We haven’t, which is why I started this thread. Which makes ‘death panels’ hysterical hyperbole, but not completely divorced from reality. A group of Doctors likely WILL make a decision regarding whether or not to continue treatment of many Grandmas.
I am just wanted to talk about rationing.
Yep, and as a taxpayer you undoubtedly will not want to pay for a liver transplant for an alcoholic, a heart bypass operation for someone who is obese, etc. etc.
This is exactly the kind of thinking that will eventually prevail in a government health care system. Once everyone’s health care becomes everyone else’s concern, how everyone lives will become everyone else’s concern as well.
I, for one, don’t want the government telling me what kind of food I have to eat, or how much booze I’m allowed to drink, or how much I have to weigh in order to have the care I need. And under a government plan, strapped for cash as all government social programs invariably are, that will be the eventual outcome.
On the OTHER hand… with all the bitching about “oh the government with it’s bloated bureocracy is gonna make health care decisions” we forget that NOW a bloated bureocracy already makes health care decisions…the only difference is that the bloated bureocracy is PRIVATE!!!
And therefore subject to contractual agreements, laws, regulatory oversight, etc. The government is answerable to no one and can do whatever it wants.
If insurance companies are the problem – which I doubt, given that I personally have never known anyone who didn’t get the coverage, treatment and medications that was covered under their plan – why not pass rules and regulations to address those problems?
The answer is that insurance companies are not really the problem; they’re just a convenient bogey man for people who simply want the government to take care of them. Take away the insurance company issue and they’ll just latch onto something else.
There are simply too many people in this country who want the government to act as their parent – protecting them, caring for them, and making everything “fair.”
And they are destroying everything that made this country great and provided a standard of life and luxury for a greater percentage of its population than ever existed in history in favor of socialistic philosphies and practices that have failed or are in the process of failing everywhere they’ve been tried.
Wheter it is health care or cars or schools or the response to fires or the response to criminal activy or new roads or parks or hospitals or electricity or water to your home…
Either you believe that a profit (by someone) should be made off of these universal needs or…you don’t.
The question is: WHY is it moral or ethical or nice to make a profit off of the needs* of all human beings?
COST (which, of course includes wages and salaries of the providers) should be enough.
Right?
I just don’t ‘get’ why the necessity of these primary needs should be a reason to grasp for profit.
Because, of course, everyone who advocates for a profit - or tax - on these things has no good reason other than - "Folks need them, so why NOT tax them with profit?
Making money off of the needs of every human being is…well…is what makes America so great, right?
Well, I have known people who didn’t get the coverage, treatment or medications covered under their plan, so I guess that means you’re wrong. With anecdotal evidence, all it takes is one person with contrary personal experience to shoot your whole premise to hell.
As far as these “socialistic policies” that are failing everywhere: do you seriously ignore the testimonials of people who live in countries where UHC is actually a reality and which refute your claims, or do you just conveniently ignore them?
Yeah, it provides incentive! It’s what causes the vast majority of people in this country who have good health care to have it. It’s what causes advancement research and treatment. Profit is the engine that drives progress and provides standards of living.
And besides, even if government were to supply all your needs – cars, food, gasoline, a home and furnishings, health care, etc., – profit is still necessary Where else is the government going to get the money it takes to provide you with the living you seem to think the world owes you simply because you are a human and you have needs?
No, I don’t ignore them but it’s apparent that you do. Have you forgotten the Canadian poster whose mother had to wait nine months for cancer treatment, or the other one whose mother had to wait two months for a CAT scan? Or the poster from the Netherlands who speaks with apparent pride over the fact that her government focuses on “palliative care” (i.e., a pain pill to make one comfortable) for elderly patients as opposed to medical treatment?
Almost every poster from Canada and European countries speaks of waits and rationing, but they’re cool with that because…hey, at least they don’t have to pay for it, huh?
Sorry, but I’m not willing to trade immediate care and a focus on doing everything possible to make me better for a system where I have to get in line and take whatever some underfunded, beaurocratic government deigns to give me.
Oh GAWD…Starving Artist you simply think that the private sector is automaticly more efficent. Sorry it’s a myth that the capitalists want you to buy into so they can make tons and tons of money off of you while ripping you off.
Heck, look how freaking worried all the health care lobbists are!!!
They’re afraid that their profit is going to be skimmed off.
And trust me… private health insurances are very weird…For example. I am deaf. They will cover a very expensive hearing implant called the CI. Some of them even cover TWO. (even thou the only benifit is sound localiazation and ease of hearing in noise) Very few health insurances will cover hearing aids, even thou overall hearing aids are LESS expensive then an implant. A lot of people who significently benifit from HA, have gone the CI route b/c they are so sick of paying out of pocket for HAs or staying poor so that they can still qualify for mediaid!
Yes, I most certainly do think that private enterprise is more efficient than government, and what it undertakes is generally better funded and the end result is usually much higher quality. This is not to say that there’s never a need or justification for government, however. Public utilities would be a good example, wherein services are provided for people on a wide-ranging scale that would be unprofitable for private enterprise to undertake.
But again, if insurance companies are operating in an unscrupulous way, why not make adjustments to the way insurance agencies operate? Other businesses are not allowed to renege on their agreements. Why should insurance companies be otherwise?
Generally I’ve found that most complaints about insurance companies come from people who feel they should have been covered but weren’t, and then because they weren’t they feel they’ve been “ripped off” by insurance company scavengers looking for loopholes. The fact of the matter is that you get what you pay for, and insurance companies are doing nothing wrong by investigating whether your coverage is what you think it is, or whether you’ve done something over the course of your life to negate (by previous agreement, no less) the coverage you once had.
Every company examines its books and makes sure it isn’t paying out for things it didn’t agree to pay for, and every company checks to make sure that the people they are doing business with are abiding by the terms of their agreement. It’s no different with an insurance company. You pay for certain coverage, subject to certain limitations and exclusions. If you need care that doesn’t fall within those limitations, or you’ve done something which results in an exclusion, the insurance company is only doing what’s right by its shareholders and itself by denying coverage. And yet people right and left scream that their insurance company screwed them by not covering some ailment, or by excluding coverage of that ailment for cause, when the insurance company was never on the hook for it under those conditions in the first place.
If you go to an automobile dealership and sign an agreement for a new car and then once you have it you discover it didn’t have the sound system you thought it should have, would you accuse the dealership of screwing you over when they go over your contract and point out that you never requested or paid for that sound system in the first place?
Of course not, and it’s the same with health insurance. Again, most dissatisfaction with health coverage – apart from having to pay for it in the first place – lies in the fact that people think they “ought” to be covered for things that they are in fact not covered for.
With regard to your insurance company’s stance on hearing aids I have no idea, other than that they may have found that it’s less expensive over the course of a patient’s life to provide implant coverage than to be constantly replacing or repairing HA’s.
And now take a look at your last line. “They are sick of ‘staying poor’ so they can qualify for Medicaid”. What does this tell you about government coverage? The government doesn’t care if you need a HA, all it cares about is that you don’t meet the standards they’ve set – in this case, income – before they will provide them, and the system is set up (just like much of welfare is) to keep people down in order to get what is always minimal government largess. And yet your answer to that is to want more of the same.
(Having said that, I truly am sorry about your deafness and I do hope that you will be able, one way or another, to get the assistance with your hearing that you need.)
Rationing care means no such thing since we already have rationed care and 95 year olds still get pacemakers. The people in your friend’s life may be Ford Pintos. Maybe your other friend has a beautifully restored and Bulgati that just needs the timing adjusted.
Hey, Starving Artist. What does it matter what you are allowed to eat if you are starving anyway? Denmark, one of those countries with a really good NHC program, is famous for ham, cheese, and beer! And the French have an incredible health care system! And everything is eaten with a cream sauce. I don’t think you are going to have to worry about having to live on stone soup. But maybe you should go to Paris and check it out for yourself.
Speaking as a grandmother, there is nothing in the plan to change what we have now in terms of a doctor or group of doctors making any such decision. These would be extreme circumstances. The doctors do not have the right by themselves just to terminate a patient.
The plan will however pay for counselling regarding such things as Living Wills. That includes the subject of DNR orders. That is so that the patient knows that she or he can specify personal wishes regarding those situations.
Some people on the extreme right have tried to make this change into something like a goon squad that comes to take your life against your will. That is the opposite of what the provision is. Why they keep twisting the truth, I do not know.
If you don’t want any input into your final days, then you don’t have to have the counselling and you don’t have to fill out a Living Will. What has changed for you according to this part of the plan? Nothing!
One of these days…
Still, isn’t France undergoing something of a right-wing revival in light of fears of a global recession?
I’m of the opinion that most of the European countries that have adopted socialism or socialistic practices are stagnating their own economies in doing so. Further, socialism is always doomed to fail because a point finally gets reached where politicians’ promises and citizens’ desire for more and more goodies overreach all available revenue, even at 100% taxation.
Socialism produces nothing, is a drain on its host country’s economy and production, and is, inevitably, unsustainable.
Capitalism is the only type of economy that is self-sustaining. And to the degree that it is burdened by socialistic programs, its ability to sustain itself is reduced.
Most modern socialistic countries haven’t been socialistic all that long and already they are beginning to suffer the consequences.
That’s a lot of assumptions there.
Starving Artist, I assume if you’re not a disingenuous debater, and if this private bureaucracy won’t judge me that you can tell me where one can get affordable healthcare coverage with a preexisting condition?
Let’s say for example this condition is an inherited kidney disorder.
Also I assume you’re not a disingenuous debater you can back up your assertion that tax payers won’t pay for alcoholics and obese with actual cites of this happening on medicaid or medicare?
If you can’t back up assertions will you retract them?
Preexisting conditions are a difficult problem. If you force insurance providers to accept all preexisting conditions, they will be bankrupt in no time because people will sign up for hundreds of dollars and be given tens or hundreds of thousands in health care. But the same economics apply with government. How can the government spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars taking care of everyone with preexisting conditions? It can’t. And therefore, rationed, delayed, and denied health care will still exist, with the difference being that everyone will be forced into a substandard, underfunded and beaurocratic system for all their health needs, not just preexisting ones.
Certainly not, unless you can guarantee by Constitutional amendment that the cradle-to-grave health care system that this will surely lead to will operate identically to Medicaid or Medicare.
For that matter, I’d have much less objection to the current plan itself if a Constitutional amendment preceeded it stating that it would never grow beyond its current scope. But that’s never gonna happen, is it?
The primary thing government seeks to do is to grow bigger. It always wants to be bigger, to take in more money, to do more things. A hundred years ago this country didn’t even have an income tax and look where we are now. There is a thread going on now in which someone asks how much their taxes would be on self-employment at $40,000 a year. The answer? Approximately 10,000 a year, with self-employment tax (i.e., Social Security) taking $6,000 of it alone. Then add in state and county taxes, sales taxes and all the other taxes people have to pay these days, and he’d be lucky to net $20,000!
Now, I don’t know about you but I think it’s ridiculous that a guy making $40,000 a year has to pay $20,000 of it in taxes. That’s six months a year that an average Joe, earning a relatively small income, has to work for the government. And the reason this average Joe works for the government six months a year is because of the way government has grown over the years.
So no, I have no doubt whatsoever that this is just the first step, with cradle-to-grave, government-provided health care (and the doomsday scenarios we conservatives have been predicting) being the eventual result, and for that reason I think Medicare and Medicaid bear precious little comparison to what health care will be like once it applies to everybody.
Do you have a cite for this? The British NSH treats anyone and if you don’t like their care level you’re still free to buy private insurance. What specifically about a public option prevents people from using a private option, if they want? Keep in mind in your response that UK does still have private options.
See the only difference between their system and ours is people here with preexisting conditions are denied coverage, the poor are denied coverage, and insurance company villains try to wiggle out of contracts for people who develop expensive conditions. Truly despicable in the way they try to betray those who bought protection from them in trusting good faith.
Also Britain’s system is 1/2 the price per capita, and provides better health as measured by life span and infant mortality.
Why should our economy be forced to spend money unnecessarily supporting insurance company “death panels” where executives decide who lives and dies out of pure inhuman greed?
Move goal posts much? Your assertion was tax payers won’t pay for alcoholics and obese. Medicaid and medicare don’t care if you’re fat or like the drinky too much. Both of which are tax payer funded programs.
Your assertion is therefor false. Surely if you’re debating in a good faith belief in your opinion, you won’t pursue arguing assertions that are factually wrong will you?
And if the voters, as represented by their elected officials feel it needs to grow?
I find your 50% calculation highly doubtful, but irrelevant to the debate.
For his taxes, whatever they be, he gets federal highways, state roads, city roads, clean drinking water, environmental regulations, guaranteed retirement fund, public schools, college assistance, public library, protection from hostile invading countries, programs to make sure his food and medicine are safe, fire assistance, police, etc.
In short in exchange for his taxes he gets a reasonably safe, educated, and developed society that protects him if he suffers misfortune. All the UHC people are saying is we’d like to add healthcare to those protections. Given it’s demonstrated to be 1/2 the price per capita over all it’d lessen the burden on your small business owners all the country, as well in larger organizations and be a boost to the economy. UHC would save him money over all.
Finally lets say this small business owner was the person with an inheritable kidney condition. How would UHC affect his finances?
Yet somehow the rest of the civilised world manages to run UHC (alongside private provision) without the Dark Gods rising from their long sleep. You are just projecting your ideological fantasies onto a screen of your own devising.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1915835,00.html Maintaining their list of getting everything wrong, the righties are wrong again. The good doctor is against euthanasia .
The British system rations it’s care. And unless you get a tax refund for purchasing private care you’re not free to buy it unless you are wealthy enough to pay for both systems.
It was previously the case that–at least in the case of pharmaceuticals–the NHS didn’t want patients to supplement public medicine with private funds. (Though in practice there was a lot of elective private medicine anyway.) I imagine there is a good if obscure reason for this, but it became intolerable, & they changed it last year.
http://www.nhs.uk/news/2008/11November/Pages/TopupfeesQA.aspx
Note that it is the new model that I want the USA to adopt. Public medicine provides & subsidizes a floor; private medicine augments that.