Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to out my behind

Medical care
TB — (archived)

I've done a lot of looking into nationalized health care, and at the examples of other countries that are tossed up as always being better than ours.

You need to look at where the medical technology, the new drugs, and everything that these other countries use comes from. You need to look at costs of scale, and population levels. Much of the medical systems around the world, particularly in R & D, are subsidized by the private health care infrastructure in the U.S.

Without going into the economics, what it boils down to is that putting three hundred million people on Medicare, or giving everybody Canadian drug prices, isn't going to work for the same reason you can't give every customer the "senior discount" at a restaurant or theater.

People just don't understand the levels of money that will be needed. The annual cost of the war in Iraq would be almost lost in the noise. Medicare and Medicaid right now, covering only 40 million elderly, comes to six times the cost of the war every year.

I can do all the numbers yet again if I have to. I'd rather not.

I appreciate the sympathy and desire to help that makes nationalized health care so appealing--there's a lot of emotion involved in these discussions--but the hard economic fact is that the end result would be pretty much a subsistence medical system that's "just good enough."

Like Social Security, which, if it's your only source of income, basically keeps a roof over your head and fresh cat food in the cupboard. It's certainly better than starving on the street, but not something you'd want everybody to have to live under.

A sensible solution would be to find ways to help just those people who have no alternatives, or in a serious financial emergency. We manage a Food Stamp program without nationalizing the grocery industry. But then, there wouldn't be enough political power to be had, would there?

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