Warning: the Health System in the USA will be Changing for the Worse

The only thing that seems certain to pass is "the mandate," which is a euphemism for a very regressive tax collected from those who can not afford private insurance and from those who don't like to grossly overpay for things, for the benefit of...

For the benefit of who? This question is supposedly being discussed right now. Since they want to get the money from the new tax, the incredibly rich private insurance industry is throwing their money around in Congress to prevent any true public insurance option from emerging.

The one thing that appears to be certain, "the mandate," is the one thing that is almost guaranteed to make the system worse for those it directly effects and no better for those it does not directly effect.

As long as you are relatively young, healthy, eat healthy, keep some level of physical fitness, and in general practice good "preventive medicine," then in a depression economy you are economically better off if you do not buy the way overpriced private insurance, even if you can afford it.

Of course, you could possibly be that one in 100,000 people who has an unusual disease even while young, but I'm just speaking as an economist here, and as someone observing the World's most dysfunctional and expensive health system.

By saving the money, in effect you are buying insurance against homelessness. Whereas there may be no real option in the event of homelessness, in the extremely unlikely event of a health emergency, you can go to a hospital emergency department. Most hospitals have to provide emergency care to anyone right now, although some have been caught cheating. If you can't pay the resulting huge bill, you can file bankruptcy.

This may be disrupted by "the mandate." If someone can not or will not pay "the mandate," it seems likely that the hospitals will no longer provide as much care in the emergency department to the "deadbeat" as they do now to the uninsured, and possibly not any at all.

I mean, it's an open question right now: if someone is caught with no insurance card at all, are they to be denied any and all care?

If someone does pay "the mandate" and then becomes homeless as a result, I can virtually guarantee you that the net effect on the person's actual health will be negative.

To simplify and conclude, if anything other than single payer emerges, which seems a certainty, to the extent the system does change, it appears it will be changing for the worse. To even talk about anything other than single payer is pathetic actually.

[The above is in response to this article.]

Both Single Payer and Cost Control are Required for the US Health System, but Neither are Coming

For at least 20 years now the most important reason why the Canadian health care system is better than the American one is simply that the Canadian system is far cheaper. It's not only prescription drugs (that many Americans import from Canada) but numerous other health care goods and services that are far cheaper in Canada as well. Obviously, the huge private insurance companies in the US have not only directly and indirectly denied health care to tens of millions, but they have also ballooned the costs of goods and services to the point where today it's more the cost itself rather than who pays which is ruining health care in the US and, by hogging resources, the economy as a whole.

Now along comes O'bama, who is apparently reneging on his pledge to not require people to buy grossly overpriced insurance. So now residents of the US are facing massive unemployment from a depression (or at least a massive recession), lower real incomes every year, and a new, completely unprecedented requirement to buy an overpriced private product. Obviously, at least two thirds (and probably much more) of the current uninsured can not afford to buy it even at a 20% discount.

Any mandate will create a very large new enforcement bureaucracy which, you guessed it, would make the US system even more expensive still. If the poor are exempted from buying insurance, you have to ask: Can the US afford to, without greatly reducing the costs themselves, pay for tens of millions of people to buy insurance? Or, to pose the question more accurately, will the Chinese and other funders of the US debt sign on for this new burden?

So what is going to happen to the already forsaken poor in the US? Do they get shuffled off to jail if they can't pay for private (or public, for that matter) health insurance? I mean, the US already won the sweepstakes for most people in jail than any other country, so where does that insanity end?

At this point, anything less than full single payer AND big cost reductions will be a hopelessly inadequate attempt to “reform” the health care system. It is already too late to save either the health care system or the US economy as a whole with just single payer alone. Because the cost of health care is one of the things that is eating the economy alive.