TheWesDude said:
no, you see, americans would not really mind socialist health care if it were not for a few factors:
1) nobody believes it can be passed without a net increase in taxes. if they could somehow make it a reality without increasing taxes, it would gain a lot of ground. of course nobody with any brains thinks you can have socialist health care without increased taxes. lower taxes is more important than decent health care.
It shouldn't be, since the current system sucks.
Also, the US spens more money per capita on health care than any other country, which would suggest that it can be done much cheaper and eventually lead to a decrease in taxes.
TheWesDude said:
2) you could prevent non-emergency health care to illegal aliens. even providing emergency health care to illegal immigrants is bad enough and enough of a tax burden, this again would lead to increased costs.
I sincerely doubt that this would actually have a major impact. Are there any numbers on this? Also, what does this actually have to do with a healthcare package?
TheWesDude said:
3) for health care to be decided upon by your doctor and you rather than some political panel. if a politicial or any panel decides your care, then it would lead to the great fear of denying care to elderly people to curtail costs. of course, not denying care to elderly people would lead to increased costs which would have to be passed down to tax payers.
How would it lead to refusing the elderly more than they are already refused? Elderly people who can't pay the healthcare bills are already fucked, and universal healthcare should help them get care. Conversely, the elderly who now can afford healthcare shouldn't be denied, because y'know, they can already pay for it.
TheWesDude said:
4) would lead to greater governmental influence in our every day lives and require more overhead to make sure all policies and proceedures are followed. leading to... higher costs associated with running this idea which would get passed to the tax payers. which means more taxes.
Actually, a system of universal healthcare should lead to a decrease in overall health costs. 'The Undercover Economist' by Tim Harford does a really good job of explaining why this is the case.
Mainly, it's due to an information imbalance.
Here's what happens in a non-universal healthcare system: people signing up for healthcare are going to be the ones who think they are most likely to need it. In other words, the low-risk groups who would otherwise pay for health insurance but not use it often are removed from the pool of insurance clients. This leads to an increase in price for the remaining people, as the burden is shared by fewer people. This increase in price then increases the threshold for people to join up, which means that the people who think they need it the least again stop getting health insurance. See the vicious cycle?
The insurance companies try to counteract this by getting as much information on their clients as possible, and then dividing them into risk groups and charging them accordingly. This defeats the purpose: it charges much more of the people who are in a high-risk group (and hence most likely to use health care) and hence doesn't make it more affordable for them.
The reason that this is a problem, is that when catastrophe strikes, healthcare bills pile up and for many people it's impossible to ever pay those bills.
In a universal healthcare system that problem disappears. The burden is shared by everyone equally, lessening the amount everyone spends by themselves. The information imbalance disappears, because there's no drop-off and no point to filtering: everyone gets healthcare and insurance companies can't deny people healthcare.
Singapore has an interesting alternative that seems to work well: they give everyone a health care bank account, they put in some amount of money each year and ask that the people themselves put money in their health care accounts as well. That way, people build up a sort of health care budget and can decide themselves where to spend it.
TheWesDude said:
are you seeing the trend yet? its not that we are vhemently opposed to socialist health care, its that we do not want to pay for it.
No, it's more that the US public is ill-informed of the actual costs of 'socialist'(pah) healthcare.