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I don't understand Elok's word salad but if I gather something is that he claims that a privitized health care system if rife with corruption?
funny. that would be the argument for a state health care system
Noone wants to pay for another in Europe but there are some things called human dignity. having a state that will look after you if oyu fall ill is one of those dignity things.​
funny. that would be the argument for a state health care system
Noone wants to pay for another in Europe but there are some things called human dignity. having a state that will look after you if oyu fall ill is one of those dignity things.​
"Corruption" as such is probably much more common with Medicare and Medicaid than with private insurance. Medicaid is basically required by law to pay providers very, very badly; there's a rule that providers who deal with Medicaid have to give Medicaid the best possible price, so if they give a service to any insurer for, say, $400, Medicaid will not pay above $400 for that service. In practice, this means it's often hard to find providers who will take Medicaid, and also providers who take Medicaid and also other insurance will give the other insurance worse deals for fear of being forced to lower their Medicaid reimbursements. This is just one example of what they call "perverse incentives" built into the system. In the meantime, one great way to make money off Medicaid (possibly the only way) is to submit bills for services that were never actually performed. This also works to some extent for Medicare; I know at least one doctor at my hospital is grossly overbilling for hours compared to what he actually spends taking care of patients. I don't report him, even though there's a 10% bounty for catching this stuff, because I don't trust the government to successfully prosecute this stuff and protect me from retaliation. It's a huge problem, and it doesn't get solved because the government frankly doesn't have the manpower (or the ability to hire enough sufficiently clever people) to prosecute a tenth of the theft. Leaving aside grey areas; for example, that same thieving doctor is very fond of performing a specific procedure because it is quick, low-risk, and earns him a fair amount of cash. It is also easy to justify as maybe medically necessary, so he will do one of these things at the least excuse. Is this "fraud"? Not provably. But if people actually paid for their healthcare, they might say, "hey, what's this procedure? I don't think that was necessary, and I'm not paying that much for it." Since the government pays, and the government isn't that great at telling what's necessary, my doctor buddy keeps on racking up the easy money with these damn procedures.
As for private "insurance": it gets criticized as a failure of capitalism or free markets. But any economist will tell you that markets require certain conditions to work. Most relevant here, people have to know what stuff actually costs. So-called insurance, as it exists in America, hides the real price; you pay your insurer some amount of money as a premium (and your employer may pay significantly more, which works out to you essentially "paying" far more to the insurer than you realize), and they invisibly negotiate prices on your behalf and spit out some number on the other side, and you get some services, and even if you abide by all the rules (and there are often a lot of rules), you may still have to pay something, or not, but it's usually very hard to tell going in how much you will have to pay. As for what your insurer finally pays, you will almost certainly never find that out at all. You may be presented with a bill, but the insurer will do some dickering after the fact. The whole system is so complicated that it's extremely hard to tell whether you're getting good value or not, or what a good value even is. "Insurance" here is not really insurance, unless your insurance is what we call catastrophic insurance, designed only to cover really big costs. Otherwise what we call insurance is actually just a giant, price-obscuring middleman, which we illogically expect to save us money. And you can't even really shop around for insurance; you can accept your employer's insurance, or pay for your own insurance (which I think almost nobody does, because it's inferior even after government subsidies). Or, if you are poor, you can use Medicaid, which kind of sucks and is miserable to deal with but strictly speaking is better than nothing.
I could say more, a LOT more, but I suspect you won't really read what I've written and it took too damn long to type it all up.
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