On Jan 7, 2008 2:17 PM, John Oliver <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Mon, Jan 07, 2008 at 01:46:19PM -0800, SJS wrote: > > begin quoting John Oliver as of Mon, Jan 07, 2008 at 01:37:33PM -0800: > > > On Mon, Jan 07, 2008 at 12:00:35AM -0800, David Brown wrote: > > > > On Sun, Jan 06, 2008 at 11:04:27PM -0800, SJS wrote: snip > > > the taxes are collected by people who are paid, > > > and that money is handled and disbursed by more people. All of those > > > people have supervisors, and they all need shiny office buildings to > > > work in, which needs electricity and water and maintenance and toilet > > > paper and more cafeterias. We pay for all of that on top of the amount > > > we'd pay up front. > > > > Um, we have all that already. Your money is taken at the register, who > > has a supervisor, who has a manager, etc., up the corporate ladder, > > where the buildings are REALLY shiny, that have maintenance and toilet > > paper and more cafeterias. > > See above. > > > It's a wash. > > I say it isn't. Private enterprise has a vested interest in remaining > as efficient as possible. Government bureaucrats have a vested interest > in being as inefficient as possible. They do not need to "show > results". They get paid the same either way. And they want their > opoeration to grow, and employ more bureaucrats, so they'll have a > higher status (and salary).
It is also not a wash in the case of a government funded(socialist-style) system compared to a capitalist-style system because of one other thing: freedom of choice. You have far less of it in the socialist system. A government funded anything says do as we direct or you either don't get benefits for which you paid taxes to support or, in some cases, people with guns come and take your property and you go to jail. A doctor in Canada that charges more than the mandated maximum rate for certain services can be arrested snd have his or her clinic shut down, regardless of any economic necessity the doctor may have had to charge more. I've always thought that the key difference between socialism and capitalism is that socialism is based, ultimately, on coercion, whereas capitalism is based on persuasion. The problem with the US healthcare system is that is has been set up since WW2 so that the insurance companies make more money by persuading employers to buy their products than by persuading the end-users of the healthcare to buy them, virtually removing competition among doctors and hospitals for the patient's money and creating a competition instead for insurance money. This causes prices to go so high that individual consumers lose the ability to choose(shop) either their healthcare provider or their or their health insurance provider. The result is, in effect, a privately funded socialist model for delivering healthcare wherein insurance companies are able to effectively coerce doctors, hospitals and patients into competing for insurance money. I suspect this is a big reason why socialized medicine tends to look so good to a lot of people in the US. However, for all that our system is broken, it is still easier to fix as a private capitalist system that a government-run socialist system would be. For starters, remove all tax deductibility to employers for employee healthcare insurance expenses UNLESS they are paying empolyees to purchse and pay premiums on individual policies that the employee owns with no restrictions on whom they buy the policy from. This would force the insurance companies to deal with the patient, not the employer, when selling health insurance and doctors to deal with the patient, rhather than the insurance company, when setting prices for their services. In short doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies would, once again, be required to compete for the patient's money and the emplyer would be left completely out of the decision, as they should be. If ever this was done(I can dream), I wouldn't be surprised to see healthcare costs in this country become the lowest in the world for a given level of treatment within about five years. Robert Donovan -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
