Quote Originally Posted by VanChilds View Post
What kills me with the President/Democrats is their effort to create this program w/o an overall raise in taxes. They are scrambling to pinch a penny here and find a dime there. I understand a National Health Care Plan will provide some big savings but how in hell can you look me in the face and say we can afford it w/o a large increase in revenue? I'd like to take some smaller steps first and see where we are at that point.

1. Find a mechanism to create competition between doctors/hospitals price wise. Most doctors can't tell you their actual prices b/c w/ insurance companies it is irrelevant and static regionally. I don't really know how one would go about doing this or even if its possible within our current system

2. All though I am typically against federal databases and I will hate to see GE make a ton a money on this, a creation of a national medical data base and singular nationalized means of insurance filing regardless of company would greatly reduce the bureaucracy/paper work/paperwork load

3. Cap or change in malpractice suits to reduce the large amount of money Doctors pay for malpractice insurance

4. Provide more state/federal money to help Doctors with the staggering amounts of student loans they incur while spending near or more than a decade in school

These four things would in theory lower overhead for medical practitioners, increase efficiency and reduce the price for the customer. If in fact these things happened and the overall price of insurance didn't drop remarkably then we would have to take another look.

p.s. Pretty sure Switzerland doesn't have a nationalized health care plan. Maybe they are a model to look at.
You're not going to get competition between anybody with the current system. Half a dozen huge health insurance companies have their own regional monopolies and spend hundreds of millions on lobbyists to restrict competition and preserve their monopolies. The way the Democrats (some of them) want to create competition is by creating a public insurance option which will allow the government to offer a competing insurance scheme with the big health insurance companies. But the insurance companies are terrified of the competition and are lobbying to block a public plan. All the GOP and some Democrats are now dead against it and it looks like nothing is going to change.

Malpractice suits total costs are less than half of one percent total spending.

The medical malpractice myth. - By Ezra Klein - Slate Magazine

Blaming the cost of healthcare on malpractice is just something the GOP do to press peoples' buttons, blame it on lawyers instead of on health insurance companies who've increased premiums 80+% in six years and increased their profits 400%.

A great way to cut healthcare costs is to stop healthcare companies authorising super expensive treatments that are ten or more times more expensive than similar treatments. It's hard to believe that a private business would take advantage of sick, scared people to sell them expensive stuff they don't need but maybe there's a first time for everything. Some studies say the insurance companies inflate bills by up to 30% by pushing various types of treatment. Obama recently got a billion dollars in funds to carry out comparative effectiveness programmes that would find out which types of treatments were expensive rubbish and which could be done at a fraction of the cost by other treatments. The GOP fought the billion dollars all the way and have now introduced a bill which if passed will ban anybody from using the findings of the studies to try and get the insurers to stop pushing expensive bill-inflating treatments.