So are you telling me that the majority of the costs from treating uninsured people has to do with life threatening, emergency, bleeding to death in the street type of issues?
Somehow, from over the years of reading on this stuff, those circumstances don't seem to be the majority that is the biggest issue across the country. There is a difference between a hospital choosing to help a dieing man, and being forced to give emergency care to someone that comes in with a dinged up wrist or a lingering cold.
Consider the opportunity costs of treating the dinged up wrist or lingering cold. Given that there are a fixed amount of both hospital beds and physicians in your average ER, treating the wrist could cost more than meets the eye. Say for instance, someone with a knife wound is forced to wait. The longer this person waits, the more costly it will be to treat them (blood loss, infection).
So while you are correct in your assessment of ER use as a primary physician, there is more to it than explicit costs.
And indeed, if the vast majority of this issue is people who simply can't "Afford" health insurance, then why are you going to punish people who could afford it but choose not to...and if something happens to them may be financially well off to take care of it save for extreme circumstances...while letting those that are causing the problem continue to cause the problem.
That is just not a rational expectation. Can someone forgo insurance and still be able to pay their immense health care cost if "**** happens"? Maybe, but first and foremost that is borderline retarded, and secondly, that is creating a great deal of waste. Now a rich person is going to have to sell 10's of thousands of dollars of assets, or take 10's of thousands of dollars out of the bank (and more like hundreds of thousands) to pay for something that would have cost $2,000 + $200/month? And we are expected to take that persons opinion seriously? I find it very hard to do so....
Liberals keep harping on a right to privacy, a right to determine things for your own body. My health is my own god damn body and its private to ME and its none of the governments business to tell me what I must or must not do to keep it healthy, nor am I going to get on board with anything that further makes my body, my health, MYSELF "Government Interest". History has shown us, far to many times, what happens when you start making something come under the umbrella of what the government says it has a vested interest in and there's no way I'm going to give my body as one of those things. It amazes me at the hypocracy of liberals who shout down and decry conservatives non-stop over the abortion thing, over a right to privacy, over ones own choice to do what they want with their body and the government shProxProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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ld have zero control over it at all.....and yet want the government interfering with our bodies in every other way.
Our bodies are already government interest, and have been for quite a long time. This is why there are many product safety labels, smoking bans, restrictions on chemicals/animals/massive weapons. The government says that i cannot take my own life, and courts can force surgery deemed necessary by attending physicians.
While i agree that having the government for an end all solution in health care is nothing short of frightening, the facts that motivate policy implications, specifically a public option, are rather difficult to logically deny. This is not a NHS style proposal, but more along the lines a solution in which to "internalize the externality".
These costs are simply unsustainable. You cannot really blame private companies for not wanting to insure the most risky possible people. At the same token, you cannot blame government for stepping in and providing a back drop for the most risky possible people to insure, the elderly. Nobody says **** about this because we know that we all will get old, and yet, there is not a private solution to this problem that does not create an even greater social and private cost, coupled with greater dead weight loss. So the government provides Medicaid, because the majority of seniors would not be able to obtain private health care given their financial means and potential risk to the insurer.
You can however blame smokers, the self created obese, and those who can purchase health care but choose not to and wind up ****s creek when **** happens.