[speaker001:] okay Lee tell me about your ideas on this uh the US government supporting health insurance and so forth
[speaker002:] well I think it's inevitable that we are going to see national health care and the reason is because the market place doesn't seem to have performed adequately uh the invisible hand that which Adam Smith wrote has uh provided some very good health care and uh much I think inadequate health care uh and in some cases the absence of health care has resulted from market place forces and I think um it's inevitable it is just a matter of uh time and mistakes and they're both inevitable
[speaker001:] well what is this going to do the insurance companies who are supporting this work now and hopefully are doing uh a good job
[speaker002:] well it's gonna make it tough for them and it's it's gonna be a difficult transition I don't know uh how it's gonna uh play out in terms of the particulars but I don't think society society will be willing to tolerate the current health care crisis for too long our uh physical mental and spiritual health uh it's really uh very costly and uh as a society we are paying a staggering price for this my
[speaker001:] yes well this is what's bothering me Lee another question do you think that there should be some control uh innovated such that the doctors are not allowed to charge ridiculously ridiculously over priced things we realize that for the individual person some things are very important uh matter of fact in some respects their life might depend on it
[speaker002:] right
[speaker001:] but by the same token some of these charges they make for well well minor endeavors shall we say on the parts the doctors are really out of line there should be some control of that
[speaker002:] um-hum yeah yeah there are abuses of they're abusive of privilege
[speaker001:] yes and that's what's giving the local um insurance companies hard times that's the one thing we have no control over are these charges that happen when you go to hospitals and you get something done and they want to charge twenty thousand dollars for it
[speaker002:] right well this I think is one of the things that national health care of some sort of evolutionary process over the next ten or twenty or thirty years will address because I know this is addressed by uh in Canada I I have a good friend who is uh a physician practicing in Canada and they made the transition uh and I think that the uh for example duplication of magnetic resonance imagers uh
[speaker001:] yes we've had several of them my wife and I both have had that recent
[speaker002:] I've I had one myself and uh they're wonderful technologies but cities have uh three or four more than they need or three or four times the number they need so I think that what the marketplace doesn't do because of the way the system has worked and it doesn't allocate resources optimally because there is a tendency uh at least there has been a tendency to drive up the price of medical care primarily because the insurance companies could pass on the bills what's begun to change all of that the people paying the bills uh employers ultimately have begun to squawk because they've seen their health care cost rise two hundred percent in the past ten years
[speaker001:] yes
[speaker002:] so I think the evolution will be interesting uh Hawaii has a system that is apparently working and uh it'll be interesting to see how how uh much more attention we pay to that I do think though that it's inevitable primarily because of the pain uh that people are feeling uh under the circumstances and I believe that it will contribute to something that we would at this point call national health care whether it's subsidized by the government and and operated by private insurers uh I don't know I like that idea I tend to be one of those people who believes the market place can under varied circumstances with the profit incentive work very very well uh I we would be a lot better off if we if we contracted our national defense to a group who rather that operated as a government entity because we would probably have much less waste
[speaker001:] see that that bothers me about the government see uh my
[speaker002:] that's that's that's the problem with government uh uh administration of these programs and that is one of the things that we as society are going to have to deal with government is gonna have to change in this regard
[speaker001:] do you think that these that these insurance things should be covered on a state basis or US government basis
[speaker002:] you know that's really a tough one for me to answer I don't uh uh I would like to see the greatest improvement in management my my field my field is the cognitive sciences and I recognize that a lot of these things that are done are done um as a function of the operating systems in place and those operating systems have to change and and as we become more efficient in developing machine operating systems we're going to develop more efficient human operating systems and so a state or federal application uh could work uh it all depends upon the way we structure the environment we may have to do