Re: The 112th Congress: Debt ceiling edition
From you saying it's stealing for the gov't to tax and then saying that you aren't against all government spending. I directly quoted you, did you not read? The only conclusion from such a statement that you're not against all spending is that you're alright with stealing some if you like it.
Where did I use the word "stealing?" You are putting words in my mouth. I very clearly said "taking under threat of law," which is exactly what taxation is. Do you disagree? (see my post to Kepler. Taxation isn't bad; it's serious).
I explained why it cuts cost for the insured, I didn't talk about why it cuts cost from the supply side. From your text you don't seem to understand that an actual single payer type system does not have the gov't running insurance companies. It is the insurance company. This immediately cuts a great deal of overhead.
Po-ta-to, po-tah-to. Overhead reduction could be a good argument why costs might come down if the government were running the insurance industry - if the majority of the overhead that the insurance companies incur weren't already due to government regulations. Call me crazy, but I think that if health insurance companies could cut out that overhead while charging the same premiums, they'd do it in a heartbeat. After all, they are cold, heartless corporations who don't care about their employees (not sarcasm - I actually think this), so if they could increase profits by cutting their costs, they would do it.
NEJM said:
In 1999, health administration costs totaled at least $294.3 billion in the United States, or $1,059 per capita, as compared with $307 per capita in Canada. After exclusions, administration accounted for 31.0 percent of health care expenditures in the United States and 16.7 percent of health care expenditures in Canada. Canada's national health insurance program had overhead of 1.3 percent; the overhead among Canada's private insurers was higher than that in the United States (13.2 percent vs. 11.7 percent). Providers' administrative costs were far lower in Canada.
So the US spends 31 percent of its health care dollars on overhead, but private insurers' overhead is only 11.7 percent? How exactly are the private insurers the offending parties, again?
Sounds like the overhead problem must be mostly on the providers side, and nationalizing health care doesn't necessarily do anything about that. I would think there would be good ways to reduce that overhead with or without national health care.
Foxton said:
Also not everyone consumes the same amount of care. The quality is expected to be the same but there is not "once a month you must go to the doctor and get this, this, and this done." In fact by increasing the amount of people who can have procedures that are prohibitively expensive now the cost for those procedures will go down because before only a small handful of people could have it done before. The demand went up.
Of course, there can be economies of scale. But we have to keep the macroeconomic scale in mind, because we're talking about total national spending on health care. If building a machine to treat 1,000 people costs $1M, but building 10 machines (to treat 10,000 people) costs $5M, then the cost per patient has gone down by half, but the total health care spending still *increased* by $4M. That's an increase in efficiency, but not a savings.
Foxton said:
But I will ask that since you argue that without varying demand costs would not go down, why don't you explain why it hasn't gone down? It's gone up, way way up. You even admit that costs continue to rise even with the free market in control.
You think the market is in control? Hospitals are not legally allowed to turn away patients. Patients are not legally allowed to refuse treatments (in many situations, as leswp1 pointed out), and the government already pays for ~60% of the health care in the country. That's not a free market - not even close.
).
You still haven't answered why we still haven't seen decreased costs. 