Impeding changes to our Health Care system

[whosonfirst]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

Don't worry. There's no plan that will affect the ability of the wealthy to self-finance their own treatment. But if I'm on a health plan, I'd trust a government beaurocrat over a health insurance company.

I wasn't ragging on capitalism; jut pointing out that there are some areas where market pressure isn't in the right direction.

On the contrary most government run single payer(governemnt run) plans DO NOT allow for opt outs or selectively going outside the plan to your own doctor. They control by making it illegal for the Doctor to treat outside the plan sometimes and continue to participate in the plan for the balance of his practice.

Lets not get distracted by the thousands of pages of details that are in these proposals. There is only one thing to consider. If the real objective is to control costs-and I believe that is NOT the real objective-then we need to look at the federal governments track record of 'controlling costs': medicare/medicaid costs 100's of percent higher than initially projected; education spending out of control for declining performance, $800 toilet seats and $140 screws, etc.

Or on a larger scale the overall success of centrally controlled governments at providing a decent quality of life for their citizenry- USSR, Communist China, North Korea, Iran, and how many others.

Bottom line --with the 'awful' healthcare system we have here-you can count on one hand the number of people leaving the US to get better health care elsewhere. And those are invariably for experimental treatments. And when residents of only those moderately socialist places like France, Scandinavia, Canada-with their government run programs need superior care, they come here.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by whosonfirst

On the contrary most government run single payer(governemnt run) plans DO NOT allow for opt outs or selectively going outside the plan to your own doctor. They control by making it illegal for the Doctor to treat outside the plan sometimes and continue to participate in the plan for the balance of his practice.

First, I don't know about "most", but it is definitely not the case for all single-payer plans.

Second, there is no single payer plan being proposed for the US.

[whosonfirst]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

First, I don't know about "most", but it is definitely not the case for all single-payer plans.

Second, there is no single payer plan being proposed for the US.

Are doctors who accept medicare allowed to treat medicare participants outside of medicare? NO!. Same in England, Canada, etc. And those are the systems advocates here look to as models of government plans.

In fact, they ARE proposing a single-payer in practice. By artificially creating a lower rate schedule people will opt for lower direct out of pocket and eventually dry up private carriers.

If they thought they could get the votes for an openly stated single-payer plan they would go right for it, because the outcome will not provide lower overall costs-its impossible when the government runs things-they would go right for it. But the words 'single paper' scare people too much so they put it in the details while denying it publicly.