How on Earth did this get rated a 5 for insightful (Score 1)

For those that don't know, the United Kingdom spends eighty billion pounds a year on healthcare, funded directly through taxes. His central point was: "Don't you feel like you're being ripped off paying for the health care of jobless people when you're busting a gut earning a living?"

This point is the blind leading the sightless. The whole problem with socialized medicine is the childish entitlement mentality. What are you guys doing running around making sure everyone is getting their fair share?

I think it's an important question and one that needs answering if the United States is going to replace their broken healthcare system. My answer is simply that even ignoring the people who don't work, it is still a better deal for you if you have socialized health care.

While our health care system is, indeed, broken, it is less broken than most other health care systems, including and especially Britain and Canada's. This kind of question is not really an important question -- it is not why most of the opponents oppose socialized medicine.

Free market economies work best when prices are elastic; that is, where changes in price affect the demand for the product. This allows price to signal the level of available supply and prevent shortages of goods. The problem with healthcare is that it is not elastic. If I have cancer, a broken leg or some other ailment I have to get it fixed - regardless of the cost.

I don't know who you are -- you could be an economist for all I know. Perhaps you are a leading expert on health care economics. But, this little analysis of yours is absurd, and you really don't know anything about what you are talking about. If what you are saying is true, then no prices for anything would be elastic. When the clutch goes out on your car, you need a mechanic to fix it. That doesn't make the market for such services inelastic. Some people fix it themselves, but the vast majority of us do not. Similarly, when one dislocates their shoulder, some people will fix it themselves, but the vast majority of us will not. Some people with terminal cancer just decide it's their time to go or resort to their own "treatments", but most of us get professional help. When someone has problem with the plumbing in their house, they usually get a plumber, but some people don't. The fact that people seek out services or have a need for services doesn't make the price for those services inelastic.

What makes the price for a given service inelastic isn't the fact that almost anyone will get that service from someone if they need it, but rather if they don't have a choice of providers to get that service from. And, that is precisely what would be the case with socialized medicine. And, that is also part of what is wrong with American health care. It is not caused by the need for services but by intervention to prevent a competitive market for providing those services. This happens, for instance, by way of the fact that it is illegal to get prescription drugs except by way of authorization from certain professionals, the fact that it is illegal to get certain medications by any means, the fact that it is illegal for people to perform services unless they are licensed to do so, and so on. At any rate, the price for medical care is every bit as intrinsically inelastic as mechanical work on your car is. In other words, it's not.

Furthermore, another thing that is wrong with American health care is the fact that we get way more services than we need. And, that is also what is really wrong with your analysis -- this idea or attitude that a little health care always makes things better. You gain nothing from superfluous services. If you tear your ACL, you will quite frequently get an unnecessary x ray "just in case" you might have broken something. Right now, for any given person, there are a multitude of tests many of which are quite expensive that could be run to determine if they might have some exotic disease or condition that they have yet to really notice the symptoms of. It's not hypochondria. It is just a fact that you could do a lot more for your health at any given point in time than you probably do. You could do a lot more to secure your *nix box, too. And, you could get a tune up or change your oil every 1000 miles, too. It certainly won't hurt you to do that -- at least, not if you don't consider the costs of doing such a thing. And, that is precisely the biggest single problem with American health care -- the fact that so much of it is obtained without a proper cost-benefit analysis. The only one really qualified to do that is the consumer and not the doctor or the health insurance company. We try to delegate this responsibility to "the experts" but we cannot do that anymore than the CEO of a bank can just blindly follow their IT departments advice on everything. Sooner or later they really have to make their own determinations in a way that goes beyond pure technical analysis of their problems. Most Americans should be doing that sooner rather than later or not at all when it comes to their medical care.

In a profit making company, this means raising the price indefinitely sees no reduction in demand. This leads to an ever increasing cost that outstrips inflation. The American system compounds this because a lot of white-collar workers get insurance plans from their companies. Companies have deeper pockets than an individual ever could so the prices increase still further!

It is entirely the fact that costs are hidden from employees that has contributed to the fact that prices have gotten out of hand -- not your silly little analysis. There are other factors, too, but the fact that there exists a demand for medical care is not one of them.

Socialised health care delivers better value for money because of the enormous purchasing power of the government. The NHS can purchase millions of shots in one go. That allows you to hammer the drug companies on price and share the proceeds with the population. In the American system, it is you against the drug company and you are needy; you are willing to pay anything to fix yourself. In short you're screwed.

In reality what happens is the drug companies have a much greater interest in the cost of drugs than you do so they spend billions to lobby the government for higher drug costs and succeed since you certainly are not going to go to all the trouble to prevent them from getting their $1 price increase on some drug you may well never use anyway. Over time, drug prices go up further than they ever would in a free market.

There are also other economic benefits. Heathier and less desperate neighbours translates to less crime and increase productivity. It pays to insure that the daughter of a crack-addict prostitute get first class health care and education - if only to increase their chances of escaping the poverty trap and contribute more to the economy.

You'll have to forgive me if I don't just accept your bullshit speculation on the matter when you couldn't even possibly begin to measure such vague, intangible benefits.

It also pays because you can remove the inefficent insurance companies. If everybody is covered then there is no need to have a bureaucracy to decide if a person is covered.

The government calling the market inefficient is laughable. Are you like a refugee from the 19th century or something? Insurance companies aren't inefficient and the reality of the economics behind such things is vastly more complicated than you seem to be able to possibly imagine. This sort of simplistic arm-chair-economic analysis isn't even worthy of being called "analysis". It is just propaganda. And, I really cannot believe that everyone is sitting around rating it up. (Well, maybe I can.)

Socialised health care is not evil communism, it is a practical solution to the health care of your nation. I don't see anybody complaining about the socialised road, garabage collection, fire, police and military. When you trust the security of your nation to the government, why do you not trust your healthcare to them too?

Yes, socialized health care is evil communism. Roads, garbage collection, fire, police and the military are all widely recognized as public goods. And even then, people do complain about them. Roads and garbage collection, in particular, have been quite successfully been accomplished privately in many cases. In fact, they usually start out private and only later are overtaken by some growing municipality. At any rate, medical care is clearly a private good, your ridiculous attempts at bringing up crack hos to argue otherwise notwithstanding.

I'd I've seen the benefits first hand. When a friend of mine, at the age of 20 developed Lukemia, put his Computer Science course on hold, checked in to the local hospital and began his treatment straight away. He was cured and back in education the following year. I fear that had he born in the United States, he would not have been able to continue with his studies, in fact, he probably would have been bankrupt. Socialised healthcare not only save his life, but his future.

Ridiculous. Had he been born in America, he would have almost surely been covered by student health insurance, if nothing else, and he would certainly have gotten care for something like Leukemia. He probably would have also gotten care for the bladder operation that Janice Fraser was on a catheter for years awaiting. She wanted to pay to have it done but that is verboten in Canada. What about the nearly 800,000 Canadians and 850,000 Britons on waiting lists? Every year, in Britain, shortages cause the NHS to cancel as many as 50,000 operations. Forty percent of cancer patients never get to see an oncologist. Twenty percent of colon cancer cases considered treatable when first diagnosed are incurable by the time treatment is finally offered. In Canada, Canadian Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin wrote in a decision striking down part of Canada's universal health care program that "patients die while on the waiting list."

Meanwhile, even though 47 million Americans are uninsured, they are usually only uninsured for brief periods of time. And, even so, "uninsured" doesn't mean that they don't receive health care. Hospitals are already required to give care regardless of a patient's inability to pay. And, people pay for their health care directly. Yes, ordinary people with ordinary incomes are able to pay for services they do actually need. It is financially taxing to be sure which is what insurance is for, but don't act like just because an insurance company decides they don't want to pay for a service that the patient has actually been denied care. This attitude more than anything amazes me -- the way people blame the insruance company of all things. How about the hospital charging $5000 a day just to lie in a bed? How about the surgeon or the anesthesiologist who charge thousands for their services?

But, of course, providers should be able to charge top dollar for their services if they can. That's what makes American health care, though broken, much better than the alternatives. For all its problems, the United States still provides the highest-quality health care in the world. Eighteen of the last twenty-five winners of the Nobel Prize in Medicine either are U.S. citizens or work here. U.S. companies have developed half of all the major new medicines introduced worldwide over the past twenty years, and according to a survey by the president's Council of Economic Advisors, Americans have played a key role in eighty percent of the most important medical advances of the past thirty years. For instance, fewer than one in five American men with prostate cancer will die from it, but a quarter of Canadian men will, and fifty-seven percent of British men and nearly half of French and German men will.