We already have government paid medical care for the expensive old folks, and we already have HMOs screening coverage for smokers and drinkers and old people and "pre-existing conditions" and chronic disease, and we already have long waits for appointments and non-emergency surgery, and we are already pricing ourselves out of medical care.
Everything wrong with socialized medicine is wrong with our current system, and we're paying 50% more for it, and more than half the people in the country don't get standard first world care from it.
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Very good observation, and you are correct. Throwing more money at the problem is not going to fix it. That is why I cringe whenever I hear the Bush solution to Healthcare, give them a tax credit. It would be like throwing gasoline on a fire. It would do nothing to solve the problem and acutally make it worse by degrading the financial position of our government. The other Bush solution is to make individuals responsible for obtaining their own healthcare insurance. The theory being that individuals could negotiate a better price from insurance companies than their employers. Yea, right. An insurance company is going to compete harder for my $5,000 per year policy that for my employers 50 million dollar annual policy...I think not.
Our healthcare industry acts like a classic monopoly, because it is a monopoly. That is why it is immune to prices. Prices surge at more than ten percent per year....more than in any other country of the world. Consumers are "price takers" and the industry are "price givers" meaning the industry sets the price and the consumer has no influence on price. The situation needs to be reversed, and the situation can only exist because of government regulation that prevents competition and establishes and maintains restricted markets which allows providers to set prices.
No one would argue we have a very efficient form of healtcare. Our information systems are stuck back in the 1950s. Our information systems are not automated. And we spend 33 percent of our healthcare dollars just on administration. Healthcare administration has not changed in at least thirty years. I was recently in the hospital, and nothing has changed in ward management since last I worked on a ward more than thirty years ago. So obviously no money has been spent to improve hospital operations in the United States.
Please see below from Wikkipedia:
It is often argued that monopolies tend to become less efficient and innovative over time, becoming "complacent giants", because they do not have to be efficient or innovative to compete in the marketplace. Sometimes this very loss of efficiency can raise a potential competitor's value enough to overcome market entry barriers, or provide incentive for research and investment into new alternatives. The theory of contestable markets argues that in some circumstances (private) monopolies are forced to behave as if there were competition because of the risk of losing their monopoly to new entrants. This is likely to happen where a market's barriers to entry are low. It might also be because of the availability in the longer term of substitutes in other markets. For example, a canal monopoly, while worth a great deal in the late eighteenth century United Kingdom, was worth much less in the late nineteenth century because of the introduction of railways as a substitute.
Our problem here is that the barrier to entry in the United States is the government in conjunction with private interests.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly
In the United States medical research is mostly performed with funding from the federal governmnet. A small percentage is from private industry and individuals. Private research money tends to be spent on research bettering existing products as opposed to entirely new research. Bettering existing products is less risky and helps extend patent protections (monopoly power).
