re: #189 Cato the Elder

My father, a retired physician, is one of them. And he has compelling arguments for his position.

Unfortunately his and many other doctors’ first choice, a single-payer health system, is not even being discussed by the so-called reformers. Respected physicians who tried to speak about it were forcibly ejected from the Senate hearings. The Chairman oh-so-democratically refused to give any time at all to the proposal of these experienced doctors.

The members of the “reform” movement in Congress are bought-and-paid-for insurance “industry” shills. The most we’re going to get is tinkering around the edges of a failed system, with the guaranteed result that the failure will be even bigger in future. We will continue to pay twice as much in GDP percentage terms for half as much as other countries get. America will continue to be the milch cow of the pharmaceuticals business, while people elsewhere get medicines at reasonable cost because the governments negotiate reimbursement rates. Canada will continue to have lower infant mortality than the US because of their emphasis on preventive medicine. England will still have the NHS, with which most citizens are quite satisfied, and no politician who would suggest that they go to the American “model” (read: shambles, in the sense of abattoir) stands a chance of election.

We’ll be lucky to get some protection against cherry-picking and a few paltry tax credits to pay for crappy policies that disappear when we need them.

I must strongly disagree with that take:

online.wsj.com

spectator.org

I learned a lot on this subject from Betsy McCaughey at a Manhattan Institute presentation: she had a wealth of data, statistics, and comparative analysis (touched upon in the last link) that address the issues you raised.

It may be worth your time to read her detailed article.