That's just flat out false and you know it. Spending has increased very year since 2006. http://www.politifact.com/punditfac...a-vanden-heuvel-says-congress-has-slashed-fu/
In Italy, a country with a very wide almost free healthcare, we have not only made it less free, but we are thinking to reduce it favoring free market. The problem is that a free healthcare, with a lot of public hospitals, tends to see its expenses grow more and more. If something is free, even if it's not necessary, but only useful, people will tend to ask for that public service. This makes sanitary structures busy for little matters and not suitably available for serious matters. This requires more personnel and more facilities ... The sanitary public system in Italy is a main cause of our enormous public debt.
The private health care model is a huge failure which is why no other country does it. It is bankrupting this country. Canadian and Uk and French.....etc companies don't have to have health insurance for their employees which makes them much more competitive. It is time to end this huge failure and ensure EVERYONE has health insurance. Health care should be considered a basic RIGHT for all americans just like basic public education.
I'll tell you what will happen if America has "free" healthcare: There will immediately be shortages and the country will have to bring in cheap foreign nurses from outside. It will DEVASTATE the nursing profession.
Switzerland is private healthcare. The difference is that unlike the US, Switzerland has health insurance policies tied directly to the individual isntead of based around companies. They don't have socialized medicine and unlike the UK and Canada they don't have long waiting times and they have access to more and better technology.
Every time it has been tried, socialized medicine can't afford to pay for enough nurses in the country, so they have to resort to bringing in lower cost skilled labor from elsewhere. Particularly true in the U.K. where fewer than 40 percent of doctors are neither foreign-born nor second- generation British citizens.
Why do their healthcare outcomes rank so much higher? If the system is so lousy why do they all keep it .....for decades now.
It costs less because they end up bringing foreign healthcare workers in who are willing to work for less.
Absolutely not the case. An MRI costs one third the price. Medications often cost half. That has nothing to do with personnel. And what stops hospitals from bringing in cheap labor here? - - - Updated - - - That's why it doesn't work. You CAN'T have a free market in healthcare when you are required by law to treat people for free in the ER. - - - Updated - - - Why doesn't the US bring in nurses from elsewhere (they do). Don't they want to make money?
Good point. Maybe the government should only pay for healthcare based on how much money it will end up saving in the emergency room. That way the government can only engage in a limited form of socialized healthcare, while still saving money to society as a whole. I also think a voucher program would be the most fair here, so if you did not like the government's socialized healthcare program you could take your voucher and the government would help pay towards you getting private medical care elsewhere. That way it doesn't create a monopoly where consumers end up trapped in the government-run healthcare program. This way is fair to all, the government can still provide free treatment to the poor, but higher income people do not have to sacrifice quality or choice to get that benefit (which their tax money is paying for). Any socialized healthcare system should focus on preventative care, spend the least money now to reduce medical costs later. The government does not need to take over the entire healthcare sector though.
Nope. That still leaves in the profit motive which is what makes health care so expensive. Just go single payer
Well, I do believe medical research is best funded by government for the benefit of all. That is not the same as medical care though. Problem with single payer is it takes away choice. If government bureaucrats are so good at managing things, why not give people the money and let them choose. I mean, they could either go with the socialized plan, or the government could pay the same amount of money towards the patient's private medical care, if that's what the individual preferred. What I do not want to see happen is the government take your tax money and then say "Now it's our program or you pay for it all on your own!", meaning now you not only have to pay for your own medical care but also for a big government medical program you're not using.
That model works so well in other countries that you could not get elected dog catcher if you said you wanted to go back to a for profit model. The research has been done and socialized medicine wins
We already have a socialized model to look at; it's called non-profit HMOs. They work ok, cost about the same amount as for-profit HMOs, the hospital doesn't have an incentive to try to kill patients to maximize profit, but it's still a low cost care plan, they are not going to pay for an expensive operation if they feel that money could be better spent on another patient. There's no reason to think a government-run program would be any better at controlling costs. If the government could do it, why haven't non-profit HMOs managed to bring prices down?
A non profit HMO ( I have never heard of one) still has to use the for profit system. Take out the middle man. What could your company do if it did not have to pay for health insurance for its employees?
From what I recall, the VA underwent a sort of renaissance in the 1990s and has since outperformed the private sector in most key measures, per the liberal propaganda machine Forbes. http://www.forbes.com/sites/harlank...dgment-about-va-health-system/2/#b4a03fa57e0c and every other source I've seen that uses actual data as opposed to tragic stories. We see bad press in the media because the kinds of things that would be just another lawsuit or medicare not paying more for preventable complications for the private sector are seen as unacceptable when applied to veterans. So I'd like to see actual data on performance that supports yours position. The main thing I would expect you to find is a problem with elective waiting times. That said, absolutely the VA should work to improve like all organizations and I'm not sure if the incentives are adequately aligned for that, but part of the problem really is the budget. Even in 2014, the article from Forbes that I cited stated utilization of primary care was up 50% but the staffing was up only 9%. I saw later in the thread you posted benefits figures, but the VA system has seen not only an increase in utilization of healthcare for their sicker-than-average patients but also increased costs because medicine can do more each year at higher costs - this is why all healthcare systems struggle with budgets. The more advanced medicine becomes, the more expensive it becomes, but demand for healthcare is inflexible because people will pay anything for their lives, and veterans are told they are entitled to it. I'd also add that a "single payer" system applying only to a less powerful segment of the population is not representative of what single payer applied to the whole population would look like, particularly when you have ridiculous laws in this country like medicare not being able to negotiate for better drug prices. So basically, Congress is at least partly to blame for the problem with the VA, but Congress would be forced to do better at least in terms of adequate funding if it had to be accountable for basic healthcare for all of us. Though corruption will be a problem in how laws are written in America as long as money is free speech.
Profit means that net positive budgets are given to private gain, usually in the form of shares held by investors. Having a surplus budget and making a profit are not the same thing. In a non-profit, net positive budgets can be applied to reinvestment in infrastructure/staffing, which works well for healthcare. Kaiser Permanente is a nonprofit HMO... Kaiser is one of the biggest players in my area. It has long been known that nonprofits work better: http://articles.latimes.com/1999/jul/14/news/mn-55805 When your goal is profit, there's no such thing as too much profit. Usually this isn't a problem, since it means people really love what you're selling and are buying it. With delivery of healthcare and HMOs in particular, it's not so good. The special problem with profit in HMOs is that it incentivizes minimizing the amount of care you give, since you maximize profit by minimizing healthcare delivered to your members, at least to the extent you can get away with it.
As I showed someone else funding for the VA system has gone up since at least 2006. Your also trying to compare apples and oranges. Forbes wont show up because I have adblock and I will NEVER turn that off for any site but I assume you are referring to this very very very very very old piece form 11 years ago. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2005/0501.longman.html It mentions the 11 criteria. Its 2016 not 2005. Second they compared the VA system with fee for service Medicare which is what liberals such as yourself also point to as a reason to believe that it works. All the article shows is that Medicare was worse than the VA system back in 2005. That is not a comparison between the VA and the private system. No matter what happens politically though we have a huge problem with doctor and nurse shortages and an ever aging population. Obamacare dumping millions of extra people into the system without additional staffing AND making it more expensive is not helping the problem at all. We need Switzerlands model and we need it yesterday.
No it's from 2014, and the independent review from 2015 concluded the same but that's a bit cumbersome to cite directly. You must have seen some data against the va to be so against it? I already told you that an increasing budget is not necessarily sufficient given that utilization went up 50%, costs per patient in all systems went up let alone the sicker patients of the va, and to a lesser extent things like inflation.
Your article is from 2014 but the study cited is from 2004. http://www.herc.research.va.gov/include/page.asp?id=va-vs-non-va That article also explains why its almost impossible to accurately compare medicare costs and performance versus VA performance. We do know that Medicare back then was worse but as I stated already that is just another version of single payer system not working. Claiming that the VA is better than Medicare is like saying its better to die from a gunshot to the head than being burned alive. Both suck. What I hope to see is the continued growth of concierge medicine. It might end up being the only reprieve from government run medicine which is horrible in every country its been tried in. And before you quote the WHO rankings from 2000 (16 years ago) keep in mind that they stopped doing it precisely because it ended up being so flawed and even one of the editor's wrote a public letter pointing out how useless the rankings were. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-concierge-medicine-will-get-bigger-2013-01-17 This is just one of many articles that show that not only is concierge cheaper than the private insurance or the socialized models as it gets rid of the two main drivers for medical costs insurance companies and the government. It also shows that the care is better and more efficient. A couple was quoted as paying only $5,000 per year for the both of them for all expenses. That is $416 per month. Compare that to the costs from Obamacare and remember that unless you are getting the gold plan (which virtually no one does) you are only covered for 60-80% of the cost and must pay the remaining 20-40% cost.
