Conquer Club

Phatscotty wrote:

AAFitz wrote:I dont see what the big deal is... If a person doesnt have cancer, why would you want to routinely check for it?

I dont know, but he news on cervical, breast, and prostate cancer limitation reccomendations......does not quite fit into the whole "preventative medicine" could save billions......

All for the SEIU, get it thru your heads

Night Strike wrote:

Snorri1234 wrote:I mean, evidence has pretty clearly shown that when people pay for their care each time they go to the doctor (as opposed to having insurance and being free to go whenever they want) their choices are irrational and inefficient.

Since when? When people pay directly out of pocket for their care, they are more selective in what drugs and procedures they're going to pay for. True cost-cutting happens when people make their own purchases, not when a different organization (insurance or government) makes the bulk of the purchase after you pay a premium/co-pay.

The moral-hazard argument makes sense, however, only if we consume health care in the same way that we consume other consumer goods, and to economists like Nyman this assumption is plainly absurd. We go to the doctor grudgingly, only because we’re sick. “Moral hazard is overblown,” the Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt says. “You always hear that the demand for health care is unlimited. This is just not true. People who are very well insured, who are very rich, do you see them check into the hospital because it’s free? Do people really like to go to the doctor? Do they check into the hospital instead of playing golf?”

For that matter, when you have to pay for your own health care, does your consumption really become more efficient? In the late nineteen-seventies, the rand Corporation did an extensive study on the question, randomly assigning families to health plans with co-payment levels at zero per cent, twenty-five per cent, fifty per cent, or ninety-five per cent, up to six thousand dollars. As you might expect, the more that people were asked to chip in for their health care the less care they used. The problem was that they cut back equally on both frivolous care and useful care. Poor people in the high-deductible group with hypertension, for instance, didn’t do nearly as good a job of controlling their blood pressure as those in other groups, resulting in a ten-per-cent increase in the likelihood of death. As a recent Commonwealth Fund study concluded, cost sharing is “a blunt instrument.” Of course it is: how should the average consumer be expected to know beforehand what care is frivolous and what care is useful? I just went to the dermatologist to get moles checked for skin cancer. If I had had to pay a hundred per cent, or even fifty per cent, of the cost of the visit, I might not have gone. Would that have been a wise decision? I have no idea. But if one of those moles really is cancerous, that simple, inexpensive visit could save the health-care system tens of thousands of dollars (not to mention saving me a great deal of heartbreak). The focus on moral hazard suggests that the changes we make in our behavior when we have insurance are nearly always wasteful. Yet, when it comes to health care, many of the things we do only because we have insurance—like getting our moles checked, or getting our teeth cleaned regularly, or getting a mammogram or engaging in other routine preventive care—are anything but wasteful and inefficient. In fact, they are behaviors that could end up saving the health-care system a good deal of money.

thegreekdog wrote:Speaking of the US government being able to successfully run a program, does anyone remember how much money was spent per job created in the latest job bill? Was it $250,000 per job? Yeah, add that to the list of failed programs (Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and 2009 Job Bill). It would have cost us a lot less to give tax breaks to the average Joe.

xelabale wrote:

thegreekdog wrote:Speaking of the US government being able to successfully run a program, does anyone remember how much money was spent per job created in the latest job bill? Was it $250,000 per job? Yeah, add that to the list of failed programs (Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and 2009 Job Bill). It would have cost us a lot less to give tax breaks to the average Joe.

Yeah, then they'd take that tax break and go and create jobs for less privileged people right? They'd take their 200 dollars and improve the roads I guess? Or maybe they'd invest it in healthcare for themselves and their fellow Americans. Or, they'd head to Cancun and get pissed up whilst riding a banana boat.

Definitely one of those.

Snorri1234 wrote:You know, I've heard a lot of people say that social security and medicare are failed systems but noone has actually given me any facts on that.

"The net effect of the new guidelines is that screening would begin too late and its effects would be too little. We would save money, but lose lives," says Stephen Feig, MD, professor of radiology at the University of California at Irvine and president-elect of the American Society of Breast Imaging.

thegreekdog wrote:Or, alternatively to the two above, we can discuss how many jobs a company could create with $260K compared to how the government did. My company, for example, could have created almost 7 jobs (an associate starting salary being $40K). That's seven times the amount of jobs the government created.

MeDeFe wrote:

thegreekdog wrote:Or, alternatively to the two above, we can discuss how many jobs a company could create with $260K compared to how the government did. My company, for example, could have created almost 7 jobs (an associate starting salary being $40K). That's seven times the amount of jobs the government created.

So seven people would have jobs for a year, and after that?

MeDeFe wrote:

thegreekdog wrote:Or, alternatively to the two above, we can discuss how many jobs a company could create with $260K compared to how the government did. My company, for example, could have created almost 7 jobs (an associate starting salary being $40K). That's seven times the amount of jobs the government created.

So seven people would have jobs for a year, and after that?