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The most brilliant and comprehensive analysis of the health care crisis I've read so far. I don't agree with his solution of forcing people to comply, but he absolutely is spot on when it comes to the problem(s) and why Obamacare is no solution.
If you want to make the case that this article definitively shows that "Obamacare is no solution," don't throw that out in this thread like you're a Reddit feed. It would be as if I threw out a Gladwell article and simply stated "Thus Obamacare is the solution, QED."
Empty internet calories. And this is a serial habit of yours at this point: soundbite threads. Give your own take. Summarize. Add something.
2.
Okay, let's view the concluding paragraph, taking into consideration your abject refusal to accept the validity of any solutions involving taxation or forced compliance/coercion which I will assume falls in line behind your statement that you don't agree with his solution of 'forcing people to comply.'
quote:Before we further remove ourselves as direct consumers of health care—with all of our beneficial influence on quality, service, and price—let me ask you to consider one more question. Imagine my father’s hospital had to present the bill for his “care” not to a government bureaucracy, but to my grieving mother. Do you really believe that the hospital—forced to face the victim of its poor-quality service, forced to collect the bill from the real customer—wouldn’t have figured out how to make its doctors wash their hands?
Okay, so .. we can't have medicare, no public support system for healthcare. Nothing. Let's say the doctors wash their hands and it's so successful that it goes beyond even the improvement noted at the beginning of the article. Let's say the bill presented to this grieving mother is 'merely' $350,000.
Assuming hospitals are still obligated to provide care to individuals requiring emergency care (in effect, we're not instituting a system in our country that leaves people in medical crisis outside of the hospital to die unless they provide assurance of payment), how many of our elderly are going to be in a situation to actually pay those hundreds of thousands of dollars to the hospital?
As it stands right now, hospitals only get back, on average, about 40 cents for every dollar in total that they charge. The rest is simply absorbed by the system, because the other 60 cents are costs incurred by people who simply cannot pay (medical bankruptcies remain the largest single cause of default in our country, even in the midst of a gargantuan mortgage crisis).
Obviously, you would mandate that we do not have public coverage. Not even of our old people. You would vanquish medicare and medicaid and social security and all those other things that we are 'forced to comply with.' In this case, what percentage of these grieving elderly widows are going to successfully pay their six-figure bills to the hospitals to cover the costs of care?
The answer is so low that you could be assured that, by removing all 'forced compliance' models categorically, you'd leave the american hospitals in a situation where they would be unable to recoup the costs for providing necessary care to people — especially the elderly — in medical crisis.
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The author pretty explicitly is not advocating "no public support system for healthcare." He suggests both a government-run, universal catastrophic health insurance plan, by which taxpayers would pay for catastrophic illnesses, as well as direct subsidies of Health Savings Accounts for those who can't afford to save on their own.
Rather he's suggesting ways in which he believes we can better align incentives with quality of health. By increasing transparency at the transaction level (rather than hiding it somewhere in Washington, D.C.) he feels that people would be more likely to make good decisions.
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quote:The author pretty explicitly is not advocating "no public support system for healthcare."
I know. That's a response to Lisa's conditionals. Part of this guy's analysis, his hopes for reforming the situation, involves stuff like public regulation that she will have no part of. So, I'm asking, what's her solution that removes all these things?
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