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Town Crier: Is health care bill realistic? Tracy PressHaving invested 39 years of my life in the Health Insurance industry I find it interesting when someone tries to make sense of it. Most of the comparisons are not really apples to apples and I do not think it is appropriate to compare the financing of health care (an unavoidable necessity)to a purely optional expense such as beer, for example. Requiring insurance companies to spend 85% of premiums on health claims (the "loss ration" in insurance jargon) is a very reasonable level. Don;t expect insurers to express delight with this level any more than any company might express delight on a limitation of their profitability. Health insurers have lived in a very lax world in which inefficiency has been the norm rather than the exception. Administrative costs for transactions (claims) in health care are multiples of the cost of transactions in the finance (another not quite apples to apples comparison but merely an illustrative example). And the transaction costs are remarkably high for bothGovernment health insurance, Social Security, private mortgage lendersAt this site and others you might have come across the libertarian argument that State-provided medical insurance will out-compete private medical insurance because the State has the privilege of coercing ever-increasing tax revenues out of its captives. For instance, I blagged about Sheldon Richman’s recent column putting forth this and other solid arguments. In response to this line of reasoning, I have come across a counter-argument from Statists that goes, “Yeah, government medical insurance will crowd out private insurance just like Social Security did away with private retirement funds and Fannie Mae made private mortgage lenders obsolete.” Ha! If you want to compare the future of your beloved government health insurance to the other governmental failures of Social Security and Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, go right ahead! What does their impracticality, their inefficiency, and indeed their criminality, together with the fact that they continue to exist in our society, tell you about the nature of private vs. “public” ventures? If you think the taxpayer-funded health insurance will do just as well for its subscribers and for the rest of the country at large, you can assert that all you want! File this under the “Statists are hopelessly stupid and so is their worldview” category. ArrayBe covered by the World's Leading Medical Insurance Cover - BUPA. No matter where you work, Bupa may be able to provide the healthcare ... Private Medical Insurance - News
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