18th September 2009, 6:31 PM
No, the government is the only one who has a chance of really making health care better. For-profit health care companies benefit by denying care to sick people, it's the core of their profit-making business... along with things like giving people drugs they don't need, etc.
Government health care would not be perfect, but it would actually be focused on helping people, not just making money. And that's the key difference, and that's why things which simply require everyone to get private insurance don't work. All that really does is increases the number of people insurance companies can make money off of... you need something there to keep them focused on waht they should be doing, making people better, not on satisfying Wall Street profit expectations. Of course you need to pay attention to money... but not the way they do. Most other Western nations have better health care on average than we do for a reason, and we spend more on it per capita than most of them too! That shows how we really don't need to spend more on health care, we just need to spend it better.
Of course some of the other hopeful changes would be good, such as making it so they can't drop coverage, deny people for their prior medical record, etc, but the question there will be if there are loopholes they can jump through. Hopefully not, but we'll see. I'm not too hopeful, but it should help at least some.
Anyway, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veteran's Administration are very good services. They have some money issues, but those are solvable... and compared to our completely broken private insurance industry, so focused on their own profits and not in patient health, they are shining examples of greatness. That they are far from that shows how bad our private insurance system is...
Government health care would not be perfect, but it would actually be focused on helping people, not just making money. And that's the key difference, and that's why things which simply require everyone to get private insurance don't work. All that really does is increases the number of people insurance companies can make money off of... you need something there to keep them focused on waht they should be doing, making people better, not on satisfying Wall Street profit expectations. Of course you need to pay attention to money... but not the way they do. Most other Western nations have better health care on average than we do for a reason, and we spend more on it per capita than most of them too! That shows how we really don't need to spend more on health care, we just need to spend it better.
Of course some of the other hopeful changes would be good, such as making it so they can't drop coverage, deny people for their prior medical record, etc, but the question there will be if there are loopholes they can jump through. Hopefully not, but we'll see. I'm not too hopeful, but it should help at least some.
Anyway, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veteran's Administration are very good services. They have some money issues, but those are solvable... and compared to our completely broken private insurance industry, so focused on their own profits and not in patient health, they are shining examples of greatness. That they are far from that shows how bad our private insurance system is...