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 The Bill To Fix Health Care - Permanently
Jerrydenim 2 posts, incept 2017-03-31
2017-03-31 20:10:15

Hi Karl, new registrant, first time poster. My father who passed a bit before his time used to read your blog regularly and subscribe to your news letter. He was a CPA, a very smart guy and fairly conservative politically so as much as I loved and respected him we didn't always see eye to eye on matters. We had some fun debates. I miss him. He and I were different people from different generations who lived different lives with greatly varying experiences. He used to forward me a lot of your posts which I enjoyed.

I just finished reading through your last several posts on Healthcare reform and the ACA etc. and I must say your analysis is extremely insightful and intelligent. I just read your last post on how to fix the system and I could get onboard with 99% of your recommendations, but there is one huge glaring, inescapable error that I am surprised you missed:

As you astutely noted at the end of your post, "The problem isn't that health care is "expensive." The problem is that it's a rip-off and is laced through with fraud, theft and arguably even racketeering from top to bottom." Very accurate observation indeed, and I would agree the healthcare industry is chock full of greedy criminals. Insurance and pharma CEOs being among the very worst. I cut and pasted your list of policy prescriptions into MicroSoft Word and your post was approximately 7500 words and 24 pages long. In the absence of a massive, beastly federal agency created to enforce your manifesto who exactly is going to make the criminal mafia profiteering from our healthcare industry comply with the new law of the land? Assuming you could get your common-sense, clean-up-the-healthcare-racket bill passed and a huge new federal agency to enforce your bill created, then what? How do you stop the lobbyists and Pharma billionaires from buying Congress and judges then suborning the new agency, and eventually wrecking it from the inside before the public is ready to abolish said agency for being ineffective and corrupt? I mean that is the business party playbook from the last 30 years, no?

I propose something much more simple and likely to succeed instead- Medicare for All, everybody in, nobody out. Seven simple words. The entirety of my idea. Remove the profit motive and remove the temptation for humans to extort plunder when given the opportunity to withhold life saving services. Deliver healthcare to Americans as a basic human right and a public utility like every other civilized nation on earth, fixing the out of control cost problem while providing every man, woman and child with a universal, non-means tested benefit. I know, I know. It's socialism. But seriously what's not to like? The Norwegians and the Swiss are stinking socialists- can't we at least deliver universal healthcare for the same cost that they do? Their healthcare costs are half of ours here and beer cost something like twelve dollars a pint there! America is at least as good as Norway right?

You're a very wise and smart man Mr. Denninger. Take off the idealogical strait-jacket. Our health insurance system is a classic free-market failure. I have been doing my banking with a non-profit credit union for two decades now and so far I haven't seen any other dangerous signs of communist creep in my life. We can have socialized medicine in the United States and still be a capitalist democracy. However, I'm not sure we can stay a capitalist democracy without single payer healthcare. As you have pointed out, our current "free-market" healthcare system is set to bankrupt the county very soon without radical reform.
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