8537
VIP Member
Here? Are you in Vermont?
oops...yes, I am. That might help explain my posts a bit better
Truth be told, I grew up in California and my dad worked for the phone company. We had an HMO called Kaiser Permanente which in my humble opinion was phenomenal. If I could be assured that our hospitals were going to be run with the efficiency of Kaiser, I would be jumping for joy and lobbying for the change without a moment's hesitation. Note: not everyone who had Kaiser agrees with me.
But, what I foresee is a government run health insurance company without any of the checks and balances offered by the free market and that is what scares the shit out of me.
Immie
Kaiser is actually a far larger insurer than any system in Vermont will cover - I believe it's got something like 7.5M subscribers, and our entire state is only 620,000 people. Kaiser, however, made a lot of the efficiency advancements that a single-payer system will help create: a streamlined system where the doctors, hospitals, insurers and providers are all part of the same system.
In my humble opinion, health insurance and health care delivery can never be efficiently distributed strictly through the free market. But that's another discussion...
Interesting conversation nonetheless.