[quote name='Koggit']You're right, it's a lot like education in that regard: everyone should have access to it, but those who want something better should be allowed to purchase their own.
If you find a good private doctor that you'd rather go to, you can, but that's a luxury -- just like finding and attending a great private school is a luxury. Getting health care, period, is a necessity.. even more-so than getting an education.. which is why it should be available to all Americans. In the current system, a painful amount of people are turned away because they're
too sick. That's
ed up. HMOs do their best to only cover healthy people, and they spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to avoid spending money on the sickest Americans. It's despicable -- it's ruined lives, it's
taken lives, and it'll only continue for as long as health coverage remains profit-driven. Your health care provider needs to be thinking of patient interests rather than stock holder interests.
I can sort of understand the opposition to the idea, but again, I have to believe the opposition is rooted in ignorance. Or possibly just selfish douchebaggery. Nationalized health coverage may very well end up causing the quality of your care to decrease (possible, far from certain) or you to end up paying more than you currently do (possible, far from certain) but that's because you, like most Americans, are lucky: you're generally healthy. The
need for nationalized coverage is not to help people like you, but it shouldn't be too hard to see the bigger picture and consider the needs of others.[/quote]
It's a complex issue that you are oversimplifying into: National health care good; anything else bad.
You can look at it two ways: from the standpoint of the individual or from that of a population. Certain things that you might want done for yourself may not be cost effective to do on a population level (e.g., screening for a rare genetic disorder). From the standpoint of a population, it may be more cost effective to sacrifice certain members of society who are chronically ill, have little chance of getting better, and tend to use up a large portion of healthcare dollars. Of course, if that person is you or someone whom you love, you would likely beg to differ...
Reimbursement in medical practice is a big issue: we get paid nothing for calling patient's or counseling patients and we get paid next to nothing for clinic visits. If patients have medical, then we get pain literally pennies. It's not like lawyers who can bill by the hour. There is simply very little incentive to promote preventative medicine. Conversely, procedures and surgeries are reimbursed at a high rate... it's pretty ass backwards, but simply moving to a nationalized system won't necessarily fix such problems.
Plus, the elderly, disabled, and poor (the ones who need medical care) already have a form of nationalized insurance: Medicare and Medicaid. Most young/healthy people don't really need health care...
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