Quote:
Originally Posted by Pete F.
It's really hard to get a straight answer around here. Does your answer mean you would like to not need insurance, or is it some imaginary competitive price?
I would like to not need insurance. I would like to pay an actually competitive price. Both of those likes require an actually free market.
But, since we live in a highly regulated market, the notion of "price" is degraded more akin to a tax rather than being a competitive marker for self regulation as used in free market business models. In our current politically driven system, price is driven by regulatory costs and political wish fulfilments.
And we have made even our regulated, political system worse by centralizing control in a national system rather than dispersing it to competitive state models.
Healthcare costs per capita in developed nations including public funds average around $5000 per year, we pay twice that of which over $4000 is public funds. So my answer of $1000 to your question is actually a total cost of $5000 one way or another.
Comparisons to other countries is not useful if all the differing factors which make up the unique character of each country are not part of the calculation. We are larger than most countries. We are more significantly affected by cultural and racial differences. We have far more open borders. We have greater economic disparities and different ways per locality to deal with them. Almost everything here costs more for varying reasons . . . just for starters . . .
Switzerland has a competitive system (private insurance) and they come closest to our costs, but because they also have some government controls are less expensive.
Switzerland's population is less than that of New York city. It is fairly racially and culturally homogenous. Political differences are not as diverse and polemical as ours. Negative social factors such as crime and poverty are far less consequential. Its population, business entities, and government don't have to fund the various researches required to create new technologies and cures, etc. . . . Yet it can tap into the productions and creations of countries such as the U.S.
Its privatized health care system is good and far less politically messed with than ours, and would be a kind of model for us even without a mandate--as expressed by the Forbes article I posted in your "Let's discuss something really simple, Health Care" thread.
Here is the question in case you forgot.
How much do you guess you would have to pay for an insurance policy that paid for all the things needed for you to live a reasonable life?
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I knew you referred to Health Care when you said "all the things needed for a reasonable life." But my question actually referred to ALL the things you would need for you to live a reasonable life--food, shelter, clothing, transportation, leisure activity, and so forth. ALL those things impact overall health. Some are even more fundamental to life than health care, and most are in more constant demand than health care.
Why do we want to insure health care over those other things? Cost? Isn't the cost of health care made more expensive when it is insured by a third party such as wealthy insurance companies or the government--especially when that third party becomes more and more universal? Aren't the cost of ALL those other things made more affordable because they are not universally paid for by a rich third party? How much would you have to pay an insurance company or the government so that either would in turn pay for ALL those other things you need to live a reasonable life? Is health care really that different?
And if some procedure is so rare that the cost to provide it is prohibitive, perhaps each individual state, by vote, could create state clinics to make the service available to its people.
Getting the federal government out of it would be a first step to lowering costs, in my opinion. I think it would be more financially feasible to have 50 "Switzerlands" than one behemoth, overspending, and dictatorial State.