[kenberg]

There is definitely something to be said for a bill that upsets the insurance companies. Early on, I understood that Harry and Loise were in favor of reform This made me very nervous.


I like to think that somewhere, after plowing through all the crap and hypocrisy, that at least some reasonably sized group of senators and representatives have chosen this way to make a living with the hope of doing something worthwhile. Sometimes it's hard to keep believin...


A story with no great point: I pulled a muscle or something, anyway I had a pain and it was not disappearing as fast as expected so I went to the doc. He suggested I might want to take five pills a day of something that had 220 milligrams of something in each pill. I said "So 1100 milligrams a day". I should know better than to say such a thing. My ability to multiply 220 by 5 in my head apparently was a challenge to his status as authority figure. He immediately started talking very fast, rattling off various doses of various drugs at a pace far faster than I could comprehend. At one point he was talking of 24 pills of some magnitude! What? He slowed down and corrected himself. We must treat the mathematically challenged very gently.

[Trinidad]

mike777, on Sep 19 2009, 01:38 AM, said:

"The private insurances. If I start an insurance company, I want to make money with it. With private insurance companies, money flows from the health care system to share holders. When the government is the insurance company, there is no need to pay share holders."



Killing off the private health insurance industry may be a good idea but it does come with some costs.

Of course it does. That is the beauty of it all! (See below why these "costs" are actually savings, not costs.)

mike777, on Sep 19 2009, 01:38 AM, said:

Shareholders, pension funds lose tens of billions of value.
Dead industry pays no taxes

Nobody is suggesting that capital should be destroyed. When health care is nationalized, the government buys the shares. Pension funds can invest the money somewhere else (e.g. Tobacco industry ).
The fact that the nationalized industry doesn't pay taxes is irrelevant. All their profit will go back into the government/health care system. In private health insurance, only the tax percentage of the profit will go to the government.

mike777, on Sep 19 2009, 01:38 AM, said:

Tens of thousands lose their jobs
Out of work people pay no income tax.

Simply put, half of these workers will find a new job in the government run health care. And the other half can do something useful. Alternatively, all of these workers can take a part time job for the government, and do something fun or useful with the rest of their time.
In the absolute worst case scenario, half of the workers are out of work and on unemployment paid by the government. In that case, the nationalization didn't gain anything, but didn't lose either. Every worker that does something useful after the nationalization is economic gain.

All these workers that are dealing with the bureaucratic mess that the US health care system currently is are paid for by ... you. When the health care industry is nationalized, you will still be paying for all the workers in the health care system. But a large part of these administrative workers will then be working somewhere else. And you won't need to pay for those anymore.

Rik

[onoway]

This was filmed in 2006. It would be interesting to know where these projects are now in the general scheme of things.
http://www.ted.com/talks/alan_russell_on_r...our_bodies.html