Eric Novack comments on the difficulties of a single-payer system:
. . . single payer advocates like to have it both ways. On the one hand they speak of inability to get care, while simultaneously decrying that up to 50% of care is unnecessary. Which is it? Or is it both? And, again, how is it that an unelected bureaucracy, given complete authority over what care you can choose to purchase with your own money, do a better job of both MAKING people take the doctor’s advice, while simultaneously preventing the 50% of care they think is uneeded? Again, single payer advocates have no answer for this other than a’panel of experts’ that will be immune from criticism from individuals, but highly susceptible to the money and efforts of aggressive lobbyists.
Related posts:
- Single payer to fix malpractice?
- Obama invokes single-payer
- Single payer ills, part 2
- The moral argument against single-payer
- Single-payer: Forcing health care down people’s throats?
- Single payer: Some common sense talk
- Medicare and single-payer
KevinMD.com on Facebook
{ 2 comments }
Ironically, Eric, Kevin, and numerous other physicians make the exact opposite arguments when advocating for health courts.
They say a “panel of experts” will be good for health care, and that these courts will increase care, but at the same time that much of the care is unnecessary. Basically, we’ll have an unelected bureacracy given complete authority over the value of a patient’s claim, which will allegedly do a better job, free from susceptibility to money and the efforts of aggressive lobbyists.
Of course it is impossible that a serious deficiency of primary care could coexist with a glut of unnecessary high-tech interventions of dubious medical value! That would be having it “both ways!”
And while we’re at it, insurance company bureaucrats don’t currently make vital decisions about what care you can have (sometimes retroactively)! If it happens behind the closed doors of corporate board rooms, it must not really happen.
Comments on this entry are closed.