OT: WSJ article "Change Nobody Believes In"

The Wall Street Journal doesn't like the prospect of health care being taking out of the free market, and subject to more government regulation, on the grounds that it will raise costs.

They don't seem to be aware that US health costs are 50% higher per head than French and German health costs, while the French and German universal health care systems deliver health care equal to the best- performing parts of the US system.

The US free market system is - in fact - remarkably expensive. If the Wall Street Journal was actually worried about costs they;d be counselling a move towards systems that perform better.

One has to conclude that ideology is more important than performance.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

But Congress believes in it, they think they have figured out how to = profit from it.

The free market system is continually driving up the cost of everything, like consumer goods, clothes, cars, semiconductors and computers.

All that duplication in MCUs, logic families, programming languages, semiconductor processes, bicycles, drugs, etc., is costing us a fortune.

Decades ago all of those were cheaper and better, before competition-- basically partisan bickering between selfish private companies-- destroyed innovation. They will be again, once we establish real centralized economic planning you can believe in.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

No doubt Slowman would prefer the Soviet economy.

Hey, a few Senators actually partially get it:

Why the Health-Care Bills Are Unconstitutional

Another reason: special deals and marketplaces violate equal protection--some Americans will pay less and get more than others.

The manager's amendment(*) to the Senate bill actually includes a particularly pathetic section devoted to rationalizing why the bill / is/ constitutional (Sec. 10106, pg. 67-71). Sen. Michael Moore might've drafted it.

It is a pity that the "socialised medicine" we have in most of Europe is the national insurance scheme invented and introduced by that famous crypto-Communist Bismark.

In the Netherlands we have a number of government regulated health insurance companies competing for customers - you have to join one of the schemes, but you get to choose which one - and negotiating their own bulk-buy deals with various hospitals.

No doubt if we had more centralised planning - as they are claimed to have in the U.K. though the UK National Health system now includes a lot of local autonomy

we'd get the financial benefits - the UK system does cost about half what yours does as a percentage of GNP, whereas the French and German system is only two thirds of the price - but customer satisfaction is higher in the Netherlands, France and Germany, and all four systems provide universal health care.

If you are going to post ideologically based nonsense you should really go to the trouble of discovering the ideological basis of the systems you are rejecting before writing them off as too heretical to consider.

And it is just possible that assembling an effective health care system makes different economic demands than does churning out a large number of very similar gadgets (which don't happen to need much after- care, and have got progressively less likely to be able to get it as I've got older).

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

krw doesn't know much - even less than James Arthur - and can be relied to be unaware that health care in the advanced industrial countries of Western Europe is organised in a different way than it was in the Soviet Union before the fall of the communist party.

It has been claimed that getting decent health care in the old USSR involved bribing your doctor and other carers, which would probably mean that it looked more like the kind of free-market arrangement that right-wing nit-wits claim to be most desirable.

The current Australian health care system seems to work much the same way - the more popular doctors get away with charging more than the health insurance will repay, and the patient has to stump up the difference, ideally in cash.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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I think so too.

The bill is unconstitutional. It's immoral. And it's dumb--it costs more, not less, and cost is the problem they're supposedly solving.

Financially, it's the greatest fraud ever perpetrated in America. Madoff was a piker.

It's the greatest seizure of liberty and civil rights in my lifetime.

And it's being done in secrecy. They're thwarting the very core of a representative republic--our representatives are voting in the dark. So we're not represented. That's not what we were promised--

-- James Arthur