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5 Myths About Health Care Around the World
It’s soooooo much easier to just sit back and believe the politically-anchored assertions made on talking (and screaming) head radio and cable talk shows, but T.R. Reid, writing in the Washington Post, says it is not quite that simple.
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67 Responses to “5 Myths About Health Care Around the World”
No, it's actually my money being confiscated. And no, insurance companies would go out of business long before they got people paying them $15M a year. You're arguing way beyond the realm of facts.
So I don't know what to tell you, GreenDreams. Your beliefs about the effectiveness of the public sector are flatly contradicted by its track record. Yet you keep bringing up demons like insurance companies or Cheney's wife, as if they were relevant. You're apparently convinced that if it weren't for those few bad apples, government would be a terrific engine of benevolent growth.
DrJ-Just as you seem to think that with the exception of Enron and our financial sector and wall street the capitalists have been a great bunch of trustworthy guys no matter that the track record does not reflect that either. Gov nor the private sector can do it all, they both need their places and roles. When we blend them we get what we have here and when we exclude one in favor of only the other we again end up near here. The answer is balance and a blend but you are not calling for balance you are calling for “the free market do or die” which is similar to the fantasy land that believes that gov can do anything and the private sector do nothing yet I do not see the crowd that says that on this site.
DJ, my “argument” is based on the exponential function. It's irrefutable. I've noted this many times. Insurance goes up at 7% a year. Doubling time is 10 years. It doubled in the last 9 years. It will double the doubled amount in 10 or less. The insurance industry admits this won't vary by more than “a percent or two.” Case closed, unless private insurance will do what it has NEVER done; lower rates.
“Once again, the national debt is a Republican creation”
So? If I want the party who will leave me with the least debt right now which way should I go?
” instead of FEMA delivering emergency services, we have tens of thousands of private contractors adding their profit and overhead to what FEMA used to do”
That's just absurd. FEMA was supposed to write checks after a disaster and help plan before. That's it. People have tacked on all kinds of stuff to them that shouldn't be there and would be better served handled by someone else.
“we have $900 a day mercenaries fighting alongside our own service men and women”
No we don't. We do have $250 a day cooks and laundry workers so solders don't have to wash sheets instead of , well, soldiering
“DJ, my “argument” is based on the exponential function. It's irrefutable. I've noted this many times.”
So you have, it's just not relevant to this discussion. Which, I'll remind you, started with me claiming the public sector is crowding out the private over the past century. You denied it with the claim that that the growth in government spending really reflects gouging by the government's private sector contractors. I pointed out that baldly contradicts your usual claims about government's ability to negotiate costs down and that both can't be true.
Now you're throwing up smoke about Bush and Cheney and Mrs. Cheney and rising health care costs and how the taxes I pay out of the salary I earn actually comes at the largess of the Chinese and how the 40-percentage-point drop in the national debt since WWII proves Republicans created it. You sound like a man with an ax to grind.
But none of it dents my original claim: the public sector has expanded dramatically over the past century and continues to do so. Therefore HemmD's claim that capitalists call the shots is either wrong or a major black mark against the government we hire to keep them working for us.
MSF: “You seem to think that with the exception of Enron and our financial sector and wall street the capitalists have been a great bunch of trustworthy guys no matter that the track record does not reflect that.”
Trustworthy? Not at all. I merely think that for the most part, competition is a more reliable way to keep them in line than easily-hijacked government regulation.
The goal of regulation should always be (and, as the FTC generally practices it, usually is) to increase competition in whatever markets it's overseeing.
DJ, as I said, with the exception of 3 Republican presidents, Reagan, Bush and Bush, EVERY president has paid down the debt as a percentage of GDP. That's a fact.
Government has increased as a % of national budget since WWII precisely because of what the CEO of GE called for at the close of that war, “a permanent war economy”. It has certainly not been health care costs. In fact, Bush raided the Medicare trust fund to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy: $1.6 trillion.
I have no idea what a permanent war economy is, nor was I aware we have one. And I don't see the relevance. Like I said, the public sector has grown immensely over the past century (though it's below the WWII spike).
The relevance is very specific, DJ. Despite the end of the world war, despite the end of the Cold War, no matter what, war or peace, defense spending goes up. And not just a little. The GOP, its “military industrial complex” (Eisenhower), its prison industrial complex, its rich and greedy, have successfully bribed politicians to shovel tax dollars into their pockets, thus increasing the federal budget. Meanwhile, for the benefit of their next quarterly report, they got tax breaks for offshoring jobs, hiding their profits in tax havens and all sorts of other sweet goodies that COST US MONEY.
The “permanent war economy” comment came in a meeting of defense contractors after WWII. The gist of it was “this war was great for us. We all did very well. Now what can we do to make it permanent?” The Cold War was born, which like the GWOT, would never end but would scare generation after generation to open their wallets.
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I'll give you credit for trying GreenDreams but it's sounding more and more like Dr J is really Mr H… if you know what I mean!
So you're not really disagreeing that government spending has risen, you're saying it has and blaming a right-wing conspiracy. Have I got that right?
What I'm pointing out is that “public displacing private” is false. Of “foreign aid” it's typical for 80% of the money to go to private American contractors. USDA money goes to farmers, DOD to Blackwater, Haliburton, etc. The dollar increase in federal budget is real, but there's no displacement. For-profit companies love to suckle at the federal teat.
Yes, what you're describing is displacement. Decisions based on market signals and economic efficiency are being displaced by decisions based on politics.
We have differing opinions of what should be, in America, the basic rights of citizens. Classically, what is defined as “the commons” are those resouces that are considered the property of the people. It has been shown repeatedly that corporations with their focus on short term gain and a preference for private gain over the public good, do not manage the commons well. This is especially evident in environmental issues. Corporations will externalize every cost they can, while keeping the profit to themselves. That's a big problem of “market forces” as they are very rarely concerned with the future, though they should be. The decline of commercial fish (down 95% currently) shows that even though fish marketers depend on fish for their commercial existence, they never act on that by self-limiting what they take. The same happened with the classic case of commons, Boston commons, pasture land used by area ranchers for grazing. Commercial interests said, why should I limit myself to 20 cows. I'll just put 40 on the commons.
With respect to health care, I believe it is in our best interest as a nation for our citizens to have guaranteed access to health care. You apparently do not. So the GOP answer, as in the Ryan bill, is to guarantee the profitability of the insurance business, instead of the health care of our citizens. Forcing citizens to give profit to businesses is worse than forcing them to share the cost of national health care, in my opinion, because whether they can see it or not, a healthy citizenry serves us better and ultimately lowers costs while increasing our competitiveness. Neither private insurance nor public health care payments do anything at all to improve actual health care–that's doctors, nurses, clinics and hospitals. I just want the most efficient way to pay for it, and nonprofit is more efficient economically because profit is an unnecessary expense when all you want to do is manage the assessment of claims and issuing of checks. The counter-argument, that private enterprise in health care PAYMENT delivery is more efficient and can lower costs, is simply not borne out by the historical facts. Insurance companies are not effective in lowering costs. Government is (lower rates for doctors and hospitals plus lower overhead.) I've documented this repeatedly.
I'm familiar with the tragedy of the commons, and it has nothing to do with corporations per se. It was originally about individual cow herders, but it applies to any rational economic actor. Governments are similarly disinclined to champion the common good when it doesn't align with their interests. Look at disputes over international fisheries, or the current wrangle over C02 reduction.
You will probably say, “yes, but that's only because corporations are lobbying them” and I will say (again) that besides smacking of paranoia, that's in practical terms a lame excuse for failure. If failure is inevitable, due to corporate lobbying or union lobbying or heavy traffic on the beltway, we should keep more decisions for ourselves and not hand them to government.
With respect to health care, “guaranteed access to health care” is a too vague to debate. I believe it is in our best interest to build the best system we can, and that demands we stop excusing failure and insist that people do their jobs. Health care providers need to find better, cheaper ways to treat us. Individuals need to take at least as much responsibility for their own health as they're expecting random taxpayers to. Government needs to make decisions it can be trusted to make well and relieved of the ones it can't.
Your mileage may vary, of course. You're welcome to keep thinking the path to success lies in rewarding incompetence and inefficiency. You're also welcome to keep thinking we disagree about goals rather than means. I don't believe either.
And BTW, I do believe health care could easily get 5 times more efficient than it is in even your best foreign examples. But only if we aim higher than what they're doing.