David Forslund <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > But the government paid healthcare in the US is one of the BIG > stimuli > for fraud and identity theft.
That's because it is selective, covering poorer and older people only. Universal govt-paid health insurance is a much better idea, paid fro by progressive taxes (so the rich pay proportionally more). That what we have here in Oz and the incentives for patient fraud are much less (but provider fraud is still a problem). > Removing any restraints on > eligibility > will drive > the costs even higher. All the evidence from the UK, Europe and here suggests otherwise, counter- intuitive as it may seem. > I believe getting the consumer to be price > conscious > is one of the biggest levers for preventing healthcare costs from > skyrocketing. The consumer needs to be price **and** quality-conscious, and getting metrics on the latter is very tricky. > Medicare in the US has done little to slow down the increasing costs. Needs to be universal as some of the Democrat candiadtes are proposing. > One of the great pressures on the system in the US is the illegal > alien > population > which, I believe, is on a scale unlike any other country. It is > probably > the biggest > force on identity theft in NM. In any case it is also necessary to > identify persons > across political boundaries, so the identity problem remains, since > one has to > deal with different social infrastructures even for a single patient. Yes, that is an issue which the US and some European countries must deal with. Even a few hundred desperate refugees on a boat cause huge outcries here in Australia. > My point above has nothing to do with whether there are incentives or > > disincentives > for sharing an ID. It has to do with accuracy of matching some kind > of > identifier > to an individual. Possessing an id card seems to help only slightly > and > not in > the difficult cases as others have pointed out. Particularly now > with > terrorism on > an international scale becoming more common place. I thought that in > most > places today people are quite concerned that a person is who they say > they are > when boarding an airplane. Sure, and teh debate over how to identify people is indeed an interesting one - but it relates to how you manage those identities in an PMI/MPI etc. Tim C
