Originally Posted By: redrum
Free market will, in most cases, always outperform and be more cost effective than a government run or controlled environment.

Please show your work. Provide examples.

Also show me at what point the costs of keeping a person alive outweigh the benefit.

Avoiding the snark, though, keeping people healthy should not be a profit-based business. When a company decides that it's simply too expensive to pay for that cancer treatment and decide to drop you, despite the fact that you've been paying premiums for years -- well, that simply shouldn't happen.

Outside, though, the limitation of the egregious excesses that the bill limits, there's almost the exact same free market now that there was before, only now there's a larger market as the government requires people to have health insurance, and subsidizes those who can't afford it. The biggest difference along these lines is that the individual market mostly goes away, as the government effectively created a new category of group coverage: those who don't otherwise have access to group coverage. One would assume that the insurance companies are making money now on the plan you purchase through your employer. If they weren't, they wouldn't offer it; there's no requirement that they do. But they're making an assload off of the individual insurees, as they have no carrot to wave. (See Anthem's 40% increases, despite increasing profits.)

Actually, that brings up a good point. If health care cost increases are driven by increased cost to the insurers, why are the insurers making record profits? It might be explained by the fact that there is very little actual competition in your "free market". Because of the way insurance is segregated, and due to mergers and acquisitions, there is usually only one major player available to each individual.

Originally Posted By: redrum
pee-ons

Heehee. That's a good one.


Edited by wfaulk (22/03/2010 13:00)
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Bitt Faulk