re: #153 Pete(Detroit)

Fixed it for ya.
Ted Kennedy, John Dingle and John Conyors all come to mind as ‘wisdom challanged’

The reason we really want congress to start over is that one of the easy ways to reduce COST is to reduce USE - get people invested in staying healthy, and seeing a Dr when you have a small lung infection, before you get pneumonia. If someone else (ie EVERY else) is picking up the tab (single payer - which, agreed, is not likely on the table at this time) there is NO motivation for people to go to Dr for regular checkups, and wind up seeking attention only for catastrophic situations. Which is where we are now, w/ folks in Emergency rooms. Where’s the change in that? Or the savings?

re: #143 SixDegrees

Universal coverage will have to be mandatory if any of the bills we’ve seen so far are to succeed. It’s the only way to ensure that those who need coverage the least - those who are, as a group, inherently healthy, like the young - pay as much as possible into the system, while not making use of it’s services.

Unfortunately, rosy predictions like this generally don’t work out well in real life. When health care becomes apparently “free,” usage rises across the board, something none of the projections of future costs has taken into account. Like Kilgore, they assume that people’s habits will not change, even when the health care environment they’re immersed in changes radically; or they assume, at worst, any such change will be minor, and linear, when in fact it is much more likely to behave like an exponential function.

Two posts, both arguing against the same thing, but that completely contradict one another…