Everybody’s got a view, why not me.
National health care won’t work. It won’t work simply because by definition it has to be worse than what we have now, and what we have now obviously isn’t working.
It’s a lot like the recent economic bubbles, we’re leveraging against our future with the current system and it’s like running so fast your legs can’t keep up with your body and you eventually fall over. At the current rate, the existing system will collapse soon enough. (universities seem to be having this problem as well)
The reason I say it has to be worse than the existing system, is because if the government were to take over the health care system, they’d have to play ball with the current health insurance infrastructure. They’d have to, simply because the health insurance companies aren’t going to just say “okay, it was fun, we’ll go out of business now, since you’ve got a handle on it.”
No, they’re going to fight to the death to maintain their existence. And what we’ll be left with is the government instituting a system of health care, that involves the extra wasted layer of infrastructure that the health insurance companies bring to the table. They’re not needed, since the government will be providing the services that they now currently perform (thus ‘nationalizing’ health care) but they will be there sucking up administrative costs all the same.
So what we’ll end up with is a system more expensive than what we have now and I think we all see that the system we have now is already too expensive.
I imagine what the health insurance companies want is for the government just to pay all the bills. Right. And it’s in who’s best interest not to pad all the bills? After all the government is paying.
We’d need to create a system where it is in everybody’s best interest to try and do things cheaper, and I hate to say it, but competition is probably the best option.