i read these comments and ask, do any of you pay for employee health care?

i do.

and have for decades.

and beyond health care, i pay for long-term disability care[in other words, incapacitated by a stroke, i furnish coverage that will provide a stricken employee a monthly amount to pay for some percentage of their care requirements].

and if you purchase my products, you pay for that.

but, in a funny sense, this system makes my employees my slaves. though i think that i run a great ship, whether i do or don’t, the current system mandates that my employees cannot leave my employ. they are health care-indentured servants in a very real sense.

and that is why i think that the gangsters in bentonville do not want a health care system that eliminates their employees being chained to their largesse[sic].

you know, if a citizen has a health care contract with an entity other than the citizen’s employer, which grants the citizen some independence, then an employer cannot be a simon legree[sic]. and workers can be free to move elsewhere. indebted to no one for their health care.

when you listen to any senator, congresscritter,dems/reps, trying to tell you how health care cannot be provided without the instrumentality of the insurance industry, know that you are listening to an individual on the take.

and understanding that, i think that you have to recognize that to change this is to implement a revolution. build the tumbrils.

the congress IS TELLING us to “EAT CAKE”.

I agree… a strong public option is a bridge to de facto single payer, not an end point in itself. We may not get de jure single payer, but that’s a fight for another day.

I keep reading unsupported claims that a public option is “a bridge to single-payer.”

It seems to me that the public option would be a bridge to nowhere, unless the final bill included a viable solution to the adverse-selection problem, about which selise has repeatedly quoted Himmelstein and Woodhandler.

But you will not see dramatic savings unless you can substantially reduce the administrative dead wood in the system in addition to eliminating the profit motive, which is what drives all the shenanigans with respect to denying coverage to sick/costly patients and denying claims due to pre-existing illnesses and all the other bullshit.

Single payer is the only system that will deliver big savings to the consumer while maintaining a high level of quality care.

I’ve heard it said for years that costs within a hospital are redistributed. The hugely expensive machine and surgeries and other large expensive things and the costs of uninsured unpaid-for care are distributed, to the cost of a pain pill so many of us require and to all other services.

But then, I’ve also heard recently that uninsured and unpaid-for care is paid for by the government. Millions!

Okay, which is it?

Do they collect twice by redistributing the costs to other patients AND to the government?

I think a public option which is uncomplicated will suddenly show up a lot of garbage that has been going on. Who knows, maybe they will begin to undo some of that stuff before the gov’t reform goes into action.

I did not try to estimate savings because a large public plan will be able to rationalize pricing by the medical people, too hard. There will be savings on that side as well. And, the public option will probably try to teach people to make better use of the system.

I flatly disagree with your suggestion that government can’t do anything right. If you want to see real waste, try Merrill Lynch with the $85,000 wastebasket for its CEO who led them into disaster; or any huge corporation, wasting money left and right at the expense of investors.

People aren’t as economically rational as the Chicago School of economics said they were. Even the Ayn Rand worshipper Alan Greenspan realizes that.

Medical Bankruptcy in the United States, 2007:
Results of a National Study
David U. Himmelstein, MD,a Deborah Thorne, PhD,b Elizabeth Warren, JD,c Steffie Woolhandler, MD, MPHa

here’s the pdf

The only folks that pay the “going rate” are those without insurance, i.e., those who can least afford.

Your interest expense at 0% for the government I find a little off…. We are in massive debt. The government runs social security pay-as-you-go. all the money we spend is borrowed and shuffled around. I see your logic in shifting to a more efficient business model but also find it hard to believe that the government could be a model of efficiency for it never in it’s history has