Give free healthcare to everybody

“Stopped Clock” writes:

I genuinely honestly have not seen Democrats, here or anywhere, enact a transfer of wealth policy that benefits the whole middle class, or those who have steady incomes…

Actually, Democrats want to enact free health care for everybody. (Or do they? It’s hard to figure out what they are proposting.)

In any event, I think that Republicans should get behind free healthcare for everybody. The government already gives free healthcare to the retired and to the poor, so why not also give it to people who actually work and pay taxes?

* * *

It seems to me that the majority of people opposed to the idea are opposed based on religious* reasons rather than because they've looked at the actual facts.

(1) The people want government guaranteed healthcare and will favor the political party that will give it to them.

(2) Sure taxes will go up to pay for it, but then you won’t have to pay for your own healthcare, so this should be a wash, and more likely a net benefit.

(3) The argument that “socialist” healthcare will always lead to higher costs than “free market” healthcare is a nonsensical argument because the current U.S. healthcare system is nothing at all like a free market. It’s a highly inefficient quasi-socialist system with the appearance of being “free market” because some big health insurance corporations are making a lot of money. Other developed nations with so-called socialist healthcare have much lower healthcare costs per person than the United States, demonstrating the extreme inefficiency of the current U.S. system.

(4) Government-provided healthcare can be tied into enacting good policies like ending immigration of people without the job skills needed to pay their share of taxes. (Poor immigrants already get free healthcare under the current system, because all they have to do is show up sick at a hospital and the hospital is required to treat them.)

*religious = "relating to or manifesting faithful devotion to an acknowledged ultimate reality" (in other words, a religious belief that the existing system is "free market" and therefore better than anything else)

* * *

Some people left comments stating that the plan proposed by the Democrats sucks, and it’s easy enough to believe that Democrats would come up with something that sucks. Other people say the Canadian system sucks—I’ll take their word for it.

Here is an opportunity for Republicans to come up with a bold plan, which provides universal healthcare for everyone including the middle class and the upper middle class, and which doesn’t suck. Unfortunately, I predict that Republicans won’t step up to the plate, and we will wind up with some Democratic initiative which sucks.

* * *

Here’s a link to one of my previous healthcare posts. As you can see, I am not writing anything inconsistent with what I’ve previously written.

Government-provided healthcare for all citizens would be a form of the inheritance dividend which I’ve previously endorsed.

Comments

[tc]

It's not quite that simple. The government also wants to tax people for this, so we get much higher taxes.

see http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/10/marginal-tax-rates-from-health-reform.html

[HS: You're already paying taxes to cover healthcare for the poor and the retired, why not pay a little bit more and actually get something out of it?

Because you wouldn’t have to pay for your own healthcare, there would be a net benefit. ($150 extra in taxes per month, but you save $300 per month by not having to buy your own healthcare).]

[Fred]

Two law degrees, and undergrad from Penn, and you post this? I know you're just trying to generate comments here (and I'm commenting) but this is really mailing it in. See any of the last few dozen posts Megan McCardle has written on health care at the Atlantic. I don't always agree with what she writes, but at least she has done some thinking on the subject.

[Dan]

HS believes in perpetual motion machines and yet considers himself to be enlightened.

[j.d.]

I think the best way to please everyone is this:

-For those who want healthcare provided by the government, tax them (and only them) who opt for this.

-For those who want private healthcare and to not pay (through tax) for government healthcare, do not tax them and let them turn to the market for their healthcare. But again, they are not taxed for this.

Thus, people who demand government provide services get what they want. People who don't want state-run healthcare don't have to pay for it. Everyone wins. Nobody is left out.

[Kimberlite]

@ DaveinHackensack

Thanks, that had been confusing me. I assumed most soldiers carried some type of sidearm at all times when in uniform.

[not too late]

There is no such thing as free.

We have open door immigration.

Free for all, means for all, not just citizens.

Health care costs are so high because the poor/illegal aliens get it for free and providers shift costs to those who do pay.

Insurance is the reasonable and efficient way to share costs among those who pay. There is no way to have a free system where 40% pay for the health care for all. With current unemployment rates, it is more like 30% paying for everyone.

[Stopped Clock]

Free healthcare? Not that I have heard. They're proposing a public option health insurance plan that would be more expensive than most private plans yet only pay a mere fifteen percent of the bills of most routine doctor's visits and up to thirty percent for catastrophic care. (By contrast I've had a $10000 surgery reduced to monthly payments of $25 for a few years by an open-enrollment insurance plan that only cost me about $30 a week.) Or maybe I'm just blinded by my hatred, which could well be since I haven't read much about the proposal since late September, so correct me if I'm way off track here.

Yes, there are subsidies for the low-income people, such that the insurance cannot cost more than 10% of their annual income (and if income is 0, the insurance cost is 0). But that's just the price of the insurance, not the bills for the actual treatment, which you'd still have to pay, no matter what your income level is. Thus, all in all it works out to an extremely undesirable plan for anyone who has a choice between the public and the private. The public option is a massive ripoff.

[DocBrown (A scientist not an MD)]

"Other developed nations with so-called socialist healthcare have much lower healthcare costs per person than the United States, demonstrating the extreme inefficiency of the current U.S. system."

This is completely false. First, almost every country has a mixed system, with private healthcare supplementing the governement system. Canada is one of the few with complete government health care, with private care forbidden where the government has a presence (e.g. a broken leg), but not where it doesn't, (e.g. a cavity).

Canadian health care costs are indeed much lower. But so are service levels. It takes me 3 weeks to get an appointment with my family Dr. In most cases I will have gotten better on my own or end up at emergency. Non-urgent (i.e. you are not having a stroke RIGHT NOW) MRI's take 3-6 months to schedule. Even if you are having a stroke, it can take hours, not minutes, to get into the MRI, if there is even one at your hospital.

The fact that Canadian longevity results are comparable to the US (a bit longer on average) indicates several possibilities:
1) Medical care may not be as helpful as we like to think.
2) Adverse affects to high-tech medicine may be greater than we think.
3) People increase high risk activities (e.g. being overweight and underactive) believing that medicine can fix that later.
4) HBD Factors are at play in average longevity and bias the results depending on demographics from country to country.
5) People in the US are paying for quality of life and pain relief rather than longevity. For example, in Canada you have to worry for 3-6 months before you find out if you actually have cancer or not. You are off work for 6-12 months waiting for a new hip or knee.

In the US, you can go bankrupt from your medical bills. In Canada, you go bankrupt because you can't work while waiting interminably for your "free" treatment.

Back to the point of contention. Efficiency is measured by service delivered / cost. In the US, the service delivered is high, but so is the cost. In Canada, the service delivered is low, and so is the cost. Efficiencies are likely comparable. Also, outcomes include quality of life, not just longevity.

[Steve Miller]

The real problem is that there is nothing in the proposed reforms to control health care costs. Government-provided universal coverage, and the resulting monopsony power a government health plan would have, may well lead to lower costs. But universal coverage is not part of any bill in congress. What's in the Senate bill is much more in terms of subsidies to lower-income families to purchase health insurance in the private market, combined with a mandate that everyone purchase insurance in the private market if they do not already have health insurance through their employer. Those who fail to purchase insurance will be fined. It's not socialized medicine, it's corporate welfare for the health insurance industry. That's what's on the table, and I hope you can see how that is even worse than what we have now. Basically, it's the Massachusetts plan for everyone.

The big debate now is over the inclusion of the public option, but the public option will really just be another government-subsidized insurance option for those who cannot afford any of the policies currently available on the market.

With or without the public option, the effect of all these "reforms" is to further increase health insurance costs, and thereby health care costs, even more rapidly than we're seeing with the current policy combination of subsidies, Medicare, and Medicaid.

[Stopped Clock]

Since I'm sure someone will ask me for a link to a reliable news source or government document to back up my claims, I'm currently looking. I cannot find anything that affirms my "15/30" claim, so I could be wrong about that. However I've never heard anybody say that the government was going to pay 100 percent of healthcare claims; if they were, why would they be talking about whether or not there was a need to put a cap on out of pocket expenses?

Additionally, here is one link that seems reasonably informative:

http://finance.senate.gov/press/Bpress/2009press/prb091609d.pdf

[RW]

This post would have been appropriate about 6 months ago, at the beginning of the healthcare debate. There's little excuse, at this point, not to have learned from the subsequent discussion. As a starting point, I recommend checking out Megan McArdle's many posts on the subject over at the Atlantic.

[j.d.]

With that new update, I'm with Fred: your post is now bog-standard low-IQ fodder.

Just because some religious idiots get airtime on news networks to voice their opposition of state-run healthcare on religious fictions, doesn't mean their conclusions are wrong. It does mean, however, that their analysis is wrong.

If the Dems take out the abortion-clauses, then they lose their platform, and must retreat to a new position. They'll then argue that it costs too much, which is also a flawed argument. And they'll retreat once again on yet one more defeated point, much like the Bush Administration went through a Rolodex of rationalizations as to why we're in Iraq (WMDs...violated UN sanctions...to free Iraqi people...to 'we can't leave or it will implode). But this is expected from people that argue from emotions (much like liberals).

The truth is, healthcare is not a right. It is a private good. A right is a freedom to act, not a exaction on privately produced services and goods.

Otherwise, why has there not yet been an argument that Car Insurance should be run by the government?

[TGGP]

You don't know what you're talking about, HS. The welfare state in the U.S is not for the poor, but the old (who tend to be wealthier than average). If the middle class received no entitlement spending, our debt problems (and Europe's) would be no big deal. Having the government cover more people means either more spending on healthcare (which doesn't do any good according to Robin Hanson) or more denials of procedures. Given the American political system and Medicare's track record, the latter seems a lot less likely than the former.

[Gc]

What I really can`t understand in your current system is that, the goverment gives free healtcare for all groups which need a lot of expensive healthcare like AIDS - patients and the elderly. The system can`t be fair if the insurance companies can choose invidually to which citizens they give insurances, because every citizen is usually seen as entitled to somekind of healt care. So the insurance companies are obviously free riding.
Why can`t the goverment negotiate a somekind a minimum deal with the insurance companies for all citizens. Then if you or you employer can afford you can negotiate a better deal.

[Dan]

First and foremost you cannot strip politics out of health care when the decision and role of government in health care is purely political.

But from a purely non-political view there are several problem with the notion of universal health care. One is the question of how to avoid the inefficiency of providing a good or service to someone at a cost more than that person would value that good or service himself.

Is it not irrational to provide a $500 gift to someone who would never use it? For example someone could buy me a sewing machine and I promise you it will go unused. The person who paid for the sewing essentially wasted his money.

Universal health care will waste a lot of money as it will essentially provide a gift to people that will be worth less to the person receiving it than what was paid to provide it.

[Wilbor Simonson]

The problem with the US health care system is that we have too much of it, which is the result of too many people having too much insurance for which they did not (directly) pay. Health care is over rated and benefits society as a whole very little in proportion to the amount of money spent.

1. A disproportionate amount of money is spent keeping very sick people alive for a few days more, at a time when their quality of life is very low.

2. Most medicines do not cure disease. Antibiotics are an exception, but they are overprescribed, making them less effective.

3. Doctors are reluctant to prescribe effective pain medication because of anti-addiction hysteria.

4. Anti-depressants are overprescribed and not signifcantly more effective than a placebo.

5. The treatments for the most common reasons for doctor visits, back pain and viral infections, are highly ineffective or could be obtained on the Internet for free.

[HS: I agree with all 5 points!]

[Tino]

“Sure taxes will go up to pay for it, but then you won’t have to pay for your own healthcare, so this should be a wash, and more likely a net benefit.”

You are ignoring economics and thus making a logical error. Paying something collectively in this way is associated with costs because of a collective action problem associated with financing something collectively with taxes rather than individually:

Everyone gets free health care regardless of how much they earn. But their work has nothing to do with how much funds there is going to be for their individual health care needs, since it goes into a pool with 200 million other adults.
So people will earn less and try to free-ride on each other whenever something is financed collectively. Why work your ass off so your family can enjoy secure and high quality health care, when you get exactly the same health care if you don’t work?

Regardless of Half Sigmas quasi-religious statements to the contrary, taxes are empirically shown to distort behavior. Funding health care through taxes would require about 10% of GDP in more taxes. This is equivalent to doubling the federal income tax or more than doubling the employer fee. Cross country and over time raising taxes as a share of GDP by 1 percentage points is associated with 0.9% fewer hours work. Raising taxes by 10% of GDP in the US would lead to about 9% fewer hours worked in the economy, permanently.

As a comparison the painful recession we are in now is a temporary decrease of hours worked by 7%.

That’s just hours worked. Taxes also effect investments, intensity of work, tax evasion, job choice, risk taking and other productive behavior.

It is hardly “a wash”, and certainly not “a net benefit”.

You might think the benefits outweight the gains, but ignoring the costs of tax-finance based is anti-intellectual.

[Henceforth Danforth]

There is little sense debating it, when the sides use different definitions. When "insurance" is used to describe paying for all medical care, including pre-existing conditions, and when "free" is used to describe the mass confiscation of wealth run through a vast and inefficient bureaucracy, the language stops being a viable carrier of information. You are dealing in Orwell-speak, and you will lose that game to the professionals. In this world, IQ isn't as important as being a completely amoral shyster.

[Tino]

“$150 extra in taxes per month, but you save $300 per month by not having to buy your own healthcare).”

Let’s ignore the effects of taxes on behavior. Let’s agree with Half-Sigma that communism works, and people work just as much to finance the collective as they would work for their own individual benefit. So everyone pays $150 extra on average in taxes, and everyone get back an average of $300.

Where did the rest come from?

Is Obama in possession of a machine that doubles resources?

Have you really taught this one through?

[David]

Let me preface my comments by stating that I am a citizenist, as defined by Steve Sailer. I am a person that feels solidarity with my fellow citizens. I happen to have been born with a high IQ, attended an ivy, and make plenty of money. I have a high income and a high wealth level (saved up from my past earnings)

I have lots of sympathy for all my fellow citizens that were born with a below average IQ and I think that society should take care of them to some extent. Of course I would like to politely and ethically encourage people with below average IQ to not have too many children. But frankly I think that decent universal healthcare for below average IQ people will not cause them to have more kids.

So as a high IQ person, I am very happy with paying taxes to provide free basic healthcare to all citizens with below average IQ.

But let's focus for a minute on the people with above average IQ.

In my humble opinion, we have something of a problem in the US with above average IQ people choosing to go in to worthless fields instead of going in to the fields that we as a society need them to go in to

As an example, let's look at the typical young woman that went to Penn with Half Sigma. This young woman had a choice at Penn - major in nursing and become a registered nurse or get a soft liberal arts degree and become a freelance journalist or freelance PR person. In my humble opinion, nursing is a much harder, much more demanding job. Young women at Penn will ONLY go in to nursing if the compensation is much much greater than journalism, PR and other soft fun things.

Right now, there are two differences between working as a registered nurse and working in freelance journalism / PR or other fun soft things. First of all, the registered nurse makes much more money - let's for the sake of argument that all-in the nurse takes home twice as much in cash compensation per hour. Second of all, the nurse is given a very high quality health plan and the freelance journalist / pr person gets no health coverage.

In my humble opinion, our society says to young women - if you do something that our society really needs like nursing we will give you BOTH more money AND ALSO give you good health care.

What all of the health care plans now on the table do is narrow the gap between what a young woman doing something productive and useful gets and what a young woman who does something worthless gets. The result is that more and more smart young women will bypass nursing and go in to soft fun fields.

In my humble opinion, our society has to STRONGLY persuade the smart and capable people to do something useful with their lives. Maintaining different health care systems is crucial to that.

Bottom line, I think that girls that are smart who are growing up need to be told, repeatedly and loudly, that if they go in to some fun glamor field like freelance journalism, freelance PR, "struggling aspiring actress", "aspiring artist" or writer, or fashion designer, or any of the other fields that are considered "cool" that they will not only be paid very little money but that they will also get no health care.

On the other hand, if they strive to fill a true pressing need that our society has, by becoming registered nurses, or doing something socially useful, they will get paid LOTS of money, AND get a pension, and get good health care.

There SHOULD be plenty of stories on TV that show young women who work in glamor professions getting diseases and suffering due to poor health care and other stories showing young women that went in to important jobs getting diseases and getting great health care. People need to know that their health care depends on their job, so they take the jobs that we need them to take.

I am interested in whether others here see the same pressing need.

I draft this post after observing many of the smartest young women in my own extended family going in to soft fun professions instead of the ones that really help our society

[Unbelievable]

"It seems to me that the majority of people opposed to the idea are opposed based on religious reasons"

How a blogger of your idiocy ever managed to attain a readership is a mystery. Seriously, the above passage is the stupidest goddamned thing I've read this week, and that's no mean feat.

In Canada, we write it "free" "health" "care". It is, as you may neither free, nor health, nor care.

You're a very left wing individual, it should be noted, both fiscally and socially, and that is wholly incompatible with the HBD movement, which needs to mean more than "some humans are different".

[Yawner]

"Sure taxes will go up to pay for it, but then you won’t have to pay for your own healthcare, so this should be a wash, and more likely a net benefit."

Too bad you won't have a job because a lot of jobs will have to be cut to pay for increased health benefits.

"The argument that “socialist” healthcare will always lead to higher costs than “free market” healthcare is a nonsensical argument because the current U.S. healthcare system is nothing at all like a free market."

It is EVEN MORE NONSENSICAL to claim that because our system is not entirely "free market" that we should increase the existing level of government control. Of course increased government control will lead to increased costs - it always does!

[ATC]

As a recent WSJ column noted, health care is one of the few innovative, productive American industries that the globalists can't kill off.

So why are we trying to pinch pennies here?

Note that SWPLs love the idea of spending health-care dollars as long as it's on embryonic stem cells.

Bending the cost curve and adding taxes will only squeeze our pharmaceutical companies and medical-device manufacturers. Let's be the country that develops and sells miracle cures and causes angst to governments that would ration them.

Let's also do something about the doctor, dentist and orthodontist guilds that artificially limit their ranks.

[Tino]

I don’t want to dismiss Half Sigma entirely. His argument that paying for something through taxes is the same as paying for it directly is wrong. Let’s leave that aside.

Should the government provide tax financed health care to the middle class?

The US system costs 16% of GDP, whereas Europe spends about 9% of GDP and Canada 11% of GDP. The ALREADY tax-financed part of American health care is 7-8% of GDP.
Clearly the US government could provide cheap health care by simply copying the European system. Do we want that?

1. David thinks high income (IQ) people should support lower income (IQ) citizens. But this is another logical fallacy: The rich are already taxed quite high in the US. The top marginal rate for state and federal taxes will soon go to close to 50%. The most reliable estimate is that 50-55% maximizes revenue, after that the tax base shrinks more and reduces revenue. In the long run it may be even less, as people move out of high-income high-effort fields such as law and finance (if you look at extreme welfare states such as France and Sweden the top-earning professionals are a far smaller share of the workforce than US, even though these countries have the same or slightly higher average IQ. Economics matter).

If you want universal health care for the middle class you can only pay for it by taxing the middle class (some, but not all, could be financed through reducing tax deductions for the rich). The idea that we can extract hundreds of billions per year more from the “rich” is a populist fantasy.

2. Europeans and others free-ride on the American health care sector. The US has 4% of world population, but stands for 50% of drug revenues. Health care spending is to a large degree expensive innovations. Europe doesn’t pay for innovations because American consumers do, and the Europeans and others cheaply buy the drugs and technology that was financed with American dollars. That is part of the reason Europe gets away with a cheap system with seemingly comparable results, they free-ride. This fact is conveniently ignored mentioned by the liberal elite.

If or when the US switches to a rationed low-spending system the rate of medical innovation will decrease. This will be completely invisible, who is to say how much more technology we would have had in an alternative system?

This is the main reason I don’t want socialized health care in the US: I want to live a few years longer, and I don’t mind paying an extra 5% of income.

3. American health care is better than European health care. Yes, Americans live fewer years and have higher infant mortality, but that is for other reasons. Without lavish health care spending the gap between US and Europe would be even longer.

Life expectancy of Asian-Americans is a staggering 84 years, longer than that in Japan, the major country with the highest life expectancy in the world. Why is that? Would this be true if the US rationed health care?

4. Health care spending is not only about life expectancy. It is also about quality and comfort. The European system gives you the same health for the most important life threatening treatments, but saves costs by reducing marginal treatments. From personal experience from NON-LIFE THREATENING TREATMENTS the American system is better than what I am used to from Europe Knee-surgery, psychiatric care, eye-care and access to cable television in hospitals are not reflected in life-expectancy, but people still want them.

Americans did not like HMO:s, even though HMO:s cut marginal treatments and give you comparable life-expectancy.

5. There is a political cost from going to public health care. People become so grateful for the government “giving” them life itself, that they accept any level of taxation and intrusion. They don’t rationally compare the free health care with what health care would cost, but with what it is worth. Health care, like food or water, is worth much more than it costs. A common argument with Europeans goes like this:

-You pay 50% of your income in taxes, is that reasonable?
-So what, they GIVE ME health care!
-Yes but you could buy heath care yourself 5 times over with that money.
-free health care! FREE!

The left knows this, which is why they are pushing to strongly for universal health care. It would ingratiate the people to the political system and allow them to push through a full social-democratic state on back of "free" health care, the Gift of Life.

[thecraken]

There is a reason we have the most innovative health care system in the world. That reason is the presence of free market incentives. And our innovation benefits the entire world, which in fact free-rides us in this respect. By contrast, the rest of the world is smothered in a purely bureaucratic approach that encourages—and produces—mediocrity at every level. Also, they have the advantage of much more homogenous populations, which increases levels of trust and the acceptance of equal treatment. Here, regardless of the actual quality of care, the educated classes will feel shortchanged if they received the same quality of care as the mass of NAMs receive.

At a minimum, to avert the destruction of our unique innovation process and pipeline, we must develop a strategy to keep it vigorous even in the event of catastrophic socialization of the whole sector. This is a major institutional challenge since it is perfectly contrary to all bureaucratic instincts. But, a health-centered organization similar to DARPA would be a start, with various grants available for high-risk R & D and substantial prizes available for successful advances. It’s unlikely, however, that this type of artificially-induced market would work quite as well as the more natural venture-capital based ecosystem we have now.

It’s also unlikely that something like this will even be attempted. The natural history of government expansion is that it takes over a sector and sits on it until it dies. Then the government swallows the carcass whole, sucks down for its own satisfaction any energy found therein, and vomits up piles of inert quasi-organic scum. These piles it nominates “the system” and sets the piles over us as lord and master. And from a ruling bureaucracy there is no recourse, since no one is ever responsible for anything.

[not too late]

I never thought of 1/2∑ as naive and gullible. Any gov't program will be loaded with corruption and graft. It would be intractable because you couldn't stop feeding the beast. Any private plan that has to compete against others is automatically better because you can leave and starve it into submission.

[sabril]

I think tino has a lot of good points. I would add this:

Right now, we have a two-tiered system. Yes, poor people get medicaid, but also their health care is informally rationed. Which is good (in my opinion) because poor people (actually people in the underclass) have a knack for ruining everything they come into contact with.

To see this in operation, visit the waiting room at an inner city public hospital some time. Then ask yourself if you want to give these people the legal right to use the same doctors and hospitals as you and your family.

_________

Here's an analogy:

Right now, we build housing projects for poor people. Average and wealthy people pay for their own housing. By your logic, we might as well make everyone live in public housing.

Of course nobody would want that. Because everyone knows I am right: People in the underclass ruin everything they come into contact with.

[Aa]

"(2) Sure taxes will go up to pay for it, but then you won’t have to pay for your own healthcare, so this should be a wash, and more likely a net benefit."

If that statement made any sense, why don't you apply it to any good or service we currently get from the marketplace?

[J]

"Americans live fewer years and have higher infant mortality, but that is for other reasons. Without lavish health care spending the gap between US and Europe would be even longer"

The US and European countries use radically different standards for what constitutes a live birth (and the US standard is considerably more broad); I'm not sure data even exists to allow a comparison of infant mortality rates between the two. Also, infant mortality is arguably the largest factor in life expectancy calculations, so again, it's not clear that Europeans live longer - it's only clear that they claim to by excluding a lot of live births from their IM stats.

"Life expectancy of Asian-Americans is a staggering 84 years, longer than that in Japan, the major country with the highest life expectancy in the world"

That should tell you all you need to know - Japanese have the longest life expectancy in the world as a nation, but Japanese Americans using the American system live longer than Japanese using the Japanese system.

All that said, I've read enough HS posts to be pretty certain this one is a troll.

[GS]

You have missed the three important reasons why health care is more expensive in the US than in Europe:

1) Lawsuits -- Doctors perform far more tests than are necessary and this results in much higher costs.

2) We subsidize the rest of the world's health care -- In the US drug companies set the prices of the pharmaceuticals they develop. In Europe, its primarily cost plus. As a result no drug would be developed for the European market, but once they are developed for the US market, companies bring them to Europe to make an extra dollar.

3) We have more and better care -- True, our 'health outcomes' on an aggregate are poor, but this is because other factors. E.G. We are a country of fat people, we have a lot of blacks who may have genetically worse health outcomes, and most people in this country do not exercise. On the other hand, we have far more medical equipment and treatments available for those in need.

4) Our 'free market' system is not really free.

Also, why are health care prices going up in general?

Because health care is improving with new technologies every day, and people are willing to pay for it. This sounds like a realization of what people want. Whats wrong with it if people want to spend all their money on health care?
---

Government mandated health care might save money in the short run, if it was instituted like Europe's, but it would slow down the progress of new drugs in the long term, and would result in much more expensive and worse care.

Moreover, government health care will just be another way to tax some people to pay for other people's services. Sounds tyrannical to me. Your argument that we already do this seems like it would lead you to say that we shouldn't be doing it already, not that because we are doing something wrong, we should do more of it.

GS

[Randall Parker]

HS, The government's own Medicare program pays for the bulk of the wasteful spending on terminal patients in ICUs.

Extending government funding to displace insurance companies as conduits of payments for medical care will not reduce the scale of that problem and may even increase it.

Government funding of health care in other countries decreases the incentives for new treatment development. Drug prices and other prices are controlled. The US medical care marketplace provides the largest incentive for new treatment development. We should not screw that up. A single payer system would definitely screw that up.

Since most of us are many years away from a serious illness our biggest interest in the health care system is what treatments will be available 10, 20, 30, 40 years from now. Health care policy should be made with the future in mind first and foremost.