Public Healthcare for all, funded by our Medicare Tax.
Private Healthcare for people can pay more and seek more exclusive treatment. They can buy insurance if they want to / or if they are worry of malpractice.
No mandatory to buy insurance. Insurance is not healthcare provider.
One of the problem of why insurance cost soar is that the person who never buy insurance (people on Medicaid) can claim millions in lawsuit, you can't claim a winning lottery sum if you never buy the lottery ticket.
PS: Canada and US have similar tax rate. Canadian are not mandated to buy insurance to get their free public healthcare.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AsiOJsAYdjmhhSSzK.MgIJzty6IX;_ylv=3?qid=20100306211343AAMPfZv
Gordon O
Makes too much sense so no... got to try all bad ideas first...
Count Acumen
You're talking about the public option. That's the plan that President Obama and many Democrats were pushing for from the very beginning.
V2
I agree. It reminds me also some European plans. However some Americans have problem with public option - they don't want anyone to have it, because it deprives insurance companies from potential profit (destroy private insurers as they say) and would require tax dollars to cover public costs (and they are not paying into the public pool, just into the private).
Kiran C
First, the fear of lawsuits is not the driving force behind the surge in insurance costs. The number of people in the private insurance pool are decreasing and are sicker. That is the problem that causes insurance costs to rise.
"To understand the problem, think about a simple case in which there are only two kinds of people, those with high and low expected future medical-care-costs lives. Imagine that the insurance company can't distinguish the two types, so it charges all comers the average cost across the entire population. For the healthy people, the cost of the insurance will look very high, so they won't buy it. That means that the only people who will buy the insurance are the unhealthy. Realising this, the insurance company will have to raise their price further to compensate for the fact that only the high cost people are willing to buy insurance. This is the classic "lemons" problem that causes markets to fail and was first described by George Akerlof."
If even you ban all medical lawsuits, frivolous or not, the type of people in the insurance pool has more effect than lawsuits. That is why the mandate is a good idea. It expands the pool.
http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/363
ali
Canada health-care system is not free, its funded for by tax dollars, i.e. everyone is paying for it. I think people are being myopic if they are just debating about public versus private health-care instead of understanding the basic underlying problem as to why health-care is so expensive in America. To me, its a tough issue, it always has been. There is no magic solution here. People who think that if we just adopt a single-payer system, or a mandated insurance system, or a government-run system, then the problem (exploding costs) will go away.
That may very well be so, but the reality is for health-care cost to go down, some criteria must be met. First, the new system must be efficient, ie minimal effort for maximum gain. Secondly, health-care providers must not be bogged down by rules and regulations that does not make sense, ie they have to pay extra cost to keep the regulators happy and/or pay extra to prevent/protect themselves from getting sued. If these 2 criteria are met, no matter what system you use, health-care would not be a problem.
Now, the question to answer is then which system is best for attaining these 2 criteria? Well, that depends on the political situation of the various countries. For some countries that are like dictatorships, a government solution might work because an effective strong central government can mandate changes to the health-care system to optimize it thus driving cost down. Health-care departments, hospitals, clinics, etc are constantly reviewed and inefficient ones are shut down by the strong arm of the government. Of course, a strong government can have the opposite effect if the government is foolish and does things inefficiently. In America, my opinion is that the government is very ineffective and inefficient. They have union contracts that makes shutting down departments and shifting allocated resources impossible. A government solution will not work, neither will mandated insurance. Anything that involves the use of government policies to influence individuals in their behavior of using health-care has been an abject failure.
Flower
Well, Canadians are taxed much more than Americans and with a population of only 30 million, they can afford a national health care service.
Medicare pays private insurance companies the 70 to 80 percent of charges incurred by the Medicare beneficiary (patient). The person pays the rest, or another gap insurance will, or Medicaid will for very low income people.
If there were limits on jury awards, doctors malpractice insurance might be lowered but I don't think insurance premiums would be cheaper for individuals.
Insurance companies themselves have a monopoly on what they charge patients and they are immune from anti-trust laws in their regions or states. They don't compete with each other. They collude on price-fixing. The government wants a public insurance company to compete with them to force the private companies to lower their rates.
I dont understand the rest of your question.
Orignal From: How about Public Healthcare and Private Healthcare?
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