So Libs, what is your FREE universal health care gonna cost?

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This exercise is especially instructive, because it reveals where the "single-payer," universal coverage folks end up. Democrats who run the Wisconsin Senate have dropped the Washington pretense of incremental health-care reform and moved directly to passing a plan to insure every resident under the age of 65 in the state. And, wow, is "free" health care expensive. The plan would cost an estimated $15.2 billion, or $3 billion more than the state currently collects in all income, sales and corporate income taxes. It represents an average of $510 a month in higher taxes for every Wisconsin worker.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110010374

Healthcare *USED* to be both affordable and readily available. The way to solve the problem is to remove government incursion. History both records it and proves it.

http://www.cchc-mn.org/privacy/hmoart.php3

Answer 1

They don't care what it will cost. The working man will be the one that pays for it. All they can see is the word FREE. Not better, but FREE. That will get any socialist attention.

Answer 2

Before any viable, affordable form of government initiated healthcare plan is implemented, they must first investigate the reason why healthcare costs are so high to begin with. How can a healthcare provider charge a patient $6 for one pill, when you can buy the same thing over-the-counter for $6 for 100 pills? How can a healthcare provider charge a patient for services it never provided. Come on $10 for a box of facial tissue, with only 20 tissues inside. At least $1,000 per day for a semi-private room, and they chop up the day in such a way, that logically no one gets out of there without being charged for more than one day. They have money to blow, on constant building modifications. And those modifications do not automatically translate into better, more efficient care. I'd rather it be more affordable, than have the latest waiting room furnishings.

Answer 3

Universal Healthcare is a risky venture, particularly in the hands of the US government. Ideally, they would want to use competent HMOs as a middleman - it would be disastrous if they tried something like this on their own. We've already seen how badly they muddled up Medicare. (Don't even get me started on what a logistical mess Medicare D is.)

I think if the government does intervene, they may want to try the MA model that Mitt Romney had a hand in developing. They took the "no insurance" pool that hospitals dip from when they treat people without insurance, and used that to subsidize health insurance for people over the poverty level. (The people pay some of the premium, the ratio depending on how close to the poverty line they are.)

It was found that when people without insurance needed care, they would go right to the hospital, where the cost for the care was significantly higher than a doctor visit. Therefore, it was reasoned if you could get these people a basic health insurance package, it would actually save money in the long run. Not rushing to the hospital for everything would mean the money would be better spent.

Answer 4

I have such a hard time with this.

I know you are right, Universal Health Care, or Socialized Health care as it is also called, is too expensive, and would increase our Taxes greatly.

It is also unworkable, by all accounts. It don't work anywhere it has been implemented, I know this to be true.

Still I long for a solution for the enormous cost of Health Care in the US. Insurance Companies charging higher, and higher in Premiums, and Co - Pays. and refusing to cover some Rx's, and/or Procedures. Pharmaceutical Companies who charge exorbitant Prices for their Product. It just isn't right. Something must be done !

Do I sound like a Communist ? I'm a Conservative Christian Republican, but I see a problem, which don't seem to have a solution. This is The USA. Shouldn't we be able to fix this, and make it work ?

Answer 5

Health care will never be free. My mother recently retired as a senior exec. with a major publishing house in Philadelphia. She is not quite old enough for medicare and is therefore having to pay for a private health insurance which is just over $600.00 a month and can be lost at anytime...if she actually uses it.

The health care tidal wave is coming with my mother's "Baby Boomer" generation. This generation has gotten their way whenever they wanted it. So when they decide what kind of health care they want...well that's what we'll have.

As a member of generation X, I hold no illusions about the future of my health care as an elderly citizen...it won't be pretty.

Answer 6

Great question... Here is where you miss the point though. See, it is only the working class that will pay. It will definitely be "free" and yet another hand out to all those who leach off the system...

And hey... who doesn't want to pay the same or more than they currently do and have the government decide what treatment you get? So far they are super qualified to determine that an 80 year old lady just might be a threat to bringing down a plane so they should give her a good hard shakedown. I am totally confident in their decisions about my physical well being.....

Answer 7

It used to be affordable for many reasons, among them medicine wasn't as complex as it is today, our first open heart surgery wasn't until the mid 50s. Now on a daily basis we do things that were undreamed of, stents, heart surgeries, radiation, reconstructive surgery, all that and the tests that go with them are horrendously expensive. And the pharmaceuticals...when people died sooner we spent less on them, now they live courtesy of some very expensive drugs. Should we let them die? The money saved by individuals and businesses who would not have to pay for health insurance would more than make up for the amount true universal health care insurance would cost. Do you know what it costs now for a family of four? $1500 a month.
Can you afford that?
Spreading the cost of health insurance to the most people will mean that proportionately there will be fewer users.
That's the way all insurance works, and there will be fewer layers of people taking profits and less confusion for people, all of that good.
But what I rarely see from people like you is an alternative.
How would you see to it that people get health care? Or is that not important to you? Would you rather see someone costing you thousands in the emergency room as the president says, or would you rather have the illness caught early with a GP visit and a prescription for an antibiotic? Or maybe the poor should just die somewhere out of your line of vision?

Answer 8

Wow, you're wrong about that. There is no government incursion today - it's all private health insurers (PPOs, HMOs). Health care costs have mounted because preventive care is minimized and in some cases not permitted by insurers, so that when catastrophic care (which could have been prevented) is required, the costs are out of scale. Add on to this a pharmaceutical market in the US that is artificially inflated by import restrictions that create drug oligopolies, and you have one horribly expensive system.

You can claim all you want to know about free enterprise and its benefits, but until you can talk about diseconomies, exigencies, and Pareto optimality and distortion, you haven't contributed to the discussion.

Answer 9

Health care was only affordable for the people who could afford to pay it. What demographic are you pointing to here?

Your "free" health care costs the taxpayers money if you go for the universal model. Your non-free health care system, as we have now, costs the taxpayers money.

The difference is about those who are covered. There are lots of people in this country who do work and could never afford their own private health insurance, make just enough money to keep them from getting health insurance from their state, and unless they are deathly ill, will not go to see a doctor at all because they cannot afford to. This also will cause your coverage to increase since the uninsured cannot be turned away when the medical condition is life-threatening. And then we wind up paying for it in the end.

Sure, it's going to cost. There is no such thing as free universal health care. Someone always pays for it. The difference is in how many people can be covered under it. In my opinion, the for-profit health care system we have today is in shambles, costs too much money and covers less people than ever before.

But you just go on with your free market talk and your misleading questions. The free market for-profit health care system is responsible for more poor people dying prematurely than a universal coverage health care system would.

But I'm sure you don't care at all about the poor, do you?

Answer 10

Democrats Block the Children's Insurance.
It took more than a decade of constant agitation for the elderly to win the right to charge their prescription medications to Medicare.

Republican reluctance to spend the money combined with a Democratic willingness to put off action keeps the issue in partisan play. The result was that it took a Republican president to undo the political knot and pass a plan that finally offered senior citizens some relief.

We are now watching House Democrats play the same partisan game with the renewal of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which expires on Sept. 30. Meanwhile, the Senate on the one hand and President Bush on the other appear to have crafted a generous extension of the program that may now fall prey to the House Democratic desire to provoke a presidential veto — and the children be damned! Starting yet another blame Bush campaign.

Bush opened the game by proposing a $5 billion expansion of the program to cover more children and to limit the focus of the program to child health insurance.

This highly successful program, initiated in the middle of the Clinton administration, has now succeeded in reducing the proportion of uncovered children to less than 10 percent (many of whom could get Medicaid if their parents bothered to apply). States have moved to use the program to expand coverage of adults without insurance and the Bush administration wished to restrict the practice.

But the Senate went further and is pushing a $35 billion program, financed by an increase of at least 60 cents in the federal cigarette tax. The extra money would bring the five-year cost to $60 billion.

Crafted by Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley (Iowa) and Orrin Hatch (Utah) along with Democrats Max Baucus (Montana) and Jay Rockefeller (West Virginia), the plan would make child coverage virtually universal and permit states to access food stamp and other assistance program data to locate uncovered children and bring them into the program. But it would restrict the coverage of adults.

Raising the tobacco levy is a good thing to do anyway, even if you don't need the money. A higher cigarette tax has been demonstrably shown to cut teen smoking, and the increase, which would bring the total levy to $1 per pack, is a good step to improve national healthcare.

Bush threatened a veto, but seems to have backed off and appears able to live with the Senate bill.

So the House decided to pass a bill he couldn't sign. By deliberately provoking a veto, they hope to demonstrate what a heartless Scrooge Bush really is.

Not only is the House upping the price tag to $50 billion, it is gratuitously courting the favor of the medical establishment by eliminating the cuts in physician fees scheduled for the next few years as part of the effort to save Medicare without cutting benefits. The House bill also opens the doors of the program wide to adult coverage. Covering adults is a good idea.

It would be great to cover all Americans without having to fundamentally alter our healthcare system. That way, socialist utopians like Hillary couldn't use the uncovered population as an excuse to make healthcare a government-dominated program.

But House leaders know full well that Bush won't sign the bill that repeals his Medicare physician fee cuts and opens the program to adult coverage. But they are determined, nevertheless, to jerry-rig a bill that Bush can't sign by festooning it with provisions that not only endanger the future of the Medicare program they profess to adore but also may kindle a new round of medical cost inflation they profess to abhor.

The House should just back off. It is a major accomplishment in healthcare, the new third rail of our politics, to expand SCHIP to cover all children. Forcing the administration to give up its hard-won gains on Medicare cost containment to swallow the program is deliberately unrealistic.

Answer 11

$15 billion dollars to provide health care to 4.6 million people (wisconsin population under 65) amounts to $3,300 per person. That is a lot less than it currently costs to insure all those people with private health insurance.

Sounds like a good deal to me.