Quoted message said:
Private insurance companies and medical clinics have incentives to
streamline their bureaucracies yet the bureaucracy and overhead is
still huge. Why would you think a government program that lacked these
incentives would be any better?
Private insurers have an incentive to maximize profit... which is not
the same as minimizing bureaucracy, if you have the power to rig
certain terms and conditions to your advantage. As I see it, it's in
the interest of insurers to make the process of getting medical
treatment as expensive as possible, because that will make sure that
as many people as possible see insurance coverage as a must-have item
(can't afford to go without). Because their actuarial scheme takes
into account the actual cost of treatment, plus administrative costs,
plus profit margin, that means the more everything else costs, the
more profit they get.
The reason that no competing insurers cut their costs to get a bigger
market share is because that would reduce the size of the pie that
insurers get a piece of. It the same reason that no cell phone
providers offer terms like what land-line long distance providers
offer (use only as much as you want, pay for only what you use).
Because if one of them offered that kind of service, all of them would
have to do so to remain competitive. Customers would then pay less
for what they got, and the gross revenue for all the commercial
players in the business would dwindle. Thus it is in the interest of
all the various medical insurers to make everything as expensive as
people can possibly withstand.
I think what JFT wants, what I want, and what a whole lot of other
Americans want, is a medical system that covers everybody (because
that's the right thing to do) without making a lot of private
businesses rich at the taxpayers' expense (because that's the wrong
thing to do). It isn't a fair or worthy use of public money to
guarantee private profits. But getting everybody the medical
attention they need is exactly the sort of thing we should be doing
with public money.
Cubans get better health care, by just about any measure, than
Americans do. And they get it at a small fraction of what we pay.
It's not because they don't have an onerous bureaucracy-- I'm sure
they do-- but it probably has something to do with their taking the
profiteers out of the supply chain.
Chalo
