Michael Moore and healthcare

[cxxguy]

If you cap prices for medical care, you will create a shortage, and make it harder to find.  This is elementary economics.

Maximum prices create shortages.
Minimum prices create surpluses.

The only answer is to deregulate.  Navy corpsmen can perform procedures that only an M.D. can perform in the civilian world.  Corpsmen have about 3 months of training.  Needless to say, if civilians were permitted to obtain the same training and perform the same procedures, they would be much cheaper than doctors.  They would reduce the price of medical care from doctors, as well, by reducing the demand.

This is just one example.  Remember that doctors must amortize the cost of doing paperwork over the patients they see, so those mandates are not free.

Also remember that we do have socialized medicine in America, in the form of hospitals being forced to treat patients who cannot and will not pay.  That is why I don't bother carrying medical insurance.  Paying for medical care in America is a sucker's game.  Given the choice of being a crook and feeding a crook, I will be a crook.

[KBCraig]

Isn't paying into an insurance company for health care a form of socialized medicine, just on a different level?

I think it is. For all the talk about it being "voluntary", the reality is that the big corporations offer insurance "benefits" as a sort of quid pro quo for their government partners. This in turn raises the cost of health care dramatically. It's voluntary ... sort of. The costs continue to rise, though, as a result of the business/government relationship, and I don't have too much control over that, so the whole system doesn't seem that voluntary to me.

Health insurance (life insurance, too) was strictly contracted on an individual basis before WWII. Few people bothered, and self-insured. They opted to pay cash for services rendered.

During WWII the government imposed price and wage controls. Companies could no longer offer higher pay as an incentive for better work (or workers). They had to offer something else instead, so they started offering insurance benefits. It's all part of the cost of employment from the company's point of view, but they weren't offering illegally higher "wages" as far as the government was concerned.

And then the government started regulating insurance, heavily.

The blame for the ills of the current insurance system lies more with government interference than with the "greedy" insurance companies.

There's collusion efforts on both sides. That's what happens when government can regulate your business; they can also regulate your competitors (to your advantage).

[David]

When gov't regulates or threatens to regulate an industry, it represents an attack on any in the industry.  The industry makes it their business to try to control the attack to lessen the impact.  At some point someone in the industry decides to use the gov't to gain business from it or to influence others.  The ones that use the gov't the first or the most effectively, are wildly profitable.  But the problem starts with gov't.