Healthcare bill-any other ideas?

[womaninphysics]

For those of you who are mad at the health care bill passing, I would like to hear your real ideas for fixing health care in this country, which is definitely broken. Costs are skyrocketing, businesses and workers who have insurance through work are suffering from rising costs, small businesses can't afford to cover their workers, but the

Comments

Re: Competition is the key

[eigenadam]

Markets sometimes work great and sometimes they fail. Sometimes competition is reduced by companies leaving the marketplace, merging, or being bought out by other companies. I'm thinking cell phones, cable television and countless other examples. Markets can tend to oligopolies. The problems with the free market is that corporations, no matter how efficient, will first and foremost look after their profits. If there are only a small number of choices, it's very easy for companies to not be extraordinarily competitive, as it can be very difficult for now companies to enter the market place.

Government, especially the legislative branch does tend to be cumbersome and bureaucratic. However, the government is not motivated by making a profit the way corporations are required to.

In many countries with government-run healthcare, there is the option to use private insurance and pay out of pocket. There is nothing mutually exclusive about having a public healthcare system and a vibrant market-based system. Clearly no system is perfect, and the US system is excellent if you can afford healthcare. 15.3% of the US population has no health insurance, and many people who do have insurance have deductibles or copayments which prevent them from seeing the doctor in a timely fashion.

US expenditure on healthcare is the equivalent of about 16.2% of GDP, France is 11% and UK is 8.4%. Yet, US has the highest infant mortality rate of those three (US:0.67%, UK:0.48% and France 0.38%) and the lowest life expectancy (France 81, UK 79.1, US 78.1).
--Source OECD, WHO