Challenged by the friend Antonio, I am answering Three health care questions (4 actually). They are questions indicative of the health care debate, I believe, because they are very silly. In fact they immediately look to the the more experience rhetorical eye as good examples of straw man argument: we attack weaker – yet unrelated – points that our opponent really doesn’t support. So, I am giving a short answer to them – short, but too long to fit in a facebook comment where this thing arose.
Why does the impending fiscal disaster known as Medicare justify increasing the role of the federal government and reducing the role of prices which are the essence of Medicare?
Who said it does? The role of federal government should be increased simply because the private system doesn’t manage to offer affordable cover to enough citizens and, even when it does, it simply doesn’t work. It is highly inefficient in expenditures and in covering. Medicare’s costs come mainly from so called excess cost growth which. People do get older and medical practice gets more powerful and expensive and the fact that Medicare is more expensive with time is a consequence of that, not of intrinsic incapability of a state-run system.
Why is the fact that “every other industrial nation provide universal health care coverage” considered evidence for its desirability?
That fact alone is not sufficient indeed. It becomes a good hint, though, together with the observation that every other industrial nation runs in fact a better health system, as judged by WHO and OECD. Also, they run it cheaper (about ~2x). Better and less expensive, together, make a very good argument to me.
Why do proponents of universal care argue that demand for health care is vertical when a major cause of the expanded use of health care over the last 40 years is the fact that so many people now pay so little out of their own pocket?
First of all, it is not true that you pay little out of your own pocket. More of 60% of all bankruptcies in 2007 are medical; three quarters of such bankrupters DO HAVE medical insurance. That means that your out-of-pocket expenditure is much higher than what you think it will be. Also, if health insurance is damn expensive for your employer, this is a fake problem from the very beginning (it is already a tax, simply not paid to the State).
Why does there exist a widespread sense that each of us, as individuals, is incapable of — or should not be obliged to — providing for our own health-care needs in the same way that we provide for our own grocery needs, our own household-furniture needs, our own automobile-insurance needs, and many other of our needs?
About 16% of Americans have no health insurance, mainly because they cannot afford it. Many of them may earn just too much to qualify to medicaid and yet too little to pay for a good coverage out of their own pocket. Also, bad example anyway ’cause automobile-insurance, which is the closest to health insurance in that list, is in fact compulsory in many states. People have trouble perceiving risks and odds, especially when they are young, and it is a duty of the State to make sure that said trouble is not going to interfere with me.