For your information, Mr. Smarty Pants, here in the US of A we like our low-hanging fruit! We are so proud of our low-hanging fruits that we elect them to Congress!
Somehow I feel left out, in a nation supposedly that lets no minority suffer.
I work in a family business. I pay no income tax because it’s damn hard that I keep a small business alive for five years to begin with. (well, I pay sales tax and hidden taxes) Still, this so-called “universal” health care sticks in my craw that the liberal advocates keep insisting is good for me.
Please explain; I hear endlessly about how we are including “everybody” in all the “equality” being passed around because of “rights,” and therefore you must forgive me for calling BULLSHIT. Sorry, you forgot my cost of earning my own living without asking for shit from anyone, except the customer pay their dollar. You forgot that there’s no-one I can demand my “free” healthcare from.
Any of you losers thinking I’m entitled to have the broken tooth I need pulled on your dime PLEASE send me a couple hundred bucks for the oral surgeon.
BTW I’m barely making it as it is, and NO, I don’t qualify for Medicaid, and NO, I don’t have enough extra money at the end of the month to pay a premium, and NO I do not think that anyone is thinking about “equality” for “all.”
This is a healthcare system designed entirely for big corporations and the exceedingly poor. I’m neither, and hey, all you self righteous “equality” types, NONE of YOU have mentioned people like me in this entire thread. I view the entire idea with disgust. I’ll have my tooth pulled, someday, but it’ll probably involve someone who is very smart but is guilty of “practicing dentistry without a license.” Common people can have the ability to buy surgical tools and appropriate drugs (despite the fact that’s against your “program,”) too, but I’ll get it done and I won’t need you or your sorry “equal” “universal” “health care program.”
Got no use for it or anyone who wants to quibble with the justice of it.
Surely if I were black, asian, hispanic, female, gay, or left-handed, or too lazy to earn a living, someone of you “kind considerate caring people” would have thought to include me in your “programs,” but I just happen to be a caucasian male earning his own living, and I just don’t qualify for “universal” health care.
I call BullShit all around.
David42 I see you have swallowed the propaganda. Under universal health care you, too, would be included. That’s the point. It’s UNIVERSAL.
It’s our current system, which you cling to, that excludes you.
I didn’t need any propaganda whatsoever to realize that I fell through the cracks. If you’ll try to catch my drift here, I’m in favor of neither the old or the new system. I couldn’t get health care either way; but I’m betting you have some.
Seems the height of arrogance to me to tell me that this is not really my experience of being left out, but instead I’m swallowing propaganda. You see, I’m not arguing a fictititous person might get left out. I’m arguing I’m a real person who did indeed get left out. My anecdote is not the result of propaganda, it’s the result of reality.
Next. if I complain that it’s getting hard to buy a loaf of bread, will you tell me no problem, just eat cake?
Err… Obama’s heathcare hasn’t actually kicked in yet so if you don’t mind my asking, how do you know what kind of care you’ll get?
Here is a link describing subsidies for lower income people under the new system, and if you are not paying any income tax I’m pretty sure you qualify. You seem to be in one of the classes of people the new system is designed to help, so you won’t fall through the cracks any more.
So why is Cyclone banned?
I know the system will have tons of problems, but a single person will pay about $5000 a year for insurance premiums if they have an income of 38k a year, plus another $1700 in copays and deductibles. That will take a huge bite out of people’s incomes since neither employers nor the government will be helping people cover the bills at that income. It is a step in the right direction, but lots of people earning 40k a year won’t have $6700 a year for insurance, deductibles and copays, and that is for the basic plan. They are predicting 17-20% in income for premiums and other medical expenses for people who don’t get subsidies but who are still in the working class and middle class. On top of that those people will end up paying taxes to fund medicare, medicaid, CDC, VA, etc. A person earning 40k a year could end up paying 25% of their entire income for health care in one form or another.
I do hope the bill lowers the rate of medical inflation. But that would require a massive restructuring of US health care and I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
You misunderstand - under an actual universal health care plan, such as civilized countries like the UK, Germany, England, France, Australia, etc. have** YOU WOULD BE COVERED**. No questions about it. No cracks to fall through.
I want that for my country. Why should we be the only first world nation that continually leaves people such as yourself to suffer? Why can’t we do what everyone else is doing?
Remember, in today’s system if someone who doesn’t have insurance would have to pay $1700 with insurance they would get royally screwed. It will be interesting to see what rates will be once the overhead is capped, more people get into the system, and we have some real competition.
That’s true, but is moderate pain better than the very real chance of losing everything? I certainly agree the system isn’t optimal.
As they do now.
Or introducing best practices - the way some areas of the country have significantly lower costs than others with a similar population base. There is an awful lot of low hanging fruit out there, reductions which today’s private market clearly hasn’t been able to or cared to address.
I’m calling bullshit on that. No matter how alluring the tale of “I pulled myself up by my own bootstraps and owe nobody anything” is to your ego, it’s a propaganda lie.
When you were born, your parents (or somebody else) cared for you. You went to school - paid by other people. You use roads - paid for by taxes from other people. You can trust a minimum of protection by police (compared to countries like Somalia, where you have to pay the local war chief protection money) - paid for by taxpayers. You know that, though it’s a long process, you can take people to court if things go wrong - paid for by taxes (compared to informales in Peru, where everything hinges on their personal word and reputation: business is limited for them to the small circle of personal aquaintances). You can eat food and drink water that’s been controlled by the govt., paid for by other people. You can go to a bank to get a loan if necessary, because the banks are regulated (though less so than in Europe, it’s still more than in corrupt countries) - by govt.
So stop that bullshit about how you owe nobody and earned the money yourself. You relied and still rely each day on the network of civilisation, which works because of the contributions of many people.
The new plan passed in Vermont is supposed to lower medical costs by 25% over the next 10 years or so (after implementation) due to a mix of lower overhead and changing reimbursement to promote wellness rather than procedures.
The VA system was dramatically changed in the last couple of decades, and as a result quality improved dramatically while prices declined.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/30/opinion/30goetz.html
So done properly reform could be pretty effective. But I think meaningful reforms will have to occur on the state level because on the national level there is too much political gridlock and ideological purity litmus tests.
Wow! Somebody needs to study what they did and pass that data around!
This has some info on how they did it. FWIW the quality of the VA system grew dramatically during the same period that prices declined, it tends to consistently outscore both private insurance plans and other public plans (like medicare) for quality and patient satisfaction.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2005/0501.longman.html
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2007/0710.longman.html
The electronic records system seems to be a big part. But also the doctors are salaried so they are not paid based on how many services they provide (eliminating the incentive by doctors and hospitals to push for the most expensive diagnostics and interventions since they get paid the same anyway). Plus the VA negotiates medical supplies rather than buy them at market value.
Our medical system is great. that is why 500,000 Americans were involved in Medical Tourism last year. I saw a story of a guy who needed a hip scraped for 50 K. he got it done in India. It included a 6 day recovery at a resort and a 5 day hospital stay. total cost $8800.
Medical care will be outsourced to escape our enormous costs . I imagine insurance companies might force their customers to go offshore to save money in the future.
Given that a lot of people in the US don’t live conveniently close to major medical centers it’s not uncommon for some procedures to require significant travel now. Provided the care I’d travel to is on par with first-world standards, and the travel itself doesn’t increase the risk, why not? Especially if that’s the only way I could afford a needed treatment.
Don’t worry, it will get even better. Mitt wants to improve on it by privatizing the VA with a voucher program :smack:
Two things about the VHA that make them unique are first, that they had to rapidly expand to cover the expense of all of the WW2 veterans getting old and now that most of them have passed away they are dealing with the fewer people and still have the infrastructure in place they had before. Also the typical veteran only gets less than half of their medical coverage from the VA. This is because the VA rations care depending on the amount of disabilty of the veteran, and if someone can not get care from the VA because someone with a higher level of disability is being served they can get the healthcare elsewhere. This can be a problem since it is estimated that 17% of disability classifications are incorrect and appealing a decision takes over two years. So one way the VA keeps prices low and is by rationing care and then letting veterans seek help elsewhere. This is probably not going to be possible for others groups providing healthcare.