Shorter Paul Krugman
1. Society bears the cost of health care one way or another.
2. Private health care is less efficient than public health care and won’t cover high-risk patients.
3. The only competition in private care happens for healthy patients.
4. Companies are either going bankrupt paying for health care or screwing workers.
5. The US is getting poorer and sicker and spending more.
6. (Implied) Insurance companies love the US health care system.
April 22nd, 2005 at 11:08 am
The doctors, via their A.M.A. (which makes a big buisiness of licensing medical schools), insisted that “socialized medicine” would “harm the doctor patient relationship.” Big industry insisted that “we will handle that.”
Not only do we need the government to just get off it’s ass and just do the damn job, we really must go further. We must demand that every person, no matter how rich or poor, be given the SAME LEVEL of care — EQUAL CARE. Screw ‘em!!!
April 22nd, 2005 at 6:19 pm
“Equal care”? However will you figure out what that was?
I’d settle for reducing the power of profits over selecting who lives and dies.
April 22nd, 2005 at 8:04 pm
Well, if nobody can figure out what it is, then nobody should have any objection to passing it.
Actually, if you were in a jury that could convict doctors and patients who went too far over the line, you really wouldn’t have that much trouble figuring it out. It would be infinitely easier than trying to decode the meaning of circumstantial clues in difficult murder cases.
April 24th, 2005 at 9:22 am
An even shorter Paul Krugman: Americans are paying more for health care than people in other countries and getting less for the money because too much time and money is being wasted trying to get others to pay the costs.
April 24th, 2005 at 3:32 pm
Medical care and treatments can be provided with only a very small draw-down on electrical, oil, or (in the future) methane resources.
In fact, medical care would be almost too cheap to be concerned about if we simply did away with the Byzantine patent system that makes medical instrumentation insanely expensive, and the copyright laws that send drug prices through the roof. Eliminating these artificial stumbling blocks would also clear the way for a vast new open source cornucopia of innovation.
If we really are serious about survival, we will also demolish brick and concrete hospitals that incubate pathogenic microbes, and build disposable wooden ones in their place. And we will eliminate high speed human transport, which is guaranteed to spread whatever the first mass-extinction microbial pandemic pathogen turns out to be.