Originally Posted by
GeriDoc
http:///forum/post/2645215
Don't confuse size (the Medicare Program spends a huge sum of $), with efficiency. The cost per participant has risen faster in private insurance than in medicare . Then there's the issue of choice. while the right persists in warning that the "gumment" will tell you what doctor to use, in fact medicare does no such thing-it is the HMO's that do this while determining which patients get which treatments.
Originally Posted by GeriDoc
http:///forum/post/2645224
what I mean is that Medicare spends (I recall) more than 90 cents of every dollar on care, VS. HMO's, that spend below 80 cents of each dollar on actual medical care. BTW- those numbers are approximate since I don't have the current numbers home with me .
That being said, I don't like insurance either, my whole contention is that medical insurance is a scale model of government control on a market, (essentially a mini-government) They on a smaller level fix prices, collect premiums (taxes), and redistribute wealth from non-users to users. And because of that we've do have rapidly increasing costs associated with that. (along with some other stuff that really does increase costs on the doctors side) But we've had a scale model, you think it doesn't work, that doesn't mean we should ramp it into a full blown single payer government provided health care system.
And that isn't getting into the government telling me what I have to do for the health of my own body.
