rickyp wrote:from Steve's quotation:

The liberals' plan is that when Medicare does crash, the market for medical services will be so distorted and so government-driven that it will be too late for any alternative except socialized medicine.

See, this is remarkable. Medicare IS socialized medicine. And yet your author and apparently you strongly insist it isn't...
Why? Because Medicare is popular...

Medicare costs are out of control but then so are all US health care costs... Medicare is hit a little faster because the group it serves use more medical services.

Again the point is Tom and Steve, that when the same medical procedures and the same pharmaceuticals that you use in the SU are 40% more costly than they are in France or 30% more costly then they are in Canada you've got a system that isn't working. (There is no cost control. )
Obama has entered into some measures that will incrementally bring in cost controls but he can validly be criticized for not going far enough.

Now Tom. Do Americans want Medicare when they reach 55?

Let’s start with “Medicare as we know it.” According to the Congressional Budget Office and Medicare’s trustees, the program has a long-term unfunded liability of more than $30 trillion. It’s about a decade from insolvency. The trustees’ latest annual report, released on May 13, notes that the Medicare trust fund is projected to run out of money five years sooner than was projected last year. Its current trajectory would swallow up the federal budget. Taxes could not be raised high or fast enough to keep up with its growth without crushing the economy. “Medicare as we know it” is not an option. Leaving Medicare alone means it simply won’t be there for future seniors. The question is how to reform the program in order to save it.

The Democrats cannot deny the figures, but their solution is to let the crisis come. President Obama’s budget offered nothing beyond Obamacare as a solution. Of course, the effects of Obamacare are already accounted for in the latest actuarial projections, since Obamacare is current law. Indeed, in an extraordinary letter affixed to the recent trustees’ report, Medicare’s chief actuary noted that Obamacare’s approach to the program—price controls determined by a board of experts and devoid of market-based reforms that could help health care providers improve their efficiency—would actually exacerbate Medicare’s troubles.

The Republican budget offers precisely such market-based reforms. It proposes not just to reduce the growth rate of Medicare spending, but to introduce consumer pressures into the system that would create financial incentives for providers to work more efficiently and reduce the growth of the health care costs that are at the heart of the problem.

Right now, Medicare pays all providers the same price for a given service—regardless of quality, efficiency, outcome, the cost to the provider, or patient satisfaction. Medicare recipients play no part in determining who gets paid and how much, and have no sense of what their health care costs. Providers have no financial incentive to deliver better care at lower prices. And price controls that would reduce what Medicare pays per service (the Obamacare solution) would only create an incentive for providers to supply a greater volume of services to make up the difference. That is exactly what price controls have done in the past—drive efficiency down and costs up.

The House Republican proposal would change Medicare’s counterproductive design. It would leave today’s seniors and those now 55 or older in the current system, since they have planned their retirements around it. But everyone younger than that would join a redesigned Medicare when they retire. Rather than pay all providers a set fee directly, seniors would use the money (in the form of a premium support payment that would start at current Medicare rates and grow with inflation) to choose insurance plans from a menu of guaranteed private coverage options. Poor seniors and those in the worst health would get significantly greater support, while the wealthiest would receive less. And seniors would be buying guaranteed insurance with limits on out of pocket costs, not paying directly for care. Sebelius’s notion that they would simply “run out” of money if they got sick is nothing more than fear-mongering.

Insurers and providers would compete for seniors’ dollars. They would be free to find innovative ways to offer better quality at lower costs. That’s how markets produce efficiency: by letting sellers find ways to offer buyers what they want at prices they want to pay.

Everyone agrees that such efficiency improvements are essential. As Ryan has put it, the basic choice offered by the parties’ competing approaches to Medicare has to do with how efficiency is achieved. It’s a choice between giving a board of experts the power to deny care to seniors based on its magisterial judgment of quality and value, and giving seniors the power to deny business to providers based on their individual opinions and priorities.

In principle, therefore, this is a choice between markets and central planning, which should no longer be hard to make. In practice, it is a choice between modernizing Medicare to allow it to continue providing seniors with health security in retirement and letting the program collapse under its own weight.

theodorelogan wrote:Those people are why we have charity wards. They can rely on their families, friends, church, etc for help. Just because an insurance company won't pay for your surgery doesn't mean you have no options.

You deny them their treatment everyday when you choose not to hand over all of your money to pay for the treatment of people who can't afford it. How do you feel about it?

Maybe they wouldn't do that if there were some actual consequences. Like, getting sick and having $100,000 in debt because of it.

Society doesn't make calls.

Give me an example of a society making a decision, and I'll show you the individuals who actually decided.

Everyone agrees that such efficiency improvements are essential. As Ryan has put it, the basic choice offered by the parties’ competing approaches to Medicare has to do with how efficiency is achieved. It’s a choice between giving a board of experts the power to deny care to seniors based on its magisterial judgment of quality and value, and giving seniors the power to deny business to providers based on their individual opinions and priorities

rickyp wrote:fUndeniable facts...More like false choices.
What your author conveniently neglects to point out is that the current health system has clearly indicated that the kinds of market choices that affects the prices of other services and commodities is virtually unfelt in the market for medical services.

New Zealands' health service pays about a quarter the price of drugs that the US consumer does . Why? The negotiate collectively.

The more a company knows about coming changes to the nation’s health care laws, the more likely it is to consider radically restructuring the way it provides insurance to employees, according to a study by the consulting firm McKinsey and Co.

The study, which is being circulated among Republicans, predicts that as many as 30 percent of companies will stop offering health insurance benefits, reduce the level of benefits, or offer benefits only to certain employees. If this prediction holds, the number of Americans who could see changes to their health insurance would be far more than the 9 million to 10 million estimated by the Congressional Budget Office.

That means that the cost of subsidizing plans for those people—about $19 billion a year, according to the CBO—could more than triple. And, if the report's predictions are borne out, many Americans would lose their health insurance.

The study contradicts at least three others predicting that reform will have a negligible effect on employer-sponsored insurance. A Rand study finds the number of employees who would lose insurance to be “small,” and the Urban Institute believes that the percentage “would not differ significantly.”

“History has shown that reform motivates more businesses to offer insurance,” said an administration health care expert who read the study at National Journal’s request. “Health reform in Massachusetts uses a similar structure, with an exchange, a personal responsibility requirement, and an employer responsibility requirement. And the number of individuals with employer-sponsored insurance in Massachusetts has increased.”

In first selling the plan to Congress, President Obama said that “no one” who liked their current plan would be dumped into a subsidized insurance market by their employers. But his language changed once it became clear that some employers would find it cheaper in the new system to not offer health benefits at all.

Why do you persist in this untruth? You act as if the current system is a "free" market. Are there not a myriad of regulations and restrictions imposed by the government? Why do you insist on blaming the highly-regulated market instead of the government that promulgates the restrictions

rickyp wrote:They don't do it. It doesn't happen. But not because there are regulations that stop them from doing so.

The new plan offered up by the republicans provides a consumer with a level of funds to provide for their care. But if they can't meet their needs in a given year they need to use their own funds. Somehow its beleived that this will force seniors to go shopping for cheaper health care. (The "faith in the markets")

It would be interesting if you could provide evidence anywhere that a senior would leave their doctor for a cheaper doctor. Thye would leave behind a medial practioneer they've used for years in order to get a small discount from an unknown ?

This "faith" in the markets demonstrates absolutely no "faith" in human nature.

There is of course evidence that there is a potential for real price competition in pharmeceuticals. Seniors taking bus trips to Canada to buy medicine.

A real free marketer would allow the reimportation of drugs in order to allow seniors to shop. Whats the republican (or democratic) stand on that Steve?

Throughout the process Reid mobilized Democrats to block efforts to alter the terms of the deal between the White House and the pharmaceutical industry.

It would be interesting if you could provide evidence anywhere that a senior would leave their doctor for a cheaper doctor. Thye would leave behind a medial practioneer they've used for years in order to get a small discount from an unknown ?
This "faith" in the markets demonstrates absolutely no "faith" in human nature.

Really? So, for example, there is no law to prevent a company from selling health insurance across State lines? There are no bare minimums and absolute maximums set by law?