{"id":2613,"date":"2002-07-21T21:15:06","date_gmt":"2002-07-21T21:15:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/staging.armedliberal.com\/?p=158"},"modified":"2002-07-21T21:15:06","modified_gmt":"2002-07-21T21:15:06","slug":"real-health","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=2613","title":{"rendered":"REAL HEALTH"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Had lunch today with a political friend, and was chatting about healthcare; mentioned my distaste for \u0091National Health\u0092 type solutions, and was rewarded with a verbal smack to the head.<br \/>\n\u0093What do you think we have now?\u0094 he asked, giving me the you-moron look.<br \/>\nHe referred me to the LA County Budget (a pdf chart is <a href=http:\/\/www.co.la.ca.us\/fbcharts2122\/fb2122.htm target=\u0094browser\u0094>here<\/a>), and points out that in 2001-2, Los Angeles County spent <u>23%<\/u> of its budget\u0085or $3.85 <u>B<\/u>illion on healthcare. Public Protection, in contrast (Sheriff &#038; Fire) were 20% of the budget, and Social Services (the County is the major provider of welfare) was 29%.<br \/>\nHis point is well-taken. We already have publicly-financed healthcare. It\u0092s just crappy, inefficient, and relatively ineffective because we persist in making believe that we don\u0092t.<br \/>\nThis is because the giant institutions\u0085the giant hospitals, and the emergency rooms which increasingly serve as the primary-care physicians for a large portion of the population\u0085soak up an increasing amount of the available dollars, and my guess is that they leave little for the kind of preventative, low-profile, relatively less expensive care which would potentially be less expensive and possibly provide better care.<br \/>\nNow this is a \u0091newspaper\u0092 set of interpretations; I\u0092d be most interested in hearing from folks in the field.<br \/>\nBut the one concrete point is that we <u>have<\/u> government financed health care for a large portion of the population, and folks like me who sit around and pontificate on how bad government-financed health care would be need to wake up and look at the real world.<br \/>\nSo how do we do it better?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Had lunch today with a political friend, and was chatting about healthcare; mentioned my distaste for \u0091National Health\u0092 type solutions, and was rewarded with a verbal smack to the head. \u0093What do you think we have now?\u0094 he asked, giving me the you-moron look. He referred me to the LA County Budget (a pdf chart [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2613"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2613"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2613\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}