On 4-Jan-2004, (Snowbird) wrote:

Hear, hear! Aside from adding in, that many people who lack
health insurance wind up in hospital, at public expense, for
severe complications of easily-treatable conditions whose
(much cheaper) treatment wasn't covered.

It's definitely a broken system. What makes me spit is that
every time someone suggests changing it, we hear "then we'll
get triage! we'll get delays!" Well folks we get triage and
delays now, they're just usually not in the public eye.


Yes, that's it exactly. If EVERYONE had health insurance total health care
spending would go DOWN! When an uninsured is treated in an emergency room
(the most expensive kind of care, and usually the only place that will treat
the uninsured) who pays the bills? WE ALL DO. In some cases costs are
borne by taxes, in others they are passed along to other users of the
hospital, which are reflected in higher costs for health insurance.

There are really only two "solutions". We can let the uninsured die of
treatable conditions (morally unacceptable) or we can find a way to insure
EVERYONE, like every other industrialized country has long since been doing.

-Elliott Drucker