Feeling Randy, Part 5

Digby has a point:  Republican physicians turned politicians are the ones saying there's not enough profit margins in health care, and that "reforms" need to consist of making us pay more to stay healthy.  As far as first doing no harm, well...here's my favorite Galtie ophthalmologist, Rand Paul!

AB: You’re a doctor. We see a lot of doctors who go into politics, from both sides of the political divide. What can a doctor bring to lawmaking that perhaps a lawyer wouldn’t bring?

RP: Doctors, myself included, bring a perspective on the health care problems and what we should do with health care reform, and that will be an issue that has great interest to me. But I bring to that table the same arguments I would bring for every other area of the economy: capitalism works, competition works, and the reason health care’s broken is not too much capitalism, it’s too little capitalism. We could get it to work if we could bring capitalism to play.

AB: Bring capitalism to play in what way?

RP: Well, right now there’s almost no capitalism involved in health care. Capitalism involves freely fluctuating prices that consumers engage on a daily basis. Fifty percent of what I do is Medicare, the price is fixed, 5% of what I do is Medicaid, the prices are fixed. You can’t choose your doctor based on price. You can choose premiums with the insurance company, but there’s no market place. We need higher deductibles. We need multi-year insurance plans. Health insurance needs to be more like term life insurance, so there are some reforms that we could bring into it.

Wow.  The problem with this multi trillion dollar industry, 1/6th of our economy as the Republicans will tell you every 35 seconds, is that there's not enough profit in it.   If people have to pay more, and health care becomes more expensive, more people will be doctors because that's where the profits are.  Of course that means you have to pay significantly more than you do now, making the most expensive health care system in the world even more expensive.

Yes, let's bring Wall Street to the doctor's office even more.  Not enough profits in this $2 trillion mess. Somebody's getting all this money.  And it's not you.

And Rand Paul want to bring that to all sections of the economy, not just health care.  Time to pay up under the Teabaggers, folks!

Open up (your wallets) and say "Ahh!"