Topic: . - page 24. (Read 46171 times)

http://www.nationaljournal.com/health-care/sebelius-blame-contractors-for-obamacare-site-20131029

week after the contractors who built HealthCare.gov blamed the Obama administration for the site’s failures, the administration is shifting the blame right back.....

http://www.irs.gov/irb/2010-29_IRB/ar08.html#d0e479

[...]
Reliable data are scant, but a variety of studies indicate that between 40 percent and 67 percent of policies are in effect for less than one year. Although data on changes in benefit packages comparable to that for the group market is not readily available, the high turnover rates described here would dominate benefit changes as the chief source of changes in grandfather status.

....

I'd almost prefer a single payer system myself, over this BS, and that is probably the point of it all.

Oh, but it does.  You just don't see where it's going yet, apparently.  No matter; carry on and you'll get there with the rest of the short bus.

What does any of that have to do with the provision of driving insurance in the UK?


This sub-thread is about needing insurance to drive on public roads, see the bolded bits of the message I responded to. Since you agree with that, what exactly are you arguing about?
It has nothing to do with US healthcare.

While not technically a monopoly, it's definately government led collusion by regulatory capture.  The end result remains the same, no different than the Robber Barons of the US railroad industry colluding to inflate shipping prices.  The cabal benefits so long as no players undercut the cabal, which can't really happen when government is part of the cabal.

Sure.  I need private insurance if I desire to drive on the public roads.  But driving is an earned privalige, not a right.  I have a right to life, and shouldn't have government telling me that I have to buy a particular product to continue to exercise that right to life.  The major insurance companies have long been for Obamacare as they were in favor of Hillarycare before it.  It's only the small & otherwise innovative insurance companies that were opposed.  Stop and ask yourself why this is.

, as they were in favor of
There are a large number of different insurance providers, so how can there be a monopoly?

And yes, you need to have third party insurance to drive on public roads, and a good thing too.

You are misunderstanding me lobbying is present tense and current, they've succeeded yes but they still need to keep lobbying in order to maintain the monopoly on car insurance

You seem to get my point though much of the so called 'mainstream' ideologies and beliefs our societies have are motivated by a few people wanting a monopoly to make easy money, you dig through many mainstream groups you'll find it out easily, they don't even really try to hide it.

Canada? I just go to the pet store.

...There's a heavy, and fairly successful lobbying and propaganda campaign in the US to convince people that ordering prescription drugs from outside the US is "scary and risky".

Maybe just one in ten people do it.  Maybe fewer than that.

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=225320

Some of the information comes in the comments as I responded to people's questions, but most of it is directly in the essay.

Total costs of uncompensated care in 2011: $41 billion. Making everyone insured would only have a $41 billion impact, versus about a $2,700 billion total. "Oh, we're only charging you more to cover someone who couldn't pay" is a lame excuse for the racketeering they're pulling off. (Doctors are completely ignorant about it -- they don't usually know how much they're charging).

Upper bound on health care litigation: ~$20 billion at its peak, and it has been trending down for years. Cost of defensive medicine, ~$200 billion. Some say that tort reform will save us all the defensive medicine, but they forget that doctors and hospitals are profiting off the defensive medicine and it's not going to stop just because they won't get sued anymore. So tort reform will only realistically save a few billion, at the cost of losing whatever small degree of accountability the system has.

Total costs of pharmaceuticals: ~$250 billion. Price differential between here and the rest of the world: ~2:1. The problem isn't to be found exclusively there.

Difference between maximum and minimum charges for an identical common procedure (in this case, appendectomy): ~$180,000.
Difference between maximum and median charge: ~$140,000
Difference between median and minimum charge: ~$35,000.
Minimum charge: ~$3,000.
(numbers extracted from graph).

Common hospital markups for various drugs: ~%4,000.

Conclusion: racketeering.