People are bashing Rep. David Dreier (R-CA) for saying that people diagnosed with brain tumors shouldn’t be provided millions of dollars of health care. What he meant was that it’s stupid for someone who is uninsured and has received a horrible medical diagnosis to then be insured against receiving a horrible medical diagnosis. They are effectively asking a for-profit corporation to pick up their medical bills. That’s not insurance, and that’s not a viable medical system.
But that’s precisely why insurance is not the right model for medical care. In a system with private for-profit insurance, you will have people who are insured and people who are not. What we want is a system in which everyone is covered all the time, from birth to sickness to death. Rather than buying health insurance, people should purchase health coverage paid for through payroll taxes.
Instead, we get these ad hoc high-risk insurance pools which are created for people who either had no insurance and got sick or lost their insurance after having been sick (through job loss, for example). They aren’t insurable at any reasonable or affordable rate. So, it’s just pretend insurance. We pretend that it makes sense to insure someone who has a brain tumor, when that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
But it also makes no sense to leave people without medical care for any reason, ever. It makes no sense to bankrupt people when they get sick. The whole system is horrible and illogical and inhumane.
ObamaCare is a vast improvement over what we had before, but we really ought to give up on private for-profit health insurance. It’s dumb.
Rep. David Dreier is correct. But he draws the wrong conclusions.
It’s actually worse than that. Most of the state high risk pools have come about either because of the numbers of people dumped from their insurance because they got sick, or, as in WA state, insurance lobbyists convinced the state legislature that they shouldn’t be required to insure people once they got sick.
The problem isn’t just that a lot of people don’t have insurance. It’s that the for-profit insurance model creates a massive incentive for insurance companies to refuse to provide the service their policy-holders are presumably paying for. And our political system has been so corrupted by corporate money that the companies are never held accountable for product frauds that are directly responsible for the deaths of countless people each year.
In a perfect world, not only would private insurance companies be abolished (excepting perhaps secondary insurance for boutique or exotic procedures not covered by a universal system). Their senior executives would all be in prison. They’re literally mass murderers, the lot of them.
In other words, fraud. So insurance lobbyists’ main job is to make fraud legal for insurance companies and insurance company lawyers’ job is to make the contracts so complicated that even if someone catches the company defrauding them, they cannot respond.
General rule: Markets cannot handle the distribution of goods and services that society determines that everyone must have.
So far in human society, there have been two alternatives to the market: gifts and the commanded delivery of goods and services. Given the inadequacy of the first to cover everyone, I think that most folks would like to see general government command instead of individual private command. An individual private command is like what my wife’s grandfather experienced during prohibition. Al Capone’s gang came to this small town near Chicago and wanted a false gas tank fitted to one of the cars. Those are the individual private commands that one does not say No to. No doubt Capone’s gang made similar private commands of health care professionals.
I agree 100% with your conclusions, but I disagree on what the Congressman meant. He did mean that money should not be wasted on people with deadly expensive illnesses. I’m sure he did.
BTW, that is a factor that many people fear from government healthcare, namely that they will be dumped to save money. That is a legitimate concern, but it their faith in private enterprise is touching when they think their insurance company won’t do the same thing.
Opponents have done a pretty good job of instilling in people that fear of the “faceless government bureaucrat”, sitting in a dimly office somewhere deep inside Washington and randomly scratching their names off the “government approved list”.
When the reality is, the chances of something like that happening at the hands of a “faceless insurance company worker” are probably exponentially higher.
But so it goes in the world where they have successfully painted all government efforts as doomed for unimaginable failure, while private companies are held up as bastions of fairness, mercy and good will.
I don’t think people actually think that, though. Government-provided health care is not unpopular with the public. Health insurance corporations are unpopular with the public. I don’t think the conservatives have actually been able to sell the public on that line. The polling doesn’t seem to show it.
Yeah, it is a legitimate concern. It seems like a natural response when told you have a terminal illness to spare no expense and try everything to live longer or cure the illness. The system itself is set up in this way where the default is to use heroic measures even when there is no realistic chance of success. But it is the rare person among us that wouldn’t at least have an impulse to do that.
End of life costs are a major driver for healthcare expenditures.
In addigtion to concern over the boogyman, er government bureaucrat making the decisions, there is aso the fear of the cost which would, as pointed out, come through some sort of a payroll deduction. However, people forget what they wouldn’t have to pay for under a single payer system:
In all likelihood, all of those savings (or increase in income) would cover whatever the payroll tax would amount to.
Excellent point, and that is why US industries are not competitive with other countries that do have healthcare systems. Preventive care reduces multiple serious emergency room visits. Primary care reduces uninsured emergency room visits. No cost shifting of these expensive services.
Overall health care costs should drop 1/3 to 1/2 in aggregate.
It’s hard to communicate this to folks who don’t understand the structure of health care costs.
Another reason is government funded education, producing a pool of skilled workers to which we might add (at least in Germany) Union funded training. In Northern Europe there seems to be a legacy of employer-union cooperation that is missing in the USA. Not sure about France and Southern Europe, they seem more hostile and violence prone, but that could be reporting bias.
Drier doesn’t have to worry, he doesn’t have a grain.
Republican=Psychopath.
Brain. I ruined my own little joke.
Looks like the Republicans are trying to make their death panels real.
Couldn’t agree with you more. The sooner we get the insurance companies out of the business of health care the better.