What I am not hearing in many debates about all this healthcare BS is the eventual impact on personal liberties once the taxpayers are all chipping in to pay for everyone’s care. Does anyone really think there won’t be more prohibition on all the things that “aren’t good for us” (AKA those products/activities in industries with weaker lobbying abilities)? This has always been the scariest part for me.

We’re fucked.

If you’re not researching a surgeon already, you’re likely going to get what’s coming to you. I’d thought Radley had even posted about how certain doctors’ organizations help shuffle around negligent surgeons, and they can do this because of the monopoly on licenses… but I can’t find the posting using Google.

Such private ratings systems exist already – I’d cross-referenced a half dozen to attempt to get a feel for a surgeon I’d ended up consulting with, and better-organized outfits such as Angie’s List have gotten into the medical review aspect as well. Ask them how they plan to deal with lawsuits – probably with their own lawyer and case law that protects opinions and fact, just like anyone else.

The problem with many peoples’ idea of government is that they think government sucks, and yet they somehow believe that the jobs the government has monopolized can’t be done better. I ask you to name one government program that has done well. Then consider the power of voluntary transactions combined with the information-sharing capabilities of tools like the Internet and see if you still believe that the government can do a better job that the truly free market.

You can’t offer both simultaneously. People will act according to their best interests. Young healthy people will reject a single payer option because their insurance premiums will be less in a free market system, as compared to what they would have to pay into a single payer system to subsidize the care for all the old sick people. And without the young healthy people there is no one to subsidize care for all the others.

#4 cleavingSpace
What’s your solution to the healthcare crisis in this country, Radley?

Here is my solution to increased health care costs (it’s capitalist and based on competitive free markets):

All doctors and care giving offices post the services they provide and the cost for each, kind of like a menu with prices. That way, you can go to several websites and “shop around” for whatever floats your boat. There will be those willing to pay the higher prices because of a perceived increase in quality (kind of like buying a Lexus instead of a Buick), but there will also be those who are happy to shop at the “Dollar General” of healthcare. This allows people to take price into consideration when deciding where to get care, plus the competitive nature of business would drive down prices in general.

I thought bribing a foreign official or businessman had been made illegal way back during obama the 1st reign.

Nice job creating a beast, Mr. President(s).

Fine, give them the political choice. Call it Timmy the Aardvark if you like, I don’t care. The point is choice, not the adjective in front of it.

I just get tired of hearing people blather endlessly about choice and doing their damndest to prevent the US populace from even getting a look at an option that the rest of the Western world has chosen and doesn’t want to go away from. (In Canada the surest way for a politician to commit political suicide is to touch universal health care.)

Hell, the assorted wholly owned health care subsidiaries called “US Senators” are turning the country inside out to prevent even the palest form of public choice in the laughingly tiny “public option”. The underlying rationale of gutting any form of Euro- or Canadian-style health care reform is fairly simple: when people get their health care under those systems they’d rather eat underfried cockroaches than go back, which is why the health care and insurance industries are batshit terrified of the public ever getting to see such a system work in action. So “choice” is limited to “the shitty extortionate criminally rapacious private options”.

The Canadian public consistently kills any American-style privatization. Up here the dynamic is more 90-10 than 60-40 and the electorate has taken the position that if the price for 90% of the population getting what it wants and needs is 10% of the population getting what it needs but not what it prefers then so be it. Ideologically contrary to economic libertarianism, granted, but it is a valid political choice.

I thought the British and Canadian systems were both single-payer.

Fairly simple, isn’t it? Market choice in action. If people don’t want “socialized medicine” they can vote against it.

That’s political choice, not market choice. In the market, if 40% of the population wants to buy something, it won’t become unavailable to them because 60% don’t want to buy it.

Fairly simple, isn’t it? Market choice in action. If people don’t want “socialized medicine” they can vote against it.

2 – lowered standards – I can’t find the link, but I’m fairly certain that you proposed here that one solution to the “doctor shortage” was to lower the standards for the credentials required for medical personnel to see patients. Is this not accurate?

3 – and here you are linking to a video that supports point #3 and you say “The video specifically is a criticism of Massachusetts’ plan, which forces everyone to buy into some third-party-payer system even if they have no need for comprehensive health care“, which means lowered standards for what plans must cover. Same for your proposal for plans to cross state lines- it essentially means that the cheapest plans will be those in the states with the most lax requirements, i.e. “Delawareization”.

Do you or don’t you support Whole Foods CEO Mackey’s health care proposals? Maybe your two posts about that were solely about his right to have his opinion without facing a customer boycott, but it seemed like you were approving of his positions- there was no real criticism and you stated that these were things that he saw “had worked” and you were going to shop there more often.

I thought that you had posted that capping pharm company profits would stifle innovation for developing new drugs, but that may have been John Stossel and others posting at Reason.com; if you disagree with that point I’ll withdraw it, but if your only complaint is the implication that it’s true only if it isn’t funded by “government handouts/corporate welfare” then I don’t understand what your point really is. and what are the specifics for streamlining FDA approval? Fewer tests and shorter testing periods?

I’m not sure abolition of all gov’t controls will work. Some organization(s) need to exist to document the competency of doctors, hospitals, EMTs, etc. If the private sector provides such services, how do you handle the libel and slander lawsuits from low-ranked doctors?

Less gov’t control is generally a good thing, but I don’t want to do a month of research to pick a doctor to treat my wife’s stroke.

Society works better with less interference, but society also works better when citizens can specialize. I am an electronics engineer; my knowledge of banking, medicine, auto mechanics, and many other things is limited. Yes, I can educate myself, but that prevents me from being as good an engineer as I could be.

Some regulation is good. How much and in what aspects of commerce are the questions that need debate.

1. Abolish all federal laws, regulations, and schemes pertaining in any way to the health care industry.
2. Strongly encourage states to abolish the above as well, in addition to any state-run licensing.

The current health insurance debate conflates both uses of insurance. I am young, I would be happy to purchase insurance for a bicycle crash, broken leg, etc, and to separately save for my predictable old-age medical care. A health plan forcing me into a larger pool is nothing other than a cross-generational subsidy from me to older people who did not save for their predicted expenses. The social bargain is the assumption that in 30-40 years, younger generations will be happy to cross-subsidize me.) I’m not saying that this social bargain is wrong, but that its existence must be recognized, to have an honest debate. I can be compelled into the social bargain (the Obama plan). I can be taxed into supporting the (predictable) health expenses of others who did not save for them (medicare). Maybe the solution is a ‘lifelong health-care savings plan’?

Insurance is NOT suitable for expected and planned expenses. If an insurance company wants to sell insurance, not run savings plan— and one where their clients have little incentive to minimize expenditures, they are several things they’re going to naturally try to do. They’d be high-deductable to not have to deal with the paperwork of handling the (predictable) earaches, sore throats, etc. They’re going to avoid insurring pre-existing conditions, which are, after-all predictable expenses. This also explains adverse selection, after all, any rational buyer with a predictable expenses greater than the insurance premium is going to purchase the ‘insurance’.

Some of those are good ideas, but none are what I’ve said are the critical problems with the health care system. It’s like you just went to some conservative activist website, copied their talking points, then attributed them to me.

Also, I don’t remember ever writing that “pharmaceutical companies need large profits in order to spur innovation and development of new drugs,” especially if those large profits are fueled by government handouts. I’ve consistently railed against corporate welfare on this site. Moreover, the biggest hindrance to development of new drugs isn’t R&D money but the excessively laborious process of getting FDA approval.

You’re not really even trying, are you?

1. Is there really a health care “crisis?” Survey after survey shows that a large majority of Americans like their doctors and are satisfied with the health care they obtain. That’s not to say there aren’t problems–of course there are–but do we fuck up things for the satisfied majority in order to try for Utopia?

2. There are no solutions, only tradeoffs. Stop trying to pretend that there is enough money to pay for all the health care that everyone could possibly benefit from. There isn’t. Care has to be “rationed” in some form. Right now the main deteminants are your resources and what kind of insurance you have. If we want single-payer, govt.-run health care then let’s say so. But we can’t pretend that wont be rationed too.