How the US Government Buys Votes

[SamuelRSmith]

SvennoJ said:

SamuelRSmith said:

SvennoJ said:

Yeah get rid of social security and health care, see how that works out.

Sure there are people that try to abuse the system, but it's not just there for entitlement. Free healthcare for all might actually be cheaper in the long run. Saves a hell of a lot of paperwork, and people don't postpone until it becomes an emergency.

How come corporate income tax is only 5%? Are there so few American based companies left?

That's the oddest argument I've ever seen for public health care. The NHS, the most comprehensive public health system in the world, is so bogged down by paperwork that you literally can't move for the stuff.

Maybe that's a problem with the NHS.
I was referring to the differences between US and Canadian health care. Canada spends about half as much per capita on health care as the US government, yet here it's free for all.

http://www.torontosun.com/2011/08/05/us-health-care-system-less-efficient-study

Researchers found U.S. physician practices spend almost four times as much money and 10 times as many hours on paperwork than Canadian ones do.

"The Canadian system is by no means perfect and often gets a lot of criticism, but there are points in time where we have to sit back and say our system does allow access for people and does provide quality care and it does deliver it in an efficient fashion compared to the U.S.," Dr. Dante Morra, lead author of the study, told QMI Agency.

American practices spend $83,000 per doctor every year dealing with health insurers and other payers, whereas Ontario only doles out $22,000, according to the study published in the journal Health Affairs.

There is no correlation between public/private and the amount of paperwork, so to suggest that going public would reduce paperwork is not true. The huge amounts of paperwork is more to do with the legal framework of the country.

The best solution for the USA is to completely tear up its healthcare code. End tax breaks for health insurance, in all forms, end the protectionist policies over cross-state competition and imports of pharmas, and to end medicaid. There is also something to be said about reform in terms of frivolous lawsuits, but that should be dealt with at state level, not federal.