Originally posted by: glenn1
Ignoring for the moment the argument about people who are too poor and sick to pay for their healthcare and why anyone should have to pay for them even though one catastrophic illness can bankrupt event the thriftiest saver in a very short time this boils down to the competing notions of US and Canadian healthcare. Is it better to have free healthcare that is restricted or to have unrestricted healthcare that you can't afford? The results are the same. I offer another option. Healthcare shouldn't be a for profit enterprise. Human life shouldn't be put on an auction block run by pharmaceutical companies, health care providers and health care insurers. Sick people should be treated and their prescriptions filled. I know this will be called socialism but if you consider the medical benefits we give free of charge to the politicians who restrict our benefits you will realize the irony of this situation. Politicians know the value of health care and waste no time or money on getting the very best for themselves while they allow over 43 million Americans to go without health insurance. If we are to fix this there needs to be strict regulation of the pharmaceutical companies, healthcare providers, insurers and hospitals. The millions spent on advertising and contributions alone will go a long way toward paying for benefits and making healthcare available for eveyone. You may be in a position now where your concerns are being met and therefore you don't consider this your problem but let one catastrophic illness or accident occur and you'll change your mind. We are talking about human life here. I find it very odd that people who for instance claim to be pro life on the one hand don't have a problem with limiting health care that leads directly to hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths each year in the USA alone. It's time to take health care out of the realm of corporate boardrooms and stock prices and make it the humanitarian effort it should be. If planned properly a system can be created that will provide the best possible care for everyone. Otherwise we are playing god and choosing between who will live and who will die based on profits and income.
I understand your concerns and know that your heart is in the right place. There's a few problems with your plan though. First of all, I think that giving the government the responsibility for the healthcare of 280 million people is a bit too much to ask in terms of complexity.
Secondly, I can definitely empathize with the person that has a catrastrophic injury/illness that wipes them out. I daresay the better solution to this would be to use taxpayer funds to give grants to citizens to purchase their own personal catastrophic healthcare insurance. That does the most amount of good for the least amount of expense and government interference in the provider side of the healtcare market.
Also, keep in mind that this type of situation isn't what's driving up health care costs, however. Rather it's those with termincal conditions in the last waning moments of life where heroic efforts are being made to prolong their life by another couple of hours or days. Since reality dictates that there is a limited amount of resources available to pay for healthcare, do we spend any given $1 million on primary care for 10,000 people, or multiple organ transplants for a single person? Both have needs, and choices will have to be made. Do you want a Washington bureaucrat making the decision if you're one of the people involved in the above scenario needing healthcare?
You need to keep in mind also that socialized medicine won't work because of the simple economic principle that people don't value what is given to them for free. Do you really want your tax dollars paying for the chronic malingerer who goes to the emergency room for every ingrown hair? Socializing healthcare won't do anything to control costs, which is kinda the whole point of this exercise.
