no profit...no free market...no choice for the patient...
solidarity......a catchword of socialism...."equal" does not always mean equal treatment....
who has the power with socialized medicine....certainly not the patient....
your analysis of quotes take out of the context of the full interview helps you? What is best for the consumer? Not all consumers are patients getting care. You are skewing things to fit an anti socialist argument. Fine. But be fair. Is a socialist solution that works bad just because it is a socialist solution?
Social Security is a socialist solution, and how many decades of Americans have been better off then Americans before FDR?
question: When you said to the insurance companies, "No more profit on the basic health plan," what did they say?
Pascal Couchepin answers: They accept it; they have no choice. And [all these] companies are [heirs] of former social companies. For instance, the Groupe Mutuel ... was built on this idea: no profit; everything must be given to the people who are members of it. So there is a tradition of social attitude in these systems.
I am not systematically against the idea of having profits in the health insurance system, but if we introduce it, it is more with the idea to balance the power in the health insurance system, because now there is a lack of balance of power.
question: Who has the power?
Pascal Couchepin answers: Who has the power? The small group of the people who leads these companies. And it is something for me which can be dangerous, because it is a business with a billion of Swiss francs, and the check and balance is not optimal in the present system. ...
question: But you have government regulation, what we might call regulated competition. Does that work?
Pascal Couchepin answers: It is regulated competition. It is in order, but I think, as a Democrat, ... it could be not bad that once a year they [the company managers] have to go in front of a public assembly to answer questions about their salaries, about the way they see the future, about improvement in the quality of the services. It would be, my opinion, not so bad. And it could be possible through a system of shareholders, but not for profit, more for control.