Quote:
Originally Posted by pocketkangaroo
Our current healthcare system isn't exactly privatized. Insurance companies rely heavily on government laws and regulations that allow them to exploit customers. From not allowing Americans to purchase overseas, having them dictate medical treatment, and allowing them huge tax breaks makes them less a story of capitalistic success and more about sucking the dicks of the right Senators to make their business easy.
On top of that, everyone who buys health insurance or pays their own medical bills is paying for socialized medicine. A true private healthcare system can turn away people, can deny healthcare. Our current system doesn't allow that, and the people who do pay their bills are the ones who pay for the poor. It's why Aspirin is $20, why a simple MRI is hundreds, and why just staying in a bed in a hospital for a night is over $10,000.
So we need to stop saying that our system is privatized. It's still socialized medicine with flaws. The difference is whether we pay for the poor in our taxes or through our health insurance. So I'm not saying that the government should run everything, but I'm saying that our current healthcare system is far from a private system that utilizes capitalism.
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I think you hit on some good points. I think what we have is a partially failing capitalistic system and a partially socialized system. The people in the capitalistic system are those with private polices, employer provided policies and those without insurance. They people in the socialized system are those on Medicare/Medicaid and/or some other federal or state government provided insurance. The problem for those of us stuck in the private system is that our private system has become a monopolistic system where all of the key players are involved in a silent conspiracy to extract maximum profit from those of us suck in that system. In other words it simply isn’t a functioning free market anymore.