RE: Trump Threatens Coverage Of Millions for an ACA Repeal
This discussion highlights one of the major problems with our health care system. The rules and regulations are way, way too damn complicated. That's fine if your objective is to ensure full employment for bureaucrats--both government and corporate. That's not fine if the objective is better health care for more people.
Bismarck is very simple. You get a basic policy that does A, B, and C, and doesn't cover D, E, or F. You can buy supplemental insurance to cover D, E, and F. Your employer can provide supplemental insurance to cover D, E, and F. Such supplemental insurance is dirt cheap, because it doesn't cover A, B, and C. If you don't want to pay for supplemental insurance, and your employer doesn't provide it, then you can pay out of pocket for D, E, and F, or take a number and get into the queue. The difference between Bismarck and other universal approaches is the ready ability to contract privately for D, E, and F, instead of having no alternative but to take a number and queue up for those services.
The elephant in the room is that Bismarck or any other form of universal health care takes tax dollars. That's what everybody is trying to dance around, and the bottom line is that you can't. Obamacare tries to dodge reality by insisting on the concepts that 1) young healthy individuals will voluntarily overpay for health insurance that they don't need, in order to subsidize the rest of us, and 2) we can lower the cost of health care by screwing docs on what we pay them to provide health care, without reducing the costs those docs incur in providing that care, and neither quantity nor quality of docs and other providers will suffer. Obviously, both of those are absolutely nuts.
I favor universal care. It costs money, specifically tax dollars, to make it happen. So get the money from a consumption tax that apportions the burden widely. And instead of single-payer or single-provider, get that universal care from a system that provides realistic alternatives when the bureaucrats stick you in a queue and tell you to take a number.
(This post was last modified: 04-17-2017 10:46 AM by Owl 69/70/75.)
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