Saturday, November 7, 2009

Response to Avian30 on Failed Messiah Blog Comments Section

Before reading my rebuttal please please please read Avian30's counterpoints to my points on health care over here on Failed Messiah. The link will appear on a new window.

The only reason why I am responding on my blog and not on Failed Messiah is because Failed Messiah seems to be having technical problems (which happened before) and my comment isn't going through.

Ordinarilly I would respond on the blog where the debate is taking place.


Now for my response:


>> This will effectively abolish regulation of the health insurance industry, which is probably why Republicans like it. But it would also be quite wasteful and harmful.


This is nonsense. Federal regulations will exist.



>> If for-profit health insurance companies cannot provide any useful function to consumers that justifies their profits, then they are useless to society and we should all rejoice when the goverment puts them out of business. And if they do provide a useful function to consumers that the government cannot provide that justifies their profits, then it's hard to understand why they would have difficulty competing.


If there is a sector of patients that are too small for private insurance to handle then sure the government should step in. This already happens with pharmaceuticals. It does not mean that the government should compete with private insurance with stuff that private insurance is able to handle.



>> If you do some research on health care systems in other countries, you will see that health insurance (and arguably health care in general) is another area where government is far more efficient than private companies. You can start with this Commonwealth Fund study.


I'm not reading all that crap. Make the points yourself dude. Sometimes I link to other pages to make my point but not stuff that's soooooo long to read. That being said, private companies are always more efficient than government. Obama himself said it best when he said that UPS and FedEX are doin fine and it's always the post office that's having problems. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS12Z-MJpvw



>> No, the only way to get into a public plan would be through the health insurance exchange. And if your employer is eligible to participate in the exchange, the decision of which plan you choose will be your decision alone. Your employer will not be permitted to choose for you.


This is the first time I heard baout "Health Insurance Exchange" because noone seems to talk about it. After googling it, it appears that Health Insurance Exchanges aren't magic button to solve everything. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/06/health_insurance_exchanges_the.html



>> How so? Anyway, many states already ban discriminating based on pre-existing conditions, including New Jersey and New York. It is called community rating. But it is not really sufficient without mandates and subsidies.


Genius, just because it's done in some places does not mean it's not constitutionally grey.



>> I don't think anyone has studied this more comprehensively than the CBO. And the CBO found that some tort reform proposals typically made by Republicans seem to reduce health care spending a little, while others seem to increase spending a little. It is perfectly reasonable to support some tort reform proposals, but it is not reasonable to use this as an excuse to oppose any legislation that does not include them.


More stuff that takes too long to read. -.- And there's people who disagree. http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/10/12/tort-reform-could-save-health-care-54-billion-says-cbo/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/30/AR2009073002816.html http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/10/12/tort-reform-could-save-54-million-report-says/



>> The moral argument for this is that when you end up in the emergency room with no health insurance and incur a $200,000 bill that you are unable to pay, it is not fair for that burden to fall on the rest of society. The economic argument (which I find more persuasive) is that a health insurance system with community rating and guaranteed issue but no mandates leads to high premiums at best, and collapses from instability at worst.


You can argue until you are blue in the face. It is wrong to make people pay for existing and making people pay for health insurance is too much like that. I have a link on my blog that says Nancy Pelosi wants people to go to jail if they don't pay for health insurance. That's crazy.



>> Private insurance companies can do this already on the individual market.


It's different when the government regulates and when private companies offer products with terms and conditions.



>> No, the recent bills cost the federal goverment around $800 billion to $1 trillion or so over a 10 year period to expand coverage. To put this in context, economists project total health care spending in the US will be around $40 trillion over the next 10 years.


To say that this kind of spending will not worsen inflation is silly. The Democrat's health care plan is not the plan of a Clinton Democrat. At least Clinton Democrats valued balancing the budget, even though these putzes did it on the back of the military.



>> And further, after cost-cutting and taxes, the recent bills reduce deficits rather than add to them. It is hard to imagine how this could cause inflation, even if we get out of this economic crisis within the next 10 years. (As a consequence of the economic crisis, we are currently suffering from deflation. Some inflation would be nice.)



Will cost-cutting mean quality-cutting? O.o Also, i'd like to paraphrase Ann Coulter a bit, 'Riiiiiiiiiiiiight. Adding 40 million uninsured Americans to government health insurance will not increase the debt. And I want my 40 million layered chocolate fudge cake that does not put on weight.'

3 comments:

avian30 said...

SJ,

"The only reason why I am responding on my blog and not on Failed Messiah is because Failed Messiah seems to be having technical problems (which happened before) and my comment isn't going through."

I had problems too. I found the solution was to split my one large comment into two smaller comments.

"This is nonsense. Federal regulations will exist."

OK, I should have been more precise and said state regulations. I was referring in particular to community rating and guaranteed issue. You can see in the Krugman articles I provided why abolishing these regulations in the states that have them would be wasteful and harmful.

"If there is a sector of patients that are too small for private insurance to handle then sure the government should step in. This already happens with pharmaceuticals. It does not mean that the government should compete with private insurance with stuff that private insurance is able to handle."

Private insurance is "able to handle" the employer-based market in the sense that they operate with profit margins and relatively high administrative costs that gets passed down to the consumers.

And private insurance is "able to handle" the individual market in the sense that they refuse to provide health insurance to the people who need it most.

"I'm not reading all that crap. Make the points yourself dude. Sometimes I link to other pages to make my point but not stuff that's soooooo long to read."

I made the point, and provided a reference to support it. Anyway, if you are too lazy to read the entire report, you can simply read the Executive Summary or even just look at the table on page 8.

"That being said, private companies are always more efficient than government."

You are being inconsistent here. You said earlier that "except for police and military government agencies are usually less efficient than private companies." And if you think government-run health insurance is less eficient than private insurance companies, why are you afraid that private insurance companies will have so much difficulty competing?

"Obama himself said it best when he said that UPS and FedEX are doin fine and it's always the post office that's having problems. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS12Z-MJpvw"

Obama is not an authority on this subject.

Incidentally, 89% of Americans have a very favorable or somewhat favorable opinion of the Post Office.

"This is the first time I heard baout 'Health Insurance Exchange' because noone seems to talk about it."

Perhaps this indicates you should do more research to improve your understanding of the health care reform bills before vehemently opposing them?

"After googling it, it appears that Health Insurance Exchanges aren't magic button to solve everything. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/06/health_insurance_exchanges_the.html"

Did I claim it was? And it is hard to see how you view Ezra Klein's article as an argument against the Democratic health care reform bills.

avian30 said...

SJ,

"Genius, just because it's done in some places does not mean it's not constitutionally grey."

You have provided no evidence whatsoever that it is constitutionally gray.

"More stuff that takes too long to read. -.- And there's people who disagree. http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/10/12/tort-reform-could-save-health-care-54-billion-says-cbo/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/30/AR2009073002816.html http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/10/12/tort-reform-could-save-54-million-report-says/"

The first and the third link do not represent disagreements at all. This is $54 billion for the period between 2010 and 2019. You can see on page 6 of this report that the White House projects Medicare and Medicaid spending for this period to be $9,954 billion! $54 billion is around 0.5% of that.

You can see for yourself in the CBO report this estimate comes from.

The second link cites some surveys and anecdotes that suggest that defensive medicine is a huge fraction of our total health spending. But the fact is that when we review the most comprehensive studies to study the real world effects of the malpractice reforms typically proposed by Republicans, we find that their proposals do not reduce health spending that much.

"You can argue until you are blue in the face. It is wrong to make people pay for existing and making people pay for health insurance is too much like that."

I have some news for you. All modern civilizations make people pay for existing. We call those payments taxes.

"I have a link on my blog that says Nancy Pelosi wants people to go to jail if they don't pay for health insurance. That's crazy."

Not likely.

"It's different when the government regulates and when private companies offer products with terms and conditions."

The point is that private companies are already committing the kind of practices you are opposed to, and they would be committing these practices on a much larger scale if not for government tax subsidies, regulations, and programs. If you truly oppose these practices, you should be in favor of Democratic health care reform, which will prevent private insurers from committing these practices on the private individual market too.

"Will cost-cutting mean quality-cutting? O.o"

Not likely.

"Also, i'd like to paraphrase Ann Coulter a bit, 'Riiiiiiiiiiiiight. Adding 40 million uninsured Americans to government health insurance will not increase the debt. And I want my 40 million layered chocolate fudge cake that does not put on weight.'"

You don't have to take my word for it. Read the CBO studies of the recent House bill and the recent bill from the Senate Finance Committee.

SJ said...

We both made our points, I'd rather leave it to the reader to come up with his/her own conclusion.


I would hope that the reader reads the whole comments section (the whole debate) on the Failed Messiah thread that I linked to in the top of the blog post for this thread, both my argument and Avian30's argument, and the link I provided on a post on my blog the 6th, regarding Nancy Pelosi.


I'm confident that Avian30 has put his foot in his mouth good enough.