anotherlife
Gold Member
What do you mean? Venezuela is a former oil export banana republic that froze its price of gas for the past 40 years. So, are you advocating a central government control of everybody's bank account, and from there to calculate how much debt to assign onto each citizen per year? The evil of FDR and all the socialists is not gone.we have a federal republic like Venezuela. Thank Goodness FDR was a left winger.There was a wage freeze so companies started to induce employment with health care. I don't know who started it.This brings up an issue. Doctors have to hire people to research different policies from different insurance companies.
What is not covered, what is covered, how much is the coverage, etc.. This adds to the cost of health care.
Yep. The way we're using insurance undermines the market and introduce lots of inefficiency. When I was a kid, doctors didn't even deal with the insurance company - patients did that, after the fact. But that was before employer provided "group" insurance became the norm, which isn't really insurance at all, but a kind of employer provided health care.
Plus, the administration cost of single payer is about 3%. For private insurance it is more like 25% to 30%. And there are many other costs to private insurance.
There are always efficiencies that can be realized with authoritarian control. The question is whether the efficiencies are worth the loss of liberty entailed.
People ask "how are you going to pay for it?" Well, it will be less than we are paying now.
That's actually a good point, and I won't argue that a free market will always be more efficient than a command economy. I'm not arguing that the single payer would be bad because we can't afford it. It would be bad because it would concentrate control over everyone's health care under a single authority.
Your point about employee-provided health insurance reminded me of something. Didn't a huge aluminum company [can't remember the name offhand] come up with that during or right after WWII? One the West Coast?
Kaiser or something?
How can a non communist country impose a wage freeze? A government can't tell private business exactly how much to pay workers. In Europe, they are now trying to do wage freezes with moving tax brackets, but that too is just an approximate wage freeze, not exactly a freeze.