Lets be real here, we all know some people get away with abusing the system, while others are completely crushed by it. Both models have flaws, but to say americas is THE model to follow is a bit absurd.
socialism is fucking stupid and as unsustainable as free market capitalism. the only thing socialism does is transfer the bulk of payment from one institution, to the other, in a very unsustainable and innefienct matter. It’s bad enough that we have fucking beurocrats sitting in insurance claim offices going through books dictating whether or not I need a procedure or not, and behaving like they know more about my medical condition than my doctor. I don’t need a even more innefiencint public employee, where my treatment is stalled because they lost my paper work.
at saying government intervention was the core cause of our medical mess here in the states. It wasn’t, the mess is that insurance exists, and insurnace robs the consumer from the ability to bargin and shop for his doctor. And that there are no regulations putting a price celing on a procedure. It’s abusrd taht the same procedure in the same city can vary from 20-100k. Stay free
And how do you think our shitty third party payment (insurance) system, which you correctly pointed out major flaws in, came to be the norm? Employer provided insurance got its first major American foothold during ww2 when wage controls were put in place by the federal government, as a means of increasing compensation while complying with the law. Later, our glorious masters decided they would mandate that employers offer medical insurance to employees working full time, and the mess has been building since. I could go on with many more details, but I’ll keep it short- government intervention is most definitely to blame.
I don’t know of laws which forces employeers to offer insurance for employeers, and if there was, I assumed it was one of those laws where people look the other way all the time
the whole wal mart thing not offering coverage to all of it’s employees, and what not, would lead me to assume there is no mandate. Especially when there are job adds that specificaly advertise “health benifits! Dental included!”
Ok, so after some digging, I have more details and a correction.
First, it seems I was wrong about employers being forced to offer full timers insurance prior to Obamacare. Under it, employers with 50 or more full time employees (and the definition of “full time”, as it relates to medical insurance, will be changing to 30 hours, meaning most part time workers can expect 29 hours to be the new ceiling) will have to offer it or pay a fine, with the situation looking like many will simply opt for the fine. That said, full time workers being offered insurance has long been the norm, and I was even offered it as an 18 year old working at McDonald’s- meaning I’m skeptical that many people working 40 hours a week here don’t have the option.
As for the role government intervention played in the 3rd party payment mess, there were the wage controls I mentioned, a tax code change in 1943 that made EPI tax exempt (which was further sweetened in 1954), the creation of Medicare and Medicaid (which shifted customer costs further away from out of pocket, creating new expectations for “market” insurance), and the HMO act of 1973, which required businesses with 25 or more employees who offered medical insurance to make HMO’s (who were also given a nice grab bag of assorted goodies by the bill) an option.
At least the government option doesn’t deny you care because, hey, profits. Health care (and education for that matter) SHOULD NOT be for-profit enterprises. To be honest, at least in the socialist/euro arena, one knows they aren’t going to be in debt to the point of suicide, even if they HAVE insurance, should they get sick. I’d imagine that counts for a lot.
Actually, they do deny care in the Euro models. Rationing becomes a necessary element when the government makes something “free”, much, much moreso than in a for profit industry. I’ll explain- lets say you run a hospital, and need a second CAT scan machine. If you run a business, it’s worth buying it, because you will be able to serve more customers, allowing you to make more profits. On the same note, as the person responsible for keeping your hospital profitable, you are very unlikely to make such an expensive purchase unless you’re sure it’s needed. Conversely, without profit and loss as motivators (which is the case in a single payer system), buying the new machine (or serving more people) is purely a drain on your budget, which is pretty much guaranteed to be extremely stretched to begin with. Getting the machine would be more a matter of begging a bureaucrat, running an ad campaign asking for a new local levy, or having a local politician secure some pork spending rather than actual need, meaning the more politically savvy/slick administrators are sure to get additional funding whether they actually need it or not.
You want to see what socialized services look like in America? Look at our public schools, the VA, the BMV, anything else the government monopolizes at taxpayer expense. Socializing something here is pretty much guaranteed to politicize something and make it wasteful/inefficient. They have a vested interest in running inefficiently because of how funding is doled out, whereas a profit/loss business has every incentive to run as lean as possible (for profit’s sake) while keeping customers happy, because those customers can take their business elsewhere.
It’s not free though. It comes out via taxes people pay. I’d rather my tax dollars go to something like that than to more corporate welfare for defense contractors. At least I get some kind of benefit from that.
Profit or loss shouldn’t be motivators. I read an article someone posted in the State Of The World thread about how a good part of the reason health care is so expensive is because a lot of hospitals do unnecessary procedures (CAT scans being at the top of the list actually) to cover their asses in the case of of medical malpractice suits. If someone comes back saying they were the victim of MM, the hospital can say they did everything they could to help the person.
And many of them wind up charging a lot more for services than what the hospital’s chargemaster (a pricelist of services essentially) says those services should cost to make up the difference. In a lot of places, the “non-profit” hospitals are the most profitable businesses! And guess who pays those costs? Usually the middle class folks who can’t really afford it because their scumbag insurance company finds some way to weasel out of covering it, or decides to cover less of it because, “Hey, rising costs, huh huh.”
Things like the VA and public schools suck because politicians funnel money out of them and into corporate alternatives that their friends run (and by making up ridiculous hot-air educational standards that do nothing to really improve the system but make the clueless voters feel better.) The DMV is state run so if yours sucks, it’s because your state sucks at running it. The ones in NY are great. In the cases of health care, education, police, fire, etc. socialism is necessary. Those are services that every citizen should have equal opportunity to use and participate in. Running them like a corporation only benefits the people at the top of the pyramid (i.e. not you and me.)
I’d say the problem is we’re just locking too many people up, and if we can’t agree on why prisons are overcrowded, we probably won’t agree at all. We do lock up more people per capita than any other country though.
Presenting an example of an even worse prison system doesn’t forgive what we have. The fact that prison rape gets tolerated at all is cruel, and it absolutely does.
Prison is a business, just like everything else in America. If we don’t have inmates, we don’t look tough on crime and we don’t get money. Hence, lock up everyone.
It’s also a cultural thing. when you don’t have enough, you turn to crime to do with, and society doesn’t offer enough opportunity or satisfaction. If our society did provide those things adaquately, it wouldn’t matter if we where tough on crime. People would have no reason to do the drugs petty crimes they did, and our prisons would be filled with only rapist, derranged niggas, and white collar trash.
the issue is a bit more complicated than that. but given our ability to actually change shit that matters, getting rid of federal minimum laws is the most logical thing to do.
SF4 rewards you with ultra for losing and Norway rewards you with Playstations when you murder people… How the fuck am I supposed to raise my kids in a world like this…