Obama and the Dems said they envision Eliminating Private Insurance...Lest We Forget

[maxcok]

Eliminate employer insurance in favor of what?...................there is no law that an employer has to offer health insurance. This for the most part was a post wold war ii perk to get people to work for a company. If companies got out of the insurance providing business what do you think would happen?

You're the first poster I've seen that alludes to how this convoluted system came to be. It was also a way for hospitals and the medical profession to maximize the use of underutilized hospital facilities and maximize income. (If anybody wants to pick up on the history of this, be my guest.) It's crazy that we've come to accept as normal a system where workers are stuck in a sort of serfdom relationship with their employers, all in fear of losing healthcare benefits - 'benefits' that are directly reflected in lower wages.

For those who would defend the existing system, I would ask the following: Exactly where in this current setup do you find freedom of choice? How do we encourage innovation and entrepreneurship within this system - the drivers of American progress and ingenuity - what made us the great nation we were not so long ago. Do you like the idea of a nation of stressed out worker bees, dependent on the whims of their employers? Is this what we've become, is this our future? In this regard, how are we any better than the Chinese, for example? If your worst fears were realized, how could it be worse to have our healthcare managed by the government - a government of the people - a healthcare system with guaranteed coverage that could never be taken away, a system with managed price controls?

Please try to imagine something beyond the status quo and thinking of it as "normal", just because that's what your narrow mind is accustomed to. The current system is not only inhumane, it is unsustainable - it will bankrupt us all and the nation to boot. Try to open your minds.

 

[Trinity]

Eliminate employer insurance in favor of what?...................there is no law that an employer has to offer health insurance. This for the most part was a post wold war ii perk to get people to work for a company. If companies got out of the insurance providing business what do you think would happen?

The question was what did Obama say he would eliminate employer insurance in favor of?

 

[Jason]

The funding of health care is one that the UK will be dealing with after our election. We're coming at it from the other way to the USA. Right now we have a National Health Service delivering free healthcare to all, paid for mainly out of National Insurance (a type of income tax). Private health care insurance in the UK is relatively unusual. In part this is because if you opt for private cover you still pay full National Insurance, so in effect you pay twice.

All our politicians will be arguing in the next few weeks that the NHS is safe in their hands, that its funding is ring-fenced, that they will do nothing to harm the NHS. But the reality is that with a massive budget defecit the UK can no longer pay the bills the NHS is creating - though you would have to torture a politician on the rack to get them to admit this. In many ways the NHS is the debate we are not having coming up to the next election.

In as much as the parties have solutions (and a lot of the answer seems to be that they don't) that of the Labour party is through rationing by queues along with quality targets for health service providers aimed at making them work harder/faster/smarter. The Conservative party idea is to encourage those who can opt for private provision to do this (basically through tax breaks) in order to take some of the pressure off a system already under enormous strain. Both ideas are in different ways bad, which is why neither party really wants to talk about them.

I wonder if right now the US has the easier problem to solve in that increasing a state element is easier than reducing it. In the UK sooner or later we have to face a textbook problems of allocating scarce resources. We can do it by rationing where the system or the queue decides who should get the treatment - ie who should live and who should die. Or we can do the same by the marketplace. In practice we will go for some hybrid. But as an election comes close we are not even talking about such things.