Health Care

[Fool]

"Fundamentally good"

Free health care = fundamentally good. Wow, who can argue with that?

Provide housing, food and now health care?

And who pays for it?

Libs always look to the gov't for their idealistic ways and the Gov't just keeps taking and taking more and more taxes.

Health care was already provided free, senile one. Now there is a mandate so those who could pay but were riding free will have to either get coverage or pay the penalty.

Lics always talk about morality till you ask them to put their money where their mouth is.

[Tahoe]

Lics...don't see me talking too much morality...then again I don't consider myself a lic.

Health Care was provided free? Ok, I'll stop paying.

[Fool]

Lics...don't see me talking too much morality...then again I don't consider myself a lic.

Health Care was provided free? Ok, I'll stop paying.

You could have and then walk into any hospital and it was against the law for them not to treat you.

Remember, it was part of the reason to kick out all 'dem e'legal ferners you employ.

[Shoopy]

As a center-right sort of guy, I don't care either way.

In a perfect world, everyone gets healthcare. In a perfect world, however, the people voting on these kinds of things actually read whatever the fuck they're voting on.

[Shoopy]

I do have one question for you guys who know about this stuff:

What's the difference between Obamacare and the Massachusetts healthcare system?

[Tahoe]

As a center-right sort of guy, I don't care either way.

In a perfect world, everyone gets healthcare. In a perfect world, however, the people voting on these kinds of things actually read whatever the fuck they're voting on.

And everyone pays their way.

[Fool]

And everyone has the same advantages to make their own way.

[Tahoe]

I'm not for quota's either.

[Uncle Mxy]

I do have one question for you guys who know about this stuff:

What's the difference between Obamacare and the Massachusetts healthcare system?

Much of what would be similar to the Massachusetts healthcare system is many years away, and will undoubtedly get rejiggered over time. There's more to "Obamacare" (which is far more structured by Congress than Obama) than what the Massachusetts setup does. It owes much to what commie-pinko liberal Nixon wanted to do in the way of healthcare reform before Watergate.

The big difference is the ability of the federal government to regulate insurer and consumer behaviors in ways that state governments simply cannot. There wasn't much that a state could do to a nationwide company to control costs, so the Massachusetts plan costs went up 10-20% per year since its inception and became stupid for its poor people. One of the big advantages is that healthcare is less tied to global economies than, say, oil is. While there's a reliance on foreign medical professionals, and it can be cheaper to fly to Thailand to get some procedures, the patients, money, and infrastructure are primarily domestic.

Thus far, there's a number of pieces to the act that cause insurers to do things they don't want to do. There isn't much in the way of cost control, really (apart from reducing the Medicare provider payments which is of dubious cost control benefit in a practical sense). Where things will get interesting is the guv'mint reaction to inevitable price escalation after having a mandate in there to pay for it. Some of the costs going up are inevitable... we use ever-more-costly mechanisms to prolong life and we do squat in the way of population control (which is how China's rise in quality of life for its population has happened). Other aspects of the costs are simply usury, and won't resemble reality without force.

[Uncle Mxy]

I'm not for quota's either.

Quotas are inevitable. "death-by-spreadsheet" is a reality today. In some ways, the reform act does away with some quota-ing mechanisms insurers have used to take money while not providing care. Laws prevent you from getting as much medicine as you want domestically, even if you can pay for it, so the only way a mega-billionaire can get a billion dollars of care involves a foreign entity with different laws. Of course, that doesn't factor in quality of care. For sufficiently rare diseases, there may be only a few individuals who can provide care, and by the time you pay megabucks to train more because society won't focus much on a disease that kills <1000/year, you'll be dead.

The interesting question involves whether or not quota-ing can be rational. Let's talk breast cancer, since I just saw another pink "walk for the cure" commercial. The actuarial reality is that breast cancer these days is a much more "solved" problem than it has been in the past, and gets disproportionate amount of attention and $ relative to other cancers and fatal diseases because it's (mostly) women's boobies. If some entity (call it a "death panel" ) were to try to rationally allocate healthcare spending in terms of probable "bang for the buck", breast cancer now ranks low on the list. But they have marketing, and will continue to get disproportionate funding relative to other killers.