Josh Petersen
The United States Government should not give free healthcare to all citizens

Why not free groceries instead? I eat a lot of groceries and free groceries would be really great. Plus eating well could help prevent a lot of health related complications. Why go without food and get sick, only to use free health care when you could eat well and avoid the doctor altogether?

I’m not totally serious about groceries, but I do think people make a fetish out of health care. If we are going to pick some really expensive social good to provide universally, health care is toward the back of my list. I’d rather see universal access to quality education (preschool – university), housing, transportation or nutrition before focusing on health care. I’m fine with care for the indigent, but why should the government pay the health care costs of middle class people? Most health care expense happens in the final weeks of life. Lets put the dollars toward the living and not the dying.

Cheer this | 8 months ago (Aug 23, 11:11AM)




Comments


DJ Stroky
Should do this

Ah, good idea on Education. I was suggesting this because a lot of other first world countries have free health care (ie Canada, Holland, Norway).

Respond | Cheer this | 8 months ago (Aug 24, 11:04AM)




Laurel Fan
No opinion

I think health care is different from education, housing, transportation, food, etc. because for health care there is much more of a gap between the cheap and expensive options. It’s not an absolute thing, but I think it’s a signficant difference in degree.

Not everyone can afford a $1,000/mo apartment, but you can find a $200/mo living situation and it’ll be acceptable.

If you can’t afford the $10,000 operation you don’t really have a cheaper alternative.

Do you have a source for the “final weeks of life” thing? It looks like an interesting statistic.

Respond | Cheer this | 8 months ago (Aug 24, 12:38PM)




Josh Petersen
Should not do this

I think you missed my point, several times over.

I didn’t say I thought education, transportation, or health were the same. I said that I would personally like to see increased national spending on education, transportation, housing or nutrition rather than additional government spending on health. So I’m not sure what you mean by saying these things are different? So are apples and oranges, and I might prefer one over the other.

Second, this argument that some people can’t afford a life saving operation, and that is why we ought to have nationalized health care seems a bit specious to me. We already have programs to give health care to the indigent at the state and federal levels. Private hospitals have additional aid and financing programs. Do you have a citation for someone who died because they needed a $10K operation, and some cold hospital administrator let it happen?

Part of why I’m not excited about the government running a national healthcare program is simply because it is such a large part of the economy. Harvard University economist Kenneth Rogoff sees health care expenditures rising to perhaps 30 percent of a country’s GDP over the next 50 years.[1] Putting the sort of people who were in charge of Katrina relief in charge of this enormous part of the economy seems like another “disaster relief plan” waiting to happen.

On to the end of life issues: Way back in 2000, Medicaid was already spending 45 percent of the $137 billion annual cost of “formal long-term care” (paid care that does not include volunteer services by family members).[2] About 27% of Medicare’s annual $327 billion budget goes to care for patients in their final year of life.[3] The U.S. government forecasts that the cost of long-term care will reach $379 billion, in current dollar values, by 2050.[4]

That estimated annual expenditure in 2050 for long term care alone (not including all other health costs) in today’s dollars, is 85% of what has been spent in Iraq so far. And we’d be spending it every year, forever.

For the same annual cost we could instead give full 4 year university scholarships to 22 million Americans, build over 4 million units of public housing, pay for 7 million new public school teachers, or cover the cost of 60 million children in Head Start.[5]

I’m saying we have a choice to prioritize what we spend money on. Some people might think healthcare is the thing, but I’d rather we look at education, transportation, housing, or other areas that benefit the living rather than the dying.

1 Reason Magazine, 2005 Medical Care Forever

2 U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging, United States Senate, 107th Congress, Developments in Aging: 1999 and 2000, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2001.

3 USA Today, Debate surrounds end-of-life health care costs

4 Breaux J. Broken and Unsustainable: The Cost of Long-Term Care for Baby Boomers, Hearing of the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging, March 21, 2002.

5National Priorities Project

Respond | Cheer this | 8 months ago (Aug 24, 05:13PM)




Laurel Fan
No opinion

I think you missed my point actually, but it was badly phrased. I guess I meant “different and here’s why I think it should be prioritized”.

It’s true, it’s not common for people to die directly because of not being able to afford medical care. People make economically irrational choices out of fear of death. I suspect that the general public ends up paying for it anyway when they declare bankruptcy. There are plenty of examples of that.

That’s why people have health insurance, to reduce risk. And that’s what I think the major benefit of universal health care would be—to reduce risk and decrease fear of financial catastrophe.

You could say that treatment for possibly terminal diseases “benefits the dying”—to oversimplify, if a certain procedure has a 73% success rate, 27% of the time it will be “wasted” on someone who’s going to die. But the problem is nobody knows who’s going to be the dead one.

The long term care thing is an interesting issue (though 27% in the last year is a bit different from most in the last few weeks) but I think it’s different from the universal health care issue anyway. With the system as it is, those costs will still be spread out over the population, whether through Medicare or through private insurance.

I think the better reason is the “the government will mess it up too” thing, and I’m kind of ambivalent about that too. There are plenty of things the covernment has been relatively competent at, and plenty that they haven’t. On the other hand, the private insurance industry has shown that they can do a pretty good job of messing things up.

In the end, I think my reasoning is totally irrational—In the past I’ve had expensive medical care (paid for by my parents and their insurance company), and an expensive college education (paid for by my parents and various scholarships). I wouldn’t give either up, but if I had to I would have given up the education. I could have gone to a less expensive school, worked longer hours part time, etc. You can’t really work to put your way through the hospital…

Do you think something needs to be done about health care costs? If not universal healthcare, then what?

One thing that I’m guessing might happen is that some costs will go down as drug patents expire. Only evidence that I have is that drug companies are increasingly coming out with drugs for made up diseases, which indicates that they might be expecting that the market for drugs for real diseases is peaking.

And maybe all the support for universal health care will scare the industry into reforming themselves, even if it doesn’t actually happen.

Respond | Cheer this | 8 months ago (Aug 27, 07:28AM)




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