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?

I disagree. The experience in countries with socialized medicine has been a deluge of people visiting doctors for every little thing, often things like scratches and headaches that they otherwise would have self-treated or ignored if the services wasn’t available at little or no perceivable cost. I’d do the same thing.

Britain, I believe, just recently began discussing instituting office visit copays, not so much to defray the costs to the system as to introduce a disincentive to consumers from using the otherwise “free” service. Here, prescription copays were introduced for the same reason - to steer consumers to the copay-free generic equivalents, and away from the much more expensive proprietary versions of drugs. Otherwise, consumers - faced with “equal” costs - have no incentive to choose the cheaper alternative.