Do you think our health insurance should be provided by for-profit companies?

I think health care and profit need to be separated. Like education, health care is a public good and not a money-maker.

Shit, the USPS can get a letter to the middle of nowhere for 42 cents. They can be efficient.

Really? What role does does the insurance company play? They make money and don’t provide anything. But they make tons of profit. FUCK THEM, it is time for them to die.

What ^^they^^ said.

GQ for topics.

Lets see… wealthy companies making money off of sick people.. mmmm… nah, I don’t think so.

The incentives are FUBAR. Single payer please.

Anything that serves the public interest should have the profit motive removed, regardless of how much more “efficiently” a private company “might” be able to do it. As long as the profit motive exists, and a corporation exists solely for the purposes of making money for the owner/investors, there will always be a motivation to make MORE money. The drive to make MORE money will INVARIABLY end up being a net negative thing as soon as the choice between doing the right thing and the most profitable thing comes along. In health insurance it’s easy to see this happening as soon as someone develops an expensive illness, if the health insurer can find a technicality on which it can avoid paying these claims, it WILL in a for profit system.

I’m going to have to disagree with you there dalepetrie. There are a great many things where profit motive leads to a positive sum for all parties. The problem is that there are also a few things where it really really doesn’t. Health care is one of them.

@swuesquire – as I said, anything that serves the public interest. I’m not for privatising all business. I’m for keeping and making the things private that people rely on, because even though the profit motive can make a lot of things more efficient and can lead to great innovation, where profit and the public interest conflict, profit will always win out in a for profit business, that’s by definition.

@dalepetrie Its not just about greed. A single payer system could provide health insurance without having to spend money on overhead such as advertising or a profit margin.

@boots I was hoping someone would notice that

@benjaminlevi – I agree, there are a thousand reasons to support single payer that I didn’t have time or room to touch on. But I do have to acknowledge that some times the competition that comes from the profit motive can be a productive thing in terms of innovation. As much as I like single payer, I think the big money interests have been too entrenched for too long to pull out what we have in place, so I think that health care reform can go a long way into making for profit businesses obey rules that serve the public interest in cases where the public interest and profit motive are at odds, and that should be the focus of the plan, but because there will always be new factors to consider, the only way to keep a private system honest is to at the same time institute a public, not for profit option that will compete with the private plans. In this way, costs are kept down in the public sector, but some of the efficiencies that private carriers can put into place to keep costs down may not be part of this plan, so it makes the plan cost enough to keep it simply competitive (and not business killing) for the private providers, and the private providers though they will have efficiencies not afforded to the public plan, they will have to make sure they keep their offerings in terms of not only cost, but service levels, competitive with the public option. I think both systems will keep each other honest….private plans competing with the public plan will make it impossible to sustain if the public plan engages in wasteful spending, and the competition from a public option which guarantees a solid level of care to all will only be undersold if the private plan providers keep their quality levels high.