While you are at it - to make sure you will be served by an insurance company how about the government guarantees the insurance companies a profit?Skipjack wrote:Hey, I would even be happy if the US passed a law that limits the cost for health insurance and that does not allow insurance companies to deny insurance to an applicant. That would at least give people like me a chance and it would still not be "socialized" or whatever you guys are sooooo affraid of (to the point of being ridiculous).
That way you get insurance you can't afford. The insurance companies stay in business and government steals the money from strangers to make up the difference (minus the usual service fees and big donor exemptions).
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"All of the actors in health care—from doctors to insurers to pharmaceutical companies—work in a heavily regulated, massively subsidized industry full of structural distortions. They all want to serve patients well. But they also all behave rationally in response to the economic incentives those distortions create. Accidentally, but relentlessly, America has built a health-care system with incentives that inexorably generate terrible and perverse results. Incentives that emphasize health care over any other aspect of health and well-being. That emphasize treatment over prevention. That disguise true costs. That favor complexity, and discourage transparent competition based on price or quality. That result in a generational pyramid scheme rather than sustainable financing. And that—most important—remove consumers from our irreplaceable role as the ultimate ensurer of value."
from:"To achieve maximum coverage at acceptable cost with acceptable quality, health care will need to become subject to the same forces that have boosted efficiency and value throughout the economy. We will need to reduce, rather than expand, the role of insurance; focus the government’s role exclusively on things that only government can do (protect the poor, cover us against true catastrophe, enforce safety standards, and ensure provider competition); overcome our addiction to Ponzi-scheme financing, hidden subsidies, manipulated prices, and undisclosed results; and rely more on ourselves, the consumers, as the ultimate guarantors of good service, reasonable prices, and sensible trade-offs between health-care spending and spending on all the other good things money can buy."
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/health-care
H/T: http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009 ... 1251644481