Health Care

[Guest]

I heard a very interesting suggestion about the public option tonight.



That the public option only be made available to those who currently are not insured or to people who work for small companies. Now of course you would need to add a clause ending the limitations in say five years to be reviewed or something that may be shorter or longer length of time.



Also there will have to be a mandate that everyone gets a health plan or the whole thing will turn out to be a waste of time and money. There are 48 million with no insurance and about 9-10 millionof those could have insurance they choose not to have it. That will have to change no matter what the number is.



Cr I know we aren't going to agree on this but I think this is a good idea over all.

That's pretty much the system we had here for a long time (and still have in other European countries). The drawback of that is that you get two-tier health care, where care providers look whether you are privately or publicly insured, and give better care to those who are privately insured. Also, we do have mandatory health care insurance, and I think that's a good thing.



The problem with insurance companies determining costs in health care is that it is not directly in their best interest to give the best care, just the most efficient care. The idea is that those two things amount to the same, but there are some factors, such as the quality of life, that cannot be expressed monetarily. The problem with having health care being determined by doctors is that they can be susceptible to pressure from the pharmaceutical industry (and boy do they try!). The trick is to find a system that is dominated by some stakeholder whose interest is to provide good <em class='bbc'>and</em> efficient health care.

The costs of health care are not, as some would have you believe, driven by out-of-control lawsuits or overweight Americans, or, in one of Rush Limbaugh's more ridiculous statements, people who keep themselves physically fit, but by an insurance industry driven to maximize profits

That, but I suspect it also has to do with insuring things that we can afford to pay for ourselves. A hospital stay cannot be paid for by most of us. A one time set of prescription drugs should be no issue, though.