[lbo-talk] Canada-US health care (was Vive La France!)

JBrown72073 at cs.com JBrown72073 at cs.com
Sat Jun 4 12:15:53 PDT 2005


Jim Westrich writes:


>I just disagree with
>people who say we should solve "insurance" first and solve that "other stuff"
>next. Because then I don't see any rational reason why the effort shouldn't
be
>on fixing medically unnecessary care and pecuniarily guided research.

Focusing on medically unnecessary care is just the kind of thing the insurance companies want--since they're cutting medically necessary care already. If people are clamoring about all that medically unnecessary care, all the better. Your denial is now to protect you, not to save ins. companies money.

I'm not interested in simply solving irrationality in health care, like its wastefulness. I'm struggling for a time when I and all my friends and aquaintances and neighbors and comrades no longer have to suffer this cruel, expensive system that forces people to stay in jobs (or marriages) they would otherwise leave 'for the health care,' excludes payment for anything that's already wrong with us when we do manage to get insurance, denies us care after we pay enormous premiums for decades, and makes us fear that if we get sick we'll not be able to get the care we need and/or go bankrupt.

The system that keeps us in this situation is our unique private, employment-based insurance system, which produces nothing but obstacles, eats up around 30% of our health care money, and requires that some people be uninsured to force the rest of us to buy insurance.

Jenny Brown



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