Americans Favor Free Healthcare, CBS Suffers from Schizophrenia
I want free gas and free food, and by free I mean paid for by the government.
And by the government I mean that rich doctor down the street. Look at him, driving around in his Mercedes sl500!
Well, I never actually see him, since he works about 80 hours a week, and I guess that isn’t a Mercedes, it’s a Toyota Corolla, but I know that the bastard is making $5 million a year for sitting around and flirting with nurses!
We need to punish these doctors. What we need is free healthcare, and Americans are demanding it.
If CBS prints a poll about Americans’ desires, it must be true, right? OK, so how about an article they printed on the same day, which details how a prescription drug benefit, not even complete healthcare, solely for senior citizens will bankrupt America?
I’m confused. CBS writes a puff piece pushing universal healthcare down our throats with one hand, and with the other hand prints a report from the top U.S. accountant explaining why a program which only covers a fraction of the population with universal healthcare won’t work financially.
Um…Hillary for President in ‘08?
March 3rd, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Sure, we can make universal healthcare work. All we have to do is raise taxes high enough, and then ration the care. Given an 80% tax rate and a 6-month wait for emergency care, it ought to work fine.
March 3rd, 2007 at 4:17 pm
Having worked in socialized medicine, I can tell you three things:
1) The food served at the hospital is worse than WW1 trench rations
2) We see 1 patient instead of 10 because there is no incentive to work
3) The majority of the workers vote democrat
March 3rd, 2007 at 7:28 pm
HILLARY CLINTON IS WRRRRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG!!!!
March 4th, 2007 at 11:16 am
I must agree, the government should not handle universal healthcare. They have sufficiently proven that, given the opportunity to handle something like this, they’ll screw it up (and it sure as hell won’t be efficiently run, which is critical to making it work; see the Iraq reconstruction).
However, that doesn’t mean healthcare should not be made available to every single person in this country. There is no one answer to this problem, but there is a solution. I would likely put the onus on employers to help make this happen, but I’m sure Archer would scream about that one.
By the way Arch, nice to see you started a blog. It’ll be fun to do a little debating, since I have a feeling we have fairly divergent viewpoints.
March 4th, 2007 at 11:17 am
Oops, I see you’ve had a blog going for a while now
March 4th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
Kaleb,
Thanks for checking out my blog.
I would say, generally, no matter what one’s political view on the issue, we all want the same endpoint: the best healthcare for Americans.
The question is how to do it. Alot of folks say : “leave it to the government, I don’t need to be responsible for my own healthcare”.
I say the answer isn’t a simple one-liner or an easy thing, but it’s definitely not the above. Even *if* the government had enough money to run it, which it doesn’t, we know that the government doesn’t run things efficiently, especially in healthcare. Need I point to the latest Walter Reed episode, or look at the record of some of the VA hospitals? Heck, look at the poor delivery methods of Canada, Europe, and other places where private industry is outlawed, with government being the only player in town.
Anyway, I don’t have a complete answer. There are far smarter people than I working on this thing full-time. I do know, however, that Health Savings Accounts, or HSA’s, show alot of promise with economic freedom and personal choice of the consumer with regards to healthcare.
Giving people the opportunity to fund their own healthcare needs with pre-tax dollars allows them to be in the same position their employers now fill.
Beyond that, I need to do more studying on the issue.
Look forward to debating! With you being a full-blown lawyer soon, I’ll need to make sure my arguments are extra tight!
March 5th, 2007 at 12:05 am
I do like HSA’s, but honestly most of the people in need of affordable health care don’t have enough disposable income to make any meaningful contribution to an HSA. It’s basically just a great above-the-line tax break for people w/ the means.
It is a really tough problem. Our best bet imo is to study what other countries are doing, evaluate what works and what doesn’t, and make something happen. You’re right, there are a lot of smart people out there working on this. I really hope they come up w/ some viable options beyond ill-targeted tax breaks. Imo the tax breaks should go to employers providing care as an above-the-line as opposed to being below-the-line as it is now (I think it’s just a normal deduction right now, not pre-tax, but I can’t be certain b/c I honestly don’t feel like looking through my Income Tax book right now).
March 5th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
HSA’s seem to be one of the “pressure valve releases” which, when opened up to the general public, will help relieve pressure in other parts of the system.
I’ve seen arguments that they would *drastically* open up opportunities for those who aren’t insured, as well as those who say the impact wouldn’t be as helpful. Both sides I’ve spoken to say that HSA’s can do nothing but help.
I do know that, at the root of it, the fundamental belief that people should be responsible for their own healthcare is embodied in HSA’s, and the more people we get, regardless of economic strata, who are more responsible for their own healthcare, the better the system will be as a whole, freeing up dollars otherwised used by those who don’t need it for those who truly do.
Looking at other countries is key, and HSA’s have been used elsewhere, as well as socialized medicine. We have alot of data to work with. One thing is for sure: socialized medicine is terrible.
TheVanguard.Org has alot more information on HSA’s, which you can find here: http://www.thevanguard.org/thevanguard/issues/health_care/index.shtml
March 5th, 2007 at 4:51 pm
Even more worrisome to me is the fact that middle class Americans can’t get coverage. There was a great article today in the NYT addressing some of these issues.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/us/05uninsured.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Sadly, even those w/ the means, desire, & responsibility to prepare themselves for these issues can still get screwed. It’s not right; we can do better.
March 6th, 2007 at 1:32 pm
Regarding HSAs, so far, most of them are going to the previously uninsured, so clearly they are filling a crucial gap. And as to the poor being unable to make meaningful contributions, this assumes that the poor themselves have to make the contributions: employers can make the contributions (and because those contributions aren’t fixed by the giant insurance company, a lot of small employers could afford to make contributions who could not possibly offer group health coverage). Moreover, in the late 1990s, Republicans forced Bill Clinton to sign a bill which created a pilot program testing the concept of Medicare Health Savings Accounts. The response was overwhelmingly positive, because even though government funded the accounts, 100% of the control remained with the individual.
This is just one creative strategy: it is not a panacea, and it should not be seen or touted as one. However, HSAs — as they catch on, and they are beginning to do so in a big way — offer a way to significantly decrease health costs while significantly increasing the number of people with coverage. They also create a way to end the use-it-or-lose-it system we currently have, where once you pay an insurance premium it’s gone forever. If you don’t use what you put into an HSA this month — or this year — it’ll still be there when you need it, forever.
That last bit is the most important of all. Most of the people with the lowest paying jobs are young, and therefore healthy. By the time most of them need a lot of money for health care, and HSA would allow them to be largely self-insured.
What a revolution — in both service and freedom — that would be! Combine it with some other free market reforms, and most people will be in better shape than they can imagine, making it a lot easier for government to pay for the handful who can’t.
Contrast that with Walter Reed (or any VA hospital) and you start to see why we need to be working a lot harder in this direction.
March 6th, 2007 at 1:34 pm
I forgot to mention regarding employer contributions to HSAs: this is not a hypothetical. HSAs are proving to be especially attractive to small business owners, who then tend to offer them to their employees (since most of them would like to give benefits but can’t afford the traditional schemes). We need to promote these more, of course, but people are catching on pretty fast anyway.