Michael Cannon: Is Health Care a Right or Privilege?

Is health care a right or a privilege? Michael Cannon, of the Cato Institute, and Dr. Hoangmai Pham, of the National Physicians Alliance, debate the topic.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• cato
• institute
• health
• care
• obama
• benefits
• uninsured

[hauskalainen]

@totheman An ineffective health care is a health care system in which insurers only want to insure healthy people and make sick people pay more. Its insurance which is about spreading risk and not selecting for it!!! An ineffective system has fee-for-service which incentivizes over treatment of wealthy/insured and úndertreatment of poor and unsinsured. An effective service is one which costs $6k instead of $13k per year per person yet its clients live longer and in better health.

[totheman]

@hauskalainen What would qualify as ineffective health care?

[berbatovinho77]

USA System = make money off of sick patients

Any other modern country = lets try to make our population healthy

which one is healthcare?

[MsZeitgeist85]

Of course Cannon is wrong he wants to vaucherizie Medicare.

[hauskalainen]

If all doctors were salaried and paid for like the firefighters, they would be assured of their income and could focus 100% on using their medical skills. They would not have to fight insurance companies or employ clerks to handle the paperwork and wouldn't worry about keeping patients rolling through the doors to maintain their income.

The US system incentivizes over treatment of the insured and undertreatment of the uninsured. It is stupid.

[hauskalainen]

If Canon was right, in France or Germany, or Spain, or England, where doctors and nurses have a right to work in public or private practice and people have a right to public or private health care or insurance, there would be ineffective health care. In fact the opposite is true. It IS effective and available to everyone and costs HALF the price of health care in the US,

[hauskalainen]

Health care resource utilization has what economists call a negative utility of consumption. Put simply, a person who spends 1 day in hospital is not better off than a person who spends 10 days in hospital.

Would you be better off if the Fire Department had hose down a fire at your house once a year instead of once every 10 years? Its the same with health care once you take payment out of the equation...

[guyjohn59]

Did the millions of Russians that starved to death under Lenin and Stalin have 'the right' to not starve to death? Probably; but because they believed in that right, they starved to death.

[qwertypoiu4321]

You have a right to freedom and Voluntarism, not a right to commit criminal coercion.

Coercive Sector Medical Care is criminal and all of the individuals upholding it should be charged as such. Everything should be voluntary, the opposite of criminal socialism.

[Rodriguez8611]

@DaveDoggOwns ......you said that the cost is proportional, remember?. What I meant is that, it doesn't matter if you're rich and therefore you have more to protect, and since I'm poor, I have less to lose; the military won't defend your side of the bed more than mines, it will defend the our common space equally, yet you paid more.

Yes, the rich will have to pay more...... what a burden!. Those who can't afford health care or food are SOOO lucky!. I wish I was poor man, wouldn't you?