If you weren’t so busy with your moral preening, Chris, you’d realize that this sort of comment proves my point.

I’ve poked around here in your blog, and I agree with Marc, you really have the bean counter’s sense of the world. You demonstrate no real knowledge of healthcare, and by that, I mean the taking care of sick people part. The putting yourself in their shoes part. The seeing wasted healthcare dollars by private insurers (beyond Medicare stupidest dreams). You understand finance, apparently. Good for you. So do the people in the French, Belgian and other well functioning systems where all are covered and all share the benefits and burdens based upon need, not income.

Good luck with that. Do you think God will put you with the Sheep or the Goats at the end (Matthew 25)?

BTW, I could make lots of comments abut your apparent “self complacent cluelessness,” but that would bea cheap shot.

Cheers,
Cheers,

I can pretty much guarantee that his practice incurs significant losses every year pursuant to his self-complacent cluelessness. I have been called in on many occasions to prevent such hardheads from going bankrupt or getting into serious compliance trouble with CMS.

I guess you’ve forgotten your comprehensive rebttal by Ron Chusid:

‘For over twenty years I’ve been involved in the billing and administration of a medical practice. Every week I see what is and what is not paid, and where my staff wastes time fighting with insurers. Medicare is the least of our problems. Generally we submint a claim to Medicare electronically and in about three weeks we have a check. When there is a rejection I can usually go on line to their web site and find the pertinent rules so that I can adust the claim to get it paid. My staff often spends hours on the phone trying to fix problems with other insurers.’

Seriously, you have clearly studied this at length. I am interested in your proposals.

Here, however, is something that IS interesting. It discusses insurance market distortions caused by government, and how they can be ameliorated.

Or maybe your position is that hey, healthcare is expensive and should be and I like the status quo. It’s a valued commodity. Which is fine, but just say so.

We get how you feel about single payer, so the question is now what do YOU think we should do?

Ah … But their effects ARE. The essence of socialized medicine is not in the nominal ownership of the providers, but in the idea that central government planning is somehow superior to the operation of the market. History has shown that to be a delusion.

But, since we already have a single-payer system (called Medicare), we don’t have to speculate about the inefficiency of such systems. Here’s a Health Affairs piece that explores but a few of that program’s many flaws.

Oh, and BTW, if my position on this were based on my personal employment status, I would be ecstatic about single-payer health care. For one thing, I can make a great living helping financially naive physicians excavate themselves from beneath the mountain of problems under which government-run heath care would inevitably bury them.