Something that completely gets lost from the healthcare debate and is applicable to most issues is basic economics. In case you didn't know economics if basically about how to deal with unlimited wants with limited resources. In other words there will always be "rationing". The real debate out to be about where that "rationing" should happen. It can be in a few places.
The government (big brother) can do it.
Your employer can do it.
Insurance companies can do it.
Or you can do it.
However you slice and dice it. Take all the rich people's money, borrow and finance debt, suck your employer dry, mortgage your house and take on debt, you can't have everything you want. So who can make the best decisions for you? There answer always seems brutally honest for me. You can always make better decisions for yourself and your family than anyone else.
Back in the day before insurance, or before insurance paid for everything people used to do this themselves, just like they do for everything else in your lives. Because when you pay with your own dollars, you are always very good at scrutinizing the cost/benefit. Think about when you go to the doctor vs when you take you pet. The vet will say you can run this test, or do that and it will cost X, and that might tell you Y, and then we could do Z, or it might tell you nothing and just cost you money. And then you make a decision about how much you want to spend vs the value of the test/procedure. When you do that you are "rationing". But doesn't it make so much sense. You get to decide how much that pet means to you and your family, what you have to spend, and the value of the service being offered.
One of the reasons healthcare is so expensive is because there is a total lack of price control. No one knows what the costs are until months later when the bills trickle in. And up and down the food chain the providers know how to offer more services that don't do anything to help you, but get them paid. My favorite example of that, is the hospital near my house that has a policy that every person in the ER get an IV. Add up the the costs of the glucose, the needle, the nurse to intert it, the waste costs... Its sorta staggering how much that costs per hour x 24 x 365. They wouldn't do it, if they weren't getting paid all the while. What's worse is when you try to stop them its like a whole big thing. I ask myself, I'm actually saving you money aren't I ? Not really cause thats a whole bunch of money they won't get from the gov't or your insurance company. Waste.
Michael Moore and company would point to france or places like that where they attempt to incentivize the provider for fixing your problem vs offering a bunch of services that don't ever help. While that sounds good in theory its still largely ineffective because it make more sense to just put the power in the hands of the person receiving the benefit, as they can always make better decisions for themselves based on their economic situation and the benefit of the service.
So if everyone took a little more responsibility with their pockets books yes, price controls would come in and fix things. Especially if there was some damn transparency about what the costs of things are up front vs two months later. But its all a big scam. Everyone wants to blame the insurance companies but its really the providers who are winning this game. Just like education. No one blame the crappy institutions that cost too much and sell you a shitty product and leave you with a worthless diploma that doesn't get you a job.
Basically it all comes down to removing the decisions from the consumer and putting someone, the gov't, an insurance company, some 3rd party in the way. We'd all be a lot better off if we just took back control, even if you think it would cost more. Because I can guarantee you in the end it will cost much less if we operated this way.
So I think things like health savings accounts make a hell of a lot more sense then any of the ridiculous ideas put forth by congress or the current POTUS. I think we'd see fairly quickly that the cost problem comes into check and people receive better service. In the end if we did that well there would plenty of money to help the poor and old.
