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Old 02-19-2012, 02:37 PM   #311
Ibby
erika
 
Join Date: Apr 2006
Location: "the high up north"
Posts: 6,127
I was thinking about this again the other day and realized that to me, the idea of health INSURANCE is not the right way to frame the health care debate.

Insurance is a "gamble" that a private company can earn enough in premiums across its customer base to offset the costs of individuals who get ill.
What the left, as well as much of the developed world, has decided is that, well, "insurance" isn't enough. The societal social contract that frames a developed society, to people of my mindset, says that "we care for the sick". We as a society can afford that. We already do for the uninsured who still get care in emergency rooms - but if we build our system of health care to include those costs as part of a broad tax, roughly equivalent to what everyone is already paying in inflated health care costs, and then guarantee at least basic preventative and curative health care to all citizens, in a unified system, health care costs for EVERYONE will go down just on administrative streamlining alone. Instead of a for-profit cost-benefit, health coverage becomes a civil right. We all pay into a BIG insurance pot (either included or separate from income tax) - instead of under Obamacare, into a bunch of separate private mandated insurance pots - and then ALL get out of it what we need.
Personally, I trust a single-payer system staffed by doctors and civil servants to have the best interest of patients in mind more than I trust a for-profit company to do so, and thus I believe that healthcare through employers is just as broken as insurance purchased on the open market.

I think that single-payer is by far the ideal system for health care.
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