Healthcare in the USA
March 21st, 2010 Posted in US Politics by Sara Scarlett
In honour of Barack Obama’s healthcare bill I made a (de)motivational poster:
If you want to know more about Barack Obama’s healthcare reform go to http://healthcare.cato.org/
March 21st, 2010 at 8:54 pm
For those of us too rushed, why do you think they should persist with so many uninsured people? I am genuinely curious: this seems to be an outlying injustice, and mad inefficiency rolled into one.
It can’t be kneejerk libertarianism, so what is it?
March 21st, 2010 at 9:05 pm
Firstly the official number of uninsured people is grotesquely exaggerated. See: http://freemarketcure.com/
This is a radical and inappropriate reform. People seem to think that the USA has a free market in healthcare. It doesn’t. The healthcare system is tied up in completely non-rational regulatory laws like you can’t buy a health coverage scheme from an insurer outside your domicile state. If you ripped away the stupid regulation and anti-competition laws you’d solve 90% of the problems.
In a country, like America, with a more pronounced charitable layer, who look more favourably on mutualist options healthcare would be sorted in no time. It needs reform but Obama’s going in the wrong direction.
March 21st, 2010 at 9:15 pm
Thanks for that Sara – I am too little an expert to judge what would work at this distance. No doubt you are right about the lack of a free market; they are after all 50% Medicare, Medicaid etc. I have also read that the uninsured is exaggerated – somewhere on McArdle’s blog. She got the numbers down to just 10 million …
I am however always a tad sceptical about relying on what would definitely spring up absent a state safety net. Americans have more charity, but that does not mean they are definitely more charitable in every necessary instance. We had a bigger civil society in the C19, and we had people die in the streets. Perhaps an example of a country where the free market, uninterfered with, somehow offers adequate universal coverage, would help.
I’m glad you also think there is a problem; the ones that dismay me are those who think that this is really an adequate tradeoff – you know, “so we have many more dying the the lack of the sort of healthcare they could get for free in [insert developing nation], but our high end cutting edge healthcare for the rich is unparalleled. So it’s worth it”. That is the really disturbing angle.
March 22nd, 2010 at 2:32 pm
I support universal healthcare, and I would be happy to debate the details of how to get it, if Obama’s opponents also supported universal healthcare.
But they don’t, and that makes the issue simple.
March 22nd, 2010 at 2:50 pm
Don’t be ridiculous.
March 22nd, 2010 at 3:22 pm
What is ridiculous, if anything, is your focus on how to deliver universal healthcare in the US, when the issue is not how, but whether to have universal healthcare.
March 22nd, 2010 at 3:39 pm
No you are being ridiculous. There would be a greater capacity to deliver universal healthcare in the US with complete free-market reforms. You’re behaving like the Republicans don’t want people to have healthcare. That’s silly because it is so plainly false.
If you want universal healthcare you shouldn’t support Obama’s reforms.