If Obamacare fails, then what?

[Kasz216]

MDMAlliance said:

Kasz216 said:

Something to consider.  The US government spends shit tons of Medicaid and Medicare despite not covering everyone.

Most hosptials lose money on Medicaid and Medicare.

 

Were we to go the route of full health insurance, the costs per person would go up.  Not down.

Medicare and Medicaid don't cost us a lot of money because they don't have proper barganing power, they cost a lot of money.... just because healthcare costs a lot of money... and we have a lot of factors that cause us to make much more use of healthcare.

Sure the government would have near infinite barganing power were we to have unniversal healthcare, but it sort of fucks us all over if they use that power to run hosptials out of buisness.

Not sure if you were just making a point off of what I said or if you were arguing against what I said, but I was using Medicare and Medicaid as an example of how expensive health-care has become. Also, the cost per person goes up initially. Theoretically it should go down as time goes on and more money flows to the insurance companies. Of course I am aware of other factors such as the elderly being constantly on life support, and a variety of issues regarding residency and legal issues, but by far the issue being addressed is the main culprit. I am writing this from my phone so I'll continue later.

Oh i just thought you were talking about cost cutting, as usually when people talk about just how expensive medicaid and medicare are they tend to make 1 of 2 points.

1) The government is really inefficent.

2) Healthcare is fucked up because bargaining is so split up.

 

The truth is, neither is true.  Well, government is really inefficient, but not in this particular case.

 

I think the difference between me and most people is that I disagree with captain kirk.  I do believe in the no-win scenario. 

 

Healthcare I believe is one of those situtations.  Free Market, Single Payer, everything in between.   I don't think any of it will actually fix healthcare costs.  At least not without drastically cutting research and adoption of new technology.

 

5%  of the people end up using 50% of our healthcare and healthcare costs.

 

At the end of the day, cutting down the number of people with multiple major health risks is the only way to REALLY get the costs down...

and THAT needs to be done via personal responsibility/lifestyle changes.

In otherwords, we're fucked.