I have heard stories of some insurers claiming later on that they weren’t properly notified of what exactly was going on and trying to back out of approval. Whether this was a hospital error or an attempt by the insurance company to get out of their deal, I can’t say. After all, there have been verified cases of insurance companies trying to deny coverage of cancer treatment by citing a dermatologist’s earlier report of a “pre-existing condition” - which was actually a minor blemish like acne.
Crafter:
We are, of course, grateful for your insights into our governmental system, as you should be grateful that there is literally no chance of their being implemented. We will protect you from yourself, even as we protect ourselves from you.
As for a “right” to health care, it is not written, in that you are correct. Our rights are wholly theoretical, there is no proof, they are gifts we give unto each other. We hold these rights to be self-evident, which is to say, we are making them up as we go along. Don’t like it, tough noogies. Convince enough of us that you are right and you will be right. Until then, you are wrong.
Again, for me, the question boils down: if the insurance companies can make a respectable (albeit modest) profit without doing these ghastly things to our people, why don’t they? And if they can’t, what good are they? If they cannot function as respectable businesses, to hell with them. And if they can, but refuse to do so out of greed and rapacity, to hell with them.
So if a rape victim wants justice, and she can’t afford to pay the police to arrest the perpetrator, or the prosecutor to prosecute, or the jailors to put the rapist behind bars, then we just let the offender go free? And before you try to say that it’s not an “individual service”, why not? What if this offender has only offended once against one person? Isn’t locking the perpetrator up an individual service for the victim?
Oh, this happened in Europe! Well, that’s very different! If it happened in America, to our people, we should be compelled to do something about it!
Because normal, upstanding, patriotic Americans don’t understand there’s a problem until, like you, it happens to someone they know.
Unless they have an ounce of empathy, in which case they’ve known about it and been pissed for years.
I have a question. You say you will support their fixed cost. Let’s say that a person goes missing. In order to find this person, the police increase overtime, therefor increasing their fixed expenses.
I’m assuming that your response would be to charge the person who is missing for that expense if they are found, regardless of the situation that caused the expense, yes? So if their car goes off the road, it’s their responsibility to pay for the service of their recovery or I guess their insurance company. Yes?
Now let’s say the worst has occured and the person is taken. The police search for this person and find nothing or they find a body. Who would you charge then? If the person is a minor, would you charge their parents? What if they have no ‘police search’ insurance? Who pays? Do we then cut police services, because they lost money on that search? The free market and all that.
How do you see that conversation going, “Sorry Mrs Smith, we found Tammy’s body, here’s our bill…on the back is the number of our financial services department. If you don’t pay, well we can’t guarantee we’ll be around next time. Nothing personal, it’s just business.”
Would you require before an extensive search is conducted, the police request that they have a promisary note or offer a ‘payment’ plan in place before they conduct that search?
The thing about “isms” is that they seem really good on paper, but in practice with real, living people; they tend to only work if we ignore any sense of humanity and behave as savages.
Of course if we all behaved as you desire, the people who are pushing these ideas, would most likely be the first ones against wall; surprised that they are the ones who needed the ‘nanny’ government after all. They are not strong enough, or smart enough or fast enough and their guns won’t help them climb out of a wrecked car or control their diabetes.
You, like the anti-vaccination people have the luxury to believe what you do, because you rely on us to carry your weight, while you bitch about how the government cheese and butter you eat is making you fat.
You know that if you got sick and walked into an ER they would help you. You know if you crashed your car, the emergency crew would come and cut you free, regardless of your ability to pay for it and you rely on it. We all do, even if we never, ever use those services.
I don’t know who you think you’re fooling, except maybe yourself.
Can we all agree that Crafter_Man should move to the Libertarian Paradise known as Somalia? He’d really love it there. Until his family was raped to death by soldiers high on PCP, but you know what, some things are worth sacrificing for LIBERTY!
I pray that you have sufficiently reinforced the front door of your home, lest it be trampled in by the hordes of public school representatives eager to adopt you as today’s “educational success story” poster child.
“Look, lady, my hands are tied. Until this check clears, the kid stays on the roof.”
We don’t agree on that, actually. Well - depending on exactly what you’re saying. An American attempt to implement European-style (and again, each country is different - some countries are better than others) single payer system may get screwed up severely because of the structural flaws in the way our government work. But if they actually just transplanted one of those systems over here magically, it wouldn’t be so bad. How do I know this? Well… because it isn’t so bad. I bought into the propoganda for a long time too about how their medical systems let people die waiting for important surgeries regularly and all that stuff, but if you actually look at the data, their treatment is quite good and cheap.
I feel like I may be the only person in the world who says “hmm, the facts don’t fit my ideology, I guess I should adjust my ideology then” rather than “the facts don’t fit my ideology, time to ignore the facts!”
There seems to be some unspoken assumption that our current system is somehow representative of the free market and is ideal and any deviation from it will damage it. But our system is pretty substantially broken - it excels in some areas and falls back pretty far in more. It is costly and inefficient. The practical requirement of employment-based health insurance is due to government intervention in the markets - changing this alone would significantly improve our health care situation, and yet people who think the status quo is somehow untouchable will act as though employment-based health care is somehow the natural free market thing. No, it’s only the result of government wage fixing in WW2, and then afterwards, government tax incentives to keep it that way. There’s this very weird and unhealthy unstated assumption on the part of many conservatives (and sometimes libertarians, in a more limited context) that the status quo is ideal and any deviation is automatically wrong. Conservatives I understand - that’s sort of their psychological MO - but libertarians tend to be more flexibly minded in my experience.
There are ways to address this without going to single payer (Sam Stone has excellent free market proposals to reduce the cost and availability of health care if you read his posts in various UHC threads), but the idea that even if we did get single payer over here it would OMG THE END OF THE WORLD! is silly. Lots of European countries effectively have as good of treatment for us for a much lower cost in terms of their GDP, which frees up their GDP for creating wealth in the other ways. Unfortunately no one with any power is actually proposing these reforms that would take us closer to a free market system and improve it - instead, the knee jerk reaction is to either go with the democrat plan or obstruct and fight to the death to maintain the flawed status quo. If the Republicans actually offered a viable alternative that changed our system to benefit more from the good that comes from the free market, the debate would have a different tone, and we would be better for it.
If it’s am emergency, right? I mean, maybe I’m wrong, but if time is an issue that will effect life or death, the doctors wont be waiting to hear back from Blue Cross in a few hours.
I’ve told this story on the board before, but I have a friend who had an uneventful pregnancy. Went into labor a few days before her due date, was in labor forever, and finally gave birth to a beautiful baby. The problem was that the baby had passed meconium in the womb (pooped) and came out unable to breathe.
Baby ended up spending 5 days in the NICU on breathing machines (because she literally wasn’t strong enough to breathe without the), feeding tubes, and all kinds of medicine. After 5 days, she was as good as new and went home. Mom and dad received the bill a few weeks later after the insurance denied the claim: $40,000. They denied the claim saying that the baby didn’t need a respirator or to be in the NICU at all— a baby who literally could not breathe on her own.
My friend asked me somewhat rhetorically, “I don’t get it: what did the insurance company want to do?” Me: “Let your stupid baby die, duh.”
BTW: dad is a teacher, has what’s considered great health insurance, blah blah.
Well, I’ll probably get flamed for this, and it’s Christmas and all, but…
Why didn’t the parents terminate the pregnancy? With “a variety of organ deformities” and a probable future as a “special needs” kid, what is the reason for birthing the child at all? I’m obviously a little hard-core on this, but, come on…
This bothers me in terms of UHC, because these parents, who I am sure loved and wanted this child, decided to birth a deformed baby, and as a part of the insurance pool, I’m going to be paying for their kid, who was defective from the start. IMO, the responsible thing would have been to terminate the pregnancy.
I am told over and over again that I must pitch in, be forced into a insurance pool, and help to pay medical bills for everyone because it’s the Right Thing To Do. It wouldn’t be right to force this couple to abort, but shouldn’t this family be required to at least be educated on how much this baby would cost everyone else? Why does the obligation to others only go one way?
Absolutely. The time factor is a major one, especially in regard to HMOs. I remember the not-so-merry-go-round of requests, authorizations, referrals, denials, appeals and other crap we had to go through when my parents had HMOs. Forcing patients to wait for care approval doesn’t exactly force their condition to improve.
And about which you’re wrong.
End of story. Don’t bother posting a rebuttal, not because you don’t have a right to post whatever you wish, but because it is not a debateable point. Hence, any attempt on your part to engage in debate about is is a waste of time and energy.
You’re right, I think you are gonna get flamed for this 
Bottom line: You don’t know what kind of ‘special needs’ this kid is gonna have. He may well have a very fulfilling life. I was born with a condition which requires regular check-ups and over the last 30 years or so I’ve probably cost the taxpayer about a hundred grand at a conservative estimate but I’m also a productive member of society and lead a good life. When placed alongside what medical technology has given me, there is absolutely nothing in the world I could care less about than your or anyone else’s tax bill and I would wager you’d feel exactly the same way if you were in my position.
On the grand morality scale, I think it is far more immoral to deny people health care than it is to hold true to some political ideology.
While many other countries have healthcare for all, we in the U.S. can’t look past the almighty dollar.
Nobody should go broke because they got sick, either.
Nah, it’s that Americans are incompetent and stupid; and we are incapable of doing – let alone making better – what everyone else in the world has been able to do.
That would have been one way to get the Republicans in Congress on board; access to health care to provide an alternative to abortions.
European-style health insurance is horrendous?
First of all, there’s no Europe-wide system. Every other first world country on Earth manages to provide health care that leads to equal or better outcomes than the United States, yet they spend half of what we spend.
If we were getting much better outcomes for our much higher expenditures, that would be one thing. But we aren’t.
In fact, here in the US government spending on health care is about the same per capita as government spending in other countries. That’s right. You already spend as much on health care for your worthless deadbeat neighbors as they do in socialist Sweden. The only problem is that for some reason in Sweden they manage to pay for everybody’s health care. Here in the United States that same level of socialism only funds coverage for a fraction of the population. And everyone else either goes without, or gets expensive health insurance through their employers.
Because purchasing individual health insurance as a free sovereign individual costs an insane amount of money. And the reason is obvious–healthy people just go without. Anyone who goes looking for individual health insurance does so because they think they’ll save money doing so. But the only way they can save money is by getting more payments from the insurance company than they pay to the insurance company. So we have a death spiral, where the price of individual health insurance is astronomical. So as an individual you either figure out a way to get on a government program, or you pay for medical care out of pocket and if you have emergency unexpected costs, you declare bankruptcy.
It would be one thing if here in the United States we had a free market fee-for-service health care system. But the fact is, we don’t. Try paying cash the next time you visit the doctor. A flat out socialist system would be superior to what we have. It might be that a free market system would be better than a European-style socialist system, but we’ll never know because we haven’t had a free market system in this country since the 1930s.
Since we’re never going to implement a free market system, the alternative is to continue as we are, with private profits and public costs–or switch to a horrific socialist system where we pay about the same in taxes that we do now, yet get unversal coverage for everyone. See, you already pay for the deadbeats and parasites, because we don’t kick sick people out of hospitals when the run out of money. It’s just that you pay through the nose for care for the deadbeats, yet you yourself can’t get that care, you have to purchase your own care because you’re not a deadbeat. So you get to pay twice. Nice, ain’t it?
You’re being reasonable. There’s a need to draw the line somewhere, and where to draw it is a question with no perfect answer.
I’d agree that if a fetus shows multiple organ deformities at six months, the wise thing is to terminate the pregnancy. If the family has the bucks (personal or through insurance) to handle the medical and developmental expenses then more power to them.
But I won’t agree that taxpayers should accept any and all expenses involved with raising a child that was known, well in advanced, to be extremely deformed.
Where to draw the line?
I find I do have a little difficulty comprehending the antecedents. If the problems were discovered several weeks prior to the Caesarian, shouldn’t the subject of coverage have been explored with the insurance company, and a plan in place that kept the insurance company on board?