Bah, Zera! "Wow" is right, you should know me better than that! To get "profit is evil" out of what I said is a stretch. I said making a middle-man profit off of ones health care is evil.
Profit is cool, we've been over this. I'm an uber-capitalist. Doctors can make a profit, nurses, hell even the drug companies. This is fine. But when you provide literally zero benefit (as insurance companies work really, really hard to do for their customers), then you don't deserve money.
See, middle-manning profit in and of itself I have no problems with. I do it myself, frequently. I bring someone who wants something to the people who sell that thing, then make a percentage. Fair enough, I performed a service. I introduce the supply to the demand, and I do it over things like better sex guides and car fuel. These things are WAY optional in life, certainly not dire by any stretch.
So lets look at heart surgery. Lets say this guy over here, we'll call him Joe, is going to die if he doesn't get a new heart. I don't know what heart transplants go for these days, so I'm just going to make up some numbers. Lets say for the new heart, the time it takes for the surgeon and crew to put it together, and the electricity and tools needed, the whole thing costs $30,000. Lets take a look at this as if it were one of my deals.
So I know Joe, Joe knows he needs a new heart, and I know the guys who can supply and install it for $30,000. I generally don't middle-man anything that I can't make at least 50% off of, so I tell Joe it costs $60,000. He can't get to these people without me, nor does he even know that if he could it would be half what I quoted him, so he gives me the money and gets his heart surgery, and I pocket $30,000. Are you telling me that
wouldn't be an instance of profit being evil?
Obviously that's 20 different kinds of hypothetical, but do you see the correlation I'm making? Health insurance companies don't add anything at all to the experience. You pay them money "in case shit happens," and when shit happens, they send out workers whose job it is to fuck you out of the coverage you've been paying for. They don't even make the introductions! In fact, if you go to the
wrong doctor, then all the money you've been paying them may as well be flushed down the toilet, because they won't even pay a percent.
Did you know that a whole bunch of food items don't get taxed (open question, I'm sure you do Zera)? Eggs, milk, bread, most meats... That's because you need food to live, and the government decided way back when that it would be unethical to profit from something essential to life that they themselves had no part in creating. A rare good call for government.
Profit is great, Zera. As you know, I generally take the conservative viewpoint in matters of monies. But health care? Major surgeries are already insanely expensive without adding extra padding, because of course the guy who literally holds your heart in his hands deserves to live damn well for the stress he's under. But to add as much as 400% to the cost in order to pay people who add, literally, nothing to the equation? That's a fucking evil that costs people their lives.
I'll make a profit on damn near anything, brother, but you won't find me telling someone that if they don't pay me 400% more than the item is worth that they have to wander off and die.
All that aside, I'm OK with the public option plan. I personally think that health insurance companies are evil and that they should be destroyed, but I feel the exact same way about the Jonas Brothers, and you don't hear me rallying the troops to make that happen, do ya? A public option would provide competition for the insurance companies, which they
have not had, ever. I personally wouldn't want to profit from middle-manning life or death situations, but if someone else does, and they can offer a product that people genuinely want instead of the public option and still make a profit, then mark my words, I'd respect that person as a businessman.
But now? There's nothing to respect in insurance companies, they're corporations that exist for the sole purpose of profiting off of misery. They don't increase the cost of a service by something reasonable, they increase it by an assload. Not just for their profits, but like you said, an average of 5 employees per doctor just to handle their paperwork? I don't know why you're not with me on this, that's beyond unreasonable.
The mere existence of an insurance company has made it so that even people who aren't insured have to pay 2-3 times more than they would have to if insurance companies didn't exist for services that very often make the difference between life and death. How is that not fucking evil?
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We're really not going to see eye to eye on a lot of this, because health care is one of the few situations where I don't follow my own rules. I'm an independent, socially liberal and fiscally conservative, that last part meaning that the phrase "tax and spend" is one I don't approve of in damn near every case. This is a case where I do. I genuinely would love to see tax dollars taken from every American to cover health care for every American.
* If the government is paying, then demand will go through the roof, and our system will not be able to handle the load, and the system will start to resort to massive lines like Canada, Europe has. 1 month is a pretty standard wait for anything in those places, and some of the more rare services are 4-6+ month waits. Many Canadians, fearing for their lives travel across the border to get these scans, when their abdominal pain, (or other terrifying symptom) doesn't go away, because they fear if they wait 6 months for the scan they desperately need, they'd be dead.
I disagree. Not that you're incorrect that there are waiting lists, I don't even feel like checking the time frames, I believe you... But our hospitals are already over-crowded, with a very decent chunk of the people in them having no health insurance and no money who need emergency care, and get it anyway, which gets paid for by tax dollars (may as well plan on it, no?). It couldn't get
that much worse, and so what if it did? Saying that it'll get more crowded than the lucky people who have good health care are used to is just prejudice against the people who haven't been so lucky. "I'm sorry, but including you in the system will just seriously fuck up the lines." is one hell of a rotten excuse for turning away someone who has nothing but a gaping hole in his side from the services that'll save his life.
"We can't afford it" I'm with you on, I seem to remember myself using the same words in no less than half a dozen threads here for all kinds of shit that we passed anyway. Which brings us to:
One blatant mistake does not justify another.
Agreed, that's not quite what I was saying. What I was saying is closer to "We're already fucked, and if we have to spend dozens of billions because the auto industry is full of whiny pussies who won't reap what they've sown, then I don't see why we don't spend another dozen billion to do something that we as a nation actually needs."
I usually do the "We. Can't. Afford. It." thing, really, on this one point I don't even disagree with you. Wouldn't dream of it. I'm just saying our government doesn't care what we can and can't afford, and since we surely won't stop spending money on stupid shit, it's only fair we spend some money on something worth a shit. If we're going to hemorrhage money, let it at least be for something we can have some pride in.
Honestly, that cliff you're talking about? I think we're already over it. I think we were over it before the wallstreet bailout, and before the auto bailout. Before that shit, I already thought we were about doomed. Still do, we're going to see a real "recession," if not a depression in our life time. We have to, what we've seen so far is nothing. Like you correctly pointed out; Obama's flushing money as fast as ever. That needs to stop. But if I had my way, we'd cut our spending by 80%, pull out of our "conflicts," liquidize the banks that failed along with the auto companies,
and institute universal health care.
Our country does a near endless list of stupid shit that drains our budget without providing us any real worth. "Medicare for all?" That's worth something.
