Romney CRUSHES Obama

[Feanor]

I thought the President made some excellent comments about healthcare and the need to curb healthcare costs.

Other than that, it was pretty one-sided.


Lol, "Mr. President, you can have your own house and you can have your own plane but you can't have your own facts..."

I still don't know whether it's clear to many Americans that the Medicare funding predicament is caused by two factors:

* Ageing populations -- though this is much less a problem in the USA than Japan or Europe
* Overall healthcare costs that are rising at multiples of inflation in the USA.

The first problem is unavoidable. The second is largely avoidable given the political will.

Various other countries have controlled cost much better by determining which procedures, drugs, etc., are cost effective and limiting those which are relatively less so. This is what the board of experts, so criticized by Romney, would do; (note that the board wouldn't make individual treatment decisions).

By contrast ,the USA's system is a largely for-profit system. In the case of healthcare, neither the patient nor the health provider are incented to control costs which born instead, given most people have some insurance, by the insurance provider. Expensive and/or relatively cost ineffective procedures are of then demanded because they are new or trendy.

Insurance providers in some instances try to control cost using HMOs and the like, but more generally just raise premiums to cover the services demanded. The healthcare "consumer choice" in healthcare, so vaunted by the for-profit healthcare industry, (insurers & providers), is the direct cause of soaring healthcare costs in the US.

BTW, voucherize Medicare would turn much decision making over to for-profit insurance company -- a further retreat from rational, cost-effective healthcare.