My GMU colleague Alex Tabarrok, over at Marginal Revolution, offers some important facts about consumer-driven health care. These facts are consistent with my friends’ happy experience with high-deductible, private health-care insurance.
Consumer-Driven Health Care
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I understand that the new talking point or phrase being used by the leftwing loonies is the term, “private healthcare monoploly.”
Yep, private healthcare has a monopoly because government isn’t competing?
Thank you very much but I’d like to stay with private.
Death panels real or false? I don’t know about the rest of you but I observed long ago when a little boy that one can kill through neglect just as surely as with a gun or needle.
So the panel decides granny “don’t get no” care. Do they kill her? No. Do they do anything to help her? No. Death by neglect? Yes.
I’d say the life or death decisions of the panel make them a death panel.
“private healthcare monoploly.”
Don’t you love how the left redefines words? Government rationing is just like private rationing, 1,300 companies competing in the health insurance industry is a monopoly, one more player (government) is needed to create a monopoly to break up this evil private “monopoly” of 1,300 companies. Tyranny is freedom, black is white, up is down, and left is right.
They really think everyone is as stupid as their dimwitted followers.
Call it what you will – “death panels” or otherwise. When healthcare is zero-sum, it makes no sense to treat the old and the handicapped who will never or never again be productive. Seniors fear ObamaCare with good reason.
M’lady, there are times, very seriously, when I am listening to the radio and out and about doing business, when I wonder just what world I am in.
My only hope and dream is that all those others are actually just like me and looking around and asking themselves, “What kind of freaking world do I live in today”.
And, it has a lot to do with what you pointed out in last sentence of your first paragraph, everything is backwards, yet seems to be accepted by everyone around me as the “new normal”.
I was on my way to catch some ZZZZs and thinking about this, and I had to come back and add this.
What bothers me most, and what is to me most revealing of the lapdog status of the MSM to the democrats, is the fact that we both know, we all know, that in the audience or crowd listening to those speakers who tell such outrageous lies such as the one above (healthcare monopoly) has to be more than one person that knows it is an outrageous lie, yet no one calls the liars on their lies.
The lies have to be discovered through independent thinkers and conservatives listening to the recordings, and by then the lie has already been sent nationwide and imbedded in the skulls of the complacent ignorant that get all their information from TV.
What a country.
Just today I heard a report asking about “the monopoly of the insurance companIES” (emphasis mine). People don’t even listen to their own words.
Ah, Viking, you assume they’re not listening to their own words. I think they don’t understand the words tumbling out of their mouths.
Probably graduates of American public schools.
A rep from an HSA company was on the Jason Lewis show last night and claimed that 55% of Fortune-500 companies now offer HSAs to their employees, and that the long standing growth of insurance premiums has already been attenuated.
Last time I used my HSA, the provider told me what he would charge me if I paid cash, and what the usual negotiated insurance price is. The latter, according to him, was twice as high.
One unconsidered argument against HSAs is that they are only for the healthy. What this misses is that health savings SHOULD be a lifetime endeavor. If you start when you are young and healthy, your premiums are exceedingly low (and often covered by your tax deduction), and you have much time to build a large savings for when you need it later in life.
In one or two generations, it would create a population of people demanding that they be allowed to put their 2.9% Medicare tax into their HSAs. And if given that option, HSAs would grow considerably.
Mandating savings like in Singapore is not compatible with liberty. If I am free, then I am free to not buy health care or health insurance. I am free to consume all the health care I can buy WITHOUT insurance. And a free country will always have all sorts of people, including the uninsured.
But it is safe to say that there would be no serious “problem of the uninsured” if such a system of HSAs were allowed to continue to grow in popularity.
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