Donald Trump and US politics

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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Jennik wrote:

1. You can have some healthcare that's partially funded by donations. I didn't argue against that. Replying as if I'm saying "donations will never provide anyone healthcare" is disingenuous. My point is that you can't have sufficient healthcare that's funded by donations.

Many poor people in that libertarian utopia will be unable to receive necessary healthcare. The healthcare disparity between the rich and the poor will grow even worse.

Someone saying "let's crowdfund a hospital" is completely unaware of the actual problems with our healthcare system.

2. A crowdfunded hospital that poor people still have to pay to use misses the mark completely. It literally does nothing to solve the problem.

America's problem is not people lacking access to hospitals. It's people lacking access to healthcare. Until we fix the wealth disparity problem, we need to start treating healthcare as a right instead of a privilege.

Numbers mine.

1 is mostly correct, although you're tossing the class warfare stuff in needlessly (but that's just your style). As I've said in this thread many times now, the problem with healthcare is pricing, not funding. It is correct that a crowdfunded hospital wouldn't work, because the costs associated with healthcare are so debilitating that not much could get done even with some seriously generous backers — that is, you can't have sufficient healthcare funded by donations.

2, however, completely missed the mark. You do understand that a "free" service is only free from a narrow perspective, and that when perspective widens to encompass the whole there's no such thing as free, don't you? You can't magically handwave away costs and thus price things at zero. Regardless of whether funding comes from donations, individual patients, private insurance or the government, changing funding doesn't solve the pricing problem.

Dalai seems to understand the core problem, unlike you. I'm not sure he does, but his history lesson isn't bad.

With regards to your point 2, you are arguing against a strawman. He never said that the healthcare would be free, just that poor people should not be required for healthcare that they can not afford.

Dalai, I don't think this is a problem where laissez-faire would allow the free market to self-correct. There are fundamental problems with free-market competition within the industry, to include significant numbers of unconscious customers who cannot take their business elsewhere if they find pricing unreasonable.

While it is true that in this scenario, the truly poor wouldn't be able to afford the hospital costs, it would still make it more affordable for others and allow a greater number of people to benefit from it at a lower cost.

Don't forget the idea of free medical check up twice a year. It cost a LOT less money to prevent something than to heal it.

Also, having such a system (non-profit generalized hospitals) would make it much easier for a government to implant nation-wide health coverage as such organization wouldn't care from where the money needed came.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Dalai, I don't think this is a problem where laissez-faire would allow the free market to self-correct. There are fundamental problems with free-market competition within the industry, to include significant numbers of unconscious customers who cannot take their business elsewhere if they find pricing unreasonable.

Laissez-faire is a problem in a market that is so narrow that there's only a small amount of competitors and that it's easy for them to increase their prices in accordance to each others.

It's also a problem when mega corporations can just do illegal actions that go against small competitors and those small competitors can't afford the legal fees to get justice.

Laissez-faire only works well on small and medium scale companies. It fails after that and it fails phenomenally

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DurianMcgregor wrote:

With regards to your point 2, you are arguing against a strawman. He never said that the healthcare would be free, just that poor people should not be required for healthcare that they can not afford.

The problem here is that modern right-wingers like Scrotes don't argue in good faith. Any time you see someone say something like "free healthcare isn't free," they're willfully misrepresenting someone's argument in a very obvious way. Nobody believes in the strawman they constantly attack, but they'll never stop attacking it. It's much easier to dishonestly pretend advocates of free healthcare are saying something else than to respond to our actual arguments.

"But it's not free! Somebody has to pay for it!" Yeah, no shit, and you know the plan is to pay for it with taxes, especially through fairer taxes on the wealthy. Why constantly lie and pretend we're talking about magical healthcare that has no costs at any point in the system?

The funny thing with government subsidized healthcare system is that since prevention becomes a much bigger part of treatments, it substantially increases the government income because there's much less people falling ill for long period of time and as a result, they can work more.

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DalaiLama wrote:

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deathflower wrote:

You realize they can't fix it? How can you fix it with a dysfunctional government?

The original impetus (tax savings) aside, the government (for the most part) wasn't the source of the problem. The government doesn't need to fix the problem, the only thing they need to do is allow/order a discreet review of the accounting at various points of the health care chain. Once the cost factors and problems are known, solutions can be found and implemented. Without government effort, the improvements will come gradually. Government can make big changes occur quickly, but with their incompetence, they are as likely to do damage as they are to help.

We just need good information.

This is in essence what I suggested earlier. Glad to see I’m not the only one.

I agree with Scrotie, insofar as “let’s throw more money at it” will only exacerbate what is likely rampant corruption at the top of the health care industry. If a mountain of cash is on fire, you don’t throw more cash into the inferno hoping that more poor people can grab a buck or two before it is consumed. You start by putting out the fire, which imo means beginning with an audit.

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Jennik wrote:

The thing holding us back is that the political party based on being an evil asshole keeps trying to pass "healthcare" bills that take away people's healthcare

Don’t worry, those people have already been voted out of power; unfortunately, however, the damage is already done.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Dalai, I don't think this is a problem where laissez-faire would allow the free market to self-correct. There are fundamental problems with free-market competition within the industry, to include significant numbers of unconscious customers who cannot take their business elsewhere if they find pricing unreasonable.

Why do you think the prices are going up?

Doesn't make much sense to price bargain when your life is on the line. Demand for products that are considered necessities is less sensitive to price changes. Drug prices are inelastic, this is where an increase in price increases total revenue despite a fall in the quantity demanded.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Dalai, I don't think this is a problem where laissez-faire would allow the free market to self-correct. There are fundamental problems with free-market competition within the industry, to include significant numbers of unconscious customers who cannot take their business elsewhere if they find pricing unreasonable.

For the free market aspect of insurance, supplies, R&D and pharmaceuticals, I would agree with you. One the facility side, I would say there are enough non-profit facilities that can make it happen, if they are given the tools. While they may share ideas within a network, they may not have access to what other hospital networks are doing, especially those that are for profit and want to protect their advantages.

An example would be staffing, where smaller hospitals or groups can't afford to keep extra people on hand, and end up routinely paying a very hefty surcharge to bring people in on an as needed basis. Paying people 3x what they should pay doesn't help. If hospitals could find a way to collaborate, they could manage this amongst themselves, and not need to pay a excess to an outside agency for the staffing.

Knowing that company X is charging in absurd excess of a healthy profit for the latest model of some medical technology would be another. Hospitals could work together to refuse to do business with companies that they know are gouging them, but they can't if they don't know that in the first place.

I don't know if you've ever had an MRI or CAT scan, but those can be horrendously expensive. The machines and setup can cost anywhere from a half million to 2 or 3 million dollars. Is that a fair price for a technology that has been in use for over 30 years or a rip off? Are the new 3 tesla MRI machines showing enough difference to be meaningful for patients? We need more info to know. Once in place, and if used often enough, the costs can come down. Some places will charge a couple thousand for a scan, others a few hundred. Finding a way for all of them to get to lower costs would help, especially since earlier use of those scans and other tests could eliminate a lot of unnecessary trips while a disease gets worse and costs more to treat.

Hospitals used to put MRSA patients in rooms with healthy patients to save costs. It turns out that putting them in separate rooms turned out to be be not only far safer for patients, but saved the hospitals a fortune.

Some places have spent a couple million on special phones for the doctors and nurses, and found out that they saved money within a couple years because of the improved efficiency - and saved enough that they rolled the upgrades out to other hospitals in the network. Other facilities are using older technology because they don't really know if they will save money, and they can't afford to risk an upgrade if it doesn't bring down costs.

There are lots of ways to cut costs, but that information needs to be shared.

As you say, there is a part that the market won't fix on its own. If we can get the information on what is broken out to the public, than solutions can be devised and eventually the public wrath will get them implemented.

Some solutions might end up being more socialized than I would prefer, some more market based. I don't have a problem with doing what needs to be done, so long as we know it is the right answer and the public has a chance to weigh in on it.

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faerwin wrote:

The funny thing with government subsidized healthcare system is that since prevention becomes a much bigger part of treatments, it substantially increases the government income because there's much less people falling ill for long period of time and as a result, they can work more.

You are 100% correct that prevention is a phenomenal way to bring down costs. We do need a way to make preventative health care available to everyone for little or no cost imo.

If more people would go see a doctor on an annual basis and make even small improvements to their health habits a large chunk of costs would vanish over the next 20-25 years. Someone ignoring a minor condition that could easily be treated, can turn into a serious illness that requires a hospital stay of several days and a bill that is a fortune.