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From: mcgeer%sirius.berkeley.edu@UCBVAX.BERKELEY.EDU
Newsgroups: mod.politics
Subject: Re:  Poli-Sci Digest   V6 #78
Message-ID: <12240609388.25.MCGREW@RED.RUTGERS.EDU>
Date: Sun, 21-Sep-86 01:15:36 EDT
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Posted: Sun Sep 21 01:15:36 1986
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>>If government pays for something:
>>
>>1) The price skyrockets.
>>   Government really has no control.  Doctors say 'it costs this
>>   much' what are they going to do?
>
>This is an unjustified and unsupported defeatist attitude.  Here in
>the United States our medical costs are higher than in England with
>socialized medicine.  Why should government have no control?
>Government can set maximum prices for common procedures the same way
>that Health Insurance carriers here in the United States do now.
>Don't even bother to reply that there will be much waste and fraud
>because that same waste and fraud exists in the United States today
>under our present system.

(1) Health care costs in England are lower because the standard of
care in England is far lower.  Transplants, for example, are not done
in England.  Has it ever occured to any of our Kennedyite
correspondents that the only major new therapies we've seen in the
last 15 years have been pioneered in the US?  Guess why.  Governments
won't pay for experimental therapies.

(2) Waste and fraud?  Well, Canada's medicare system is by all
accounts far more effective than Britain's NHS.  But in Saskatchewan,
some years back, the government announced that it was considering the
establishment of a board to review elective surgery.  Hysterectomies
immediately fell by 2/3.

                                        -- Rick
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