dogzilla do you realize that medicare is already much more efficient than the private industry? Medicare has about a 2% overhead and private insurance has about a 30% overhead. That is a huge difference.
The mean cost of basic health coverage for a family is estimated to be $30,000 a year by 2019. I'm sorry but most people don't make $30,000 a year. We have a health care crises and doing nothing will not solve the problem.
Look at it this way, if you are driving a car where the steering is out and you are approaching the grand canyon do you hit the breaks? Or do you say I don't want to stop because hitting the breaks might ruin my breaks.
Personally I think the best system would be to go to a single payer system with very little overhead that covers every citizen and tax paying legal resident. This would be a copay system in which people's copays would be determined by a sliding scale and income. If people wanted additional coverage they could then get it from private insurance.
---------- Post added at 03:12 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:08 PM ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by dogzilla
If health care costs continue to rise faster than inflation rates or rates of increase in individual income, probably not. However, I don't see how allowing either coverage of preconditions or eliminating caps, which I think ends up increasing costs to insurance companies helps control costs.
I don't know what the answer to the health care issue is, but I don't think solutions which increase demand without some way to ensure supply increases equivalently are going to solve anything.
Nor do I believe that any solution that tries to cap profitability of a company will be a satisfactory long term solution either.
Maybe more interest in preventive care helps.
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I also don't think adding those protections will lower costs, no one does. Those are protections for the people. The cost lowering must come from elsewhere in the bill. My personal favorite ways to lower cost would be to 1) provide a public option to compete with private industry forcing them to lower their costs, 2) Malpractice reform/elimination of defensive medicine, 3) educating people on better lifestyle habbits (no more chocolate covered bacon or fried coke...)