Not only that, the US government is not supposed to be in the business of owning businesses, for God's sake!!! This is a capitalistic, free-enterprise, democracy--not a friggin socialist crap hole.
Of course, by then it will be in the health insurance business, and all of the private carriers will have been destroyed.
As long as their is universal single payer health care it will be by and large a good thing. The current proposal by the democrats and republicans is merely another way of keeping a bloated medical insurance racket going. I would be very much against the destruction of private health care by the way. I believe in choice. Currently, the reality is we pay VASTLY more for people who don't have insurance (often billed at multiple times what insured people pay in a sort of mafia-esque protection racket run by medical insurers) due to the fact that unpaid bills just appear either in the premiums of the insured or are otherwise thrown back on to the tax payer. It would be VASTLY cheaper to have single payer universal health care then to continue with the absurd public private medicare garbage or worse a purely privatized system. Let me be clear a PURELY public health care system would be problematic as well. Of course I don't know of any country on earth that has public only health care. In England for instance they have a thriving private health care industry they just aren't able to parasitically feed off the tax payer when a poor uninsured person goes to the hospital. FYI the current proposal for public health care is a front for selected private interests trying to get a competitive advantage in the marketplace and is NOT in fact true public health insurance but is just another subsidy for politically favored members of the health care / insurance business All it would do is further destroy the free market in health care and insurance by subsidizing the giant companies. [video=youtube;LMtN-S0KA3k]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMtN-S0KA3k[/video] I'm all for private health care along with a public health care for those who can't afford the private health care. What I'm NOT all for is health insurance companies that make money without providing anything. Insurance is very often a scam (much like insurance being a losers bet in BlackJack) as they are working the numbers to make a profit meaning they force you to pay more over time then you would if you were uninsured and able to pay at the rate of the insured. As I mentioned above you will be billed at a HIGHER rate if you are uninsured then insured people pay for the same service (via the parasitic middle man insurers of course). Don't be fooled by the rhetoric of either party as they both work for the same folks (monopolisticly minded corporations not those interested in a free market but those who want private protected markets without competition) and not for people who believe in free markets, freedom of speech, our constitutional rights and the rights of the individual. They BOTH believe in the right of the ultra-rich elite to control the rest of us. They OWN both parties and most of the membership. Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich are two of the only people in either party that aren't corrupted to the Nth degree. I don't agree with Kucinich or Paul across the board but they are right on when it comes to many things. If you get suckered in to the talking points of either party you've already lost. We must learn to think for ourselves. Don't believe me, do your own research.
Govt. should just open their own insurance company and sell cheap preventative health care coverage. Subsidize the poor and we're done with it.
Totally agree I might make it slightly more comprehensive then that but I largely agree. I also think maintaining a healthy FREE MARKET health industry (hate to use the word industry here) that allows many forms of medicine to be practiced from standard allopathy (drug based medicine), to chiropractic, to accupuncture, to naturopath, to homeopathy to Reiki and Qi Qong is the best idea. Whatever medicine people are comfortable with and find effective for them should be allowed. This is the way it was before the monopolistically minded AMA decided they didn't want a Free Market in medicine but wanted to control who was allowed and who wasn't and then dictated to them that they have to use insurance and conform to medical malpractice laws etc. I'm not saying suing someone shouldn't be allowed if they do you harm but it's WAY out of control and hampers medicine as much as the insurance industry and the greed of pharmaceutical companies.
I think the govt. should sell every kind of insurance: auto, home, fire, malpractice, etc. When they're faced with paying out big lawsuit bucks, they'll figure out how to make the payments more fair (sized). At 0% profit, doctors' malpractice would go down maybe $30K/year, reducing costs. As a big purchaser of drugs, they'd be able to get quantity discounts. On the other hand, it'd be friends of Bush or friends of Obama who'd profit. The more power gov.t has, the more reason to pay bribes.
Yeah it's a strange dance between the private sector and government. Either one with too much power seems to go horribly wrong. Although it seems easier to contain when it's private. In the end what we all want is to limit the influence of socio/psyco-paths on our lives. Seems the less that power gets concentrated the better whether in private or bureaucratic hands seems to make little difference. I prefer a small government simply because history shows the more powerful the government the more horribly wrong it goes. On the other hand I feel like there has to be a limit on the power of the wealthy as well. There certainly isn't an easy "Silver Bullet" solution to these things, I know that much.
