Kasz216 said:
Squilliam said:
mrstickball said:
Squilliam said:
mrstickball said:
Squilliam said:
The reason why socialised health care is cheaper is that you have a monopsony (single buyer) of health care. If you want to practice in a socialised system you effectively need to sell your service to the government and as a monopsony it has the ability to pay less than what the market price may have otherwise been. On the other hand if you have large private companies with an imperitive to increase profits year after year, they'll have an incentive to not only charge more but also try to influence regulation in their favour as well.
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Depends on what kind of regulations the monosopy can force onto the providers. In the US, Medicare is a partial monsopy. They pay for a significant part of US health care. Because of that, they've driven up, not driven down, costs because everything is tied to what they are willing to pay out. Its created gross inefficiencies as some providers peg their prices to whatever the government will pay, which distorts the true price of health care.
Additionally, the kinds of compliance as given by mediare (e.g. "Fill out these 500 papers detailing how you provided a pill to aunt Sally") have driven up costs as well. Its another one of those "Great in theory, horrible in practice" arguments.
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That is more bad practice than anything which is inherrently wrong with government departments, healthcare inclusive. Maybe you're jaded by the fact that government departments where you live aren't efficient at all. Where I'm from the government is efficient, lean and often as effective as any private company of equivalent size. It is possible to have public services provided in a fashion similar to private companies, afterall I live in a country where corporatisation was a big movement many years ago and has paid dividends, even our postal service is profitable.
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And exists so because you have a very small, homogenous, populace that is rather well educated and cares about their own life and livelihood. America is about 40 times the size, and has exponential degrees of inefficiencies because of it, among the intrinsic regulatory nightmare that is American health care .
Big entities have a way of being inefficient. Your government has a fraction of the bureaucrats ours does. Heck, we have more government workers than you do people. That brings with it some terrible things.
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I suspect the problem then is more Federal vs State. One thing I never understood is why your Federal Government is up to its eyeballs in trivial matters which ought to be left to the state. I don't think it proves that government is itself bad, however surely the states themselves should be paying for their equivalent medicare, medicaid, social security etc. One thing I never understood about the republican candidates is that they all just say 'small government' and yet noneseem to say 'state rights/state responsibility'.
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I'd guess because state rights, sometimes leads to state irresponsibility.
Even the state governments have a spending problem lately, despite the fact that by law they aren't allowed any deficit....
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At least the states with the balanced budget amendments couldn't issue currency to pay for their spending. No state could get away with what the federal government is doing.
