[speaker001:] Okay, Lee. Tell me about your ideas on this, uh, the U S 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, uh, it's inevitable. It is just a matter of, uh, time and mistakes [children] 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 going to make it tough for them and it's going to be a difficult transition. I don't know, uh, how it's going to, uh, play out in terms of the particulars, but I don't think that society will be willing to tolerate the current health care crisis for too long. Our, uh, physical and mental and spiritual health, uh, it's really, uh, very costly.
[speaker001:] Yes.
[speaker002:] And, uh, as a society [LAUGHTER] we are paying a staggering price for this.
[speaker001:] Well
[speaker002:] My,
[speaker001:] 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 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, minor endeavors, shall we say
[speaker002:] Uh-huh. Yeah.
[speaker001:] on the parts the doctors are really out of line.
[speaker002:] Yeah, there are abus-,
[speaker001:] There should be some control of that.
[speaker002:] they're abusive of privileges [children].
[speaker001:] Yes and that is what is giving the local, uh, insurance companies hard times. That is 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 the duplication of magnetic resonance imageries
[speaker001:] Yes.
[speaker002:] uh,
[speaker001:] We have had several of them. My wife and I both have had that recently.
[speaker002:] I've, I've had one myself and, uh, they're wonderful technology, but cities have three or four more than they need or three or four times the number they need. So, I think that what the market place doesn't do because of the way the system has worked and it doesn't allocate resources oftenly 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, but it's begun to change all of that. The people paying the bills, uh, employers ultimately, have begun to squawk because they have seen their health care cost rise two hundred percent in the past ten years.
[speaker001:] Yeah.
[speaker002:] So, I think the evolution will be interesting. Uh, Hawaii has a system that is apparently working and, uh, it will be interesting to see how, how, uh, much more attention we pay to that. [child] I do think though that it is inevitable primarily because of the pain, uh, that people are feeling, uh, under the circumstances. Uh, 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:] Well that's, that's the problem with government, uh, administration of these programs [child] and that is one of the things that we as society are going to have to deal with. Government is going to have to change in this regard.
[speaker001:] Do you think that that these insurance things should be covered on a State basis or U S government basis?
[speaker002:] You know, that is really a tough one for me to answer. I don't, uh, I would like to see the greatest improvement in management. My, my, my field is the cognitive sciences and I recognize that a lot of these things that are done, [child whining] are done, uh, 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 you structure the environment. We may have to deal with,