re: #11 Obdicut

Meaningless analogy.

People who use medical care. Like, most people.

Only if medical insurance is just about catastrophic care. But it’s not. I have no idea why you’re pretending that it is, except that being dishonest is the only way you can make your argument.

No. You don’t understand, at all. Being a private company, rather than a public one, brings no benefit. There is nothing for the profit motive to do, for health insurance companies, except to give them an incentive to screw people over. In most industries, the profit motive gives an incentive to innovate, to create efficiency. In health insurance, it’s the opposite.

Lying about what I said is stupid of you. I said they had an incentive to keep money when possible.

You have to lie to make your argument. That should really tell you something.

Tell me this: Explain an innovation that the Health Insurance industry has brought to us. Explain something a private health insurance company came up with that was of value to something other than itself. That was of value to its consumers. Something that isn’t provided by a public form of health insurance.

It’s pretty lame casting every disagreement as a matter of me lying.

It should be plain as day to you that people have no incentive at all to buy health insurance while healthy, if they can always get coverage in the event of a major illness. Why not simply pay out of pocket for the small stuff, which cannot possibly cost as much as the health care premiums run, and then, if something big comes along, go get coverage?

I won’t call you a liar for having missed this, though. You just don’t get it, how people often seek their own best interest.

The VA is the poster child for government-provided care. It’s also the owner of a well-deserved reputation, of long standing, for providing substandard care. How could this be, when the post office, the DMV, and so on, are such marvels of efficiency and dispatch?

HMO’s, a major part of the system the new law is likely to break, have every incentive to keep their members healthy, even if it costs some money upfront.

Insurance companies, if they aren’t just cheats and frauds, have much the same incentives. If they can persuade patients to stop smoking, lose weight, exercise, or any other thing, their costs will be reduced.

If government is the logical best provider for health care, why wouldn’t it be the logical best provider for any other sort of good or service? But as you well know, it isn’t. Government laid an egg trying to run the railroads when Harry Truman took them over.

Government is the logical best provider for services which can involve lethal violence, such as policing and the military, and for resolving most disputes, because when one person “buys” justice, the other is robbed.

Government is the logical provider for support of basic R&D, because the private sector faces the deal-breaking fact that the benefits of such R&D diffuse so widely into society at large that there is no way to capitalize on your advances.

The govt now supports R&D in health care, and it does a good job there. But the actual provision of care is another matter. A patient at a private hospital can provide glowing, or not so glowing, reviews of their stay. The hospital needs a good reputation, because its patients may well have alternatives.

Govt run insurance is likely to be a complete mess. What we see now, with medicare and medicaid fraud, can only be amplified. But even if your opinion on the merits of govt medical care and govt provided insurance weren’t far off target, you’d still have no case for most of the points you’ve been advancing.

Companies such as Fortis, which use the “preexisting conditon” rule to cheat their members out of benefits, are simply practicing fraud. It’s already the job of the govt to discover, prosecute, and punish fraud.