Saturday, August 29, 2009

Universal Healthcare: Insurance Companies Already Ration Care

So here is an interesting video about why we need universal coverage, and honestly, it is pretty compelling.


Insurance companies are for PROFIT. They report to shareholders, not patients. Check out this op-ed by a former message maker for the industry. Therefore insurance companies already ration care. If there is a belief that the government will ration, well at least they have some sort of conscious about it. And there is government run medical insurance - it is called Medicare, and it will most likely be gone before we get old enough to use it, along with our social security benefits.

I beginning to think that insurance companies need some competition to make sure that they stay on the up and up, and a government option would need to have actual business people helping them be as cost efficient as possible.
My personal take that there is confusion because some people are concerned about the cost of care, and others are concerned about the uninsured. While these things are related (see my earlier posts on the topic), they are not fulling correlated. And my guess is that the people who are fully insured care less about uninsured and those who are uninsured or under insured are concerned about universal coverage. These are not the same issues and it is making it hard to have a coherent conversation because the factions care about different things.....

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