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"Companies have also been pressed into serving as providers of health insurance. In a saner world, health insurance would be something that individuals buy for themselves and their families, just as they do with auto insurance. Now, adding to the insanity, there is ObamaCare."

Actually, in the saner world, companies don't have to worry about health insurance because it's provided by the government.

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Or, alternatively, they don't have to worry about it because there is no health insurance tax deduction to force individuals to get insurance through their employer.

There's still a huge group-bargaining incentive, although, I agree, it would be a move in the right direction.

There's not really any reason that individuals couldn't voluntarily band together to bargain collectively. Right now there just aren't that many people in the individual market to make it worthwhile.

Actually, health insurance companies refuse to insure a band of neighbors collectively since they deem the risk of insuring everyone in the same neighborhood too great, due to everyone being exposed to the same environment (power lines, contaminated water, etc.) A friend actually tried to get insured for him and 30 of his neighbors and that was the rejection reason given. So collective bargaining has to fall to a more spread out organization like an employer or a union, with all the politics therein, instead of closer knit locals, which tends to work out better.

This is one reason I'm in favor of government health care: The profit motives of private health care favor denying care, since not paying out money is a good way to make money. So you have case where nobody will cover you for arbitrary reasons, or deny you payment due to a "pre-existing condition" or some other nonsense.

In the case of contaminated water, couldn't the insurance company seek sane recourse from the polluters? Usually in cases where contaminated water is a factor in the health of a community, the contamination and perpetrator is known.

As for power lines.. well, there haven't really been any conclusive studies in this area. But you get the point.

Same-environment shouldn't be a factor, as long as the reasons the environment might impact health are/can be known.

I'd argue that nobody should be living somewhere that might have health risks involved (e.g., underground oil spills, toxic ash, a radioactive waste storage facility a block away from the elementary school .... in other words, williamsburg/greenpoint brooklyn).

There was probably some ass-covering going on in the insurance company asked.

> The profit motives of private health care favor denying care, since not paying out money is a good way to make money.

This is an argument against all private insurance (home, auto, etc).

The difference between health insurance and other types is that payouts for health insurance are theoretically unbounded (well, until the patient dies).

Catastrophic health coverage is not particularly expensive. It would be much more reasonable for the government to cover catastrophic costs (say, those in excess of $200,000) and otherwise leave private insurance alone.

Depends on the coverage you agreed on.

I've never heard of homeowners insurance companies refusing to cover people in the same neighborhood. Why is it different?

Would you favor the nationalization of all types of insurance or just medical? Doesn't auto-insurnace have the same evil profit motive?

With homeowner's insurance the upper limit is known (cost of house + possessions). This isn't the case with health insurance - or at least it's in the millions, and nobody could afford the premiums on a group policy where everybody might have correlated health issues.

Why should correlation be such a big factor? Even if 30 people taking out an insurance are correlated---the insurance company is probably insuring many more than 30 people to balance this out.

So if we divorced healthcare insurance and employment, how do we garentee that Sally gets the $12,000 the business is currently paying as an increse in her salary?

What stops a business from giving her 75% of the $12,000 they currently spend on her benefits, pocketing the difference as increased profit, and leaving Sally to make up the difference with her dwindling discretionary income (despite a pay raise). I'm not sure how this help Sally.

Presumably the exact same thing that stops businesses from just paying everyone minimum wage and only ever hiring people part-time to get out of paying benefits.

I.e., Sally will go work somewhere else, or will unionize and kick their ass (ideally only in the figurative sense).

Her discretionary income, despite the pay raise, will only dwindle if her health care costs remain fixed. But the whole point of moving to a single-payer system (or at least more government-provided coverage) is that those costs go down. If they go down by more than the 25% (or whatever) that Sally is losing, everybody wins: she makes more take-home pay, her company makes more profit, and health care costs less for everyone.

There's a lot of assumptions built into that outcome, but I take it that's the idea, if the numbers work out.

Also, Sally's leverage for price negotiation with the insurer is much smaller compared to a sizable business. Meaning her bills will increase as well.

Sally will have a job...the article essentially provides that because of health care and other burdens, Sally will not have a job.

This is what the USA looks like from socialist-land (aka Britain):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLfghLQE3F4

Whilst the idea of the government paying for healthcare may seem ridiculous to you it seems just as ridiculous to us that you might be ill and not be able to afford treatment.

Actually, in the saner world, companies don't have to worry about health insurance because it's provided by the government.

Should the government also be providing even more necessary items like food, housing, and transportation?

>Should the government also be providing even more necessary items like food

I guess you've never heard of farm subsidies. Our food prices are almost completely controlled by the government, which is precisely why it is so cheap. No one goes hungry in America, because famine costs about 2 dollars a person at the corner store or McDonald's to completely eliminate. And, for those that can't afford that, we have WIC and food banks/pantries or church-run soup kitchens (also indirectly subsidized due to non-profit or church tax status).

You'd basically have to try really hard to starve in this country.

I guess you've never heard of farm subsidies.

I have, and we should get rid of them. But they're not actually that large in relative terms: $20 billion/year per Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy#United_Sta...). That comes out to around $60/year per American, and even if it goes entirely to lowered food prices (no), that's a small fraction of what we spend.

Furthermore, even if you were right and there was massive subsidization of food prices by the government, how much you pay is still directly proportional to how much you consume, so there's still some pricing signals in the market. Those signals are almost entirely absent in our "free market" (not) health care system: http://www.thefreemanonline.org/headline/doctors-are-governm...

And, for those that can't afford that, we have WIC and food banks/pantries or church-run soup kitchens (also indirectly subsidized due to non-profit or church tax status).

Sure, and welfare for those who need it is a good thing.

Unlike healthcare, these have been successfully commoditized.

Government does provide transportation. Roads?

> food, housing and transportation

Dole money, food vouchers, council houses, roads and subsidized public transport. They pretty much already do and I have no problem with my taxes paying for that.

Think of it from an entrepreneur's perspective. The bigger the safety net the higher you can jump.

Think of it from an entrepreneur's perspective. The bigger the safety net the higher you can jump.

And yet, the UK is hardly known as a startup greenhouse. In fact quite the opposite. Now why do you think that is?

EX: JK Rolling on the doll to 1billion.

http://www.forbes.com/lists/2010/10/billionaires-2010_Joanne...

Transportation is more necessary than health? I mean if you ill I think you kinda stay in bed.

But yeah, it should provide food and housing for those people who can not get either as it does in Britain and I am sure there too to some extent?

it should provide food and housing for those people who can not get either

Agreed. That's very different from paying the large majority of everyone's food and housing costs, which is what the left wants to do with health care.

Every other industrialized country has national healthcare of one form or another, and they all beat the crap out of us on cost while competing on quality. This isn't a theory, this is a fact.

No matter how many times you yell "socialism", that will still be true. The only question is how much money we waste before we finally switch over.

Health and food are two different things. He said he pays $12,000 a year for health cover. There are people there who get $12,000 a year to live on. They can afford food quite fine, but if they get some health problem they would be in deep trouble. Life and death sort of trouble, which you hardly get with food in the west anyway. You only need a dollar to survive at the bare minimum.

So food is not a problem. Nor is housing or transport. The latter are very different from health. You can afford very much not to travel. Walk instead. So too you can afford to not have your own house for a month but live at a friends house. Besides, the vast majority would not want to be provided a free house if they can afford it finely.

But with health there is a matter of principle also. The same principle that each life is precious applies to it. A person should not be free to die because of money in such a rich and prosperous country. Also, there should not be a two tire system whereby the rich can afford first class health care and the poor just enough to get on with plenty of annoyances or worse die.

Everyone is free to provide goods to other people out of the warmness of their hearts!

Oh that's right, if I want to earn points I need to support coercion.

The huge problem they have in the USA is not that health care is private, it's that health is incredibly expansive.

It's also expensive.

Or people just pay for healthcare themselves, like every other consumer service on Earth.

Spoken like someone who has never had a parent have a health emergency and then get a bill for $200k for the hospital's services. Go free market! Yay capitalism! Every man, woman and child for themselves! Especially those little old ladies. If they can't afford to pay for a health service to save their life, that's just too bad. But thankfully every old woman is rich, or has rich children.

Now, that's just unreasonable. Crazy figures like $200,000 are accounted for by the nightmarish public-private kleptocracy we have here. I challenge you to find someone who pays those kinds of princely sums, even for emergencies and very sophisticated procedures, in one of the numerous countries that has neither a socialised healthcare system, nor the catastrophe we have here in the US. In those places, people just go to the doctor and pay a basically affordable sum out of pocket.

We're in agreement actually. I was actually talking about specific and real cases that happen here in the US. Whereas in many Western European countries one doesn't have to worry about being handed some insanely high medical bill when a health emergency occurs. Their systems work more like how traditional insurance should. You pay more when things are going along normally, but when the shit hits the fan health-wise, you are neither denied medical care or handed a bill so high it wipes you out or have to spend the rest of your life paying. You get the care your body needs and don't have to worry about becoming financially devastated.

paid for by ...

...society. If workers pay for it, there's less money to spend on other things (and they might not have the same bargaining power). If companies pay, they'll have less money to invest. If the government pays, it comes from everybody's taxes.

You can't dissociate any player from the others.

It should boil down to the question of finding the most efficient way for society overall.

Single-payer systems are the cheapest way to provide healthcare for a society. However, they necessarily fund the healthcare industry at a lower level than people would on their own. Some of these savings come from actual improvements in efficiency and the elimination of marketing costs, but the rest comes from the government using its monopsony power to drive down prices. Some see this as a feature, but I see it as a bug. It results in less investment going towards improvements in the field, which I think is undesirable. I think the healthcare bill that was passed was a good way of avoiding disrupting the healthcare market while still providing healthcare for everyone.

"You can't dissociate any player from the others."

Exactly. Companies will still have to worry about it, whether they pay for insurance directly or indirectly.

"It should boil down to the question of finding the most efficient way for society overall."

To what end? And as judged by whom? The majority?

Companies will still have to worry about it the same amount that they worry about russian invasion or about the state of the pavement on the interstate. i.e., not much, yeah they pay for it through taxes, but it's not a business concern.

Taxes and the macroeconomy are business concerns.

by getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and by shrinking the DOD budget by say 30% (by cutting out things not needed to actually defend us), and by eliminating tax exemptions and loopholes for the rich and large corporations. By somehow reducing the spending done on the legal and financial professions, and by making companies pay more of the full share of the costs they impose on externalities like the environment and public health, and by numerous other possible changes to be more efficient economically. Like not having government debt so save money by not having to pay interest payments, etc.

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