Reply #3: Here's my comment, though I don't know if they'll post it [View All]

[dpbrown]

Since the nutball right-wingers apparently aren't using the common infrastructure and don't appreciate the fact that a plan that lets people pick their hospitals and doctors and will cost all of us less money EVERY SINGLE DAY by leveraging the bargaining power of a larger group, then let's cut off the infrastructure from the people who obviously don't want to PAY for it. With the savings, we could afford to keep the bloated, administratively heavy system we have now, and just pay private insurance companies straight government money to cover everybody.

After all, isn't that just SO much better than a plan that lets everyone have private insurance but saves us all money by eliminating administrative waste rotting the core of a non-competitive and sick "health" care system?

The U.S. spends more on health care, both as a proportion of gross domestic product (GDP) and on a per-capita basis, than any other nation in the world. Current estimates put U.S. health care spending at approximately 15% of GDP, the world's highest. Yet the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2000 ranked the U.S. health care system first in both responsiveness and expenditure, but 37th in overall performance and 72nd by overall level of health.

The health care system in the U.S. has a vast number of players — there are hundreds, if not thousands, of insurance companies in the U.S. This system has considerable administrative overhead, far greater than in nationalized, single-payer systems, such as Canada's. An oft-cited study by Harvard Medical School and the Canadian Institute for Health Information determined that some 31% of U.S. health care dollars, or more than $1,000 per person per year, went to health care administrative costs, nearly double the administrative overhead in Canada, on a percentage basis.

In the 1880s, most citizens in Germany became covered under the mandatory health care system championed by Otto von Bismarck. The National Health Service (NHS), established in the United Kingdom in 1948, was the world's first universal health care system provided by government. Universal health care is provided in most developed countries and in many developing countries. According to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, the United States is the only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not provide universal health care.

All that's meant by "single-payer" health care is that the payment for doctors, hospitals and other providers for health care comes from a single fund. The Canadian health care system, the British National Health Service, Australia's Medicare, and Medicare in the U.S. for the elderly and disabled are single-payer systems.

But heaven forbid that we should actually make private health insurance operative more efficiently. Instead, we should be afraid of the government - the representative body that works FOR us, as opposed to private insurance companies, that work for THEMSELVES and PROFIT only.

So if you oppose paying LESS for health care that operates more efficiently and covers everybody, then fell free to give up your sewer, your water, your gas, your mail delivery, and your roads so we can take the money and throw it into a bloated, festering, and rotten private health care system the only motivation of which is to throw as many people off of health care so they can pocket more money.

Then we'll "bribe" those multimillionaire corporate bigwigs to cover everyone using your donation to the cause.