{"id":2615,"date":"2002-07-23T11:54:53","date_gmt":"2002-07-23T11:54:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/staging.armedliberal.com\/?p=160"},"modified":"2002-07-23T11:54:53","modified_gmt":"2002-07-23T11:54:53","slug":"smack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=2615","title":{"rendered":"SMACK!!"},"content":{"rendered":"

OK so I asked the one health-care blogger I know of, Alwin Hawkins of View From The Heart<\/a> what he thought about my post, and he answered in the comments section below. It’s too good to risk folks missing it, so here it is:<\/p>\n

OK, first question: do we have national health insurance? No, of course not. You answered that question yourself in your example; LA county hospitals are financed by a complex web of county, state, and federal grants to support the system – a system almost ready to collapse and due for major cutbacks.
\n(BTW, LA county health system is a great model for how such systems collapse. Currently there is a huge budget problem. The solution? Close the public health clinics, which provide primary care. Why? Because you have to provide emergency medical care; it’s a federal law. So you shut the inexpensive, cost-effective preventive services and keep the expensive emergency services going. It doesn’t have to make sense; it’s the law.)
\nAs Ross pointed out, government health money only pays a fraction of the cost of services, and federal law prevents the hospitals\/docs from getting the patient to pay the difference. That means that the private patients – both the insured and the un\/underinsured – make up the difference. Whether it’s directly out of your own pocket or indirectly out of your employers pocket, individuals subsidize government mandated health care and federal\/state reimbursements.
\nGovernment sponsored healthcare is one of those beasts that works only because the government sets the standards. Run out of money? Don’t pay and let the administrators decide which service gets cut, who doesn’t get paid, what capital expenditure gets deferred, what medications aren’t available. After all, sick people don’t bitch much- and if you cut off services, they don’t complain long, either.
\nTo answer your final question, we do it better by requiring every government mandated program or law passed also have the money to provide those services. If we want universal health care, fine. But we have to also agree to pay for it, and to understand that it will be really, really expensive as the Boomers hit the Medicare barrier. We pay as we go, and we pay whatever it takes to provide the services so that employers aren’t left holding the bag.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OK so I asked the one health-care blogger I know of, Alwin Hawkins of View From The Heart what he thought about my post, and he answered in the comments section below. It’s too good to risk folks missing it, so here it is: OK, first question: do we have national health insurance? No, of […]<\/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":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2615"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2615"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2615\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}