I am not saying that savings plans would not work better, but health care for extreme diseases is so expensive that you have to be at least upper middle class to afford it without sacrificing quality of life.

Our health care system is predominantly fee-for-service: providers are paid for each treatment, regardless of its necessity or quality. For example, a hospital that botches a surgery is often paid for the error and then paid again to fix it. Our system should pay doctors for results, encouraging better, more efficient care.

The government run insurance agency would pay doctors based upon how much work is done: no more paying for an hour of time when you only need 5 minutes. No more paying for a botched surgery. I wouldn’t pay somebody for a bad service in another industry, so why should I pay the doctor for a bad service?

• Creating computerized physician order entry to eliminate lost paperwork and illegible writing.

~Who’s going to pay for this?

o Developing computerized patient reminder systems to improve compliance with treatments, such as automatic phone calls home to remind patients to take needed medication to help keep them healthy and out of the hospital.
~Who’s going to pay for this?

o Using handheld devices to allow hospital staff to communicate results directly to physicians, instead of wasting time trying to find a doctor with urgent information.

~Who’s going to pay for this?

I disagree in your statements that these computerized services would necessarily cost more. They pay for themselves pretty fast by using fewer consumables and allowing greater efficiency.

In short, I think the government should enter the insurance industry as a non-profit, ethical agency.

Here’s another thing. Suppose two people are paying into the system. Lets say they both have tuberculosis. One of them takes their pills and follows their doctor’s instructions, and are cured in 6 months. The other fails to do so, develops MDR-TB, and requrires an expensive regimen of drugs over a longer period of time. How is this fair to the first person, that he/she would have to pay for someone else’s stupidity? Now lets imagine this on a grander scale. People whom choose to smoke do not have the right to impose their terminal lung cancer charges on my status. People whom choose to devour large amounts of cholestrol beefsteak do not have the right to impose their coronary triple bypass on my taxes. In Europe, people are more conservative and healthy because they choose not to do things that would result in a prevelance of easily preventable disease. Not so in America: thus, our systems are not as compatabile as the Democrats may suggest.

Look at the social health insurance systems like Germany, France & Belgium which combine public & private health insurance. In Belgium for example (where I live), you don’t have the problem of losing your insurance/having to pay higher premiums when you change jobs or even if you lose your job because the mutual (non-profit) health insurance funds are not linked to your job (but do get funding via your social security contributions). This means that if you have the misfortune to be unemployed or too ill to work, you still have access to healthcare.

Also in a social health insurance system, funding & risks are pooled, so the “unused” contributions of healthy people help pay for the healthcare of the not so healthy, rather than making profit for the insurance company. Sometimes they even give extra benefits to all members of a fund, for example, my “mutuelle” (mutual health insurance fund) increased the annual number of physio/osteopathy sessions reimbursed without doctor referral.

(1) If the US healthcare system is so good, why does no-one else copy it?
(NB: the USA is the ONLY developed nation with no universal system of healthcare).

And don’t use the “many people come to the US for first rate medical care argument” because it really should be “many RICH people come to the US for first rate medical care”.

(2) Healthcare is what economists call a “public good”, the same as education, police and fire fighters; this means it will never be fully catered for by the market. In other words there will always be an element of market failure; the question is how to deal with the market failure.

Apparently Singapore has a good system whereby the market & the state come together, see:

http://rru.worldbank.org/Discussions/Discussion.aspx?id=23
http://theonlinecitizen.com/2007/05/18/singapores-healthcare-system-uniquely-singapore/

(3) Universal healthcare systems don’t have to be monolithic soviet style state run bureaucracies, the healthcare systems of Belgium, Germany, Sweden, France or Finland (and probably many others) certainly couldn’t be described as such, and yet all offer universal healthcare provision and all are cheaper (in terms of GDP per capita spent on healthcare) than the US.

(4) This article implies that a universal healthcare system will incur high bureaucratic costs, but from what I’ve read about the US healthcare system, the huge bureaucractic costs are in a large part due to healthcare providers having to deal with so many different insurance schemes. Another example of market failure?

There are a lot of specifics in the plan, as if he was the CEO of a healthcare company enumerating what he would do as the Chief Executive. The only difference is he is not a CEO of a private health service provider–he is a politician who wants to be able to control an entire industry of health service providers.

Essentially, Edwards wants to replace market forces in healthcare with political forces. The question of practicality in this case is whether you believe that the government or free market will create better incentives for the expansion and innovation of medicine.

The answer to me is simple…