"DC3 LS, Fuck Hyundai, now and forever" (eg6)
04/25/2020 at 18:58 • Filed to: None
3
21|
"DC3 LS, Fuck Hyundai, now and forever" (eg6)
04/25/2020 at 18:58 • Filed to: None | 3
| 21 |
So with the extra free time of the corona virus, I’ve been doing some thonking and I think I’ve come up with a 100% right wing argument for nationalized healthcare
.
For clarity, when I say nationalized healthcare, I mean the government owning hospitals, employing virtually all doctors/nurses, etc. Not Medicare-for-all which is essentially just nationalized health insurance.
Also this is basically a first draft, since I don’t get paid or graded on this
,
so lol grammar.
!!! UNKNOWN CONTENT TYPE !!!
Inability of the M
arket to E
conomize H
ealthcare
!!! UNKNOWN CONTENT TYPE !!!
The foundation of my theory is that healthcare doesn’t function like a typical market in almost anyway. For the most part demand for health care is nearly 100% determined by
physical conditions, no healthy person is going to be motivated to get a knee surgery or purchase insulin if they don’t suffer the medical conditions that could be remedied by them. Unlike other markets, even for essential items like food, demand fluctuates on factors such as consumers desire for surplus or higher quality/exotic foods. Additionally for basic food items such grains, fruits, vegetables, and common meats; suppliers are essentially in-capable of differentiating their products from competitors, since the product is mostly determined by nature. So the only way they can compete is on price, which leads to the lowest prices possible for basic food, while the market also allows for the allocation of surplus and higher quality food products that a centrally planned economy/market would have almost no hope of allocating efficiently.
Where the healthcare market fails, is that there’s no surplus demand for healthcare and differentiation is minimal like basic food.
This
may seem like the market would be able optimize on price, as in basic food; however because of the minimum standard of healthcare set by societal demand and the resulting government regulations of things like education
of workers, building codes, cost of sophisticated equipment
that’s not present in industries like food. T
here’s a very high price floor set for healthcare providers making price competition insignificant to the consumer.
!!! UNKNOWN CONTENT TYPE !!!
Insurance C
orporations: Privatized S
ocialism and B
ureaucracy
!!! UNKNOWN CONTENT TYPE !!!
For brevity, I’m just going to use the existence and function of insurance companies to demonstrate that price competition in healthcare still cannot deliver affordable services since insurance is still necessary for consumers to get healthcare. Furthermore I’ll argue that insurance companies are incapable of providing any benefits to consumers over a government bureaucracy.
One of the common talking points among mainstream conservatives is that insurance companies are good for consumers, because they compete and have motivation to lower healthcare costs to increase their profits and prevent doctors from performing unnecessary procedures for profit.
My line of thinking on insurance companies being no better than a government bureau is as follows. Firstly, competition among insurance companies isn’t the same competitive force that economizes most markets . Insurance is an order removed from the actual products and services of value. When consumers make a choice as to which insurance provider to go with, the only information they have is premium pricing and healthcare genres the company claims to cover (and they leave plenty of loop holes in the fine print to give them weasel room to deny services to satisfy their profit motive). Where this fails to create an efficient market is that the choice of service provider and services rendered is taken away from the actual consumer and decided by the insurance company who is not the actual consumer of healthcare, and thus a true free market is never established since ultimately a corporate bureaucrat is determining the allocation of resources rather than the decisions of consumers and suppliers. Furthermore this system obfuscates important information such as healthcare providers the consumer can go to, which exact conditions and treatments will be covered, which diminishes the consumer’ s ability to make good decisions about which insurer to use.
The alternative with a nationalized health care system, is that all healthcare providers would be available for consumers to chose from, avoiding all the confusion over insurance networks and coverage. Meanwhile, the nationalized system’s fiscal motivations can be no worse than that of private insurance. The government still has a type of profit motive, as they’ll want to stay as close to budget as possible without raising additional taxes, thus driving lower costs. However the government suffers much less of a penalty for going over budget than a private firm and doesn’t have the incentive to run a large surplus like private insurers have an incentive to run a large
profit to encourage investment and higher stock prices.
An additional benefit of government over private insurance, is the government’
s ability to levy taxes
. Using smokers as an example, private insurance must increase their revenues from all of their customers to cover the additional
future costs of the smokers. Whereas almost all governments have excise
taxes on products like alcohol
and tobacco which could be directly
used to subsides healthcare costs, while with private insurance, smokers and drinkers still pay the tax, but insurance companies still must charge for smokers and drinkers extra healthcare
cost because they’re not the one
s collecting
the alcohol
and tobacco taxes
.
!!! UNKNOWN CONTENT TYPE !!!
Other factors
!!! UNKNOWN CONTENT TYPE !!!
Since this is already quite long, I’ll just quickly sum up a few other points.
The way healthcare providers would be paid, would be hourly, and the goal of their supervisors would be to schedule most people to work 40 hours a week. This way if a facility is routinely working employees 40+ hours a week to meet demand, more workers can be allocated to work there from areas were employees don’t meet 40 hours a week to satisfy demand. (for some specialists like brain surgeons or whatever, it may be necessary to target a lower weekly target and have a higher hourly wage.)
Also a type of “Pay what you use” system could be implemented to reduce the tax burden. In conjunction with a medicaid type program so that this system wouldn’t be regressive.
S
o for low to medium costs treatments,
patients would pay in full or partially for the service depending on the overall cost and their income
. Additionally since the government only needs to settle it’s debts and not turn a profit, it could give out zero interest payment plans for those who are able to pay to minimize upfront costs without burdening them with interest bearing debt. Example, a surgery may cost $10,000 and a patient who isn’t eligible at all for the medicaid program
could be liable for $2,000 of it
, but could pay it off interest free over the course of a year or two.
As for research and innovation, this could be handled similarly to the
military. Were the government would contract or fund institutions to improve or create new treatments and drugs
. Healthcare would have further
advantages in this regard since it’d be more likely
for nations
to work together and fund these projects, since unlike military projects, there isn’t
a
need for secrecy around medical practices
and drugs that were developed for a non-profit healthcare system.
Wacko
> DC3 LS, Fuck Hyundai, now and forever
04/25/2020 at 19:16 |
|
Shouldn’t be to hard to figure out a way, almost every other country found a way to do it.
BrianGriffin thinks “reliable” is just a state of mind
> DC3 LS, Fuck Hyundai, now and forever
04/25/2020 at 19:17 |
|
I’m a big fan of government takeover of many industries, including healthcare, and a standard cost for services that are a part of it. Need an appendectomy? That’ll be $200, whether it was done in New York, Boise, or Houston.
The concern is that government is slow. This is acceptable for your taxes, even banking (LORD how I’d love to see private banking go away in favor of one Bank of the US)...but healthcare is problematic. Already there’s stories of how slow the VA or Medicare is to authorize treatment; it would be 100x as bad if it applied to everyone.
As a government manager watching how my agency responded: whoa. My people were all prepared and taken care of from basically day 1 of recommended quarantine (around 3/12 ), but other groups in my territory just couldn’t pull their shit together. Not just because of the inefficiencies of “the government”, but because most of our employees and managers are morons with zero foresight or willingness to push boundaries.
For healthcare, I’m afraid it would end up more being like the school nurse who gives you some ice and tells you to sleep it off, versus Dr. House or ER.
JawzX2, Boost Addict. 1.6t, 2.7tt, 4.2t
> DC3 LS, Fuck Hyundai, now and forever
04/25/2020 at 19:19 |
|
You’ ve almost perfectly described the reasoning behind nationalized healthcare, without relying on the healthcare as a right argument. But these not new ideas...
farscythe - makin da cawfee!
> DC3 LS, Fuck Hyundai, now and forever
04/25/2020 at 19:21 |
|
holy wall of reading...
....
have i mentioned i have stroopwafel liquer?
coz i do
(tastes just like stroopwafel...)
SiennaMan
> DC3 LS, Fuck Hyundai, now and forever
04/25/2020 at 19:24 |
|
I can think of some other points to support your argument (for instance, most consumers in this market also don’t have a choice in their insurance carrier because their employer decides. What’s worse, because insurance is ruinously expensive without an employer, keeping health insurance is hurting innovation in other sectors as people are choosing to remain employees in a company they know than to do something new or go someplace new where insurance is an unknown).
Long story short, I agree.
MrSnrub
> DC3 LS, Fuck Hyundai, now and forever
04/25/2020 at 19:28 |
|
I know a great way to get conservatives to support single payer...
Medicare for All...white people!
Spanfeller is a twat
> DC3 LS, Fuck Hyundai, now and forever
04/25/2020 at 19:38 |
|
You never really get rid of the insurance costs. Here at least the government still has to calculate how much it costs based on risk, where one lives, and other environmental factors. To drive costs down and capacity up(not quality) our healthcare system is divided into six federal providers and each state has their own public services as well. Much like how insurance premiums in the US are probably lower because the VA is a public institution that takes in many high risk insurers.
But in general it’s not hard to argue in favor of public healthcare because it is a very inelastic market (thus, easy to abuse), and it’s virtually impossible to differentiate one effective provider from another. Private hospitals here really only differentiate themselves in their quality as hotels; not hospitals. In the end I’ve met doctors that have offices or admitting privileges in multiple hospitals (private and public).
However, the cost is that healthcare workers are paid a lot less in public systems (both here and across the globe) than in the US; and it makes total sense. If you have a single healthcare corporation healthcare workers lose a lot of negotiating power, and in the eyes of the public having public officials win a lot of money is a political problem. Even if they have a strong union; their incomes would be challenged.
It also becomes invariably linked to whoever is governing, and politicians are not... even if this is surprising... expert healthcare administrators. So you might find that they bend the application of healthcare whichever way serves them politically. I do believe however that a private system also obeys some ideological inclinations... Say any hospital ran by a catholic foundation might inexplicably offer worse healthcare to some of their customers.
I’m in favor of public healthcare, but it’s not an automatic cure to the maladies of a nation; a sincere, bold, technical, and sophisticated implementation is vital to insure the healthcare rights of constituents. I can’t say I know how to apply it, every country with public medicine does it differently, but if the US were to apply it it would face unique challenges.
|
JawzX2, Boost Addict. 1.6t, 2.7tt, 4.2t
> farscythe - makin da cawfee!
04/25/2020 at 19:45 |
|
/slursdrunkely
Stroopwafel!!!
(whats the brand? I wonder if we can get it here in the US, because I would totally be hammered on stroopwafel all the time if I could...)
|
Spanfeller is a twat
> MrSnrub
04/25/2020 at 19:50 |
|
I dunno, demographically it seems like’s already happening.
|
farscythe - makin da cawfee!
> JawzX2, Boost Addict. 1.6t, 2.7tt, 4.2t
04/25/2020 at 19:53 |
|
|
farscythe - makin da cawfee!
> farscythe - makin da cawfee!
04/25/2020 at 19:55 |
|
|
DC3 LS, Fuck Hyundai, now and forever
> BrianGriffin thinks “reliable” is just a state of mind
04/25/2020 at 20:12 |
|
I probably should have added, I don’t think things like the VA and tricare would
really be
representative
of how a nationalized healthcare system would go, since it only serves a small population and thus makes it more politically costly for the government to allocate budget to it. Not to mention the VA basically exclusively deals with people who have serious and
persistent problems. Whereas a full system would have lots of healthy people who pay into it and hardly ever draw out.
fintail
> DC3 LS, Fuck Hyundai, now and forever
04/25/2020 at 20:23 |
|
I’d think it the ideal would appeal to rational non-conspiracy theorist/non-”socialism” strawman conservatives simply because single payer has been proven to be less expensive in real world situations.
Still, insurance and medical firms are massive campaign contributors, and the FIRE industries reign supreme, so we shouldn’t hold our breath.
RiceRocketeer Extraordinaire
> Wacko
04/25/2020 at 20:32 |
|
problem is that I don’t think any other country dug themselves into this deep a hole while still being convinced that this is still the right direction.
|
thatsmr
> BrianGriffin thinks “reliable” is just a state of mind
04/25/2020 at 20:58 |
|
Its real easy to enroll your child in school, its real easy to have a truck full of water hose your burning house. Its (kind of) easy to have an officer take a report when you are wronged. Giant buildings for courthouses which mostly defend corporations or the state (the people) Roads are built at taxpayer’s expense so there’s not only an interstate route to supply wally mart, but a route for you to get there.
Healthy, educated people with roofs overhead and bellies full define the priorities of a SOCIETY. If you have no interest in a society, then hose down your own house fire. Drink some bleach, shoot up lysol, find your own way to get about (and that includes those who need to truck goods for $$)
Do you like roads? Does your employer? Do you like laws? Does your employer? Do you like to have educated people around? Does your employer? Are you attracted to a city with parks and recreation? Is your employer? What is any different about people being healthy? Fed? Nobody will make the argument that everyone should have all the same, but where exactly does a SOCIETY draw a baseline?
|
BrianGriffin thinks “reliable” is just a state of mind
> thatsmr
04/25/2020 at 21:14 |
|
What...uh...what are you on, dude? I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make.
SBA Thanks You For All The Fish
> DC3 LS, Fuck Hyundai, now and forever
04/25/2020 at 21:20 |
|
Two things:
1) W
|
SBA Thanks You For All The Fish
> DC3 LS, Fuck Hyundai, now and forever
04/25/2020 at 21:20 |
|
Two things:
1) W
MiniGTI - now with XJ6
> DC3 LS, Fuck Hyundai, now and forever
04/25/2020 at 22:18 |
|
nice writing, enjoyed reading. shame it’ll never happen.
|
thatsmr
> BrianGriffin thinks “reliable” is just a state of mind
04/25/2020 at 22:20 |
|
The point is overall a simple one. At what baseline is considered quality of life, and what are our priorities as a society?
Im not talking free boob jobs. This is about why sick people go to work and make other people sick because they are afraid of losing their job. Or worse yet having no job nor home because they are sick. Why Florida is allowing employers to dump whomever into the dole, and yet only 14% have seen benefits for example
This is about defining our values as a society nothing more nothing less
|
Spanfeller is a twat
> BrianGriffin thinks “reliable” is just a state of mind
04/25/2020 at 23:41 |
|
I’d be careful about standard costs; 200 bucks is not the same to someone in NYC than to someone in Boise....