Health Care BS Spouts BS
It’s really kind of sad/scary/amusing that a guy that runs a blog called “Health Care BS” and claims to have spent 20 years in health care finance doesn’t know the difference between a single-payer system and a national health service.
Boy David Catron, that’s pretty embarrassing:
For years, advocates of socialized medicine have been extolling the virtues of the VA hospital system. Ignoring the collective cri du coeur (No! Don’t do it!) from veterans who have actually been subjected to its tender mercies, the single-payer evangelists have doggedly insisted that the Veterans Administration constitutes a good model for a “universal” civilian system.
(Nice one-two with the “socialized medicine” buzzword there.) If Mr. Catron knew what single-payer is (and honestly, I think he does, but couldn’t pass up an opportunity), he would realize that single-payer advocates advocate for a private health care system, publicly funded. No single-payer advocate I know of is advocating for a “universal civilian system,” like the VA, where government owned facilities and government-employed docs and nurses provide the health care.
I’ll say it until I’m blue in the face: NHS isn’t NHI.
The emptiness of your position is demonstrated by your deployment of ad hominem cheap shots in lieu of any intelligent response to my basic point. In reality, “single-payer” and “universal” health care are nothing more than euphemisms for “socialized medicine.” From the perspective of the patients who would receive “care” in such a system, these distinctions would be utterly meaningless.
I find it amusing that advocates of government-controlled health care are so touchy about the term “socialized medicine.” It reminds me of the used car dealers who use euphemisms like “pre-owned.” Now, why do they do that? Hmm … could it be that they’re trying to pull one over on a gullible public? Sounds like BS to me.
They’re far from useless, and if you’ve done any reading in the health policy sphere, you’d realize that they’re completely distinct entities and have very different implications.
Socialized medicine is just a scare buzzword from the 1980s; you’ll notice we don’t talk about “socialized firefighters,” “socialized roads,” or “socialized medical research,” but they’re all “government-controlled,” too.
“Government-controlled” sounds more frightening to me than “socialized.”
To ask an honest question though, if I receive all my reimbursement from the government through public funds, how am I not a government physician working at a government hospital?
OK, so I went back and read your blog on NHS v. NHI, and the only difference I see is salaried government docs who get all their funds from the government versus “private” docs who get all their funds from the government. Is salary the only difference?
In NHS, the government owns and runs and operates all the hospitals and clinics and equipment, and employs all the staff.
In NHI, the government pays for these things, but doesn’t own them, they’re still owned and controlled by the private sector.
How is the sole entity who pays me all that I earn, not my employer? (Except that in the private sector, it couldn’t turn right around and tax my earnings right back to itself)