The Naiveté Of Advocating A Free Market Health Care System

In case you didn’t notice, the current health care system in the United States is already a free market system. There are winners and losers. There are some people who can afford to participate and others who get left behind. This is how any market works, and this is how our current health care system (which isn’t really a system at all) is working, or should I say, is not working.

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America Has The Best Health Care? Not In A Fact-Based World.

The United States of America has the highest health care costs of 13 industrialized countries with an average cost of $8,000 per person in 2009. Japan has the lowest costs at just $2,878 per person in 2008. This is from a study by The Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation whose mission is to “promote a high performing health care system that achieves better access, improved quality, and greater efficiency, particularly for society’s most vulnerable”.

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It ‘Only’ Takes Political Will To Make Sure Medicare And Social Security Survive

There is no question Medicare needs fixing. The biggest problem with Medicare is that it is a high-risk pool. Insurance will be expensive per person when the only people in the insurance risk pool are 65 and older or disabled. That makes it fairly remarkable that Medicare has managed to survive for as long as it has. The reason it has survived is because of a vast supply of political will and public support. But sooner or later we are going to have to address the root issue, high risk. All insurance works by having diversified risk whether it’s car insurance or health insurance. Therefore, diversifying the risk pool when it comes to Medicare means extending it to all Americans, or ‘Medicare for all’. Having one insurance payer makes the financing of health care simpler and more efficient. Removing profits from the financing side of health care means nobody is deciding what is and isn’t covered based on shareholder sentiment and CEO bonuses. Removing profits means less overhead, hence less costly health care. Fixing health care in this country means extending the same coverage your grandparents have to all Americans.

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Health Care Is Rationed By Private For-Profit Insurance Companies. Is That Really What We Want?

We are told by conservatives that we don’t want government-run universal health care because it would mean rationing care. During the health care debate in the summer and fall of 2009 we heard talk of ‘death panels’ and ‘killing grandma’. Of course all of this was nonsense meant to scare people into thinking and voting a certain way, and it was quite effective, particularly on the Republican side of the aisle. The truth is we already ration health care in the United States. 50 million people are uninsured. How is that not rationed care? Health care costs are higher than they need to be (due to insurance company profits and waste) which means in some cases people forego treatment because they can’t afford it (even if they have insurance). How is that not rationed care?

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Obamacare, Medicare, Veterans Affairs: The Conservative Cognitive Dissonance Is Deafening

There are countless conservatives in this country who support Medicare and support Veterans Affairs (VA) but are against the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). They are against the idea of universal health care at the federal level. There is a cognitive dissonance at play here that is rarely discussed during health care debates in the media. We take it at face value that conservatives are against federally controlled universal health care as a matter of principle, but apparently their principles are malleable when it comes to Medicare and Veterans Affairs.

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