payne1000

As long as Capitol Hill is controlled by those who are making $billions by keeping us sick, there will be no change in the health care system. Change won't come from the politicians who are also feeding at the trough. We the people have to hit the streets in vast numbers and demand universal health care. Yes, there will be blood.

Worried for our children Loc: Massachusetts

Not sure I follow this. The constitution calls for it, read Amendments IX & X. Healthcare is not right, and you sure as hell won't find it in Article I section 8.



To address the remainder of your post, I'll direct you to the words of an intelligent young man, Ben Shapiro.
____________________________

"On Sunday, Senator Bernie Sanders took to Twitter to deliver one of his usual messages. “People go to the doctor because they’re sick, get a diagnosis from their doctor, but they can’t afford the treatment,” he wrote. “How crazy is that!”

I responded snarkily, “I go to a fancy store to check out a piece of furniture, can’t afford it. That’s totally crazy!”

This prompted spasms of apoplexy on the left. How could I dare to compare medical care to furniture? Was I equating the value of the two? Was I suggesting that the necessity of furniture was somehow comparable to the necessity of medical care?

Of course not. That would be idiotic. I was pointing out that medical care is a commodity, and that in life, we are often faced with commodities we cannot afford. But this mere observation caused a ruckus on the left. “Necessities don’t compare to luxuries!” said one angry tweeter. “Bless characters like Ben Shapiro for demonstrating the complete soullessness of capitalist ideology,” tweeted another.

The idea here seems to be that unless you declare medical care a right rather than a commodity, you are soulless — that as Marx might put it, necessity, rather than autonomy, creates rights.

This is foolhardy, both morally and practically.

Morally, you have no right to demand medical care of me. I may recognize your necessity and offer charity; my friends and I may choose to band together and fund your medical care. But your necessity does not change the basic math: Medical care is a service and a good provided by a third party. No matter how much I need bread, I do not have a right to steal your wallet or hold up the local bakery to obtain it. Theft may end up being my least immoral choice under the circumstances, but that does not make it a moral choice, or suggest that I have not violated your rights in pursuing my own needs.

But the left believes that declaring necessities rights somehow overcomes the individual rights of others.

If you are sick, you now have the right to demand that my wife, who is a doctor, care for you. Is there any limit to this right? Do you have the right to demand that the medical system provide life-saving care forever, to the tune of millions of dollars of other people’s taxpayer dollars or services? How, exactly, can there be such a right without the government’s rationing care, using compulsion to force individuals to provide it, and confiscating mass sums of wealth to pay for it?

The answer: There can’t be. Rights that derive from individual need inevitably violate individual autonomy. In response to my tweet, my colleague, New York Magazine ’s Jesse Singal, wrote that “free markets are good at some things and terrible at others and it’s silly to view them as ends rather than means.” That’s untrue. Free markets are expressions of individual autonomy, and therefore ends to be pursued in themselves.

Practically, declaring medical care a right does not guarantee its provision. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said at one point that she would model new constitutions on the South African constitution, which guarantees that “everyone has the right to have access to health care services, including reproductive health care. . . . The state must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realization of each of these rights.” Yet the World Health Organization ranks South Africa somewhere near the bottom of the globe in terms of medical care.

What happened? Why didn’t the right self-actualize?

Because medical care is a commodity, and treating it otherwise is foolhardy. To make a commodity cheaper and better, two elements are necessary: profit incentive and freedom of labor. The government destroys both of these elements in the health-care industry. It decides medical reimbursement rates for millions of Americans, particularly poor Americans; this, in turn, creates an incentive for doctors not to take government-sponsored health insurance. It regulates how doctors deal with patients, the sorts of training doctors must undergo, and the sorts of insurance they must maintain; all of this convinces fewer Americans to become doctors. Undersupply of doctors generally and of doctors who will accept insurance specifically, along with overdemand stimulated by government-driven health-insurance coverage, leads to mass shortages. The result is an overreliance on emergency care, costs for which are distributed among government, hospitals, and insurance payers.

So, what’s the solution for poor people? Not to declare medical care a “right,” and certainly not to dismiss reliance on the market as perverse cruelty. Markets are the solution in medical care, just as they are in virtually every other area.

Treating medical care as a commodity means temporary shortages, and it means that some people will not get everything we would wish them to have. But that’s also true of government-sponsored medical care, as the most honest advocates will admit. And whereas government-sponsored medical care requires a top-down approach that violates individual liberties, generates overdemand, and quashes supply, markets prize individual liberties, reduce demand (you generally demand less of what you must pay for), and heighten supply through profit incentive.

So, back to the furniture.

Let’s say your life depended on the following choice today: you must obtain either an affordable chair or an affordable X-ray. Which would you choose to obtain? Obviously, you’d choose the chair. That’s because there are many types of chair, produced by scores of different companies and widely distributed. You could buy a $15 folding chair or a $1,000 antique without the slightest difficulty. By contrast, to obtain an X-ray you’d have to work with your insurance company, wait for an appointment, and then haggle over price. Why? Because the medical market is far more regulated — thanks to the widespread perception that health care is a “right” — than the chair market.

Does that sound soulless? True soullessness is depriving people of the choices they require because you’re more interested in patting yourself on the back by inventing rights than by incentivizing the creation of goods and services. In health care, we could use a lot less virtue signaling and a lot less government. Or we could just read Senator Sanders’s tweets while we wait in line for a government-sponsored surgery — dying, presumably, in a decrepit chair."

S. Maturin

Perhaps the high cost lies not in the actual application of good health care, but in the administration? In other words, were there any chance the bureaucracy involved in the insuring primo health care to every citizen, I'd be a most implacable advocate.
However, all indicators tell us that more than likely the health care bureaucracy will suck up perhaps 50% or more of allocated funds.
Here's what CA knows:

May 22, 2017 11:04 AM
The price tag on universal health care is in, and it’s bigger than California’s budget

By Angela Hart

ahart@sacbee.com

The price tag is in: It would cost $400 billion to remake California’s health insurance marketplace and create a publicly funded universal heath care system, according to a state financial analysis released Monday.

California would have to find an additional $200 billion per year, including in new tax revenues, to create a so-called “single-payer” system, the analysis by the Senate Appropriations Committee found. The estimate assumes the state would retain the existing $200 billion in local, state and federal funding it currently receives to offset the total $400 billion price tag.

The cost analysis is seen as the biggest hurdle to creating a universal system, proposed by Sens. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens, and Toni Atkins, D-San Diego.

It remains a long-shot bid. Steep projected costs have derailed efforts over the past two decades to establish such a health care system in California. The cost is higher than the $180 billion in proposed general fund and special fund spending for the budget year beginning July 1.

Employers currently spend between $100 billion to $150 billion per year, which could be available to help offset total costs, according to the analysis. Under that scenario, total new spending to implement the system would be between $50 billion and $100 billion per year.

“Health care spending is growing faster than the overall economy ... yet we do not have better health outcomes and we cover fewer people,” Lara said at Monday’s appropriations hearing. “Given this picture of increasing costs, health care inefficiencies and the uncertainty created by Congress, it is critical that California chart our own path.”

The idea behind Senate Bill 562 is to overhaul California’s insurance marketplace, reduce overall health care costs and expand coverage to everyone in the state regardless of immigration status or ability to pay. Instead of private insurers, state government would be the “single payer” for everyone’s health care through a new payroll taxing structure, similar to the way Medicare operates.

Lara and Atkins say they are driven by the belief that health care is a human right and should be guaranteed to everyone, similar to public services like safe roads and clean drinking water. They seek to rein in rising health care costs by lowering administrative expenses, reducing expensive emergency room visits, and eliminating insurance company profits and executive salaries.

In addition to covering undocumented people, Lara said the goal is to expand health access to people who, even with insurance, may skip doctor visits or stretch out medications due to high copays and deductibles.

“Doctors and hospitals would no longer need to negotiate rates and deal with insurance companies to seek reimbursement,” Lara said.

Insurance groups, health plans and Kaiser Permanente are against the bill. Industry representatives say California should focus on improving the Affordable Care Act. Business groups, including the California Chamber of Commerce, have deemed the bill a “job-killer.”

“A single-payer system is massively, if not prohibitively expensive,” said Nick Louizos, vice president of legislative affairs for the California Association of Health Plans.

“It will cost employers and taxpayers billions of dollars and result in significant loss of jobs in the state,” the Chamber of Commerce said in its opposition letter.

Underlying the debate is uncertainty at the federal level over what President Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress will do with Obamacare. The House Republican bill advanced earlier this month would dismantle it by removing its foundation – the individual mandate that requires everyone to have coverage or pay a tax penalty.

Republican-led efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare is fueling political support for the bill, Atkins said at a universal health care rally this past weekend in Sacramento hosted by the California Nurses Association, a co-sponsor.

America Only Loc: From the right hand of God

You are a nut job. Your bank must love you...as you will write checks on an empty account to then have to pay the bank fees for your bounced checks....in YOUR pathetic mind you "think" you are well off....but living in your cardboard box speaks for itself. You are a very stupid and non educated individual. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED....idiot stick!

buffalo Loc: Texas

BULLSHIT! Take the money that individuals, families and businesses pay private, for profit health INSURANCE corporations that extract $500 BILLION in annual profits from the health CARE system non of which pays for any ones health CARE and that alone would be enough to cover all the uninsured. Under our current fragmented system administrative overhead consumes 1/3 of current health spending in the US.

We already have enough funds dedicated to health spending to provide the highest quality of care for everyone. Studies conducted by the Congressional Budget Office, the General Accounting Office, the Lewin Group and Boston University School of Public Health have shown that, under a single payer system, comprehensive care can be provided for everyone without spending any more funds than now are spent. They just need to be reallocated toward health CARE and NOT sucked up by greedy health INSURANCE corporations.

It would eliminate the financial threat and impaired access to health CARE for the tens of millions who do have coverage but are unable to afford the out-of-pocket expenses because of deficiencies in their insurance plans. It would return to the patient free choice of physicians and hospitals, not just choice of restrictive health INSURANCE plans. It would relieve businesses of administrative hassles and expenses of maintaining a health benefits program. It would remove from the health CARE equation the middleman - the INSURANCE/managed care industry - that has wreaked havoc on the traditional patient-physician relationship, while diverting outrageous amounts of patient-CARE dollars to their own coffers. It would control health CARE inflation through constructive mechanisms of cost containment that improve allocation of our health CARE resources, rather than controlling costs through an impersonal business ethic that strips patients of health CARE to improve the bottom line.

Health CARE and health INSURANCE are NOT the same thing.

http://www.pnhp.org/facts/single-payer-faq#bankrupt

payne1000

Soulless Ben Shapiro doesn't explain why the United States is the only developed country in the world which does not offer some form of government funded health care to all its citizens.

S. Maturin

Never heard of medicare, Medicaid, I guess, right?

cesspool jones Loc: atlanta

The country is way too big for that. Needs to be private except for perpetually ill....Medicare and Medicaid. Install flat tax to make that happen.

Worried for our children Loc: Massachusetts

I could probably find something where he does, if you'd like, but I already pointed it out.

payne1000

You failed to note that I said "all its people."
You have to be over 65 to receive Medicare.
You have to be in poverty-level annual income to receive Medicaid.
Someone who is slightly above poverty-level with conditions costing hundreds of thousands in medical treatment would be denied the care they need.

payne1000

I didn't see where you answered the question. Could you repeat the answer, please?

S. Maturin

Is there no personal responsibility for one's own health care which would meet your approval, or has the great, masterful, benevolent government to know all and do all for all?

crazylibertarian Loc: Florida by way of New York & Rhode Island

You assertion about people living longer may or may not be true, however, they were living longer anyway. And even granting that there was a causal connection. Today government regularly investigates whether the various meidcal interventions are 'worth it.' No such studies have ever been done about the entirety of Medicare & Medicaid.
Government never wants to study itself.

And BTW, the entire nursing home sector exists almost exclusively due to Medicare/Medicaid. It became really convenient for kids to palm their elderlies of onto these institutions where they can be stupefied. I know. I worked in nursing homes & when I tried to switch patients from those medications to more natural remedies such as prunes for constipation rather than Milk of Magnesia, I received a telephone call from the administrator, essentially telling me to change them back or not work.

And any self-assertion is addressed with tranquilizers.

I'll tell you what. Try a nursing home existence for six months and see how you feel.

payne1000

Wouldn't providing health care for all its citizens be much better for the world than spending that money on foreign wars which only cause the rest of the world to hate us?

Worried for our children Loc: Massachusetts

You didn't ask me a question. Go ahead and ask...