Now if only congress would pass the Affordable Auto Insurance, Affordable Home Owners Insurance and Affordable Life Insurance Acts. We could all cancel our policies pay a small fine and sign up for the appropriate insurance policies AFTER a crash, a fire or death.
If you are such a fool to continue believing that will be allowed you are a bigger fool than even you think you are. Your assumption of ""You can most likely find a plan that will insure you effective the next day" is comical at best. Where is marketsurfer when we need him? :eek: Lucrum he will believe anything that enhances his warped mind... :eek: Done with this thread. BYE
In my state (New Jersey), there are 3 companies on ehealthinsurance.com. The agent said that one of the companies will insure you effective the next day.
This is a real concern to all of us. Particularly in more backward Sates where there is not willing cooperation with Obamney. Due to lack of adequate competition in certain States, some companies will inevitably try to game the system by getting their foot in the door at exceedingly high rates. This may cost you temporarily, but be patient. All of these abuses will be brought under control. We only had Obamney rolled out a few days ago. There is going to be a lot of initial problems. Pay your insurance then cancel and switch as soon as it becomes feasible. Remember, under the new law they have to accept you as a member of your risk classification and can't single you out. This goes back to the need to Dump McCarran -Ferguson and get to a truly national insurance market and greater competition. It will happen.
All you guys saying under obamacare "my premiums are going up 50%" are comparing apples to diamonds. Every insurer sells "no frills" plans that basically don't cover anything. Here in NJ they sell a "basic and essential plan" that you can get for like 300/month. Do you know what the annual payout limit for doctor's visits is? Its like 600/year. So if you go to the doctor even once your done - the plan will stop paying anything after that. So then you go to obamacare and see your unsubsidized premium is now 500/month (cause you make 4x poverty level) and you say the price has gone up 50%. Yeah, but your coverage just went up 10 million percent. You finally have real comprehensive health insurance. Opposing universal comprehensive healthcare in 2013 is like opposing universal education in the late 1800s - you're living in an alternative reality. Universal education was a huge success. Illiteracy went from 90% to like 2%. Social security was another huge success. Poverty amonst the aged went from over 50% to under 10%. Obamacare is going to be another huge success. The % of people without comprehensive healthcare is going to go from 50% to 0%. The economy is all set for a huge boom due to obamacare.
Lucrum. thank you for posting that Cato Institute article which makes the case for a competition driven medical system over one closely controlled and regulated by the government. Just two few brief comments: 1. I would guess that competition driven medical care, if only it could work well, would be the ideal from the perspective of myself and many ET'ers. We are mostly confirmed capitalists (zdreg's insistance that i'm a communist not withstanding.) I have written long detailed posts extolling the virtues of competition in medical care and pleading for deregulation. That was before I realized I was wrong, and that while we should make every effort to introduce competition, and while we need to eliminate the anti-competitive regulation that we have now, a totally deregulated, profit driven, medical care delivery in the U.S. will forever prevent us from becoming fully civilized. And the reason is so obvious that it escaped me for years. Now I realize that for free enterprise capitalism to work as we anticipate, the customer has to be able to walk. If you don't satisfy that fundamental condition, you will end up with an unsavory form of capitalism -- a form that we, in fact, ended up with, viz., a Cartel! 2. Statements made by Cato such as "In countries weighted heavily toward government control, people are most likely to face waiting lists, rationing, restrictions on physician choice, and other obstacles to care", tells us that there is a correlation between government control and rationing and waiting lists. Yet the data tells us waiting lists and government control aren't correlated. All the health systems, including our own, are heavily weighted toward government control. I would suggest that government control is weakly correlated, if at all, with the quality or cost of care. On the other hand, the kind of control exercised appears very important to the relative success of the various systems. _______________________ I always like to emphasize that my definition of "free enterprise" is different from that of many of the capitalist tycoons such as Bill Gates, or in a former era, Mr. Rockefeller. "Free enterprise" to me means that everyone is free to enter the market place on equal terms, letting the customer decide who succeeds and who fails. This requires that he government act as a referee and sheriff. On the other hand what typical capitalists business tycoons mean when they extoll the virtues of "free enterprise" is laissez faire capitalism which means you are free to do whatever you like without government interference. You are free to lie, cheat, intimidate, steal and form monopolies and cartels. This latter definition of "free enterprise" requires that the government stay on the sidelines and turn a blind eye, or assume an active role if business interests require the government's help and protection in securing their dominance in a particular market. The latter is the U.S. model, the former is the ideal. The chief role of government, so far as the citizens are concerned, should be to protect free enterprise from the capitalists.
"fully civilized"? Isn't that a bit subjective? Personally I prefer natures way, it works. You got some reputable stats/research to back this up?
Yes. "fully civilized", is, I would say, highly subjective; yet if you asked many people what they considered to be the requirements for a society to be considered "fully civilized" I think we would both be surprised at the degree of agreement. Would that make "fully civilized" less subjective then we realize? There are reams of information on the extent of government involvement in all of the 14 modern, industrialized nations that we consider ourselves a part of. Wiki is an excellent place to start. What was striking about the Cato report is that it seemed to have been written by someone living in another world, as the author seemed unaware that virtually all of the problems that are encountered in other health systems are also encountered in the U.S., but to differing degrees. I still hear politicians say "That health care in the U.S. is the best in the world" ignoring the reality that the U.S. is ranked 36th or 38th by the objective criteria used by the World Health Organization. You still hear anecdotes about the Potentate of such and such flying to M.D. Anderson for chemotherapy, as if anecdotes were any way to judge a health care system. Let me say that for every patient receiving state of the art chemo in the lymphoma unit at M.D. Anderson there are ten others in midsize towns across America that are being treated with out-of- date regimens being delivered by minimally qualified aids; some will die because of that. The cost at M.D. Anderson may be lower, however! You are reflecting the opinion of a majority of younger, healthier citizens who have little personal basis to judge the quality of U.S. health care other than how painful their school vaccination was. In fact, I would venture that you have a much better informed opinion than most of your healthy colleagues the same age as you. Younger people have little experience with medicine beyond routine care and treatment. In general you have to be relatively old, relatively poor, or relatively unlucky to have experienced the shortcomings of American medicine beyond its outrageous cost. And sadly, far too often only your family members will ever learn of the shortcomings, if then. In general, for those that have easy access, American medicine is very good, but not as good as politicians say. It is ruinously expensive however; ruinous to individuals; ruinous to business; indirectly ruinous to the entire economy. Obamney care attacks only one aspect of cost by, in effect, attempting to bring group insurance rates to everyone. That's only a start; it won't be enough to fix our broken health care system -- which that bright fellow from the Mayo Clinic pointed out wasn't really a "system" at all.
You are significantly understating your case. The fact is there are 41 comprehensive cancer centers in the US of which M.D. Anderson is one. Half of our states do not have even one such center and even in those 25 states that do the vast majority of those treated in one live within 50 miles of the states' major city. There are not ten others in midsized cities that are treated with out of date regimes etc, there are hundreds treated in such a manner for every one treated at an Anderson or Dana-Farber. I'm not suggesting that any society can (or even should) attempt to deliver a uniform level of care across an entire population but I am suggesting the fact that the Shah of Iran came to NYC for treatment and that various world leaders have shown up at the Cleaveland Clinic, while true, is simply anecdotal nonsense. My brother was, until recently, a Trustee of a world class hospital that has one of the 41 Centers as a part of their campus which means I have been, for many years, privy to a very high level of anecdotal nonsense but also to some pretty decent insight into the reality of American medice. The difference between being treated at the instituition where he served on the board and a hospital litterally less than five miles away is the difference between watching a major league club play ball and watching a high school baseball team with one great pitcher and a few other talented players. To talk of the quality of the American health care system by talking of the top tier is absurd. My family is fortunate. We get top tier care and a bit better because the politics demand we get treated well but in fact all over America the wheels are coming off the system that the Rockefeller's brilliantly planned and partially funded almost 100 years ago. It was largelly the largess of that single American family that did the planning to bring the American system from "barber shop" medicine into the modern era. What we tolerate nationwide -- not just in cancer but accross the board -- is a disgrace. BTW, none of what I've said should be construed as an endorsement of the Affordable Care Act. We need to do something bold very soon but my best guess is when it all shakes out we will find that not only will have put a band aid (one of those really small ones that live at the bottom of the box) on a hemorraging patient but that we will have put it on the left ass cheek as the blood streams out the juglar. We are looking at second rate medicine in a third of the US today and within 10 years I suspect it will be tw-thirds. Not only will we have an undereducated workforce we will have a workforce that is in second rate health. While all empires fall, it is just so sad to see how quickly this one heading downhill. And, BTW, all those petroleum resources -- both oil and gas in ND etc. -- can't save the day. This country will simply be both energy self sufficient and a shithole.