Good ole Ronnie......the biggest snake charmer this country has ever seen!
Originally Posted by WTF
Do you really think Reagan was a bigger snake charmer than Obama? If so, I'd love to have some of whatever you've been drinking!
...it won't do much for costs because for profit medical financing is the real problem.
Originally Posted by TexTushHog
We went through all this way back when the thread's post count was about a dozen short of a hundred!
The
real problem is not the existence of for-profit health care; it's the fact that no one (including the consumer) has any incentive at all to control costs. Some solutions are outlined in the article to which I linked in post #88.
Food availability is an even more critical need than health care coverage, yet does anyone seriously believe that for-profit food production/distribution is a problem? Of course not. Can you imagine how bad state-owned farms and supermarkets would be? The key difference is that grocery store shoppers have access to good market information and incentives to keep costs down. The same goes for producers and distributors of food.
The sad truth is that the current health care delivery system is about the furthest thing imaginable from a well-functioning free market.
It's also a shameful absurdity that no one will confront the politically-powerful trial lawyers lobby. Physicians feel compelled to practice costly defensive medicine by conducting all manner of tests which are intended, in many cases, only to "paper the files" -- and improve the prospects for defence in case of jackpot-seeking lawsuits. This considerably drives up aggregate costs.
As I see it, the biggest problem of all is that we're adding the second big, expensive entitlement program within a span of just about seven years without asking anyone to pay for it -- and at a time when we already have out-of-control spending and deficits. In 2003, Bush and a Republican congress jammed through an expensive prescription drug benefit plan at the same time that we were getting an across-the-board income tax cut. Now we just passed an even more expensive health care plan. The notion that we can pay for this with tax hikes only on the top 2% of the income strata is absurd.
This health care bill is not "reform" -- it's simply the subsidization and massive expansion of an expensive, dysfunctional system in which perverse incentives are allowed to continue unabated.
If we continue on our present course, we'll soon face a calamitous fiscal train wreck -- even without adding huge new entitlement programs.. Passing this horrifically expensive health care "reform" bill is a little like choosing a kitchen remodeling contractor while the house is on fire.
It's not about you
