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Originally Posted by willravel
The free market has given birth to these outragous costs.
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Laser eye surgery is not covered by most medical health plans or medicare. It is not normally done in hospitals. It is less regulated than other proceedures. The cost have gone down over the years not up.
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The free market, left unchecked, will eventually spiral down to a system based on profit alone.
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Value. If you are in a free market and you sell goods or services with no value, you go out of business fast. In free markets profits come from added value.
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As medicine is something everyone needs, they can afford to hike up prices to unreasonable heights and "personal responsibility" has no control over that.
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People taking cholesteral medicine have two choices or actually three. They can pay for the medicine. They can lower their cholesterol through diet and excercise. Or, they can live with high cholesterol.
Seems that you argue this point just for the sake of argument. Or, it seems that you think people are generally unable to make informed decisions. I think most people are pretty savy and can live o.k. without government looking out for them.
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It is your and my responsibility to stop those free marketeers from taking advantage of or hurting people.
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Yes. Fraud, criminal activity, negligence are the things we need government involved in.
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How would I go about doing that? Threatening to take away their market. How would you do that? Put universal healthcare on the table. Either private healthcare shapes up, or federal healthcare takes over.
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I would put people in jail for criminal behavior or fraud. Civil courts can handle negligence, although I would make some reforms to our present system.
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Originally Posted by host
aceventura3, picture a funnel of money flow that begins with a wide mouth that sucks in all of the medical insurance premiums deducted from every worker's paycheck for the medicare portion of the FICA deduction, matched by an equal employer "contribution". It's comprised of 1.45 percent of earnings from each, or 2.90 percent total, of all W-2 earnings, wuth unlike the SSI joint deduction
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Some companies have about a 50% benifit load on base salaries, then you add federal, state and local deduction, then you end up with, for example an employer spending $100,000 on an employee. The employee is actually getting $50,000, then after deduction is getting about $35,000. I say pay the guy the $100k and let him spend the money or save it how he chooses. The government can collect taxes base on what the guy spends.
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Here is a report on what the private sector has been doing to medicare:
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When you creat systems that only a few understand, those few will manipulate the system to their advantage. If you want to improve the system, simplify it.