Chicago economist, who I'd love to study under in a few years.) He points out that treating the healthcare sector as anything "special" is irrational behavior, courtesy of the consumer.
So, here's a little ditty from the brilliant Mr. Levitt, who says, "Well, my friends in the Obama Administration aren’t going to be very happy with me, but I really, I don’t think it solved any of the important problems that we’re facing with healthcare. So virtually every economist will tell you that there were two things you needed to do to healthcare reform to materially improve the situation. The first was to break the link between the provision of healthcare and employment. And that is just an archaic element of our healthcare system, which really makes no sense. And yet because of tax subsidies, it’s the way most people get their healthcare — through their employer. It shouldn't be. There’s no good economic justification for it. And yet, if anything, I think this healthcare reform bill actually strengthened that link. … [Healthcare] is virtually the only part of the economy where I can go out and get any service I want—cancer treatment, open heart surgery, have a wart removed, whatever it is—and I pay $3 for it or $5 for it or nothing, even if it costs $50,000 or $100,000. I mean, imagine if you had the same situation with automobiles. Where I could show up at the car dealership and I could say, ‘I want the Mercedes for free.’ Well, people say, ‘You can’t have the Mercedes for free. You have to pay $50,000 for it.’ You say, ‘Why not, I have an inalienable right to free healthcare. Right? Why don’t I have an inalienable right to a free Mercedes?’"
Back to France, however, while their socialized medicine may serve everyone, we have to ask how well it is serving them. Yeah, I could open up a stand on the street and give free medical aid to anyone who came, for free. Me. Without a medical background (beyond the Boy Scouts' first aid merit badge) or a proper equipment. Would that be a good system? I'd would be giving care to EVERYONE, after all. The American system provides us with the highest quality doctors, because it's significantly more beneficial to be a doctor in the free market than it is in a highly controlled one. Medical tourists enter America to gain access to the best technology, and the best trained doctors. I have a distant cousin (once removed, I believe) who works at the Mayo clinic. Among my cousin's patients is an Emirate prince. Now, why isn't he going to France or Sweden for his medical needs?
There are basically two medical extremes: Cost too high, and quality too low. We were a lot closer to the "cost too high" problem, but we'll be right in the middle of the "quality too low" problem, soon.
As for saying it's like education, Mr. Heidelberger, you're absolutely right! That's why I'm a proponent of Friedman's views on school choice! When done correctly, school choice essentially has a Medicaid option for the poorest of folks, while effectively privatizing (albeit slightly subsidizing, to start, at least) the sector, and providing much better, more specific education than a public school could, while empowering parents and students with freedom of choice.
So, I guess we don't exactly see eye-to-eye on either of these issues, but as always it's interesting to discuss them here, where viewpoints seem to be coming at you from every conceivable angle.
Elliot
Health care is just like any other part of the economy - until you have cancer, or your spouse has Alzheimer's, and you have to pay everything you have to stay alive. Don't be naive: The reason the wealthy from around the world come to America for their health care is quite simple: if you have enough money, you can get anything you need here, along with every imaginable luxury, and the wealthy like that and expect it. The reverse side of it is medical tourism to India, where, if you don't have the cash plus insurance that's required in America (and most of us don't; there's no such thing as $3 cancer treatment), you can still get necessary, excellent treatment. And, of course, there are huge numbers of people in this country who do not get any care except in the emergency room (at hideous expense to the taxpayer, I might add) because they cannot afford doctors or insurance. I realize that many people today say they believe that the latter should just go ahead and die, but again, they think that until it happens to them. And it can. That is the real world. That catastrophes happen. No one is immune from sudden poverty (tornado, stock market collapse, business folding, catastrophic illness); no one is immune from sudden catastrophic illness. To pretend that somehow it's all someone else's improvidence that creates their hell is just trying to whistle past the graveyard that has your open casket waiting.
Best doctors, best technology, twice the cost... and we aren't living longer than the rest of the world. Hmm...
But Elliot, health care doesn't operate by free market principles. I can't operate as a rational market actor even if I want to. When our daughter was born, the doctor said she needed to go to Sioux Falls for ICU treatment. I didn't have the time or knowledge to examine the doctor's claim and comparison shop. I barely had time to ask to take the ground ambulance instead of the helicopter, just to keep the price down, even though I didn't have any idea what the exact prices were or how much would be picked up by my insurance company. In Sioux Falls, no person providing the immediate care or the accommodations could tell me how much things cost. When I asked that my wife be moved to a simpler room rather than what looked like a deluxe suite which must have cost more, the nurse not only could not tell me a price, but she said (paraphrasing), "Oh, just relax and enjoy it." In each of those situations, I felt like people would look at me like I was some kind of bastard for even asking such price questions when my daughter's life might be at stake. And don't even get me started on trying to understand all the complicated and deliberately deceptive ins and outs of health insurance policies.
Health care is too complicated and too urgent to be treated as just another consumer product. The only way we can afford health care now is if we all jump in the pool together. That's the reality of insurance... and private insurance works too hard to deny coverage to the people who need it most. The moral and practical thing to do to save lives and save money is to take basic health care out of the private sector and take care of our neighbors, all of our neighbors. Medicare for Everyone takes an enormous burden off the economy and allows us to spend more resources more productively in other competitive sectors of the economy.
I'd like to think that we've evolved as a society, that we don't still treat medicine as "magic" and doctors as "masters of the unknown" as our ancestors once did. Apparently, we haven't. Some of us still treat medicine as something "from the beyond!" Something that is so indomitable that it should be exempt from our general social principals! What else do we believe to be true? That we must beware of fire-breathing dragons, or great serpents in the sea? That our planet is as flat as a piece of paper? That we must sacrifice virgins to satisfy the gods? I find belief in any of these things to be foolish, and the fact so many people find healthcare to be in a category of its own stuns me. Yes, lives are at stake when it comes to healthcare, but are they not also at stake when buying a car? When choosing a neighborhood to live in? When deciding what to eat? Should these not all be regulated, too? And, seeing as the government is implicitly best at deciding these things for us, the idea is to have the government step in to protect the people, right? In that case, every single consumer decision should be made by the government, no? Okay, you're welcome to experiment with totalitarianism, but please don't import it to America, some of us like to make our own choices!
I think the fact that a great many doctors (including my dear uncle, or my cousin) could give you several dozen pages (each), debunking the myth that this healthcare system will work also stands in my favor. Below is a video from a very intelligent, articulate doctor who agrees with my stance on this issue. If anyone reading this is a practicing physician, I'd love to hear your thoughts! I'm not a practicing physician, and it's not a field I find myself to be particularly suited for, but nonetheless, I think a doctor's "prognosis" on this issue may be really insightful (first-hand, please, I can search for doctors' links on my own, but if there is a doctor hear willing to chime in, I think everyone would MUCH appreciate your views!) Perhaps you could "prescribe" us some papers to read, or some statistics to view.
Elliot
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8D_e1osuomg&feature=related
P.S. I think I'll take Dr. Levitt's empirical, research-based views over your personal experience, this time, Mr. Heidelberger, and I will also point out that you did act rationally in the situation. A rational consumer can only make choices where choices can be made, and can only make them on the information available (rational consumers aren't God, after all.) Given the predicament you were in, a perfectly rational consumer would make the exact same choices, or very similar ones, by evaluating the value of time and the risk of personal (emotional) loss to be greater than the potential difference in cost, in this scenario.
Of course Cory made the right choice; as did I when my husband had a massive heart attack and they wanted to airlift him to Sioux Falls and I said yes. And these are the choices that matter in the health care debate, because these are the expensive ones. A regular check-up, a mammogram, a prostate exam, all are fairly inexpensive, and you can check up, check around, do your research, choose when/where, etc. to do it. It's the crisis situations - no time to research, decision now - that break the bank. These are the ones that any health care policy has to deal with, but so far hasn't. Instead, everyone skips this part of the question, and pretends that it's so rare. But it isn't. Look up the odds for heart attack, stroke, etc., and you'll see that, if it hasn't happened in your immediate family yet, it will. And, as I said before, for the uninsured and broke, when crisis hits they go straight to the emergency rooms and, thus, the taxpayer. And that emergency room care costs the taxpayer far more than any mandated insurance would.
This is not totalitarianism. Using such language simply insults those who lived under Stalin or Mao or the Nazis.
And as for choice: those who think they really have unlimited choice right now, are living in a fool's paradise. There are a limited number of insurance companies operating in the State of South Dakota. Before Obama's health care plan, if you had pre-existing conditions, you could be turned down for insurance - severely limiting "choice". And, finally, please remember that we are a pay as you go health care system, and unless you have the kind of money that, say, the Shah of Iran had, you're not going to get the kind of treatment that he had. Period. Doesn't matter what kind of insurance you have. I've said this before, but unless you have, say, a million dollars in cash saved and stashed away, there's a damn good chance that a catastrophic illness will take everything you have earned and leave you and your immediate family broke and in debt, no matter how hard you've worked.
Going back to why the world-wide rich come to America, there's another factor that's never mentioned but fairly important: conspicuous consumption. The rich like to spend money, and they like to spend a lot of it even when they don't have to. How else to explain $250 t-shirts? Or, here, the $400,000 t-shirt: http://themostexpensivetshirtintheworld.com/
Even the wealthy (gasp!) don't make rational economic decisions.
Elliot, what the doctor in your video is doing to that woman (and by extension any senior who watchs it) is patently immoral. He should be barred from the practice of medicine.
Watch this, Elliot.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6bwbbjY4Os&feature=player_embedded#!
But Elliot, my position has nothing to do with some mystical conception of doctors' powers. You miss the point that I could not act according to free market principles because key free market information, price, was completely absent. No one could show me a dollar amount at decision time.
I watched .23 of Elliot's video and I'll tell you the end of it.
My husband's friend David: employed by University of Missouri with the best health insurance possible, 57 year old insulin-dependent diabetic with 12 heart stents prior to open heart surgery November 2010.
June 2011 he goes to the emergency room again with chest pain.
His Obamacare-hating, Bentley-driving cardiologist tells David he doesn't "qualify" under Obamacare for another stent because he didn't have enough blockage right then. "If we didn't have this goddamned Obamacare, I would operate right now and make you feel better!" Actual quote. My husband was at most of these appointment with David.
2 days later, David's back in the ER, chest pains. Test results show same amount of blockage but the cardiologist puts another stent in anyway. No other tests were performed prior to the stent.
October 2011, David is physically worse than before the June stent, deteriorating chest pains daily. Cardiologist says maybe the June stent wasn't needed (not in written in the records, of course) and David needs to man up because Obamacare won't help him much more. This, of course, after the cardiologist is paid for his services under the good private insurance.
David hates President Obama because he's in pain, not going to get better, and his doctor tells him it's Obama's fault.
November 2011. David takes early retirement fro MU, begins to draw long term disability to keep his MU health insurance as long as possible and has applied for SSD. What he really wants from the SSD is the Medicare he gets after two years.
He wants his government provided health insurance. He hates President Obama because what his doctor has told him.
Obamacare wasn't sold to the public well at all. It's right up there with the new flag issue South Dakota is chomping at the bit about. No one sold Obamacare and its benefits to the people. No one sold South Dakota the idea of a new state flag prior to unveiling one out of the blue.
Worse, doctors are operating unethically about it because it's going to cut into a lot of Bentley time and the Medicare gravy train will also come to a halt.
The last people that need to be consulted as experts on the implementation of universal healthcare are the people that are going to lose the most under Obamacare.
Ms. Fisher,
What you're suggesting, giving all of the power of choice to the demand-side, simply doesn't work. A balance between supply and demand has to exist. Imagine for a moment that there is a D-average student, in the bottom 10% of his class. He wants to go to an Ivy League school. Just because he wants, does he get? No. There is too great a demand to meet the supply. A for-profit insurer has the same right to turn down a citizen as Harvard has to turn down the poor student. You may say, "Wait! That citizen was born with preexisting conditions that put him in the position to be declined." Well, did you consider the fact that the student probably has an IQ unfit for an Ivy League school? Seeing as IQ is mainly a preexisting condition, so-to-speak (NY Times Magazine reported IQ as being 75% heritable), the two scenarios can be measured as parallel to each other.
Mr. Fleming,
I stopped watching that video after the host seemed to suggest outlawing an industry (for-profit healthcare.) I happen to be opposed to government regulation of businesses in any way, aside from enforcement of contracts and prevention of fraud and forgery. This man broke one of my biggest rules: NEVER, EVER, EVER think you, or anyone else is smarter than the free market. Look what happens when people do: we get financial recessions, dictatorships, etc.
Mr. Heidelberger,
You chose (wisely, I may add), not to force them to give you a dollar amount. As you stated yourself, you paid the price (literally, a higher cost) for the social comfort you were afforded by not asking for the price. You certainly could have DEMANDED to know the price, and said that you would take your business elsewhere if they did not give you one, but you evaluated the situation, and decided that your the well-being of your wife and daughter, as well as your social comfort (not having to be "That Guy") were worth x dollars. You knew the price of choosing to act one way (demanding the price), to the extent that it alone was enough to convince you to pay the alternative, the extra x dollars. No, I believe the situation is demonstrably free-market, but exact dollar value was unnecessary.
It'd be like if I were at Sotheby's trying to buy a nice new Rembrandt to hang over my fireplace, and up against me were several Russian billionaires, and one Mr. George Soros. I don't need to know the final selling price to know I don't stand a chance at winning this one. Just like you didn't need to know a dollar price to know that your the safety of your wife and daughter was worth more to you. You evaluated the options, eliminated the worst of them, made a choice, choice and acted on it- and there's nothing more free market than that.
Time for me to get to bed though, I stayed up until 1:15 for this one, and I have a concert to watch tomorrow.
Elliot
Taunia, agreed. As per Cory and many other SD Dems, our big gripe is that Medicare E (Universal Health Care) wasn't sold at all.
The irony is, that's what we already have. It's just the most expensive, least intentional, most chaotic, knee-jerk form of it imagineable. ie. Are you sick? Yes. Got any money? No. Go to the emergency room. Okay.
That's okay, Elliot, I stopped watching your video the minute I saw the doctor lying to his paitient in order to scare her into protecting the money in his wallet.
What makes libertarians selfish, void of empathy, materialistic and robotic?
Talk about class warfare, Mr. Heidelberger, Ms. Fisher just brought out the atomic bomb of class warfare: All, or even a sizable portion of doctors drive Bentleys!
Oh, no, sorry 'twas Taunia who talked about the Bentley's. My mistake there... Sorry everyone.
How much money does your uncle doctor lose if universal health care was implemented tomorrow?
Elliot, your free-market fundamentalism takes you too far. I demanded a price. It was Friday afternoon. The medical staff said the one person who could have given me that information was out for the day and wouldn't be back until Monday. Do you seriously think that yanking the IVs from my infant and taking her home, damn the health consequences, would at all be an admirable free-market decision? The "price" I would have paid would possibly have been the death of my child, quite possibly arrest for criminal neglect and loss of custody of our newborn child.
For the free market to apply, there has to be a market, with stated, accessible prices. Almost no one has sufficient information to make fully rational decisions in the health care "marketplace."
That whole "free market" thing...
Now rest up for that concert, Elliot... and sleep peacefully, knowing that if you get sick, French health care can probably fix you up without forcing you or your folks to go bankrupt. (How does that work, anyway? Did you have to buy special travel insurance? Who exactly pays your bills if you have to go to the hospital?)
He's not in the U.S.?
Elliot labors under the false assumption that anyone in our system who has either health care insurance, medicare or medicaid as their financial resource for health care delivery has any say whatsoever about what the health care costs will be. By and large, people don't care what the cost of their health care cost is beyond their copay and deductables. And even if they do, there's nothing they can do about it.
I submit that if the American Health care system were truly freemarket based, there would be a lot fewer doctors making a lot less money and a lot more dead people. Think Deadwood SD, circa 1876.
Insurance was mandatory, I believe, for Rotary Exchange Students. Not sure of the exact cost. I've visited the doctor twice (once for a sports medical, once for a cold), and each time it cost me 23 Euros, but was reimbursed by my insurance. The problem I find is that when the costs are so uniformly low, as they are in France, you get people who will go to the doctor over a cold, and the doctor will prescribe five different medications for you. Now, I didn't need to go to the doctor over my cold, or be prescribed five different medicines, but my host family had me do it anyways because it's not a big deal over here. Meanwhile, there are people with much worse maladies out there who are being killed by universal healthcare, because, while I'm in there describing the symptoms of what I know to be a harmless cold, I'm taking away time from the doctors, who could be helping people who NEED to be treated. That is a huge evil of universal healthcare, to me. The fact that one person can be in the doctor's office, complaining about his sneeze, while the guy who is having a seizure is in the waiting room is just intolerable to me. Apparently those of you who support European-style universal healthcare don't mind that; you're just fine with that poor chap dying in the waiting room as the doctor tells the patient it's just a head cold. This may sound like an exaggeration, but it is a bitter reality, and I invite you to witness the system yourself, if you disagree.
If anything, I think that America's system provides us with a better mentality, healthcare-wise. In France, they're generally opposed to many preventative measures, like vaccinations. Thus, they're more susceptible to the big illnesses. They follow a reactionary program, not a preventative one, although it's widely agreed that preventative medicine not only works better, but is also a whole lot more cost effective. High prices serve as a natural deterrent to reactionary medicine, and when we think the high prices have disappeared... BANG! We all start using limited medical resources very inefficiently!
I came over to France on the far left of things, politically. I'd read most of Marx's works, and would've described myself as an anarcho-syndicalist. I can't tell you embarrassed I am to say that, but, much like Tolstoy saw and refuted the errors of his ways when he embraced Christianity, I've embraced classical liberalism. It took me less than two months in France (a mixed-market NATO member) to realize the flaws of their social and economic policies, and realized that I'd been supporting what was essentially an idiot's philosophy. I'll come out and say it: I WAS AN IDIOT! And being the idiot that I was, I supported PPACA wholeheartedly. I can now tell you exactly what's wrong with "Obamacare," because I've perceived it from every possible angle over the last year. I urge you to reevaluate your stances on this issue, as it truly is a very important one, and the consequences would be grave, were we to make a mistake.
The idiot,
Elliot Knuths
Sorry about the grammatical error(s) I've posed in there, I just spotted a rather obvious one after skimming...
Elliot, don't worry about the grammar, just do some work on your logic.
Your post is so full of internal contradiction its hard to know where to start in terms of sorting it out.
Are you upset because you were required to have health insurance? Or because your host family wanted you do go to the doctor" Or because you weren't charged enough much money for your doctor visit? Or because your insurance company reimbursed you for such a modest expense?
Were you going to the doc for preventive maintenence? Or because you had a real problem. Should people see docs for preventive maintenence? Or should they wait until something is really wrong with them?
Do you really want people thinking they shouldn't see a doctor because they might be using up time better spent on someone who is really sick? i.e. do you expect people to self diagnose?
You're all over the board here, Elliot. Maybe forget about whether you're a Marxist. a Christian, or a Libertarian for a minute and just concentrate on being a good critical thinker.
If you find me tough to understand, Mr. Fleming, you would really hate my buddy Wittgenstein...
If I recall, Wittgenstein emphacised intentionality, Elliot. That's what I'm suggesting you do as well. Clarify your intention.
Put that poker down, Elliot... ;-)
23 euros, fully reimbursed: sounds better than U.S. rates. And the equal life expectancies seem to belie your concern that you were killing people with your less-than-urgent doctor visits. As for the poor chap suffering seizures in the emergency room, he's still more likely to suffer preventable death in the U.S. than in any other industrialized nation.
Out of 16 industrialized countries, the U.S. has the worst rate of deaths that could be prevented by timely access to health care: 96 deaths per 100,000 population. Guess whose rate was best? France: 56/100K. Vive la France... heck, vive en France!!!
As to answering your questions, Mr. Fleming, I'm not upset that I had to buy insurance, I was answering Mr. Heidelberger's question. I can understand Rotary wanting to protect itself and exchange students from terrible harm, and in the current system, health insurance is the most sufficient way to do that. What I'm frustrated with is France's culture of reactive medicine, maybe I didn't make it clear enough. I'm not mad that my insurance company reimbursed me, that's what I expect them to do... that's why I'm paying them in the first place, right? (Or is THAT the lapse in logic?)
I am mad because lowered costs make people more liberal in their going to the hospital. A natural deterrent for not getting in car crashes is that your rates will potentially rise if you do. If we say that you can drive as aggressively as you like and your rates will stay constant, well, you better buckle up. Talk about collateral damage. And it's the same with universal healthcare. Of course people should see doctors for preventative maintenance, but when was the last time you had a neurologist check you out when you accidentally, lightly bumped your head? People should certainly go for preventative maintenance, and when things are REALLY wrong, but making everything cheaper makes everything seemingly more expendable.
I do expect people to self-diagnose, to a degree. You know when something is potentially very wrong. I know when something is potentially very wrong. When the cost is lessened though, excess runs wild. If you drive by a place that's selling fine French Champagne (from my region, I might add) for a price that's just crazy, like 50 cents a bottle, you might feel you "need" to buy it, because it's an offer too good to refuse. However, if you're "thirsty," and you drive by a place selling bottled water at an outrageous price, you might reevaluate whether you're thirsty or not. If you are, the water is worth it. If you aren't you're saving their supply of water for someone who is thirsty enough to pay for it. I say keeping healthcare prices reasonable (not too cheap nor too expensive) gives us a better chance to make reasonable evaluations of our needs, which is the rational thing to do.
I think I'm finished posting in this thread, though. Debating three or four different people can get a little exhausting, and it's not worth it if you're not willing to open your minds the slightest bit.
Elliot
Looks like Elliot got worn out arguing with himself. Come back when you rest up, Mr. Knuths. It's always interesting to watch your young mind at work.
Elliot, nobody wants to get sick. Only a few neurotics enjoy going to the doctor. I am one of the most liberal South Dakotans around, and if you gave me French health coverage, I still wouldn't go to the doctor unless I absolutely had to. I would simply be content—no, ecstatic!—to know that one slip on the ice, one tumor, one bad virus would not leave me uninsurable and bankrupt my family.
I'd also be happy that, per the evidence above, we would prevent the deaths of thousands of my fellow Americans.
I understand the difficulty of arguing with several people at once, Elliot. I appreciate your willingness to engage as much as you do with this rowdy crowd, and your ability to do so without getting personal. But you have to be careful about reducing real experience to analogical abstractions. The market dynamics and moral dynamics of a 50-cent bottle of water are not the same as what Erin and I experienced while making decisions for our newborn daughter.
...and Bill, Elliot does have homework to do... and a concert to attend! Thankfully, he has good insurance with apparently no deductible, so he doesn't have to worry as much about getting sent to the hospital in a riot by rowdy Mozart fans. :-)
I have to add, Elliot, that you are arguing the wrong part of health expenditures. It's not the everlasting tests that make up the skyrocketing cost of health care in this country, even when someone (though I've never met them) gets a cat-scan for a bump on the head.
5% of the population accounts for 50% of the spending. Please read that sentence again: 5% of the population accounts for 50% fo the spending on health care. This means that 95% of the population is very frugal with regard to health services.
Who/what/where are the 5%? Of that 5% of the population, 39% of them are elderly (65 and over); and of that, a lot of them are dealing with end of life costs (see below). The rest are people who have something catastrophic happen to them: stroke, car wreck, heart attack, aneurism, other accident, illness (pneumonia, flu, etc.) with complications, surgery with complications (staph infection, etc.). Some of these people will eventually recover and return to the bottom 95%. Some will not. Any of these could be you, or me, or anyone, anywhere, any time. It's not a matter of frugality. It's a matter of s**t happens.
16% of all health-care spending is on end of life care. Why is that so pricey? Because most people can't bring themselves to pull the plug on granny.
All of the above can be referenced, for one, at http://www.ahrq.gov/research/ria19/expendria.pdf
So, Elliot, you've been screaming about the wrong problem. Most people are frugal, very careful with their health care dollars: until the catastrophe hits. Then they do what Cory and I both did: get their loved one the care they needed because they wanted that person to survive. This is the reality of the health care world, how it's lived out day by day.
@splcenter: Racist? It might just be your low IQ. Go figure.