| badgenome said: All it takes is a quick Google of "insert western nation here" and "health care costs" to see that it's a huge problem everywhere. America's system is more screwed up than most, not because of private insurance alone as you suggest, but because of the entire third party payer system. Medicare and Medicaid are a massive part of that. And thanks to Obamacare, the private insurance market has just been turned into a fucked up form of for-profit welfare, so shit is going to get worse before it gets better. The fact that Democrats want European style health care without including European style tort reform because they are so beholden to trial lawyers doesn't help. |
One of the fallouts of not having a universal safety net and welfare system, with a lot of answering for consequences, is that tort reform gets taken out of the equation. Because you run an adversarial system, where if you lose, you suffer, people will use the courts as justice. The courts act as a bounty system and exert fines on individuals to deter bad behavior. And individuals are rewarded by getting these paydays, because it encouraged them to hunt down corruption, and if harmed by it, make the evil doers pay. Unless there is a system by which individuals can be taken care of, if they are harmed by bad consequences, you will be running this bounty system.
In regards to Obamacare, it isn't what Obama ran on. The original idea was to have a government run insurance program that people could be part of. Well, out came opposition from the Republican side, and the insurance industry, so Obama adopted the GOP alternative, proposed by the Heritage Foundation, and others (heck even Romney ran it), to end up regulating the insurance industry with tighter requirements, and also mandating people pay for insurance, or have coverage some way.
