14 thoughts on ““Free””

1. And don’t forget that anytime the gov’t spends money, there is tremendous amounts of fraud. Look at Medicare/Medicaid, where fraud is in the billions per year. New York City transit workers who all come down with a case of the disability around age 50. Minnesota EBT cards being spent in Chicago liquor stores.

2. Just today, the clueless and moronic Nancy Pelosi, admits that Obamacare is flawed. So she suggested a “fix” that we all knew was coming anyway. Wait for it…a single payer system!

3. Those familiar with the EMS system may also note that when healthcare is free, some parents choose to use an ambulance to take their cold-infected kids to the doctor.

   While the wait time here is still negligible, the cost isn’t. Perhaps in Australia a shoe related to their medical system had dropped, whereas we’re still waiting for ours to hit the ground. Ours will likely be much louder than theirs …

4. It really illustrates how providers come out of the woodwork when people are actually paying for a service and disappear when they have to work with the government. It is as if markets work or something.

   Maybe someone should tell the President.

5. It WILL work. They just have the wrong people running it.

6. “Dental care in Australia is free”
   Joe should really check his facts.
   http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp0809/09rp01

   Dental care was only briefly part of the Australian national health service and the program was terminated in 1997. As a result, the “vast majority” of Australian dental spending is from individuals out-of-pocket or private insurance. Basically they have a bare bones public program for children and low income adults, but everybody else is on their own. Since the 1997 repeal dental health has gone backwards.
   http://www.hpm.org/de/Surveys/CHERE_-_Australien/05/Access_to_dental_care_in_Australia.html

   “The Commonwealth Dental Health Program was not renewed in 1997 because waiting times for public dental services had been reduced and therefore, faced with increased fiscal pressures, the government considered that it was no longer necessary. However, within a year, waiting lists had grown by 20%.

   In the years between 1998 and 2004, evidence emerged that although the oral health of the Australian population as a whole was good, amongst diadvantaged groups, its decline was immediate and, in some cases, dramatic.”

   So basically the free public program had solved the problem until they started listening to conservatives.

7. Rick, maybe read your links yourself. If health insurance is free for the poor, as you concede, then there is a motivation to qualify. And then we wonder why we have a whole bunch more people on Medicaid, but not enough doctors willing to take it, and why oral health is going down in the target population because they’re waiting up to ten years for a filling or crown. Duh.

   Regarding the link, it’s worth noting that the time of improving oral health included, but was not restricted to, the time of free dental care. So they’re really comparing apples to oranges, as you’d expect from a research group based in Germany, which has socialized medicine.

8. RickDFL is hallucinationg again:

   Recent calls for increased Commonwealth funding for dental services have been made in the midst of reports of long waiting lists and emerging evidence that poorer dental health is associated with lower socioeconomic status.[1] Although the National Oral Health Plan calls for action on dental health from all levels of government, the issue of responsibility for funding remains contentious. In particular, the role of the Commonwealth government in dental health provision has been the subject of considerable debate.

   http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp0809/09rp01

   Typical statist logic. When government healthcare for the poor is crappy, the solution is to put everyone on government healthcare. Except the rich and connected, of course. That goes without saying.

9. 1. So now everyone agrees Joe was making up facts when he said dental care was “free” for “everybody” in Australia.
   2. No one seems to dispute that when dental care was free for everyone in Australia, the wait time problem was mostly solved. So Joe’s central point is refuted.
   3. PM says, “When government healthcare for the poor is crappy, the solution is to put everyone on government healthcare.” Actually yes. It is called, ‘programs for the poor, make poor programs’. If only some people, especially poor people with little political clout, benefit from a program, then it will get low levels of funding and little push for effective service. On the other hand, more universal programs, like Medicare and Social Security, get very broad political support and strong pushes for effective service. Hell, Republicans have been running against Medicare cuts for 4 years. Simple question, if everyone in
   Australia, not just the poor and kids, were subject to long dental wait times, do you think more or less resources would be put into meeting the need?

10. This is a lie:
    1. So now everyone agrees Joe was making up facts when he said dental care was “free” for “everybody” in Australia.
    Joe Doakes did not write this, RickDFL wrote this.

    Dental care was never “free” for everyone in Australia, so this is a lie as well.
    2. No one seems to dispute that when dental care was free for everyone in Australia, the wait time problem was mostly solved. So Joe’s central point is refuted.
    This is also a lie:
    
    The Commonwealth allocated $278 million to the states and territories to provide dental services to 1996 97. The program was directed at adults (and their dependents aged over 18 years) covered by the various health concession cards (Pensioner Concession Card, Commonwealth Seniors Health Card, and Health Care Card) and had two components: emergency dental services (EDS) and general dental services (GDS). A separate schedule of fees for each component was established. State and territory governments were responsible for the management and operation of the scheme. Agreements with the Commonwealth specified that the states were to maintain their baseline level of recurrent funding to adult dental services under the program.[18]

    Dental services were delivered by both public community dental clinics and private dentists. Fees paid to private dentists were based on those paid under the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) scheme for veterans. Treatment was limited to the services set out in the schedules but excluded dentures, orthodontics, crowns and bridges. Annual caps $100 for an emergency episode and $400 for general treatment were introduced.[19]

    After the election of the Howard Government in 1996, the program was terminated, from 1 January 1997. The reasons given for the early termination of the CDHP were that the target of 1.5 million services had been met and the backlog in public dental services had been reduced.[20] In total, $245 million was spent and around 1.5 million services provided, with 200 000 patients accessing the program in any one year.[21]

    With the cessation of the CDHP sole government responsibility for funding public dental services returned to the states and territories. Evidence provided to a Senate committee soon after indicated that public dental waiting lists increased dramatically following the termination of the CDHP.[22]

    Direct Commonwealth involvement in dental health funding shrank substantially after the cessation of the CDHP with direct Commonwealth expenditure on dental services falling from a high of $105 million in 1995 96 to $6 million in 1998 99.[23] In response to calls for greater Commonwealth involvement and spending on dental services, the government argued that the provision of public dental services was primarily the responsibility of the states and territories.[24]
    
    http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp0809/09rp01#Government

    RickDFL’s point 3 (such as it is) is almost too preposterous to bother refuting. In the real world, health care is what economists call a “scarce good”. It is rationed, either by market forces or political forces, usually some combination of the two. The idea that the political process produces a more efficient outcome is something that socialists really, really want to be true — despite the fact that political process is controlled by idiots. Socialists put themselves in the absurd position of arguing that a medical system where providing care allows the practitioner to make money results in less health care than a system where providing care costs the practitioner money.

11. Um, Rick, regarding your points, it’s worth noting that your link compares a 30 year span with a mix of private and public funding with a ten year span of mostly private with some public funding. That does NOT suggest that the situation was better under public funding. You’d need to do a lot finer look than your source took at the matter.

    In fact, the fact that the public program was terminated after a short period of time, that indicates that there was a great deal of dissatisfaction with it.

    And regarding the idea of single payer being a solution; OK, tell me how seriously you take complaints when you’re the only game in town. For the answer, look at the VA, or the health systems of Canada and the U.K., both of which have horrific wait times for any significant procedure. So no, just because more people are affected does not make government systems work better.

    Or, for that matter, try pushing back against Common Core in the government schools. Good luck.

12. The Aussie system is a hodge-podge of government insurance, government subsidized care, government subsidized private insurance, and totally private insurance. You see the usual problems played out on a faster time scale than many other countries. The cycle seems to be:
    1) Guarantees of basic healthcare for a subset of the population (usually children).
    2) Expansion of services and the population covered, driven by political demand.
    3) Runaway costs.
    4) An effort to privatize some or all of health care to control costs. This, too, is driven by political demand (see step 3).
    Dentistry seems to be a problem for everyone (accept the rich) in Australia. Dental insurance is not readily available to people with dental problems, and covers only routine care. Everything else is paid for out of pocket.

13. At the risk of sounding disrespectful – while I used to read over the links to the assertions Rick made, I must confess I’ve sort of started lumping him in with Dog Gone, and assuming that the logic is wrong, the facts and context are mismatched, or their condescenscion wrote checks their case couldn’t cash, without going further.

    Perhaps that’s a mistake. But, it would seem, not this time.

14. RickDFL has an impossible job. Econ 101 says when you artificially set a price below market value (“free dental care for the poor”), supply cannot meet demand. Most national policies, including the US before and after Obamacare, spend a lot of effort attempting to attack health care expenses from both sides — by adding copays, for example, to reduce demand, and by subsidizing the salaries of doctors (and/or their education) to address supply.
    What happened in Australia in 1997 is their central government stopped subsidizing free, very basic, dental care in the states and territories. They had only been doing so since 1993. The states and territories could have picked up the slack, but they did not. Australia is a democracy, the people of the states and territories voted to spend their scarce tax dollars in other ways.
    Health care in Australia seems to be in a continual state of flux. As far as I can tell, currently if you are an Australian and are poor, you get a card that entitles you to basic health and dental care. There is an annual dollar limit on benefits. I’ve read, from a source that isn’t really citeable, that the reimbursement rate for people on the dole is about 1/5 what a dentist usually charges for a procedure. Hence the long wait list.
    There have been tens of thousand of scholarly papers written over the years about the problem of making good healthcare affordable to all. Neither socialism nor capitalism can do it.

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