[tolbiny]

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Saw an interview with Michael Moore, and he was talking about the knee-jerk negative reaction many people have to the term "socialized medicine". His argument was that health care should not be a for-profit business. Insurance companies are beholden to their shareholders to maximize their profit. This creates a natural conflict between what's good for the shareholders, and what might be best for the patient (as in, expensive treatments).

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One of the biggest problems with socialized ___________ is the difficulty (impossibility) or performing economic calculations well. Think about how complex medicine is. How long should doctors be in school/residency? How much training do nurses need? How many ways should each specialize? How many of each are needed? How much do we pay them to get the number and quality that we need? How do you decide between doctors who specialize in organ transplants, and foot surgeons? There are millions of questions to answer when discussing how to go about figuring out quality and quantity needs. Profits and losses are used as a way to figure out if you are providing enough of service X or to much of product Y.

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He then mentioned that we already have some socialized services in the USA, which people have no problem with. He used the example of fire departments, which provide service to everyone and are not expected to turn a profit.

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People don't care about the fire department because its 0.1% the size and complexity of the health care industry. Its less prevalent in people's lives, but if a million peoples homes caught fire every day you would damn sure want a system in place that would figure out how much fire protection to provide the best safety to cost ratio.

Micheal Moore likes to pretend that we have limitless resources, and that we ought to just give them away to anyone who asks without thinking about how this effects availability to others, and how this effects future generations.