Health reform's bureaucratic spawn

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  • CommyCommy Posts: 4,984
    scb wrote:

    From Physicians for a National Health Program:

    "Won’t this just be another bureaucracy?

    The United States has the most bureaucratic health care system in the world. Over 31% of every health care dollar goes to paperwork, overhead, CEO salaries, profits, etc. Because the U.S. does not have a unified system that serves everyone, and instead has thousands of different insurance plans, each with its own marketing, paperwork, enrollment, premiums, and rules and regulations, our insurance system is both extremely complex and fragmented.

    The Medicare program operates with just 3% overhead, compared to 15% to 25% overhead at a typical HMO. Provincial single-payer plans in Canada have an overhead of about 1%.

    It is not necessary to have a huge bureaucracy to decide who gets care and who doesn’t when everyone is covered and has the same comprehensive benefits. With a universal health care system we would be able to cut our bureaucratic burden in half and save over $300 billion annually."
    if only universal health care meant universal health care. the same fuckers that were deciding policy when the US was pissed off about it are the same fuckers deciding policy now. its empire, the landowners and managers are deciding policy, as its always been,. they aren't about to cede that power.
  • MotoDCMotoDC Posts: 947
    polaris_x wrote:
    for once i would have to agree with prfctlefts ...

    the bureaucracy that exists within major gov't programs is ridiculous beyond belief ... it's not necessarily the gov'ts fault but really the product of a nation that has lost it's way ...
    Wrong, the bureaucratic mechanism is inherent to any system that doesn't have another driving motive. In the private sector, that motive for better or worse is profit and by extension efficiency. What movitvates the public sector?

    One might argue it's the "common good". Whether such a thing exists is an entirely different (a "whole 'nother", if you come from where I come from, ha) philosophical argument, but let's accept it for now. The question then becomes, how do you determine what the common good is? Then, okay, how do we go about actuating that? The answer, absent a blind market force (like, for example, profit), is one of two things: one person decides that it's so (authoritarian) or a group decides that it's so (republican/democratic/bureaucratic).
  • inmytreeinmytree Posts: 4,741
    MotoDC wrote:
    Wrong, the bureaucratic mechanism is inherent to any system that doesn't have another driving motive. In the private sector, that motive for better or worse is profit and by extension efficiency. What movitvates the public sector?

    One might argue it's the "common good". Whether such a thing exists is an entirely different (a "whole 'nother", if you come from where I come from, ha) philosophical argument, but let's accept it for now. The question then becomes, how do you determine what the common good is? Then, okay, how do we go about actuating that? The answer, absent a blind market force (like, for example, profit), is one of two things: one person decides that it's so (authoritarian) or a group decides that it's so (republican/democratic/bureaucratic).


    what...? :?
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