It’s not a perfect metaphor - but an interesting one. Banks take in money and lend out money, keeping enough in the pot for the predicted cash flow while having the rest of out in the community working. I’m thinking Jimmy Stewart here, in the plea he makes during the bank run in “It’s a Wonderful Life”…

A national health care system is actually kind of like a national health bank. Taxpayers can be paying into it or they can borrow its resources by consuming services. Rather than using that value to build wealth, they build health. Maintaining health lets them work more productively and contribute through taxes back to the system. Rather than just their own wealth or assets increasing, the overall economy grows…

Ack! I don’t know!! But I do like the idea of that Jimmy Stewart clip used in the argument for universal health care.

Reading her post (mostly written in fact by another zombie named Valenti) was a sickening experience.

Awhile back I wrote a couple of posts on the U.S. “system” called “Demand Supply” and “Unhealthy Care,” in which I argued that the “system” is skewed toward creating profitable health care products and providing boutique services to people with means to pay for them, but our capacity to provide basic health care — including hospital emergency rooms — is being allowed to rot because they are not profitable.

It’s so screwed up now that even if we all woke up tomorrow morning and found that the Good Health Care Fairy had brought us a single payer system, it will take years before the capacity to provide essential services catches up to demand.

http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/348604.html?thread=4754876#t4754876
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joxn wrote: My point is this, of course: the basic healthcare that everyone needs to stay alive and healthy is not something which an insurance policy is designed to handle. Insurance policies are for rare but statistically definable events. But basic healthcare is not rare — although it is statistically definable: everyone will have to have it, and in the case of preventive care, they’ll have to use it for it to be beneficial.
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That would mean that risk-pooling may not be the right way to think of health provision at all - maybe pure reciprocal altruism - an anathema to those who hate the notion that human beings depend on each other (or should be able to…)

But this is all an argument *within* capitalism. Except for pure libertarians, most people feel that there is *some* role for governments in capitalist economies.

BTW, your next comment (deleted) landed you back in the twit filter. Sorry. I clear it out every six months or so and start over, so check back around Christmastime.

With a hybrid system - universal public coverage with an opt-out provision, private insurance companies would have to offer *real* value, in order to lure people away from the public system. That would create the efficiencies of a market, I think…

In other words, to make the market competitive (non-economist struggling with concepts here), introducing a live-option alternative to *all* private coverage might get around the contradiction Michael Moore describes between profit and the provision of care…

Most people in the industrialized world can relax in the awareness that the government provides the basic conditions for a good society to flourish, including roads, sewage systems, military and police protection, courts of law, and a well-educated, healthy workforce. If universal health care isn’t a right, it certainly is economically smart. It provides a baseline for an active society.

It rocks, basically. It’s *way* worth paying higher taxes. People think of the cost of taxes imposed without realizing how they would no longer have to carry their own healthcare costs. It’s not a matter of dependency, its mutual aid or reciprocal altruism. The strong support the weak, knowing that no one is strong forever.

You should do some math, if you think 4 out of 5 Americans being satisfied with their healthcare is insignificant. Also, how many of those 4 simply (before Sicko) had no sense of the alternatives?