Question On Single Payer
One of the tenants of capitalism is that the free market will regulate prices for a commodity. I personally don’t think that health should be a commodity, but some do, maybe even yourself.
If consumers get together in the “free market” and decide to start a health insurance cooperative and influence the price of health to the consumers’ advantage by initiating a new payment system, isn’t that capitalism in action?
And if health consumers decide that it would be to their advantage to enlist the aid of government in getting this new payment system in place and making it the law of the land, shouldn’t that be ok and within the functions of capitalism.
This is, by the way what the corporate health insurance lobby did when they wanted government help in deregulating their business. Shouldn’t we be able to do this too? Please excuse my ignorance, but shouldn’t we be allowed to implement a health care payment system that is to our advantage?
August 5th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
The insurance companies would love to see consumers form health care cooperatives. Such entities will never seriously compete or threaten the insurance industry because they will never be large enough to have an impact of any significance. After several years they will stagnate and be consumed by the insurance industry, thereby providing the industry will new customers without any real effort on its part.
Single payer, national health plan, call it what you will, our country needs to be free of the ghoulish perversion that the health insurance industry has become. It should not require great insight to understand that our health care system is a major factor in our economic woes. Where else in the world did a nation, a people decide that employers were to be responsible for providing the citizenry with health care?
August 8th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
My intended emphasis was on a single, national, government fiscal agent disbursing billed payments to health care providers. A socialized insurance, if you will.