Worth requoting to show how you so perfectly illustrate DE's point. Even in direct response to his point.

vulturesrow- OK, so you're looking at the world. Health care is expensive. Private health care is lot more expensive than socialized health care. Our mixed system is more expensive than socialized systems, while also covering fewer people. Cost is not the only variable here, paying more to cover more people is a good idea.

You have offered two reforms.

1) Allow selling across state lines. I don't see how this will cut costs at all. Can you explain how it would?

2) Tort reform. This is just a wealth transfer from demographics that don't reliably support Republicans(tort victims, trial lawyers) to demographics that do(doctors, insurance companies). Also, it's nowhere near enough. I mean, you're bitching that cutting from 10% growth to 7% growth isn't enough for you to consider single payer because it's still "a problem", tort reform is taking you from 10% to 9.5%.

Basically, you're yelling that the Democratic plan, which is clearly better, isn't good enough. But you can't offer a better option, so we should keep doing something dumb until we figure out a magic bullet? Why can't we switch to the Democratic proposal now, and then when we figure out the magic bullet do that?

Why do we have to stay with the status quo?

The one thing that's crossed my mind is that the Dems should go ahead and pass an immediate allowance for unrestricted sales of insurance across state lines, then sit back for a few years and watch the resulting Death Spiral as the insurers fall all over themselves to attract the very healthiest of customers, throwing millions into the uninsured population in the process. Passing single payer should be a piece of cake after that catastrophe. Fortunately (unfortunately?) they are neither smart enough nor devious enough to pull it off.

Wrong party, its the GOP that wants to tear apart America so that they tailor it to their ideal.

I have no horse in this (uninsured mid 20s, got a few more years of perfect health left woot) I am very interested in anyone who can respond to this.

Though I'm really here for Palin mocking and I'd much prefer that.

^^^^^^ yeah, what started off as another opportunity to slag Fox's Caribou Barbie has has degenerated into a partisan/non-partisan discussion about the current state of unhealthy care and its motive of profit.

I know! How could anyone look at the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review and think of him as an intellectual?

FWIW, I prefer Snowbilly over Caribou Barbie.

I always thought "Wasilla Hillbillies" made Granny and Uncle Jed look real bad. But Sarah does have that Cousin Jethro thing down real good. I'd bet she's real good a goesintas and cyfering and all that big executivin stuff.

I'm actually a little bit concerned by this. FWIW, I'm in a similar boat (mid-20s, good health, but pay through the nose for COBRA because I can't buy insurance on the individual market, pre-existing conditions ftl), but, and this is probably because I've worked for a couple of think tanks and advocacy groups doing research and organizing around the issue, people our age are probably the ones who should be most concerned about the issue. We're eventually going to be in a position where our paychecks are significantly less than they could be because so much is taken out for health insurance, or we own a business and our payroll will be significantly higher to pay our employees benefits, or we'll develop health problems as we get older and require increasingly expensive treatments, and so on and so forth.

Anyway, my point is, and I don't mean to be preachy, but start reading up on the issue, and if all you do is try to stay apprised of the issues, even if you're not attending rallies or calling your congressman, we'll all be better off.

Anyway, my personal favorite is the Institute for America's Future, because, y'know, I'm a sucker lefty, but, for an intelligent (if, I think, misguided) discussion from the right, The Cato Institute is good.

OK, sorry, let's get back to snowbilly bashing.

I concede that, yes, I am scared ****less by this guy:



EDIT: I mean, guys like him, 'cause, y'know. He dead.

re: PoBoy321

I read everything Double Eagle posts about it.

As far as my health goes, I'm pretty much set on moving out of the country in the next few years before the black hole of suck finally descends. If I'm going to be paying 50-55% effective tax rate like I am now I might as well get some socialized medicine out of the deal.

Yeah, sorry. I realized after posting that that even if you lurk here, you're probably better informed than the vast majority of the American public.

Ugh, I'm not an expert, just someone that plays one on this board.

This guy's an expert on health care costs


Ezra Klein is the best of the mainstream reporters on the issue

Followed closely by Jonathan Cohn and Harold Pollack

As PoBoy said, Cato is probably the least idiotic of the conservative sites on the issue (which is not saying much.)

Im honestly starting to think you dont even read what other people. Please find one post where I said tort reform is cost cutting measure I approve of. The only time Ive even mentioned anything of the sort was to point out the effects that malpractice suits have on healthcare costs. And I explicitly said that Im ambivalent about tort reform at best. As for allowing for interstate competition, I think a person that has boasted about his economics knowledge as much as you have ought to be able to figure out why I think more competition will lead to lower prices.

And seriously quit strawmanning. Where did I ever say I think we should stay with the status quo? I havent proposed anything because I didnt really see an appropriate point in the conversation. If you want to know what I think we should do then just check out Cato stuff. But seriously stop putting words in my mouth.

So people that put a lot of time and effort into studying and thinking about this issue are just the least idiotic? You usually post pretty reasonable stuff but you seem borderline unhinged over this topic when you post stuff like that.

vulturesrow- Oh, I don't know **** about economics, I just know more than a particular subset of loudmouthed idiots on the internet. I do know enough about economics to realize that the health care market doesn't really conform to your widget-based micro 101 supply and demand curves, if that's what you're getting at. PoBoy mentioned some of the reasons why above, but you can kind of reverse engineer that this has to be true because of the way our market-based health care system is so much more expensive than other countries' socialized care. That's counter-intuitive, right? But it's true. Here's a big step, and most of the people on this forum can't make it, but you seem sincerely interested:

If the real world produces counter-intuitive results, your intuition must be wrong(in this case, intuition that market->lower costs is an oversimplification). The real world can't be wrong.

So, again, costs are too high. Hypothetically I've discovered a way that reduces annual cost increases from 10% to 7%(put everyone on Medicare). This seems like a good idea to me. Lower is better.

That is apparently a bad idea, though, so I assume you have something that will reduce growth to 6.9% or lower? And... go:

The problem is a lot of people think or pretend that there are only two options: socialized health care or "private"/free market, and what we have now is "private."

This is clearly wrong.

more expensive to whom?

I know I've been rough on you in this thread, but I've always included a thorough explanation as to why I thought what you were saying was wrong. I'm not one to get my panties in a bunch over an internet insult, but it is you who has been constantly complaining about Fly's posting in a similar style. Again, no big deal, just sayin....

As for my remark about Cato, even though they don't throw bombs like their cousins, they simply fail to acknowledge the existence of the various incentive problems that exist in this market (I'm talking about the basic problems of health care economics like asymmetric information and vertical demand curves), and the reason for this is simple: acknowledging them begs the question about what to do about them which in their world is a bit like questioning the existence of God in the South.

Ive highlighted the key flaw in your argument. Our system is not market based, its a really weird hyrbid of goverment involvement and some market factors as well. When you look at some of the perverse incentives that this system offers then the results arent so counter-intuitive.

And I told you in my last post what my plan is. You can read Cato's stuff yourself, no need for me to summarize here. And FWIW, my understanding of Econ is a little better than Micro 101. My degree is in Econ, but I freely admit I havent had to use that knowledge very much in the last 10.5 years so I am definitely a bit rusty.

For rhetorical effect I'm going to respond to this post out of chronological order

Really? Awesome. How do you think an unregulated market would deal with the information asymmetry and inelasticy issues of health care posted above by PoBoy(and ignored by all the HCR foes)? Those seem to be factors that would drive prices upwards.
Actually, here's a whole paper that you might find interesting:

http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/82/2/PHCBP.pdf

The health care market does not, and can not, behave like the market for a traditional consumer good.

Jesus Christ. Never mind. Vote Palin. Government is always the problem. I forget sometimes.

Ill read it when I get a chance.


On second thought, maybe not. I thought maybe you were going to be able to actually act like a halfway civilized person but it didnt take you long to revert to form. I will admit its pretty for a self proclaimed libertarian to say "government is always the problem" in a mocking fashion and be completely opposed to market based health care reform.

Dude, you're repeating the same points as pvn.

The perverse incentives that exist in our health care system have nothing to do with not being able to sell across state levels(that I can see), and that's the ONLY REFORM YOU MENTIONED. It's half of the Republican plan! 1) State lines 2) Tort reform

Be specific. You can't just handwave about competition hopefully making stuff better, you need to tell specifically me which perverse incentives government regulation is causing that is increasing our prices.

Because I don't need to just handwave about socialism making costs lower. It does. You can't dispute that a fully nationalized system would lower costs, because in the UK it did. We could socialize the insurance industry and have lower costs like Canada.

I don't need to be able to explain why, because there's clearly some reason. It happened. Since a mixed system costs more than a socialized system, you're at a disadvantage if you're trying to sell me that getting rid of the cheaper(and slower increasing!) part of our system will lower costs. You are going to need to go way past micro 101 on this one, basically.

Oh well, if no one else will, I will: