"Statist" this and "statist" that. I'm afraid they lost me; I'm not a libertarian, myself, and don't really enjoy the rhetoric.
It does seem to me that insurance companies, like any company that has made a public offering of stock, are required by law to maximize stockholder profit. If they can legally do this by cheating customers out of the health care they paid for, of *course* they're going to do that. I don't see how "deregulating" them is going to help. And "deregulating" medicine? Like, Joe the Plumber would like to earn as much as a doctor, so he buys a white coat and has business cards printed up that say "Joe Plumber M.D."? I don't see how that is going to help anything.
I totally agree, if that is your point, that government attempts to fix the problem, like *anyone's* attempts to fix *any* problem, may not work the first time. That is no reason to quit trying. People in Canada, and Great Britian, and the Netherlands, have a single payer system and seem generally pretty happy with it. Sure there have been individual cases where it hasn't worked well. But I've had, in my own person, cases where present American health-care/health-insurance system didn't work so well either.
But moving to Jackson's Whole, well, I'm not tempted.
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Date: 2009-07-17 06:45 pm (UTC)It does seem to me that insurance companies, like any company that has made a public offering of stock, are required by law to maximize stockholder profit. If they can legally do this by cheating customers out of the health care they paid for, of *course* they're going to do that. I don't see how "deregulating" them is going to help. And "deregulating" medicine? Like, Joe the Plumber would like to earn as much as a doctor, so he buys a white coat and has business cards printed up that say "Joe Plumber M.D."? I don't see how that is going to help anything.
I totally agree, if that is your point, that government attempts to fix the problem, like *anyone's* attempts to fix *any* problem, may not work the first time. That is no reason to quit trying. People in Canada, and Great Britian, and the Netherlands, have a single payer system and seem generally pretty happy with it. Sure there have been individual cases where it hasn't worked well. But I've had, in my own person, cases where present American health-care/health-insurance system didn't work so well either.
But moving to Jackson's Whole, well, I'm not tempted.