Some other issues that need to be considered regarding healthcare:
US health insurance is still centered around the corporation. This made perfect sense back when most people worked at the same corporation thier entire lives but it no longer makes sense today. Here's why:
- The modern job market is all about job mobility. People switch jobs a lot.
--- 6 months of cobra coverage between jobs was added as a stop gap to fill in the gaps but it's pretty easy these days to find yourself going more that 6 months between jobs.
--- Every time you switch jobs you have a new healthcare bureaucracy to deal with. That's just a needless royal pain in the ass.
--- Legal or not, employers simply don't want to hire you if they think it'll drive up thier healthcare costs. The completely artifical link between healthcare and employment ends up giving companies a perverse incentive to deny jobs to qualified people.
- Healthcare costs end up being built into the cost of goods & services being produced in the US which does make our goods & services less compeditive in modern markets. The alternative is to fund healthcare via a Value Added Tax, under WTO rules VAT can be removed from exports and added to imports.
- As has been mentioned, hospital emergency rooms already treat anyone regardless of insurance, ability to pay or nationality. Who pays for this? You do. You, your company... the costs already do end up being passed along.
All of these problems can be adressed by switching to a single payer system funded by a Value Added Tax(VAT). A VAT is just form of sales tax, it's how Canada funds thier healthcare.
- Everyone pays, even illegals can't get around paying VAT. Granted, people living large will pay more than poor people but they already do that. In fact, costs would go down for most people because the old emergency room freeloaders are now paying at least what they can afford based on thier consumption.
- There's only one bureaucracy to learn to deal with. No switching around.
- Corporations no longer have to consider thier health insurance policy costs when decideding who to hire.
- We'd get economies of scale in eliminating a miriad of overlapping health insurance bureaucracys around the country. The savings from this alone would make up for an enormous amount of fraud if the government plan wasn't properly policed.
- No drops in coverage.
- Unions can no longer negotiate unrealistic healthcare plans for thier workers. They get the same damn plan as everyone else and that's it.
- A single payer plan would have a great deal of leverage when negotiating cost increases.
The Republicans do make one very valid point when attacking the weaksauce Democrat healthcare reform package. Where are all the doctors and nurses to properly provide healthcare for all these currently uninsured people going to come from? Crickets chirping....
The obvious answer is to build more medical schools and hospitals, spend more funding the training of doctors and nurses. How can we afford that? Well, a larger number of doctors means more job competition which will help keep costs down. Also, we could add to the funding by removing our troops from Central Asia and canceling all the contracts with Haliburton, Blackwater&co.... That'd free up Trillions to spend on healthcare.
