Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:27:36 -0700 (PDT) From: Gilbert Lawrence <gilbert2...@yahoo.com>
With the political debate in USA about healthcare, all the worms are surfacing. See link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/26/health-care-system-wastes_n_333589.html Mario asks: The dirty little secret is that it is state run programs that are mostly responsible for this "waste". This is why the statists like Gilbert have never proposed ways to cut out this "waste" before turning the rest of the system on its head to show that the statists can run even ONE government program efficiently? In fact the new system they are proposing will lead to even more waste, ineffiency and rationed health care, with government death, ...er, life panels, making decisions on the service patients receive, just like in Canada and Old Blighty where they haven't been able to get a handle on systems that are decades old. Every government run program in the US is in economic shambles, yet the statists want the health care system which represents 20% of the US economy to be government run as well. Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:54:32 -0700 (PDT) From: Gilbert Lawrence <gilbert2...@yahoo.com> That is the reason why many suggest to get rid on multiple insurance companies (within a region) and replace with a not-for-profit "Healthcare System". Here the patient?is the community. There is emphasis on prevention, group management of diabetes, hypertension etc. and treatments with the most cost-efficient methods. Mario responds: Here we see the classic statist position - get rid of legitimate private businesses and replace them with government programs or "not-for-profit" companies. The dirty little secret is that "not for profit" organizations are never efficient because they have no incentive to be. Of course, the statists don't care. Efficiency comes from free competition and the pressure to succeed or fail. Gilbert wrote: The for-profit system is designed to generate maximize profits at every step; by whatever means (that one can make a legitimate case). Mario responds: This, too, is false. These companies have to maximize profit in competition with other companies seeking to maximize their profits. This is what keeps everyone honest over the long haul. Industries where the participants are not protected from competitive pressures are the most efficient in the world. The examples are all around us, including insurance companies that insure other risks like homeowners insurance and auto insurance. The health insurance industry in the US is less efficient precisely because they are protected in each state and unable to freely compete nationwide. The banks that failed allowed themselves to be coerced by the social engineering policies of the liberal Democrats over the years and agreed to lend to high risk borrowers. Common sense said this was a system doomed to failure, and right enough, the house of cards collapsed. The thousands of banks that did not succumb are all doing fine. Gilbert wrote: One can follow one model or other; not both - unless there are incentives and disincentives for both the consumer / patient on one hand?and the providers (doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceuticals). America has been pretending to follow both models (for profit and not-for-profit) with spin, marketing, science and fiction. We have been only fooling ourselves, as the web link below suggest. Mario observes: All we need to do is a) allow free competition by the health insurance companies across state lines, b) tort reform, c) provide assistance to cover the 15 to 20 million Americans who are currently "uninsurable", and d) keep government bureaucrats and statists away from interfering in day to day affairs of these businesses. Given that there is no political will to privatize Medicare and Medicaid, these systems need to control payments they make to service providers for fraudulent health care. This is a management problem, not a system problem that only occurs in government run programs because they are "not-for-profit" and therefore have no incentive to be financially efficient.
