Uninsured + Cost shifting + EMTALA
I'll see if I can find the study I saw where it showed that we pay more per capita in taxes than a lot of socialized healthcare systems, cover less of our people, and even when you add in the private insurance we only lead in late stage cancer survivability.[DOUBLEPOST=1384408210,1384407833][/DOUBLEPOST]ok, this one has some good tables up front, but it wasn't the one I remember.
http://www.commonwealthfund.org/~/media/Files/Publications/Fund Report/2011/Nov/1562_Squires_Intl_Profiles_2011_11_10.pdf[DOUBLEPOST=1384408564][/DOUBLEPOST]Another good one, look at the spending rates in table 1. You want to tell me that our system is better you have to justify both costs and results. Costs are not just mildly higher. We spend as much as most socialist healthcare systems just for the public side of our healthcare. Add in the private side and we spend almost double what most other countries spend.
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2011/08/07/JRSMpaperPritWall.pdf
Note table 2. We have had less impact in reducing mortality than almost every other socialized country on that list. These are countries that SPEND LESS MONEY.
So, lets break it down.
We spend more tax money on healthcare
We get worse results.
....so why is the pseudo-privatization we have now a good system?
Get past the empty rhetoric and anectdotes. Show me in numbers how our system works better. And try to show something other than cancer.
You're presenting a premise I did not assert. The only options are not "socialize" and "leave it how it was." That's a false dichotomy. The problem you describe comes from trying to straddle the fence too much, so we rob ourselves of much of the benefits of either side. Our current system is (was, really, at this point) heavily (but inconsistently) regulated, and as you note, emphasized reactive rather than proactive measures. A campaign of education and public awareness would do well to help address that, without needing to put a choke chain on the electorate and bloat the federal government to even-now unseen levels of invasive control. Many other ideas have been spitballed - and shot down with prejudice because they didn't increase federal power over the lives of Americans. Which is what the ACA is really all about, not improving healthcare.
Our interests are best served by decentralizing as much as possible - pretty much the rest of the civilized western world boasting of their socialist wonders consists of nations that are a fraction of our size and population who have not been saddled with the responsibility of hegemonic domination for the last 3-4 generations. Furthermore, even aside from their shortcomings on cancer (which, despite your dismissive attitude is still globally kills more people than HIV, tuberculosis and malaria combined), there are other horror stories of patients dying/worsening during long waiting periods for access to medical resources - resources which will diminish in supply and increase in demand. Even our beloved president has already tried to ease the way for the inevitable transition. Leftists scoff when the term "death panels" comes up, but what else would you call it when the president says
in so many words your grandma is too old for the expenditure involved in surgery to save her life, and instead calls for her to be prescribed a painkiller and put in a hospice to wait for death?
We have been lied to, misled, extorted, terrified, slandered and bamboozled into a system that the majority of Americans did not want in the first place, and now clearly doesn't even work as intended - unless of course we can drop the pretense and show that the intention all along was to destroy every last vestige of the private health care industry and present single payer as the only alternative left - that the centralized federal power knows what's best for us children, and only their strict guidance and command can save us from the flying shrapnel of the health care system they themselves destroyed.[DOUBLEPOST=1384412611][/DOUBLEPOST]
Even if the quality of health care does suffer, it won't be due to lack of profit incentive, per your erroneous beliefs of human psychology.
Humanity in general suffers from the insidious stagnation of socialization. Here, the fond wish for a gentle parent figure to tell us it's all going to be alright merely enables a tyrannical power grab by miscreants and incompetents in the guise of caretaking.[DOUBLEPOST=1384412742][/DOUBLEPOST]
Actually, I contend that reducing financial incentives might have some negative effects but that there will likely be paradoxical positive effects. Human motivation isn't a one variable system, nor is it even dominated by external incentives. For example, offering students financial incentive to improve grades in high school appears to do very little at all to improve performance.
Of course not - these are children in the richest nation in the world. Their needs are seen to whether or not they have extra spending cash. Such an experiment is flawed from the very premise it starts with. However, make it so no student whose curved average slips below a C gets fed, clothed, or sheltered, and perhaps you start to see a different dynamic.
