Hey Starving Artist, I heard a rumor that when the death panels are in full operation their testing protocols will include an essay portion and THEY WILL TAKE OFF FOR SPELLING.
So let me save your life a little bit here and teach you how to spell those words:
Bureau
Bureaucrat
Bureaucracy
Bureaucratic
Okay? Okay! Save this post in your “Favorites” folder and refer to it when you want to use one of those words in a post.
That way I won’t have to denounce you when the death panels come looking for bad spellers.
I’m jealous! I had a trip to the ER which consisted of similar, except I think I was in the waiting room for more like 12 to 16 hours, and I had a CAT scan, which I’d imagine should be cheaper, and I was billed 20k. Maybe it’s the self-pay price premium.
I just did a paper and presentation on the affects of health insurance cost and small business. The one that really got to me was that for the past twenty years health insurance costs have been the number one worry of small business owners (Health care remains top challenge for business owners - Jun. 10, 2008)
Doesn’t that seem just a bit ridiculous? “I was going to open a small business but shit, forget about finding good employees or raw materials or marketing my product or any of the business things associated with it. What I’m worried about is HEALTH CARE!”
Ugh. People who argue against reform put a bad taste in my mouth.
Yeah, I’ve gotten tripped up on that one before. In my defense, I would point out the time of my post, which would indicate that I’d either been up all night (or worse, up very early), and so I must plead brain fart due to exhaustion. I’m confident that a search of my user name with the words correctly spelled will show that I do indeed (normally) know how to spell them, though they do seem to be words that I’m inclined to misspell if I’m not careful. So thanks just the same.
Fear Itself and LavenderBlue, I’m glad things worked out better for you. As I said, individual states administer the program and it would appear you live in more generously-inclined and less bureaucratic states than the one in which I live.
My question is why do suppose doctors and hospitals and pharm companies have a “right” to salary growth mutiple several times the average. Most doctors, hospital guys or pharm guys are not the “modern miracle makers”. Those guys are in labs. The rest are just ordinary mooks who gain windfall salaries because the true costs of medicine are hidden by insurance. Before the days of health insurance being everywhere, people had to pay doctors and doctors lived like people and made house calls. Now they live like princes, and nobody seems to notice they are doing the same work.
Americans are easily frightened. Many Americans are under-educated, often willfully so. We are not the people we were 60-some years ago, when we would see a hard job and work together to do it. Perhaps it is because of what we once were that we are afraid of risks now. There are stories of people who lived during the Depression, who horde food because they don’t want to do without again. In the post-war boom people could ‘live the good life’. Now they’re afraid all that they and their parents worked for will be taken away.
We don’t see the Big Picture. Most people understand that they have to put money into their cars from time to time, or else it will cost them much more (larger repairs, or replacement of the vehicle) later. Not enough people understand that a healthy population is more productive and makes the economy and the country stronger. They only see the start-up costs and imagine that all they and their parents worked for will be taken away and they will get nothing in return. Because they are being frightened by the people who really are taking what they have, and are too short-sighted to see the benefits they will receive by their investment.
Taking up torches and pitchforks? We’re too lazy, greedy, and frightened to do any such thing.
This is a big problem. And one thing that contributes to it is the 12 million illegal aliens we have here, who use the emergency rooms the same way. And many of those illegals have legal children without insurance. I don’t get for the life of me how someone who is rightfully concerned about the state of american healthcare is not of the mind that we need to control illegal immigration and try to get the illegals that are already here to leave (mainly by seriously going after employers).
Pick anything. An old house, an old car, building a levee, going to the Moon… whatever. There are going to be issues to overcome. What you need to do is to set priorities. Illegal immigration is a small problem. Health care is a big problem. There’s an old saying: Don’t sweat the small stuff. If my roof is leaking and the water is rotting my floor, I want to fix the larger problem of the leaky roof before I worry about the floor. There are 300+ million citizens in this country. Forty-five million (or 30 million, or whatever number – it’s in the multiple millions) don’t have access to adequate health care. Tens of millions more are financially ruined even though they theoretically have coverage. This situation is bad for the people who can’t afford to be well, it’s bad for the economy, and it’s bad for the country. Illegal immigrants are a very small part of the problem. Temporary solutions won’t work. You don’t use duct tape when you need a weld. The greater problem needs to be solved before the minor things can.
It’s about priorities. We can’t afford to sweat the small stuff.
When I was pregnant with my first child, I had to go to the ER 8 hours from home (during the winter holiday period, excellent) as I could keep nothing down and was dehydrating rapidly. When the advice of my doc (via phone) didn’t take, he sent me to ER.
There, I was given the most basic care–two liters (!) of fluids, monitoring of my stressed baby, and an anti-vomitting medication given via shot. Once I stabilized after a few hours, I was sent home. I was a weakened mess, but baby and I were fine after that.
While being administered the fluids, the nurse told me in casual conversation that each saline bag was approximately $1500. $1500?! For a bag of saline? But, that’s how ER costs work, he explained. The prices compensate for everyone who doesn’t have anything to pay at all. My total trip was something in the range of $5000, which is paltry compared to some, but absurd considering what was done. Thankfully, my insurance covered it all and I was only out the $25 ER copay.
The system, in its current condition, simply cannot afford to continue in this way. It’s going to collapse on itself eventually. Change is absolutely needed.
I am curious what the deal is with quoted prices that actually aren’t what the insurance winds up paying. When I called about getting a follow up MRI (willing to pay out of pocket), the pricing I was offered was confounding. I was basically told it costs $x, but really I only pay $y, and if insurance were paying they’d only pay $z.
If this were the case, it would be hard to explain why the current government run health care systems enjoy better outcomes than private in the case of the V.A. Hospital System and are liked better by their patients in the case of Medicare.
They also have less overhead and are not paying lobbiests and other groups millions of dollars to lie to the American public.
I know a lot of people in their late fifties, early sixties who are just holding on until their Medicare kicks in and they can get medical care.
As I’ve said before, healthcare in the US is the biggest, most successful con in the worldwide history of universal suffrage - and I include Saddam/9/11.
If people are finally understanding that, it’s great news. But I do note the OP primarily got the data himself from the Internet, not from the media. You’re still going to have to drag the politicians through the streets screaming though.
So how much does the health care of these 12 million illegal immigrants cost us? Surely you know the answer to this question if this is as big a problem as you say. For myself, I did not know but I had serious doubts that it was really as big of a problem as the people who oppose heath care reform say. Anyway from <2 minutes of Googling, I found the following two articles from USA today:
[ul]
[li]Rising health care costs put focus on illegal immigrants.[/li][li]Health care spending highest in northeast.[/li][/ul]
The first article gives the results of several studies of health care costs of illegal immigrants, while the second gives average health care spending per capita for the different states. The first article mentions a study by FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, for the costs in California:
OK, let’s assume the FAIR California study is accurate*, according to the second article:
Wikipedia tells me that California had a population of ~35,000,000 in 2004. After doing some simple math with the numbers above, it appears that about 0.9% of all health care spending in California is on illegal immigrants. I have seen estimates that state that 25% of all illegal immigrants in the US are in California (here is Google “I’m feeling lucky link” for an example), so I really doubt that the costs would be worse in any other state with maybe the exception of Texas. Regardless, if this is really a huge problem and a reason to shoot down the current attempts to reform this industry, maybe you can take a couple of minutes and convince me with something other than rhetoric?
*Note: FAIR is hardly a non-partisan group. The are notoriously anti-immigration and have actually been labelled as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. I only bring this up to point out that their study is most likely either accurate, or it overstates the problem to make their case against illegal immigration. To me, it is very unlikely that they would underestimate the cost of healthcare for illegal immigrants, YMMV.
Small business owner here. Generally if one is looking to go into business, they have some idea how to make, market, and supply it. UHC would totally remove a need for employers to deal with medical insurance and probably most of workmens comp as well. Between my weight and my partners PE condition, the cheapest anyplace has offered us even crappy insurance is about $450/mo each. Some months, that is 15-20% of our gross receipts.
I have been without medical insurance for about a year now.
How the heck is this small stuff. And I’m talking about how it relates to health care only. Obama tells us that there are 47 million uninsureds. Well, 12 million of them are illegal aliens. And another X million are there legal children. Also, let’s say we reform health care and everyone is insured, the number of patients per doctor just increased by about 16%. If you wanted to just give people the same access insured people have now, you’d need a 16% increase in doctors. And some commensurate increase in the number of non-emergency hospital beds. That ain’t happening over night. If at all—especially since salaries will be going down some. Immigration is the whole in the roof. Healthcare is the rotted floor. I’m all for fixing healthcare, but I’m fixing that roof first. Especially since it’s not only ruining the floor, but the appliances and the furniture, as well. I think taking your view is allowing a political position on immigration to trump what really needs to be done. IN fact, I’d say that the more one believes that everyone should be covered, the more they should be insistent that our borders are enforced and illegals be sent back home (as I said, mainly through going after employers and drying up jobs).
I think you’re making a huge mistake by splitting the choices into a black and white dichotomy. We’re not forced to choose between all private and all government care. There are many, many different health care models out there that we can look at.
For example, Germany has a system with about 200 competing, non-profit, non governmental “sickness funds.” If a fund performs poorly, people will take their premiums elsewhere, so there’s an incentive for their bureaucrats to care about you. Switzerland has a similar setup. Their citizens are healthier than ours, and pay less per capita.
