Comments by "PM" (@pm71241) on "Health Insurance Debate, the Case Against Education (Pt. 2) | Bryan Caplan | ACADEMIA | Rubin Report" video.

  1. Great ... so, let charity handle stuff you can't figure out how to handle and let financial institutions get between the patient and the doctor to profit. yeah...That'll work. <sarcasm/>
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  2. > Topphat18 It works perfectly well in Denmark. We have a healthcare tax and doctors in hospitals are employed by the public. The local doctor you go to first are independent private companies under contract with the government. ... and all he myths we are hearing from the political campaign about single payer systems are simply not true. If you are sick - you get treated ASAP by very professional staff. It's beyond me why Americans want to punish them selves on the specific area.
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  3. Unless you seriously believe that there's a case for financial institutions to get percentages of every activity in society, you should maybe consider whether something is actually better done without the middle man. Even money ... why would we let banks have a piece of the cake when we could do it ourselves with - say - Bitcoin? It's not given that the optimal solution for society always is to involve bankers. So - even if bankers works for free and provided administration of the insurance for free, what would the total cost for society be of this model? ... There will always be a percentage with more bad luck than foresight ending up without insurance to prevent them for getting their lives ruined (by bankruptcy or lack of work ability). Saying "charity will fix it is not an answer. This will cause social problems. So unless you want to employ a police force to "remove" poor people causing problems from society in general, prevention is more cost effective than treatment. You can say this is "the individuals responsibility", but unless you are prepared to simply let "responsible" or sufficiently unlucky people die in the streets you will end up needing some kind of mandatory insurance (just like we in my country has mandatory fire insurance for houses). But why just not cut out the middleman? ... A single payer health-care system is much simpler, doesn't cost percentages to the financial industry and works perfectly well. ... and when watching the absurdity of US health-care politics I'm very happy to live in a country where this is simply a non-issue. Everyone has health-care from the moment of birth.
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  4. > Robin Muerkoester It seems you missed the point of the BitCoin argument. I used it to show that it's not a given that there need to be a financial sector middleman for anything. Even money can be done without it. So why would we create a society where the financial sector had a profit from all activity if it's not needed. Wouldn't human effort be put better to work by actually producing things than by having huge amounts of bankers and lawyers effectively taxing activity? My argument was not that BitCoin had anything to do with health-care. Just to show that one should always consider cutting out the middle man.
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  5. MrKonradCurze There's bureaucracy in anything... but one area where there's minimal overhead in this system is in the question about which treatment you need and who's going to pay. There are NO legal battles with insurance companies. You get the treatment the profession judgment of the doctors recommend, and public health care pays. End of story ... No one gets ruined by bad luck or lawyers in this. Wrt. the WHO ranking, - that's a very complex index they have calculated with a lot of factors involved. Including "fairness". Point is that it works. ... Sure improvement can be made, but it works and it does solve the problems of millions of uninsured which plagues the US debate. It doesn't have to be single payer - it could be multi-payer. Germany has an excellent system too, but it (as I said previously) do require by law that everybody is insured and people pay insurance premiums based on their salary - so it's not much different from a tax based system. > It's a perfectly valid answer that could cover all important cases. I guess the non-important cases are those where a charity simply cannot afford the treatment. Talk about "death panels". > A system riddled with regulations and state intervention that prevent it from working Can you document that claim or are you simply launching talking-points? What is it that doesn't work in Denmark and which regulation are the cause? Please enlighten me.
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  6. > CrazyIvanovich1 Nahh... that makes no sense. Which "decision boards" are you talking about. Please enlighten me. And health care is not magically "free" - of course there's payment involved. So "tax" is not getting anymore in between patient and doctor than your otherwise insurance premium. What's cut out however is the bureaucracy and legal department of the insurance company. If you go to the doctor in Denmark NO ONE will question whether it's covered by you insurance and whether there's reason for the insurance not to pay. The whole concept of "pre existing conditions" and all the legalese around it does not exist. The public health care does not have lawyers on the payroll to try to avoid paying for the treatment you need.
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  7. > CrazyIvanovich1 Yeah... I get it that you are opposed to the concept of government in general. And yeah... some times political decisions are made to concentrate one kind of treatment in one city instead of having it spread out in every minor hospital.... so yes, there is an entity deciding how funding is spend. Just as there is in the private sector. And yeah... sometime I think those priorities are stupid. For instance, I have no trouble with having to travel 50 miles to get to the hospital where they do knee surgery or cancer operations. But I think it's a little stupid to close the Childbirth section on my local hospital 10 miles away and instead send people 25 miles to another one. Sure... not everything goes as I hope. But then I can fortunately just vote the idiots out of office. But how is this different from private hospitals? Doesn't the CEO and board of directors determine how funds are spend too? - and where to open hospitals?
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  8. > MrKonradCurze > I never talked about Denmark... Well ... I was. So if your argument wasn't against anything I said, ... well... then... ok. > Sure: https://www.forbes.com/sites/physiciansfoundation/2013/11/05/healthcare-is-turing-into-an-industry-focused-on-compliance-regulation-rather-than-patient-care/#381648242e3c I'm not sure what your point is here. I've never argued the US system was good. Neither before ACA, with ACA or the one they are now proposing. I'm not going to defend positions I've never held. > There maybe no legal battles but there is still a battle what therapys should be paid and what prices are necessary. Can you document that claim? > Also it is possible that the higher cost of goverment bureucrazy destroys any advantage gained by more legal security. Seems not to be the case in reality though ... can you document that that's the case? I'm sorry, but it seems to me you are just making stuff up.
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  9. > If you go to the doctor and need help you will be treated regardless if you have an insurance or not. Well... first of all: That's not what we are talking about here. We're talking about the economic consequences and whether or not you can get treatment before you end up on the ER. If you have a suspicion of cancer, can you go to the doctor in the US, be sent to a hospital and get a PET-CT scan free of charge without having a private health insurance? > Why do so many Europeans think they can judgle the US Healthcare System when they have barely any knowledge about it? Judging from what you have written about what you think of what I describe we have in Denmark, I'm pretty sure I know more about the US system than you do about the Danish.
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  10. MrKonradCurze > From there on I talked about regulations and goverment hampering the market. It should bem ore than obvious we were talking about the US-System from there on. Well... it wasn't. You obvious had a completely different discussion than I had then..
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  11. > MrKonradCurze Well... if you claims were not about issued with the Danish system, then "no" - you don't have to document anything. ... on the other hand, I don't see you point. I've never said any of the US ways of doing things were good. > I was applying basic economic principles that competition lowers prices while goverment institution suffer from bureucrazy... Like I have written Denmark is on place 34, the US is on 37. Not much difference. Well ... you've not read the study you linked to then. As I said they construct a very complex index with a lot of factors. Not all equally relevant for this debate. However, if PRICE is the metric here you should have noticed that US comes in as the absolutely most expensive system per capita in the study. > Not free of charge but it is more than affordable for everyone. Also it's never free of charge because you pay taxes in a Single-Payer-Healthcare System. Arhh... You know what I meant. Don't be silly. Of course there's no such thing as a free lunch and the cost is payed through taxes. I'm aware of that. I don't believe in magic money trees. The point was that you claimed (quote): "If you go to the doctor and need help you will be treated regardless if you have an insurance or not." ... and I then gave you an example of a treatment you wouldn't get without the right insurance unless you payed up front. ... sure, you can wait till it becomes a matter for the ER and you will get treatment, but that's just not good enough. I have personal experience here. If you go to the doctor in Denmark, with worries about a cancer like symptom, you will be diagnosed within few days (including PET-CT scans, biopsies and all the needed tests) and you will be offered treatment whether surgery or other immediately. No one ever asked for how you are insured or how you are going to pay. Your claim about it being "more affordable for everyone" in the US is simply not true. You cannot be more affordable than the cost of your treatment not depending on what you payed. This is not a feature of the single payer system as such. As I said, the German multi-payer system is the same.
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