[off-list, because I've already said too much . . .] Max Sawicky wrote: > > ...In the U.S., if we universalized a system where health > care was "free," we would see greater increases in the > share of GDP devoted to health care. If that were so our non-free health care would be less expensive, per capita, than the free health care vended out by countries with nationalized health care. It's not; according to the last figures I saw the U.S. spends 13% of GNP on health care, as compared with 10.5% or so for second place. >> The question is how other countries exercise a budget constraint. By "free" I meant the lack of any such constraint, something a lot of lefts, present company excepted, appear to think is feasible and desirable. >> The U.S. has the most expensive health care in the whole world. But despite that, even selecting out the social classes which enjoy any health care at all, U.S. life expectancy is not the highest in the world. (I guess it's, um, "unfair," to compare mortality among foreign citizens with national health care to mortality among the uninsured U.S. citizens; all those poor people dying young make our figures look bad, besides nobody wants to hear about them anyway, they're a downer.) >> I don't know who you're arguing with here. It's not me. >> You say that if health care were free, consumers of it would use it more, which is true; but it appears, by international comparisons, that the greater expense of increased use of health services would be more than countered by the elimination of the incredible windfall profits of the U.S.'s private health industry. >> In the long run I agree that a public system will cost less, depending on the above-mentioned budget constraint. I do not think profit is the biggest factor, quantitatively, in cost increases, either previous or prospective. >> Besides, the restructuring of the health insurance industry, which consumes about 15% of the U.S. health care budget, would free up something like two percent of the GNP. If you could somehow magically institute national health care overnight in the U.S., you'd also create quite an economic problem, an overnight unemployment crisis, by those hundreds of thousands of insurance company employees who would suddenly be out of work. >> Obviously if you eliminate an industry there would be disruptions of this sort. mbs
