Sunday, June 21, 2009

a thought on the health issue

Here's an addendum to the post from Thursday:

I keep seeing several points...
  1. American's spend twice as much on health care as anyone else in the world, despite having an overall health rating somewhere around Cuba's.
  2. Even though places such as Canada and France cover everyone, certain procedures are "rationed" and difficult to obtain. America is the place where all the "real" medical research gets done.
So, to sum up, we pay a lot more for worse health care (but also the best - if you have money/coverage) than most countries, and part of the cost is research for the rest of the world...

Wait, we have the best health care in the world, except not for everybody, which makes us better because we dont ration, except we do, because you cant get a procedure done if you dont have coverage or cash, and that's why we pay twice as much for it...

No, that doesnt sound right either...

Anyway, here's my idea: Pay the same amount of money (rather than cutting costs as some tout the new plan will do), and have less rationing! It seems so simple.

Oh, yeah, and get rid of the insurance companies. And if you're worried about the impact of eliminating such a huge part of the economic engine, I have a question for you: does anyone worry about that when discussing the War On Drugs?

2 comments:

sbh said...

The no-rationing thing has never made sense to me. The US has an entire industry (health insurance) devoted primarily to determining how health care should be rationed to its customers.

daveawayfromhome said...

Abso-fuckin-tively. But it's based on wealth and/or power, so that's okay with Republicans (and a lot of other Americans also). It's rationing based on need that riles the Haves and the stupid Have-is-just-around-the-corner-s who support them.