Health Care Reform...Sound off here, An ET Roundtable.

Discussion in 'Politics' started by William Rennick, Mar 18, 2010.

Helath Care Reform

  1. Leave it alone, things are fine.

    6 vote(s)
    10.3%
  2. Pass current reform bill.

    12 vote(s)
    20.7%
  3. We need reform, but write a new bill.

    36 vote(s)
    62.1%
  4. Who cares, I pay cash when I'm sick.

    4 vote(s)
    6.9%
  1. Yes, govt needs to be reformed to the ideals of the founding fathers.
     
    #11     Mar 19, 2010
  2. Insurance companies are managed with the same philosophy as
    sets prices for a hot dog and a beer at the ball park or popcorn and a pop at the movie theater ...hostage markets. The public option IS a compromise from single payer. ya gotta compromise.
     
    #12     Mar 19, 2010
  3. Another dumb fucking Republican who thinks the health bill is socializing health care
     
    #13     Mar 19, 2010
  4. <object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/I6Tna6O2K28&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/I6Tna6O2K28&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>
     
    #14     Mar 19, 2010
  5. Well it sure isn't reform.
     
    #15     Mar 19, 2010
  6. Arnie

    Arnie

    This bill just magnifies the worst parts.

    As long as the buyer and seller of a service have no interest in the true cost, costs will go up. This bill does nothing to change that.

    As far as "45,000 people a year dying" because they have no insurance....that's BS. Even if it were true, the easiest fix would be to enroll them in Medicaid.

    In order for true reform, you need everyone in the pool. You can't fix this by only insuring the sick. Imagine if State Farm and Allstate only insured houses that burned down? Instead of fining people, why not encourage them to get insurance with tax rebates and right-offs?

    Encourage everyone to have insurance by letting everyone deduct the cost.

    Encourage the use of high deductible plans like HSA's. Young people would have an incentive, since any unspent $$ get rolled over and the account builds like a 401k. Insurance should only be used for serious illness.

    All providers of health services would be required to post ALL charges on line or in printed form available on demand. There is zero transparency in prices, due mainly to the way insurance co's reimburse doctors and hospitals.

    Encourage insurance co's to take on the sick by limiting how many total customers they can have. In other words, if a co wants to grow, they HAVE to take on a certain percentage of people with existing conditions.

    If you get more healthy people covered and paying premiums (the young), you can afford to expand coverage to everyone. Let people pay for the little stuff (colds, flue, etc..) and save the insurance for things like chronic illness, cancer etc...This would encourage people to shop around, which will led to competition.

    As an aside, a true story...

    About 2 years ago I needed mionor surgery. I called around and got quotes of $2800-3200. I found out that the biggest part of the cost was because I would be "put under". I found out you can have this done with a local, so I found a doctor who would do it for $600. I had a high deductible HSA. Needless to say if I had a regular policy I never would have thought of shopping around.
     
    #16     Mar 20, 2010
  7. Mercor

    Mercor

    2 Million people with healthcare die every year.

    Maybe heathcare is the problem.
     
    #17     Mar 20, 2010
  8. --------------------------------------------------------------------





    Look how this game work sometime.





    "For example, let's say that an insurance company denies 100 claims. Of these 100 claims, five dispute the coverage and the insurance company changes its mind and agrees to accept four of the claims but continues to refuse the fifth claim. The fifth claimant then files a lawsuit and recovers punitive damages against the insurance company. Even if the claimant who filed suit recovers millions of dollars against the insurance company, it is likely that the insurance company still saved even more millions of dollars by not having had to pay the 95 claims which were not disputed. Thus, even though an insurance company gets caught every once in a while, they continue to accumulate staggering amounts of wealth by continuing to wrongfully deny legitimate claims. Sad too, is that it is mostly done to the elderly and the poor, who can least afford it, or have no strength to fight back.

    What can insurers possibly hope to gain by stonewalling except lots of bad publicity, ill will and very likely some justifiable punitive damages - that is if it ever gets to trial? None of this makes any sense whatsoever to the common lay person. What is it that we do not know or understand about the attitude of these insurers that would cause them to victimize a policyholder of many years, and why?

    Why? Because insurers make money doing it. Never lose sight of the fact that this is the single purpose of an insurance company. Pay little and pay late. When they're holding your money, they can afford to delay, and wear you down. For every dollar they spend in litigation, they'll save three dollars on people who just give up and take what is offered. Then, on the cases that they win; (and they do win -- in part because juries have been conditioned to believe that all claimants are frauds and cheats who are puffing up the number to try to get rich off the insurance company by making frivolous claims. It is startling to most people, who have worked hard, never asked for anything, and paid premiums their whole life to suddenly realize that in court, they will be treated as "one of those people" who are trying to get one over on the insurance industry -- and even more disheartening to realize that their premium dollars are funding the effort to discredit them!)"
    http://www.allstateinsurance.org/allpage.htm
     
    #18     Mar 20, 2010
  9. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704207504575130321235660474.html

    The ObamaCare Crossroads
    The vote is really about who commands the country's medical resources.


    With the House's climactic vote on ObamaCare tomorrow, Democrats are on the cusp of a profound and historic mistake, comparable in our view to the Smoot-Hawley tariff and FDR's National Industrial Recovery Act. Everyone is preoccupied now with the politics, but ultimately at stake on Sunday is the kind of country America will be.

    The consequences of this bill will not only be destructive for the health-care system and the country's fiscal condition, though those will be bad enough. Inextricably bound up in a plan as far-reaching and ambitious as ObamaCare are also larger questions about the role of government, the dynamism of American enterprise and the nature of a free society. Above anything else, this explains why Democrats have had such trouble convincing the public, let alone their own Members.
    ***

    Most acutely in the balance is the future of U.S. medicine. On the opposing page we reprint a 1996 essay by the great Milton Friedman that is more relevant than ever. Drawing from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel "The Cancer Ward," the late Nobel laureate traces the ways that national health care fundamentally alters "the consensual relation between the patient and the physician."

    In our world of infinite wants but finite resources, there are only two ways to allocate any good or service: either through prices and the choices of millions of individuals, or through central government planning and political discretion. This choice is inexorable. Stripped of its romantic illusions, ObamaCare is really about who commands the country's medical resources. It vastly accelerates the march toward a totally state-driven system, in contrast to reforms that would fix today's distorted status quo by putting consumers in control.

    Friedman lays out how the country arrived at our current pass, starting with the World War II-era decision to offer tax subsidies for employer-sponsored coverage only. Like the company store, this inefficient and inequitable preference encourages workers to be paid in kind rather than cash, and over the years the third-party payer system it entrenched has inhibited competition and desensitized patients to the costs of their own care. With the 1965 creation of Medicare for seniors and Medicaid for the poor, government has come to play the leading role in shaping the way care is paid for and provided.

    Naturally, the result has been high and rising costs. Since 1962, the share of the economy devoted to health care has risen to about 17% from 6%. Today, health entitlements account for about 5% of GDP but on current trend will rise to 7% in 2025 and about 15% in 2062.

    That is the problem President Obama inherited, as it were. Yet rather than fundamentally changing these incentives, he chose instead to create a new middle-class insurance entitlement that will transform the way U.S. health care is financed, and thus delivered. Such a "universal" system has been the core liberal aspiration since the age of Bismarck. But time and again this political ambition has been thwarted by American individualism, distrust of government power, the checks and balances of the political system, and, every so often, good judgment in Washington.

    Once the health-care markets are put through Mr. Obama's de facto nationalization, costs will further explode. The Congressional Budget Office estimates ObamaCare will cost taxpayers $200 billion per year when fully implemented and grow annually at 8%, even under low-ball assumptions. Soon the public will reach its taxing limit, and then something will have to give on the care side. In short, medicine will be rationed by politics, no doubt with the same subtlety and wisdom as Congress's final madcap dash toward 216 votes.

    As in the Western European and Canadian welfare states, doctors, hospitals and insurance companies will over time become public utilities. Government will set the cost-minded priorities and determine what kinds of treatment options patients are allowed to receive. Medicare's price controls will be exported to the remnants of the private sector.

    All bureaucratized systems also restrict access to specialists and surgeries, leading to shortages and delays of months or years. This will be especially the case for the elderly and grievously ill, and for innovation in procedures, technologies and pharmaceuticals.

    Eventually, quality and choice—the best attributes of American medicine in spite of its dysfunctions—will severely decline.

    Democrats deny this reality, but government rationing will become inevitable given that overall federal spending is already at 25% of GDP and heading north, and Medicare's unfunded liabilities are roughly two and a half times larger than the entire U.S. economy in 2008. The ObamaCare bill already contains one of the largest tax increases outside the Great Depression or the world wars, including a major new tax on investment income—and no one seriously believes it will be enough.

    So a vote for ObamaCare is also a vote against the vitality of American capitalism. Business elites have mostly held their tongues, or calculated that they can later dump their health-care liabilities on the government. Yet ObamaCare will lead to much higher levels of taxation across society. The tax wedge—the share of labor costs that never reaches workers but instead goes straight to government—will start flying towards the 50% that prevails today in most of Europe. In America, without the same welfare state obligations, it hovers near 30%.
    ***

    A self-governing democracy can of course decide that it wants to become this kind of super-welfare state. But if the year-long debate over ObamaCare has proven anything, it is that Americans want no such thing. There is no polling majority or any bipartisan support, much less a rough national consensus, for this expansion of government power. The election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts for Ted Kennedy's seat, of all things, was as direct a referendum as you could have.

    So if the health bill passes in the House, it will only do so the way it did in the Senate, with a narrow partisan majority, abetted by political bribery and intimidation, budget gimmicks and procedural deceptions. An entitlement the country can't afford and doesn't want may pass because of sheer ideological willfulness. The ugliness of the bill, and of its passage, means that some or all of it might be repealable, but far better not to make the tragic mistake in the first place.
     
    #19     Mar 20, 2010

  10. Translation: As a parasitic-leech of the left, someone else should pay for ensuring my existence is as comfortable as those evil people who prosper and contribute to society. And this can only be accomplished via a command-and-control system, like in my beloved, but collapsed, USSR.

    what a worthless lump of flesh...
     
    #20     Mar 20, 2010