Originally Posted by
ryan1234
SomedayRJ... as much as I agree with you about everything else, I would have to disagree with you about regulating the healthcare industry...The market must naturally pop the inflated healthcare bubble... If someone can't pay for something, they just simply can't pay for it, if more people can't pay for rising costs.. the costs will have to come back down to what a consumer can pay for... healthcare is the most extreme case, the personal cost is unfortunate...however people have been without groundbreaking medicine in the past and they will need to again until the market stabilizes. Asking for government regulations is opening pandora's box for everyone. Americans simply overuse healthcare, especially on things that simply could be prevented (i.e. obesity, smoking, etc). Regulations will not prevent this if it isn't taken to the end of the market.
Curing obesity is like curing the public's stupidity about anything aeronautical: it's nigh on impossible.
Basically, with healthcare in the US—
(1) Everyone (well, everyone with a brain, that is) thinks that it is a problem now.
(2) Most everyone (again, those with brains) in economics has studied it and knows that we're f*cked if nothing changes.
(3) Most everyone in Washington that you see on C-SPAN (those without brains except maybe for a few in the brain trust at 800 Indy) chooses to bend over backwards for a large voting group (senior citizens) and are too cowardly to tell them that their health programs are bankrupting the Republic and mortgaging
MY future.
(4) Most everyone working for those talking heads on C-SPAN (these guys do have brains and are mostly young ideologues—like me) knows that we have a serious emergency on our hands and that
something needs to happen, and right soon.
I don't want to especially argue inelasticity of demand for healthcare — the fact is that you need a certain level of primary care (preventative maintenance, to wit, everyone should have a physical every year) and contingency care (corrective maintenance, i.e. "Shucks, I have a sinus infection again...need more Zithromax.") I do think that most Americans could take better care of their bodies and that the "fast everything" society we have at the moment is extremely unhealthy. People work longer hours and so much of being well is being well-rested...
The part is that really ridiculous is that for almost all of Big Pharma, their single biggest payer is the Federal government. You can either (a) have the Feds stop paying for prescriptions, or (b) impose strict/draconian price regulation on anything the Feds buy. The prescription racket—and that's what it is—needs to end.
There's considerable research about single-payer healthcare; nobody really thinks it's the be-all-end-all solution but for providing basic, primary care to EVERYONE a single-payer approach is superior. And this is why the Scandinavians have it. Everyone has primary care free of charge (albeit supported by taxes for those who can afford to pay) and then may carry supplemental insurance for stuff that is not covered in the basic level of care.
What we really desparately need is to get everyone my age (20-30 age group) informed about the impending doom...that way, something might happen about it and we can break certain special interests' stranglehold on DC and replace them with our interests...namely, cheap oil, mainline pay for Q400/RJ7/RJ9s, and affordable health insurance for all.