Quote:You don't need to have anything to have freedom of access to health care, either, just no armed guards to turn you away from the hospital. The items I listed are no less important to the exercise of those rights, though, than a doctor is to the "right" to health-care.
In your own previous post you asserted you didn't need anything to have freedom of speech; now you say it requires Internet access? Real clear stream of logic, there, bucko.
Nice dodge of the question at hand, BTW.
Should people be turned away from the hospital when they seek care? No, obviously not, especially if they are in need of life-saving attention. But history has proven that government-operated systems are, quite simply, far less efficient than private insurance companies which have to compete with each other. They require a certain degree of regulation to prevent abuse but a taxpayer-fraud-funded system has, quite simply, been proven to be so problematic as to drive people who can do so to leave the country for care.
Take the British/Canadian model that you all seem to be so fond of. Literally millions of people are stuck on waiting lists to get treated for life-threatening conditions. Hundreds of thousands of people every year are dropped from the lists because they have, quite simply, waited so long that they have grown too sick to be treated.
The main cause of health insurance cost increases in the US, right now, is the increase over the past two decades in malpractice suits and awards related thereto. These suits have driven up the cost of (mandatory!) malpractice insurance for medical practitioners, which leads to two direct effects: increase in cost of care (and thus increase in cost of insurance), and decrease in the supply of practitioners.
At the turn of the century, for example, Texas suffered from a massive shortage of doctors, traceable directly to massive proliferation of malpractice lawsuits (even though 90%+ of these cases would be dismissed, there were still legal fees involved, and at any particular time more than half of all doctors in the state had one or more cases pending!). In 2003 the state legislature passed a bill limiting awards above the actual costs incurred by the patient, and malpractice insurance rates underwent a significant decrease, resulting in many doctors returning to practice in the state.
In conclusion, we DO have a system of health insurance already in place for the poor; it's called Medicaid. The difference is that we only provide it to those who can document that they're unable to afford private insurance; and unlike Canada, we haven't outright BANNED private insurance.--
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