No one seems to be asking why it should cost more. Over on the Doctor thread someone pointed out that the French system is half of what our current costs are. I've heard people say it will cost an additional $1 trillion over the next 10 years to implement Obama's plan. I guess the extra will be going to the pork. Edit to add: I don't think people are entitled to "free" health care, but our current system is broken and getting worse. We should be able to replace it with something better at less cost. I pay over $1000 a month for insurance and maybe go to the doctor once or twice a year, so I am already paying for someone else's care.
Levy a tax against a person, based off of a % of their total medical costs from the previous F.Y. The people that strain and drain the system need to pony up. Those of us that are healthy, and see a doctor very little should not be making up for obese, diabetic, asthmatic smokers with clogged aortas and fat ass kids. Arguement to my point: This will dis-incentivise trips to the doctor. Rebuttal: This force people to take their health into their own hands, and will stop them from leaning on doctors to fix all of their issues.
good post. Is someone who works hard & pays their way through college & then works hard to be successful in biz fortunate? If someone chooses to enter the labor force immediately & start breeding unfortunate? There are exceptions, but the terms fortunate & unfortunate seem to imply lucky & unlucky... as if the unlucky bear no responsibility for their life choices. BTW, my kids have their own medical insurance policy & the premium went up 57% YOY, which is insane. I do think there should be some mechanism to provide at least catastrophic coverage... then that opens the argument for preventative care being more cost effective. But I think there should be a way to pay into a system to ensure to don't get jammed the way Brandon did.
For all of those who oppose Government health care, please tell your parents/grandparents to get the hell off Medicare and start paying their own way.
Most of you have drunk the kool aid which is that we can't contain cost without somehow reducing the quality of care and access to that care. This is wrong but it is the assumption that politicians want you to buy in to as it will justify them doing stupid things like increasing taxes or rationing rather than addressing the special interests that leech money from the health care pot. Bottom line is that there is more than enough money being spent every year to give everyone in the US high quality care without any new taxes or premiums. If the lawyers, and more importantly the effects that they have on how medicine is practiced, were taken out of the equation, that would result in hundreds of billions in savings (would also significantly impact drug prices and greatly expand the number of drugs for diseases that have too small a population of sufferer's to overcome the legal costs of drug development). Next, if it were possible for physicians to practice without having to join a massive for profit HMO, because the bureaucratic overhead is such that small entrepreneurial health care is no longer viable, then we would see costs fall massively as individual docs would be able to work for X$, patients would only pay that rather than X$ plus huge corporate salaries for all the HMO's administrative staff and profits for the shareholders whos interests are the opposite of the patients. If billing was simplified and standardized so that 10-20% of a providers time wasn't wasted doing billing paperwork and a significant % of billing charges didn't have to go to the medical coding companies (much like if the tax system was simplified we wouldn't have to pay accounts so much) that would again allow providers to hang their shingle and again be responsive to their patients so rather have patients be forced to see certain providers by some health plan they would again have a real choice and customer service would again matter. When around 40% of health care expenditures do not go toward providing health care, and health care that is excessively expensive to begin with due to the practice of defensive medicine, it is ridiculous to talk about rationing, reducing access, and new taxes. Notice that nowhere in Obama's plan is there any substantive mention of tort reform that would address the huge cost that practicing defensive medicine adds. That is your 1st clue that he is not serious about tackling real reform and cost containment. Follow the money to see what his real motive is. So far it looks like it is to pump huge amounts of money in to creating new government jobs that are related to health care technology. Why? So that they can then use the stats that come out of that effort to start to control medical decision making which will require a whole other wave of government employees jumping on the health care bandwagon (because econometric analysis has been so successful in all the other areas it has been applied to, NOT). Campaign finance reform is needed before we will see any effective healthcare legislation, until then we will just get more taxes, more wasted spending, and rising costs. As all of you know premiums are rising, is it because providers pay is rising? No, physician and nurses compensation has been relatively flat the last several years, premiums are rising because the portfolio's of the insurance companies have gone down and they need to replenish their actuarial base not to mention their earnings, that is why premiums have increased particularly this past year. So, does it strike you as rational that you have to pay more for your premium and yet can expect no increased benefit in terms of improvement in care or access to it?
Single payer government healthcare is the ideal unless your government is so corrupted by special interests that you can not trust it to act in the best interests of its citizenry.
Other physicians find that if they donât take insurance, they can cut their overhead, and actually charge patients less. http://www.thehealthcareblog.com/the_health_care_blog/2008/07/doctors-who-don.html
Has anyone looked into these numbers: When they started to feel pressure from Obama's health care agenda, the insurance companies discovered they could find a way to cut back on their projected increases over the next 10 years. They said they could save $2 trillion by limiting the increases by 1.5% (no link, these are from an AARP printed article). So just the planned increases are $133 trillion? That's quite a bit of money.
i have paid cash for physician visits before, but they only reduce the price by 10~12% so it's not that significant
Tax the rich? how about curtail the government spending in useless programs to get free health care. Taxing rich is not the solution for every problem of welfare supported drug and alchohal addicts.