First of all it isn't hidden, it right there on my insurance statement I get for every time I see the doctor. Secondly providers do take losses on gov't paid patients and this is the reason for the silly billing. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/16/health/policy/16medicaid.html?pagewanted=all There can be no real market as long as gov't tells producers what they should produce and what they can get paid for it. BTW you don't know how old I am and it doesn't matter. It is logcal fallacy that age of the person has anything to do with the merit of an argument. FYI Einstein's best work was when he was about 22 years old. When it comes to painful but needed decisions, the best people to make them are those removed from the immediate situation. That's why generals are usually in the rear area and others are dying up front. Not always best of course, but as with most things like this the alternative is worse. An 80 year old man is going to tell you that the $25K/year (add in SSI and you get probably something near $40K/year) the government spends on every single one of them is worth every penny even though they never paid as much in taxes over their lifetimes. It's called conflict of interest and is as old as humanity. Of course us younger people think it is mighty selfish to bankrupt the people you leave behind with your own health care, yet for some odd reason the discussion always gets stopped by lefty shout downs about health care rights, killing old people, etc. Therefore it is going to take someone younger and wiser to stop this nonsense if it is stopped at all. It is going to take someone strong to tell people that you do not have a right to take more than you gave just so you can live longer. The left used to think gov't programs, entitlements, and other people's money is the answer to all humanity's problems. Now we have begun a dangerous new phase where the left thinks their chosen people have a right to future generations money.
well bigarrow, you think piezoe is spot on even though he spouts ideas easily shown incorrect like the military budet is larger than entitlements. Your leaders are people like Reich who say things like "It's not the program, it's the costs". You yourself add no insight and your types are ruining this country through massive gov't programs. I'll make you a deal, if you can stop that idiot Reich from blabbering his spittle, I'll never post again.
My idealogy is my own. I think for myslef and there isn't one single leader out there that I can say is a perfect match for myself. I refuse to be a repubican, and I dislike the democrats. Programs like medicare are created precisely because of idealogy, so therefore your belief system will have large impact on how you view things. Suffering and death are very emotional issues and any discussion about them will always involve you personal idealogy. Any adjustments to them will involve idealological discussions. You think gov't needs to control cost and access. I think a more free market should control it. Idealogy translated into policy. Outcomes are the tool of the left. They always use what favors their argument and they use it dishonestly. First of all the very concept of camparison is flawed because the varibles are not even measured the same. Infant mortality has a great impact on longevity since then you have a person that lived 0 years added into the mix. However Canada and the US don't even define it the same with Canada's definition of live birth being more restrictive. The expected lifetime is not normalized to things like genetics (very important) climate, diet, lifestyle, and worst of all, a big deal is made out of statistically meaningless numerical differences. Expected lifespan is an extremely poor measure of the health care system when the variances between top countries is only about 3 years in any case. Philosophically though, why is it in my interest that you live a few years longer? Isn't your health and life mostly your business? I find it immoral that you find yourself so important that you would tax my children just so you can live longer. I feel it is my duty to simply die when the time comes. I can be persuaded to compromise on most issues like this just for the sake of saving this country as we know it, but it seems impossible to comprise with with these people- this man was a Democrat! <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/TboXsOuMQGU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> add in all the left rhetoric and moral grandstanding- were screwed
Mav wrote: "First of all it isn't hidden, it right there on my insurance statement I get for every time I see the doctor. Secondly providers do take losses on gov't paid patients and this is the reason for the silly billing." Mav, I did my best to make it clear that it was only a suspicion of mine that medical charges to the patient, what the patient sees, were heavily discounted by arrangement with the provider and that insurers remitted less than the amount printed on the patients' statement, without informing the patient. (To put it in a less delicate way, I'm suggesting that private insurers may be misleading you with regard to what was actually remitted to the provider, and that your statement from the insurer may not tell the whole story.) Also, Mav wrote:"[Piezoe] spouts ideas easily shown incorrect like the military budet [sic] is larger than entitlements." This is incorrect, Mav. I never said that, nor would I. What I did say is that the deficits are largely due to discretionary spending, not entitlements. This is correct, of course, because its been the money in the entitlement trusts that's been borrowed and used to pay for excesses in the discretionary budget! In the main, the amounts collected (separately, by the way) for entitlement payments have been calculated by actuaries and are intended to balance, over time, entitlement expenditures. (Not to suggest that these amounts don't have to be adjusted from time to time, as now, to account for changing demographics. And also not to suggest that congress has always attended to their fiduciary responsibility to see that the entitlement trusts remain fiscally sound. The recent example of the medicare drug benefit being enacted without making the necessary adjustment in medicare tax is a case in point.) In summary, the source of deficits, to a major extent is arising in the discretionary budget, and not the entitlement budget. The trusts of the entitlement programs have ironically served as an indirect source of funding for the discretionary budget. Since military spending is the major component of the discretionary budget, it will have to be targeted. The false argument that the Republicans are using to blame entitlements for deficits has to do, i'm sure, more with political philosophy than any thing else, but the American voter is not known for deep philosophical thought. Thus those philosophically opposed to entitlement programs are using politically-better-selling gee whiz numbers based on the calculation of future obligations to these programs. When these numbers are projected out ten and twenty years hence they sound absolutely gigantic , and they are naturally, because you are talking about the medicare costs and pension costs of a nation of 300 million plus people. But surprisingly, if you make timely adjustments to the contribution rates into these programs now, and don't put them off, these future obligations can be met except for one, and that is medical cost! Medical costs, for years, have been rising much faster than the inflation rate. Obviously this is not sustainable and something must be done about it. The other real concern is that the congress has borrowed heavily from the Social Security Trust Fund, which currently has an accumulated surplus of about 3 trillion dollars. Instead of investing the borrowed money, however, much of it was spent on wasting assets, i.e., military adventurism, a failed drug policy, ineffective homeland security spending, CIA, etc. In my personal opinion, much of this spending is motivated by political expediency and irrational fear, originating in special interest groups. Going forward the Social Security administration will need to start redeeming the bonds in the Trust, but the Treasury can not redeem them without more borrowing, and the Treasury won't be able to borrow from the Trust anymore. And that, boys and girls, will make it quite difficult for the U.S. to go on spending 4K$/ per capita per year on military expenditures as they have been. (Germany spends about $300!) Obviously those absurd military expenditures can't be sustained. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see that that's true. Because of this problem, and the lack of political will to make deep cuts in the discretionary budget, you are going to see the entitlement programs incorrectly and unfairly targeted, because that's where the money is. But the targeting will be largely covert rather than overt, because to target these program directly would be political suicide. The Republicans may learn this lesson next November, unless they moderate their rhetoric. No politician who openly proposes cuts in entitlements is electable. What is going to happen is that medicare payout will very likely be adjusted down, and it is virtually certain that Social Security payout will be "adjusted" in some way that will have the effect of slowing the rate at which the Trust needs to redeem its bonds. The adjustment will not be especially transparent. That much I'm also certain of. Like you, Mav, I am neither a Republican nor a Democrat. But please do me one small favor and read a little more carefully what i have written before responding. Thanks.
It actually is, if you account for everything. This would includes decades worth of interest payments on the debt incurred by previous wars that are still not paid for, "off budget" requisitions (eg, the trillion dollars blown in Iraq is not, according to the White House and Congress, part of the defense budget), etc.
It's kind of dumb to incurr WWII since that was so long ago and not very relevant to what is happening today, but even with your dubious assumptions you are most likely wrong. Since you don't bother to actually check the numbers before forming an opinion, I'm not going to either.
prices are high because the healthcare industry needs to grow. we need more doctors and medical schools, a ton more.
Spot on, that has been my thinking for years. There are thousands and thousands of high IQ people who would love the chance to make half what a doctor makes and would jump at the chance to make a fraction what a specialist makes. Supply and demand, cutting hospital cost, that is a harder problem.