I was asked why I oppose the public option and what I would do to reform the MediTwins...

The public option would totally work for liberal goals...but I disagree with the goals and the metrics used to get to those goals.

The public option's main idea is to work as a 'baseline competitor.' For instance: do you seriously use the post office for anything? I dont. But its the 'crap' version of UPS and FedEx...Obama's logic with the public option seems to be that, if we've got that, the rest of the insurance companies will automatically be more efficient. Okay......no one's going to disagree with that 'efficiency' principle (1) and (2) the system already does that BUT FOR government roadblocks (like insurance companies not being able to sell between states...which makes regulation of them by the federal government directly unconstitutional right now, but who cares about that document anyway :( ).

Thus my disagreement comes: it costs way too much (it takes all the costly inefficiencies in the current companies, multiplies them, and centralizes them under one forced-increase-funded source...thus 'breaking' society like Medicare and Medicaid are now)...

...and it will inevitably expand into nationalized health care given the support single payer has from lunatics in DC (Historical example: AMTRAK forced out all other passenger train systems until Reagan cut off their tax$ support, thus realizing higher prices paid by riders...by then, traveling by train had gone culturally 'out of style' and few use it anymore...choosing cars and hurting the environment/whatever- same concept w/ public option).

If you want to lower the cost of medical care, you have to get rid of the 1940's concept of insurance. 21st century dental insurance is a perfect example: Aspen Dental in Holland, MI charges $30 for a cleaning. Small business dentists charge $60 per cleaning and have much more profit than Aspen. Aspen will not accept insurance while 'local' dentists draw those with insurance. Why? If you have to pay out of pocket, you care about the cost; having insurance with a set premium eliminates that care. This injects competition much faster than a MASSIVE and EXPANDING and HISTORIC and WHATEVER government program.

Working within the current concept of insurance, %-based premiums would have the same effect (to a smaller and slower degree) in the private sector as eliminating insurance completely (something we shouldnt do...free markets and all). If I have to pay 25% of my Allegra-D, I'd pay like $30; if I had to pay 25% of the generic, I'd spend $2.50 for the same thing. Right now I have a flat $5 premium for my script insurance...so I'm going to go with the hugely expensive brand version because I dont care about the cost. %-based premiums simply provide an incentive to lower costs across the board with little or no impact on Research and Development.

Second on the Public Option, research and development will DIE as private corps start to lower prices to the self insured. In a WAM BAM DO IT NOW government solution, theyll cut the most expendable thing: R&D. This means a world-wide dark age for pharmaceuticals (i.e. end up going with Galen's pre-Christ research in the 1700's...a dark age in pharma). No new drugs, no new medicines advertised on tv, nothing. (The US produces 85-90% of treatments/drugs in the world. Second is UK, third Japan)
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To reform M/M: first of all, privatize Social Security and put Medicaid back under the SSA. It was stupid to separate it in the 70's and has been an abject, dismal failure. When that's done, the people that take it over will immediately move to personal medical savings accounts for those under 30, and pay out for those who have paid in already. Third, I'd make Social Security optional so it and its new Healthcare Department have to compete with private life insurance companies...like it did in the 50's when it 'worked' (read: lost to private insurance co's...until we outlawed them. Reagan's 1964 GOP convention speech references SS failures).

For Medicare: take all of it and put it under the states. If you crazies really want wealth redistributed from those 'rich' places like Michigan to those 'poor' places like Texas (as it is now lol), youd continue the contributions. However, I wouldnt do that...let the states do it all. If they run it into the ground, it'll be much more public and much easier for people to fix them. It was public in the 60's when they ran their own welfare states into the ground...and you can hide it much easier in Washington...thus the political elite put it in Washington in the 70's...

There will also be more innovation in improving the system due to having 50 different ways of doing it. A large number of cases along a normal distribution works much better for improving systems than a SINGLE NATIONAL FIST way of doing things (see picture...the center or average quality/cost, in this case, will 'chase' the top dawgs toward higher quality and lower cost to the right)

...then we're talking about the first book I'm going to begin writing next year...on how governments attempt to create a 'present' (something that doesnt exist) within which to operate and fix things.

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