Being without health insurance is no big deal. Just ask President Bush. “I mean, people have access to health care in America,” he said last week. “After all, you can just go to an emergency room.”
The above is the lead paragraph of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s op-ed which was reprinted in The Virginian Pilot. The article seems right on point with much of what has been discussed in this thread. Krugman points out many of the fallacies in the arguments against some form of universal health care:
- From Business Week: “… American people are already waiting as long or longer than patients living with universal health-care systems.”
- The Commonwealth Fund survey says the US ranks “near the bottom … in terms of how hard it is to get medical attention on short notice…”
- Delays in Canada and Britain are caused by doctors, while insurance companies are the culprit in the US. Reference Mark Kleiman here.
- Americans get faster hip replacements because the majority of them are performed by Medicare, which is essentially a universal health care program.
With so many Americans uninsured, we are beyond the time for serious conversation on some form of universal coverage.
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
No, Sleepless, we’ve had this discussion before. Mouse believes the disabled should just WORK and pay for this stuff. Have you ever heard of a disabled person who was UNABLE to work? Apparently, these are the only two people around who have not.
Before blasting me, VAB, perhaps you should read what I write.
As before, you seem unable to get through an entire comment to the conclusion. For your sake, and others of short attention spans, I will again repeat myself:
Sleepless,
I just don’t think Universal Healthcare is the answer. I think it is “fun” for a lot of people to say that everyone should have healthcare, however there is an extreme cost that almost everyone is overlooking. We can’t trust our government to spend our tax money properly now, what makes you think that a government sponsored (taxes) healthcare system is going to work. Aside from increasing costs to the consumer I believe our current healthcare system provides adequate coverage to most americans, it just needs to tweaked. Left leaning Paul Krugman and the Left leaning Virginian Pilot don’t do a good job of explaining the cost of Universal Healthcare, but who cares how much it costs the taxpayer we just need to have it!
The problem of health care is not coverage, it´s the cost. Free-market based or government-based, there is no solution if you have to pay two thousand bucks to a visit to a doctor.
In most latin american countries there is coverage to the poor that´s while fair for perfect it doesn´t neglect no one. Anyone willing to have a better coverage pays private insurance, that´s not expensive at all. Yes, you are attended first in the same hospital if you have private insurance. Maybe it´s a solution.
But I don´t believe that insurance is the problem.
I disagree, Andre. I have an VERY overweight cousin in her mid-40’s. She is self-employed. She CANNOT get health insurance at ANY price — the companies will not even give her a quote. She cannot even have a Health Savings Account because she does not have insurance. Who the 773H thought of THAT?!
(Pardon my language, Vivian, but I find it absolutely ridiculous that, if you have insurance, your deductibles can be pre-tax, but if you don’t have insurance, your medical expenses are not deductible until they get past 5% of your income. It is also ridiculous that companies can deduct the cost of insurance, but individuals cannot. At least Bush is trying to fix that, but I think he’s responsible for the HSA stupidity.)
Maybe she can convince some company to give her a policy with a $1M a year deductible (which would certainly be a High Deductible Health Plan), so she can have an HSA.
Actually, medical has to exceed 7.5% of your income 😉
And don’t get me started on HSAs. The logic of them went out the window with this year’s changes to the law.
Thank you — it is not something I have had to deal with personally.
If I recall, it is only that portion that exceeds 7.5% that is deductible. Is that correct?
Yes, only the amount over 7.5%. But that’s just the first barrier. Medical deductions are a part of your itemized deductions, which you only get if they exceed the standard deduction. So if you don’t own a home (generally, the interest & taxes on the mortgage are enough to get over the standard deduction amount) then you end up losing the medical deduction.
I have to mention, though, that self-employed people do get to deduct their insurance off the top of their income. Good thing, too, since the premiums (when you can get the insurance) are astronomical.
18. rlewis By your logic, we shouldn’t trust the government to run Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, our public highway system, our food safety systems, even our military could be privitized. Or maybe you don’t think we need these systems…even privatized.
19. Andre In this country, doctors get paid an extraordinary amount of money for their services, which their very comfortable lifestyle demonstrates (even with Medicare!!!). Add on to that medican cost the cost of insurance companies’ profit and I’d assume that might be why we pay more than any other country in the world for healthcare yet rank low in providing the “best” healthcare.
Sleepless,
Well when you put it that way, YES! I think the private sector would do a much better job running social security, healthcare, public highway systems, food safety systems and even the military, which by the way has become more privatized over the last number of years. You must be smoking those pot plants in suffolk if you don’t think someone other than the government can operate more effeciently!
Motley Fool has this to say about profit margins:
Meanwhile, the profit margins for Accident and Health Insurance is 7.6%, and for Health Care Plans is only 5.1%.
The median hospital physician salary is $168k. That is very good, but considering the time, effort, and difficulty of medical training, I do not think it is too high.
Mouse, Sure hospital physicians won’t be paid nearly as much as private physicians. And there aren’t nearly as many hospital doctors as there are private practice doctors.
There’s a doctor in my family and uh…. he’s filthy rich. Two houses, fabulous vacations, expensive restuarants, expensive cars, paid over $200K to send his kids to college, and on and on and on. And yet he still complains that his Medicare patient load is an impediment to his finances !!! My heart bleeds.
Here, try this. It has salaries ranges for a variety of specialties.
Doctors do make a lot of money. But medical school and residency are very difficult, and without that incentive, we’d get second-rate doctors.
I’ve never looked at the figures, but I’m thinking that it’s a pretty safe bet that physician salaries make up a minuscule portion of healthcare costs. I’d look to big pharma, administrative services, and equipment providers long before I’d look at doctors as a source of the problem of the cost of health care.
(Good god. I cannot believe I just defended doctors. It’ll pass.)
Kidney stones pass, too.