Let me see if I understand what you are advocating here edit, that ALL Healthcare including , Doctor's, Hospitals, Research, etc all come under the employ of the government?
If we truly want the lowest cost universal health care system, NAV, I see no other path to provide that.
Every other semi-socialist system is bound to fail because it becomes the enabler which feeds a capitalist market which plays by the rule:
WHATEVER THE MARKET WILL BEAR
There's no free lunch, no matter what we choose to do.
We have only hard choices to make.
We can do nothing, and the rising cost of health care will eventually mean only the richest of the rich (and their servants of course) will have health care in this nation.
We can initiate some semi-socialist system like single player universal health care, and the market will eat up every additional cent that we put into that system without substantially improving health care outcomes in the medium run.
Or we can socialize the whole damned system, and likely the quality of care will go down somewhat ESPECIALLY for those of 10% us who have great private health care plans now.
In the socialized system, the people who are REALLY paying the price of it, are the HC providers who won't make huge amounts of money like they do now.
So they are truly the losers of that system. The HC community in all its aspects loses because the profit is taken out of it and they are employees of the state.
I expect a whole lot of highly skilled MDs would leave if we socialized medicine. Goodbye!
OTOH, included in a fully socialized system should be FREE EDUCATION FOR people going into the health care fields to offset their losses.
That would undoubtably offset the losses we'd experience as MDs (used to making ten or twenty times what the average family made) jumped ship or retired to play golf and condemn socialism with the boys in the club.
HC providers have enjoyed a wonderful monopoly on providing HC which in the last fifty years, and coupled with third party health insurance this situation has made them very very rich indeed compared to most of us.
But this happy state of affairs for them cannot go on forever.
Incidently, I am not advocating this fully socialized system.
I'm just telling you that if you want to have universal health care... it's the ONLY solution that won't entirely bankrupt society.
I'm just telling you that if you want to have universal health care... it's the ONLY solution that won't entirely bankrupt society.
The rules of supply and demand for HC are NOT like for any other good or service.
There is practically NO elasticity in prices, and ironically, in a capitalist system, the more doctors there are, the higher the cost to the society, without any that society enjoying any real appreciable improvement in morbitity or mortality statistics.
Odd isn't it?
But think about it...health care is the only thing we buy, that if we don't buy it when we need it, we lose everything. That makes for very motivated buyers indeed.
The consumer can't substitute something else for it, and while there is some difference in MD costs, who takes time to shop around when their health is on the line?
Certainly nobody who is having their HC paid by a third party like it is NOW in both public and private insurance schemes is doing any comparison shopping.
Baically, what I'm telling you is that the normal rules of supply and demand do not work in HEALTH CARE...not at least if you want you entire population to have access to health care.
phew!
Sorry to be so wordy, but there no simply way to explain all that, NAV