Medicare and free markets conservative style.

[Mountainman]

I turned on C-Span yesterday and there was a conference about the survival of conservatism. There was a panel of right wing folks and they opened it up for questions. The first guy to ask a question talked about the increase in entitlement spending as a percent of GDP. He's afraid we will become like a Swedish socialist country he says. He wants to know what to do about it. One guy on the panel talks about medicare and says the problem is with health care not medicare. He says the free market is the best means to allocate scarce resources. I interpreted that to mean he thinks that only those who can afford to pay for it should get medical care. What a fucked up concept. Medical care should be a right not a commodity that goes to the highest bidder. Imagine this country with even more people who do not have access to health care than there is now.

I can't understand people who put an ideology ahead of the welfare of fellow Americans. How is it that they can be so cold hearted? To me conservatism is a sickness when someone says we should use free markets to allocate health care. If we use the money that we are spending on Iraq on health care instead, that guy's life would not be effected in any way but he would rather we spend billions killing people than spend it on caring for people? How fucked up is that?

[WCGreen]

1. Money makes the world go around, the world go around....

The world go around....


The EmCee from Cabaret sang it best....

[iamjoy]

2. Well, Some Conservatives Say

That deregulating the health care and insurance will HELP people get healthcare. I still think that's screwed up, but not heartless - just foolish.

The Libertarian philosophy is that corporations should not get tax breaks for offering health insurance to employees. Companies will stop offering it and people will not be locked into taking one of the few (or only) plan offered by their company, rather, they will be able to shop around. The insurance companies will have to compete with each other for every customer, so they will offer lower rates. See?

Also, consumers should be encouraged to shop around for health care. Which doctor has the best price/best service? Which hospital?

Also, let's not regulate medical providers so much. Why can't a spiritual healer and a doctor be on the same level? Let me make decisions about my health care and the drugs I wish to take - why all this red tape for FDA approval?

Of course, the philosophy is flawed on so many levels. Sick people, or those at risk, will not be able to get health insurance at any price. It's hard to "shop around" and compre prices on medical providers and services when you don't know what you are going to need. And once you are sick, you may not have time (they found non-Hodgkins Lymphoma in my step-father a month ago, with waiting to schedule all the appointments he has not had a single treatment, and that's without having to shop around). Before we had some regulatory system for doctors and drugs, you had all kinds of quacks and snake oil that did more harm than good.

But, it's not always heartless.

[acmejack]

3. It is merely self centered.

When they become impoverished and sick their tune invariably changes. It is always an amazing epiphany. Why do you think this is?

[antigop]

5. Well, you know the saying...

Everyone is one catastrophe away from being a Democrat.

[bryant69]

4. I don't know what's fucked up about it

Assuming we don't have enough medical staff and equipment to take care of everybody in an equal and timely fashion (which it seems likely we don't) we are going to have to figure out some way to take decide who goes first. What's your proposal?

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[Mountainman]

6. Well I am a controller of a medical clinic. What we are doing is having our

urgent care clinic see patients first. The are being treated by PA and nurses and if needed they are being sent to physicians. We need more mid level care givers to treat the everyday medical needs. We can accommodate everyone who needs to be treated as long as there is money to pay for it. That money should come from taxes in my opinion. The problem I see is that many if not most doctors want a high level of income and don't want to work long hours. When ever we have a cash crunch the physicians do not want to be part of the solution. They still want to be paid well and not work too much. Now that is not all of them but enough that it gets hard to recruit them at what we can afford to pay. We are now recruiting foreign doctors since they will work at what we can afford. We treat manly Medicare and medical patients and those with regular insurance.

There is no need to allocate scarce resources since they is no need for them to be scarce if we don't want them to be.