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Originally Posted by jęd
Please go and look up what "tyranny" is. If it includes "lots of professionals working their asses off and trying to care about people while never getting enough backing from the govt" you may have a point.
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I come from a family with more than its share of medical professionals. Doctors, dentists, nurses, going back three generations. It's the bureaucrats, Harry, not the docs. The bureaucrats are driving the docs out of business.
You should spend some time talking to your standard family doc or pediatrician. Here in Illinois, if you are a baby doc and treat kids under the statewide insurance plan for the "poor," the state (1) doesn't pay you much and (2) delays payment for months. (Meanwhile, if you treat anyone who walks in your door, you get a lot of deadbeats who - guess what - are illegals.) And on the Medicaid/Medicare side of things, it appears that more and more docs are refusing to accept patients because of the same problems.
Let me introduce you to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy - which, as a member of a federal bureaucracy for some 37 years now, rings true to me:
"In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely."
This Iron Law is why any governmental "heath care" system will ultimately become tyrannical. It will not be run for the people needing health care, any more than the public schools are run for the students. It will not be run for the docs, except for the ones who, like teachers who become administrators, become members of the administration. And it will be a tyranny, because you will take whatever medicine it wants to give you, and prevent you from getting any medicine it does not want to give you.
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Given I have very direct experience of both the US and the UK systems that is almost completely incorrect. If you are very rich then you could, in theory, pay for your own treatment completely. At some point the vast majority will need some type of Govt intervention....
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You are evidently unfamiliar with the concept of private health insurance. It covers most medical needs, even expensive ones.
Government's role in health care is to regulate for purposes of quality control and for insuring (so to speak) competition among providers, prosecuting of fraud, and providing transparency to the consumer.
But once we let the government take over the funding we will get two things: increasing costs, and decreasing service delivered in accordance with government decree handled by a bunch of bureaucrats following Pournelle's Iron Law to the letter.