Happens all the time. Insurance corporations deny benefits to the terminally ill. It's a standard procedure. Dead people don't file lawsuits and their relatives are easily paid off if they do go to court. Your "Death Panel" is alive and well donating millions into the coffers of the no-solution nonsense swift-boat party. The over haul earmarks more money be spent on preventive primary care to catch health problems before they escalate to where non-insured show up at the emergency room thereby driving up the cost. You must be a member of the swift-boat party.
Only if you can control the risk pool. If you can't then costs will go up. You can't control the costs without rationing if you allow those with pre existing conditions into the pool. When I say rationing I mean telling someone that they are not getting that organ transplant etc. Consider this. The reason that insurance companies don't cover pre existing now is because they don't know what to charge for it. If they knew what to charge then they would be selling it. Why wouldn't they write it if they knew what to charge?? Why would they care as long as they make money?
I am in complete agreement with your post. While a single payer system might bring costs down by reducing paperwork (now 30% of cost) and eliminating the need to make a profit for share holders and still generate enough cash to pay CEO's multiple millions per year, I am not in favor of such a system in the US. The reason is that US medicine operates as a government sanctioned cartel. If single payer government healthcare was adopted here it would likely result in the present out of control costs being shifted 100% to the taxpayer with costs remaining out of control. IMO, the only way to bring down costs in the U.S. is to accept somewhat more risk and deregulate medicine to a considerable extent by following the model of other countries. This would mean, for example, having prescribing pharmacists, a vastly greater number of drugs being available without prescription, prescribing nurse practitioners operating independently of physicians, and eliminating state regulation of insurance companies and instead bringing them under control of the Department of Commerce as with other corporations. It would also help to depoliticize and reform the FDA. I believe that introducing choice and competition will bring down costs. I don't believe the Obama plan goes nearly far enough to achieve this, though establishing a public option insurance plan may be of some help in introducing competition into the insurance market. Also, as I understand it, the Obama plan would require that everyone have some kind of insurance thus expanding the risk pool that trefoil noted as helpful.
Your 2nd statement makes no sense. If you don't allow those with pre-existing conditions into the pool, you also can't tell everyone they have to be in it. Without the latter, you can't control costs, because the healthy will opt out. We are, remember, not talking about insuring the old, they've already got Medicare. The poor, who also tend to get sick more, have Medicaid. So the pool we're looking at is working age folks and their children. If you allow opt-outs, the childless will opt out because children do tend to go to the doctor more. This will increase the insurance cost for families. Families have enough struggles without the added struggle of paying more for insurance because the selfish, anti-social types of people who decide not to have families also decide to stay out of health insurance. Which is precisely where we are now.
This is a very good point. Personally, I don't have a dog in this fight, I've lived with both private and universal healthcare and they can both be made to work very well. HOWEVER - as long as the US maintains a culture of fiscal irresponsibility where so many voters feel they have a G-d given right to more services than they are paying for - in that context - any kind of "universal" healthcare will immediately turn into subsidized health care. And that subsidy - like most politically favorable subsidies - will invariably grow over time. Or to put it in Pabst's original terms - the insurance will be too cheap and all that's really happened is another deferred time bomb has been placed in the attic.
Tort reform seems like a good idea, but hasn't it been tried on a State level? Texas perhaps? Didn't it result in no difference in cost to patients, i.e., savings to physicians were not passed on?
I've been selling medical/surgical equipment for 10 years now and believe me you don't want to go to a VA or Indian hospital. That is what all hospitals will look like 10 years if Obama gets his wish.
Someone went to the trouble of adding it up - all the legal costs of health care deliver - settlements, litigation costs, the whole pie - is around $6B per year. That's about $16 per capita, per year. Or put another way, eliminating malpractice issues in their entirety - for free - would only trim ~0.5% off of the country's aggregate medical expense.
You can be a capitalist and also want some socialist programs, it isn't an all or nothing question. Our government built the highways, ran electrical lines in the country provide care to the elderly and poor, run the military, post office, all law enforcement is some form of government as is firefighters and all these don't make us a socialist country only a smart and caring country. What we have here in America isn't perfect but it is damn good I think. In my opinion, our country can afford a health care plan that covers all of us. This might be able to be achieved just by regulation of the insurance industry, and if the republicans cared any they could have gotten regulations through while they were in power and avoided all this, but they don't care, not about health care for the individual.