(November 28, 2014 at 8:22 pm)Heywood Wrote:(November 28, 2014 at 4:59 pm)rasetsu Wrote: And how does that solve the problem of people not being able to afford healthcare because they don't have insurance. Insurance is little more than a structured way of distributing risks across a class of people. If you pay for healthcare directly without that buffer, it ends up costing more for, I presume, the taxpayer, because you don't have a whole class of people contributing via insurance. You end up having to pay that cost by raising taxes. I don't see how that is an improvement.
Government produced health care would be free or at minimal cost to the recipient of that healthcare. It would drive down the cost of health care because the more there is of something, the cheaper it will be. The price of oil is dropping significantly because the Saudis are increasing their output to make the price so low that it becomes unprofitable to extract it from American shale.
If the price of health care is so high that it is not affordable to the average American the solution is to produce more of it. Obamacare does nothing to lower the cost of health care. It will actually make the cost go up by increasing demand for it. On top of that it will restrict supply because for many of the newly insured(medicaid), re-reimbursement rates are set by the government at artificially low prices.
Insurance is not just a way of distributing risk across a class of people. It is also a gambling transaction. Generally when you make a bet with an insurance company, your bet has a negative expected value and their bet has a positive expectation. The positive expected value ends up being the insurance companies gross margin. Under Obamacare, if an insurance company makes so many bad bets that it loses money, the government will re-reimburse them for their losses. Its like being able to spend a night at the casino and if you win...awesome. If you loose don't sweat it...the government will send you a check to cover your losses.
Obamacare is a shitty law because it does nothing to actually address the problem....health care is expensive. It merely covers it up with a very expensive bandaid. You will see the amount of money spent per capita on health care in the United States rise because of Obamacare.
So what you want is a British model NHS. Well I agree but the republicans would never let it happen.
It is too socialistic and that would never do for those money centred people.
You can fix ignorance, you can't fix stupid.
Tinkety Tonk and down with the Nazis.
