Can anyone tell me if this makes sense about Univeral Healthcare?

Question

We always hear that Social Security is going to go bankrupt.
Social Security mainly deals with only a certain portion of the population (mainly 65 and older).

If we have a hard time with Social Security just with that,............

Then does it make sense to put Government in charge of a healthcare program for an ENTIRE population even when we can't unscrew a program that deals with the portion of the population?

Am I missing something?

Supay,
Accountability can be done in many ways...not just through the government.

If other countries have Universal Healthcare...I say that is up to them.
Your points are well taken though.

Nox E.

We all know that 'Profit' is in our nature.
Is it possible that we can use 'Profit' as a carrot to obtain supreme healthcare?
I think so.
If profit is what drives people to create quality, then I say we need to exploit that and still somehow lower cost.

Answer 1

The US spends twice as much per capita on health care as any other industrialized nation.

Over 24% of every US health care dollar goes to paperwork, overhead, CEO salaries, profits, and other non-clinical costs. Social Security on the other hand is very efficient and spends less than 1% of its benefit costs on administration.

The United States ranks 18th in life expectancy, 37th on a World Health Organization ranking of the health status of nations, and has the second highest newborn death rate in the industrialized world..

Answer 2

Don't know if universal health care is the answer but our system does need to be fixed. But to address two of your points:
1) Social Security would be just find except that we took all the social security money and put it into the general fund to usded the surplus to pay bills - a good plan was messed up by those who did not wish to raise taxes in the past. Now in my opinion those same people owe us the moeny back, and if that means tax the welathy then that's just tough, our economy has had the benefit of our social security contributions for over forty years.
2) I heard a really good explanation the other day about how profit motive would actually marginalize the really sick, because if the prime motivation for insurance companies doctors and hospitals is profit then someone with a serious and expensive disease will charged such high rates (profit motive) as to be unable to afford insurance. Likewise it would revert to the way it was in my youth when "maternity coverage" was an option for which you paid a lot more on your medical even at work; profit motive to price out whatever is expensive and might reduce the profit. That is why free market is not going to solve our health care crises.

Answer 3

Well I hate the idea of socialized healthcare. However Ive been doing some research on my own and found out some interesting things. The US currently spends 15.3% of its GDP on healthcare. That doesnt include all the support busienss like bill, insurance, malpractice insurance, and so on. Also the average doctor/hospital spends 40% of what they make on malpractice insurance. Obviously I don't have access to hard numbers but I think its reasonable that if you cut out all the corperate profits, eliminate all the support business, eliminate the need for malpractice insurance, and any other unnessecary costs that don't provide actual care I believe we can afford a National healthcare system and save money. Best of all it would be cheaper on the middleclass and the businesses that employ them. That would benifet all of us! The middle class needs to be protected they drive our economy. Do some research on your own. I still have some to do myself!

Answer 4

Social security was well funded until Bush came to power. The issue is not the system - it is simply that the people running it were idealistically opposed to it and determined to make it fail.
Ask yourself this - why if it is possible to manage a universal healthcare system in EVERY other developed country in the world would it be so impossible here?

Answer 5

Yes, you are. Social Security is not going bankrupt. In fact right now it has quite the surplus. Social security is fine and will continue to be so far into the future.

The reason you hear that it's not doing well is because it would benefit big business to get rid of it. If the people think it's broken they can pass laws to get rid of it. If they get rid of it, social security would become like our current health care system; a business for profit.

Answer 6

Profit is what drives people to act upon their greed. Social Security gets dipped into constantly to pay for other things and the money is never put back in SS. Take a look at this and then tell me we aren't wasting our money here already. http://www.mises.org/story/1793
This is one of those things republicans don't like, yet this seems at odds with their philosophy. How much money could we save scrapping this waste? How much more could we save by making it not for profit? How much money does health care and insurance pull out of health care to pay their respective CEO's? Greed and propaganda is what stops us all from having decent affordable health care. How can we call ourselves the greatest nation on earth when we have millions of citizens who work and can't afford to get sick?

Answer 7

I live in a country with universal health care (Australia). Our health care is better than that of America's in terms of standards of care, availability, etc AND at the same time we pay far less per capita for it in terms of taxes... your system simply panders to those who make money off of it at the tax payers expense (pharmaceutical companies for example, America is totally their b*tch).

Face it, universal health care is the way to go rather than government subsiding private business interests for far greater costs while some people cannot access life saving medicine. If your government is too incompetent to run a health care system, remove them from office because there is no way they can run a country.

As for quality, when did profit ever motivate that? Profit demands doing things as cheaply as possible and selling things as expensively as possible - in a health care system that is a recipe for disaster.

*unrelated note* Why does YA censor the word b*tch? What if I wanted to talk about a female dog?

Answer 8

There are two basic ways to go. Let the government manage health care or privatize it. While the government has it's problems, we know from experience that making it profit based makes it too expensive and reduces the quality of care because it's all about profit and not about making/keeping people healthy. The trick is to make the management of health care not about making a profit, the argument being the government has a better chance of making health care about health care than for profit companies would.

Answer 9

To solve this problem of expensive health care in America, I believe a doctor should be able to counter sue anyone who brings a phoney malpractice case against them. If that person sues a doctor and it can be proven that he or she is lying and is just trying to cash in from a doctor I believe a doctor should be able to counter sue, and if the person can't pay he or she goes to jail.

The way the system is now any yahoo can sue a doctor, make him pay astronomical legal fees or astronomical malpractice insurance fees, if the yahoo is proven to be a liar he walks away scott free, only have to pay his schister lawyer's fee, meanwhile the doctor has to rebuild theri shattered lives.

If many of the malpractice suits could be taken out of the equation I think the cost of healthcare in America would fall drastically.

Now I could be wrong, I'm not an expert on this. Just giving my 2 cents.

Answer 10

You're missing accountability.

Many countries have universal healthcare, and they're managing fine. What they do is they fund healthcare in a responsible way.

Which is not the case of how the USA has funded Social Security. Compared to other nations, the USA is the irresponsible guy who's maxing all his credit cards and has no real plans for the future.