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> The way forward is ton get rid of the concept of 'benefits' packages and just let people work for a gross pay and let themselves choose their own benefits fro

> The way forward is ton get rid of the concept of 'benefits' packages and just let people work for a gross pay and let themselves choose their own benefits from that. This. Among other things, it would go a long way towards fixing the health insurance problems in the country. One of the reasons the private health insurance market is so dysfunctional is that relatively few people participate in it (most people are covered by their employers).

danieltillett 11y ago
The way the rest of the world has “fixed” health insurance is to have the state involved. Even the USA does this for anyone over 65 (where most of the spending occurs) and for anyone who is a veteran. For some reason covering the young and healthy seems too hard. It is almost as though there is a huge vested interest keen on maintaining the status quo at the expense of everyone else. Given that only unions are evil this could not be true.
- norea-armozel 11y ago
  Kevin A Carson outlined in an essay how hospitals justify their prices on everything from saline to surgery on a managerial model which treats every service/good as revenue on the accounting books. Oddly enough, they got this model from the auto industry which did the same sort of model which obviously demands consumers to use the service/good as much as possible. For example, how many patients actually need a CT scan? Not many, really, but if you dig deeper the reason they do this is to get the maximum value of of their CT scan equipment even if a patient's symptoms don't match anything that would require such a service. Equally, many hospitals also compete with each other thus duplicate services or spend their budget on the look/feel of their facilities (how many people care wth the foyer of a hospital looks like?) which leads to the higher prices. Essentially, each patient pays the full cost of the medical services rendered unlike how consumers in other industries (the price of a meal or a cell phone is not at cost, often it's lower when you factor in everything to bring it to market). I think the way to clear the system is to do a multi-tier approach which may include single payer healthcare, but if you were to install that system into our hospital system as is then expect the US to go bankrupt in less than a decade. We have to break the back of the monopolists before we can get anything close to sane market prices.

danieltillett 11y ago

The way the rest of the world has “fixed” health insurance is to have the state involved. Even the USA does this for anyone over 65 (where most of the spending occurs) and for anyone who is a veteran. For some reason covering the young and healthy seems too hard. It is almost as though there is a huge vested interest keen on maintaining the status quo at the expense of everyone else. Given that only unions are evil this could not be true.

norea-armozel 11y ago
Kevin A Carson outlined in an essay how hospitals justify their prices on everything from saline to surgery on a managerial model which treats every service/good as revenue on the accounting books. Oddly enough, they got this model from the auto industry which did the same sort of model which obviously demands consumers to use the service/good as much as possible. For example, how many patients actually need a CT scan? Not many, really, but if you dig deeper the reason they do this is to get the maximum value of of their CT scan equipment even if a patient's symptoms don't match anything that would require such a service. Equally, many hospitals also compete with each other thus duplicate services or spend their budget on the look/feel of their facilities (how many people care wth the foyer of a hospital looks like?) which leads to the higher prices. Essentially, each patient pays the full cost of the medical services rendered unlike how consumers in other industries (the price of a meal or a cell phone is not at cost, often it's lower when you factor in everything to bring it to market). I think the way to clear the system is to do a multi-tier approach which may include single payer healthcare, but if you were to install that system into our hospital system as is then expect the US to go bankrupt in less than a decade. We have to break the back of the monopolists before we can get anything close to sane market prices.