![\"aleutian\"](\"http:\/\/www.dkms.com\/kmci\/alllifeisproblemsolving\/wp-content\/themes\/cutline-3-column-split-11\/images\/aleutian_t.jpg\")
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This will be a pretty short one. First, health care reform proposals that offer a \u201cpublic option\u201d alternative do not provide \u201csocialized medicine.\u201d That is, all medical care in such proposed systems would be provided by private sector Doctors, hospitals, and other other health care institutions. Government in such a plan doesn’t do any medicine. The only thing it does is give people an opportunity to buy insurance from a public agency. Charges from the right that this is \u201csocialized medicine\u201d are just attempts to use \u201cscary\u201d labels to prevent efforts to bring insurance companies under control. The worst you can say about them is that they provide a \u201csocialized\u201d insurance option, but not that they provide \u201csocialized medicine.\u201d It’s time everyone recognized the distinction between the two. Most of the health care systems in the world that work better than ours are \u201csocialized insurance systems,\u201d not \u201csocialized medicine systems.\u201d<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n Now, why would one want to have \u201csocialized insurance\u201d? Simply because the market system in the insurance industry is broken. It works to ration health care, to deny the insured services based on technicalities, and it is monopolistic so that competition doesn’t work to reduce prices and control costs. In other words, there is no market in the classical sense of a supply and demand system. There is only a group of very large companies that administer prices and extract profits from consumers. A \u201csocialized insurance\u201d system can stop the profit extraction and administer prices in such a way as to bring health care costs under control. Provided that the system is adequately funded, it can greatly reduce the rationing that exists in the system now, and would serve people better, as we can already see from the way systems like this have worked in other nations. In short, \u201csocialized insurance\u201d is a fix for a broken insurance market that for reasons made clear<\/a> by Paul Krugman, can never be fixed.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n Second, the distinction between \u201csocialized insurance\u201d and \u201csocialized medicine,\u201d applies just as well to single payer plans, the systems that Republicans have been attacking as \u201csocialized medicine\u201d since the days of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Single payer systems are not \u201csocialized medicine.\u201d To call them that is to lie about them. They involve no Government medicine, only Government funding of health care services. The are \u201csocialized insurance,\u201d not \u201csocialized medicine.\u201d So, in closing, let me quote the GOPs favorite current oracle. \u201cHow ’bout ya quit making things up.\u201d<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This will be a pretty short one. First, health care reform proposals that offer a \u201cpublic option\u201d alternative do not provide \u201csocialized medicine.\u201d That is, all medical care in such proposed systems would be provided by private sector Doctors, hospitals, and other other health care institutions. Government in such a plan doesn’t do any medicine. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[693],"tags":[1995,1693,911,1659,1677,1992,1668],"class_list":["post-237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-1995","tag-health-care-reform","tag-paul-krugman","tag-public-option","tag-single-payer","tag-socialized-insurance","tag-socialized-medicine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmci.org\/alllifeisproblemsolving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmci.org\/alllifeisproblemsolving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmci.org\/alllifeisproblemsolving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmci.org\/alllifeisproblemsolving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmci.org\/alllifeisproblemsolving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kmci.org\/alllifeisproblemsolving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmci.org\/alllifeisproblemsolving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmci.org\/alllifeisproblemsolving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmci.org\/alllifeisproblemsolving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}