G-Flex wrote:AEmer wrote:I believe his belief is that people will step in with charity in most cases - and that there will be very, very few, because only a very small percentage of people will be willing to take the risk of running with no insurance in the first place.
Except it's trivial to see that charity
doesn't provide for people that often, and that a lot of people can't afford health insurance even when it
is (sorta) well-regulated.
His point would be, that's because of a rotten culture. That there is a dialectic between the role government assumes, and the role people are willing to assume. That when government assumes control of a practice, people become unconcerned with it; they skirt their responsibility.
He's arguing, people who aren't getting insurance right now are doing so because the emergeancy room is going to not only be free, it is going to be risk-free. Charity would be different; with charity, if you're being abusive of the system, it might say 'no, you made your bed, now you can damn well lay in it'.
You might say, 'HAHA!, but there are people who are currently being denied insurance, what about them?' - Pauls retort would be, 'It's been that way for decades, and we have done nothing, because we have these emergeancy rooms people fall back on. It has allowed lawmakers to skirt their responsibility. If people were forced to rely on charity, we would have regulated the insurance industry long ago, because of a change in public oppinion'.
In other words, Paul is arguing that the troubles with health care are systemic. That the incentive structure is messed up, and therefore every current facet of how healthcare works is twisted and different from how it would be according to his vision.
Because of this, no, it is not trivial to see. Also, here's another fact about his position: The US currently isn't a single payer system, but the government _has_ socialized healthcare to the tune of 60% of the cost _already_ (2006 numbers). Paul is arguing, this system, the one you have, is ridiculously inefficient - and doing a federal health care system would be even worse. He's arguing that you can't afford this system at all. He's right that it's the most inefficient in the world; and he might even be right that a federal system can never be as efficient as competing models.
Again, this is idealism, and I think it's terribly naive. On the other hand, I have my own pet ideal system - Direct Repressentative Democracy - that I think would solve everything, which might also be hopelessly naive. Regardless: On this one, Pauls belief hinges on something you can neither confirm or deny to be true, because his idea is very radical.