If you like this model, you should love Canadian healthcare model.

A cell phone company is a huge rip off, that’s true, very much so. But at least they don’t place themselves between you and the real human being who actually provides the service, like your doctor.

Imagine a whole new layer of cell phone insurance companies between you and the cell phone companies – would that help? If not, why not? If yes, then why not add more – 2, 3, 4 more layers?

They work better in education, which was one of your examples of where markets cannot work, same as with health care was your claim. If you have an education market even the Vatican vs the US govt, you can get the same education cheaper.

“but all an insurance company does is negotiating with providers, collecting the premium, paying your bills, and pocketing the difference; insurance company is a middle-man who rips everybody off. ”

That is a lot! And you left a lot out!

What does a cell phone company provide? A tower and a bill? Goodness what a ripoff!

I’ll accept (provisionally) that you may want the providers – labs and hospitals, maybe even the doctors – to compete, but all an insurance company does is negotiating with providers, collecting the premium, paying your bills, and pocketing the difference; insurance company is a middle-man who rips everybody off. Market doesn’t always work better, in this case command and control representing your interests is much preferable.

“Well, not everybody gets EITC, and what’s the point of all this anyway? If they want to give everybody medical insurance, why not just give everybody medical insurance?”

Because you get choice, competition, and the profit incentive remains. Same reasons free markets work better than command and control.

Well, not everybody gets EITC, and what’s the point of all this anyway? If they want to give everybody medical insurance, why not just give everybody medical insurance?

One important difference is folks voluntarily give the Vatican money to have their children educated. If they don’t feel that education is worth the money, they don’t volunteer the money.

The EITC, Earned Income Tax Credit, is currently enjoyed by millions who don’t have to pay any income tax. It is a negative income tax. Presumably the tax credit for health care works the same way. I am almost certain it would. I re-call reading bits of the plan that very strongly implied that.

Assuming the tax is negative, do you have any issues?

In your school experiment – I get the impression that the government simply pays for child’s education, while your healthcare plan has tax credits and savings accounts. There are many problems with tax credits and savings accounts, for example: most people don’t pay much federal taxes and don’t have anything to put into these accounts. So, if you change your healthcare plan in such a way that it simply pays for medical care – then yes, it’ll be acceptable.

The private education market doesn’t consist of just Catholic Schools. How is it not a private market? People buy education from a wide assortment of private education providers.

“this model you like is exactly like a universal healthcare model practiced by many European countries: private hospitals – public financing (vouchers in your case). ”

So you suppport the one of the Repbulican Health Care reform plans I provided a link to above?

The heart of the plan seems to be public vouchers for private care.

http://coburn.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=HealthCareReform.Home

If so, excellent, no problem.

Really? Whenever I here private school I think Catholic. That is probably because most everyone I have ever known who sent to a private school went to a Catholic private school. And partly because this the breakdown of private school attendance

Catholic 42.5%
Nonsectarian 19.4%
Conservative Christian 15.2%
Baptist 5.5%
Lutheran 3.7%
Jewish 4.7%
Episcopal 2.1%
Seventh-day Adventist 1.1%
Calvinist 0.6%
Friends 0.4%

http://www.capenet.org/facts.html

In a larger sense I am confused about what difference it makes. We know that private schools can provide the same education at a much reduced cost.

Right now many of those private schools are Catholic. So what? With vouchers anyone who wants to attend could attend and get the same education at a lower cost. People frightened by the term Catholic school could choose not to attend.

All the studies seem to indicate that this does nothing to hurt public education. If anything the available data suggests that the competition leads to better educational outcomes for both the private and public school students.

Further I am pretty sure that there is nothing special about Catholics that makes them the only ones capable of providing the same education at a lower cost.

You cited education as an area where private markets are destined to fail and the government must step in.

“Because, I claim, this is an area where market approaches are destined to fail. Market approach works best for mass-production of cheap identical things. Healthcare is very different: it’s complicated, consumer is not well educated about his options and costs; moreover: often he is not trying to minimize the cost/benefit ratio, because often it’s a matter of life and death. This seems to be exactly the kind of situation where governments step in and do what they do, take care of general welfare. Same as with public education, military, police, etc.”

I have pointed out that it is actually the case that private markets provide the same education at a lower cost.

If as you claim health care is the same situation as education, why shouldn’t we expect the private market to provide the same care at a lower cost?

Well, maybe you, personally, will, and maybe you won’t. But the anti-immigration movement will move the goalposts in order to avoid engaging the substance, and we both know it.

And trying to enforce laws already on the books does not require more laws, or more and bigger government. Enforcing the border (and illegal employment) is a matter of will, not resources.

It does if your current efforts are inadequate to achieve the desired results. What, you think the border patrol just doesn’t want to patrol the border? If you want society to work harder on something, you need more people working on it, or working longer hours, or with better equipment and facilities, or something like that. All of which cost money and increase the scope of government.

Unless you think you can patrol the border with 3 guys on motorcycles, you’ve already admitted that resources matter. I suppose you could argue that our current resources, differently employed, would produce better results, but that’s an empirical argument that needs evidence to support it – you can’t just pontificate about it and expect to be taken seriously (still less wave away the whole issue as “a matter of will” – real life is not a Green Lantern comic).

Charitable giving and non-profit organizations are also possibilities, are they not?

They are proven inadequate and vulnerable to free-riding. The solution to both of these problems is well known: taxation. People might not like paying taxes, but if everyone else is paying them too, then society can actually come up with the resources to solve problems of collective action.

the whole promise of universal health care is that everyone gets what they need

Considering that that would require both unlimited resources and omniscient doctors, I don’t think much of anyone who is promising that. It is a goal that can only be approached asymptotically.

Given that caveat, though, it’s certainly possible to approach the ideal closer than we are right now. “Everyone gets as much as it is practical to provide of whatever the best available evidence indicates they need” isn’t quite as snappy, but it’s a lot more achievable.

Basically you’re entitled to be investigated, diagnosed, medicated, cured and kept alive, whatever the condition might be, without ever having to worry about what it all costs or where the money’s coming from. I think that’s quite a good thing.

What, Tom Friedman couldn’t find a cab driver for you?

And why such an abject failure by the Obama administration to present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way?

Part of it is that they’ve chosen to triangulate on this issue just like Clinton & Clinton did in 1994. A single-payer system would be infinitely easier to explain to the public, and to debate on the merits, but that would be contrary to the corporate interests to which both political parties are beholden, so it’s out. That’s one problem.

But beyond that, I don’t know how you successfully present the issues in a “rational, detailed, informational way” when your opponents are willing to simply make shit up. “Rational, detailed and informational” don’t stand a chance against “Obama is going to put your parents to death when he deems them no longer useful to society.”

Byzantine beyond belief [...] a nightmare of red tape and mammoth screw-ups

I have to assume this is meant in jest. No American who has dealt with a private health insurance company or HMO could write these words without laughing hysterically. Nice one.

In short, if the writer of that paragraph is a “lifelong Democrat,” I am Marie of Romania.

“Face it: Virtually all nationalized health systems, neither nourished nor updated by profit-driven private investment, eventually lead to rationing.

I just don’t get it. Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in three weeks? And why such an abject failure by the Obama administration to present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way? The U.S. is gigantic; many of our states are bigger than whole European nations. The bureaucracy required to institute and manage a nationalized health system here would be Byzantine beyond belief and would vampirically absorb whatever savings Obama thinks could be made. And the transition period would be a nightmare of red tape and mammoth screw-ups, which we can ill afford with a faltering economy.”

Is any of that essentially untrue?
http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2009/08/12/town_halls/index.html

Charles