| Kasz216 said:
Outside of which....
1) Hording Billions of dollars. Billions sounds like a lot I know... but it really isn't. I mean what, do you NOT want healthcare companies to keep money in reserve to make sure they don't go bankrupt? The article you are talking about is complaining about insurance companies having a surplus greater then state miniums. Boy it sure would of been great if Banks had kept surplus' greater than what was legally required back when credit default swaps were skyrocketing right?
No... it's far better to be at the state minium required levels and if you just go out of buisness because healthcare costs skyrocket, all those people will just be out of luck. As for private insurance companies.... http://biz.yahoo.com/p/sum_qpmd.html Health Insurance has a net proft margin of about 9%. Which isn't exactly setting the charts on fire... and coincidentally is a lot higher then the 4-5% it was at before Obamacare was passed.
2) Your joking right? So your point is, you don't want to pay for the cost of doing buisness? That's like saying I want to buy a hamburger at Burger King but not pay for the oven that cooks it or the time spent training the workers. That equipment and training is part of the cost of a product is common sense. Without the training, equipment etc. The buisness couldn't exist.
3) I'm not sure what your talking about. Health insurance doesn't get more expensive as you use it. It's not car insurance. Everyone in the same age group pays the same rate for health insurance minus a few factors like smoking. I can use my healthcare a dozen times, you could use it never. We'd pay the same rate.
4) Only because healthcare statistics are mired by a ton of different confounding variablse like culture, crime, accidental deaths. The US actually tends to perform worse on large scales... though mostly due to stuff like are ridiculiously large prison population, high stress culture, accidents/sucides and crime and obesity rates. As fun a chart now as it was when the data was released...
(Note some countries decrease in life expectancy on the right because it's standarded not just removing fatal injuries. The actual results aren't quite as neat, but this does illustrate the point failry well.)
If a Machine works .5% better though. For every 2000 people, it's saving 1. Minor gains? Sure. Given the choie though... i'd rather have the best possible chance.
5) I never said that it was. Simply that Healthcare costs are generally always going to rise, at least as long as we find new ways to save peoples lives. This will be biggest in the US, because we focus the most on innovation? Is it fair we're paying so much more for an increase in medical technology?
As it stands though, the US government even spends more per captia than other countries do towards healthcare research. Why? Because for them it's counter productive. Every advancment they find only increases their bill, and the benefits they create are ones people didn't know where possible... so they don't miss them. |
0. Sry i thought i'd try it out. I agree it makes for an awkward discussion.
1. The article says the nonprofit is holding on to 7 times the state minimum and could instead use the a small % of the money to keeps rates lower. My only point is to dispell your myth that it's a black & white issue. Btw way, 9% profit margin is huge when everyone must buy and everything costs tens or hundreds of thousands. Not to mention lots of revenue goes toward employees of insurers. With out a health insurance system, health care would cost 80% less.
2. atleast with burger king it's cheap and i have a choice to go somewhere else cheaper. I even implied in my post that doctors should make $400 an hour. But the system is so screwed up I can't even begin to explain their justification for the current costs. Point is a hospital visit for the smallest of minor injuries, in which nothing is even done, should not cost thousands of dollars.
3. you said one of the reasons rates go up is because ppl with insurance get everything treated. i said that's a scam.
4. your statistics doesn't prove that Europeans can't save lives like we can. And expecting (read forcing) ppl to pay 10% of they're annual income every year so that machines that work can be replaced with machines that work a little better is bad business practice. They only get away with it because patients (read suckers) have no alternative system. Except if you are lucky you have a no-insurance clinic which, while highly profitable, are being force to start using insurance.
