Thank you so much for your kind words. I have avoided jumping in for all these years because of feeling inadequate and intimidated, so your encouragement means mountains to me.
Full disclosure - I adore lots of posters, independent of political affiliation. The passion of Dio and Der Trihs (if more Washington Democrats had their kind of courage, at least change would happen faster). The humor of Elucidator and Sampiro. The compassion and acceptance of Polycarp. The gentle, considered reasoning of Nzinga, Seated and sarafeena. I try to model DianaG, Shot from Guns, and **AuntBeast **IRL (and I wish I had an Aunt Beast). There is something beneficially mind-blowing about reading the posts of **KGS **and kanicbird. Reading when Really Not All That Bright defends women from nasty, sexual humor, **PRR **defends children against physical violence in the name of “discipline”, or that most excellent and heart-warming post, I forget the name of the poster who wrote it, when he talked about defending his daughter (the “I’m God’s Hammer” one). I’ve been reading these boards for a long time (since **Liberal **was Libertarian), and I can honestly say that my ignorance has been fought in most entertaining and enlightening ways.
House Democrats agreed Friday to raise taxes by about $550 billion to pay for their sweeping expansion of the nation’s health care system.
The huge tax increase will only pay for about half the cost of the Democrats’ health spending plans, and I am skeptical that it will even raise as much as the Dems are claiming. The not-at-all right-wing Lane notes:
And sure enough, the House Dems are already lookingat different ways to levy taxes on the middle to pay for their programs:
The repubs said over and over that Medicare and Medicade spending would bankrupt the country in the future. The dems are tackling the issue. Do you honestly believe we should do nothing?
Setting up the system will cost money. Then it will generate better coverage and financial savings. Then of course 50 million uncovered in America is a disgrace. Sorry ,but something has to be done. The medical and pharm lobbyists are doing their best to destroy the efforts. We all know the rich and powerful have the best interests of the country at heart. For example ,the banking and financial industry.
It’s possible your issue is that you’re too expensive and they want to get rid of you, or that you might just be unlucky. My father-in-law had to work three years to get a pap smear taken off his bill. I’m just saying that the big companies don’t have a business model of taking money and denying lots of claims.
My job is partly to look at field failures of our computers. Some months it seems nothing we have out there is any damn good - which is not what the statistics say. You have to distinguish a small number of problems which need to be fixed from a massive quality meltdown - which you get but some others don’t.
I’d only give them a pass if they think it is okay for everyone else to get pissed off when the time comes that they get sick and use “more than their share.” If they have a way of ensuring that someone never gets sick and uses benefits, I wish they’d tell us.
What is my share. I had 1 hernia operation in 40 years of coverage.Any regular doctors visits, I paid for. I never had free doctor visits. They were never covered. Ear infections and flus cost me cash. I don’t feel cheated ,I would rather be healthy.
When I had the hernia ,my insurance was supposed to pay a percetage of my salary. In case of an injury , we would get the check with no waiting period. The insurance company declared my hernia an illness. Therefore I had to wait 3 weeks for coverage. I asked them to show the virus or germ that caused the hernia. They just shut down communication and refused to pay.
Are you done misrepresenting my argument yet? I only have a problem with your support for a self-defeating business model because people want to use force to keep it functioning. If you want to subsidise high-risk customers by making a bigger profit on low-risk customers you’ll get no argument from me, until you have driven away all your low-risk customers and want to use the government to get them back.
Bill Moyers Journal . Transcripts | PBS Our system is a disgrace.Even Health Care insiders are ashamed of what they have foisted on Americans. They know how to play the PR game. And some people are dumb enough to swallow everything they sell.
Consortiumnews.com This is Moyers explaining why the best options for the people will be taken off the table. The special access the health company lobbyists have with the Senators and Congressmen is insidious. They also have special access to the media big wigs. That is why you will not get health care fixed. The media will not tell you what is going on and the pols need the money to keep their seats. The system does not work for the people.
I heard a discussion about this on NOR. They mentioned several large hospitals in contrast to McAllen that did a great job of controlling costs and offering quality health care so there are good models out there. One big problem in McAllen was that the doctors all began to see it as a for profit business and began becoming owners of other health related services. So, you visit the doctor and he orders a test or two or three. Turns out he owns the company preforming the tests as well. So, the focus was on more health care because it equaled more profit for the doctors, at the tax payers expense.
Can we diminish that problem by outlawing doctors owning other health related services as a conflict of interest?
There are two types of high risk customers - those with a choice and those without a choice. I’m all for charging smokers more, and maybe even the obese. Those are high risk customers with a certain amount of choice. On the other hand, we don’t have much choice about getting old. Since young people will get old, as a rule, I have no problem forcing them to subsidize their future care.
This dismays me also, and is the main reason why I think any plan that is good for the general public will be hobbled before it even joins the race. I fear there’s simply too much money at stake for the major insurers to just bow out of the main game. It’s not too difficult to dispense “poison pill” PR to Joe the plummer types by making fatuous claims.
I’d add professional and recreational sports players too. High risk, voluntary behavior. Also, people who chose to become pregnant. And people who chose high stress professions.
Because you don’t learn that your company won’t cover you until you actually need coverage. Unless there’s some easy way to research insurance companies and see how many claims they deny.
Seems like every interest group, from insurers to unions, is going to try to get their cut of whatever the government grinds out. From the NYT:
This of course illustrates another difficulty in having government healthcare: not only is it difficult to even have a theoretical model that works, once your nice shiny model gets into the real world of government, every interest group is going to have its own agenda, and if you want their support, they all have their price.
Put it another way. If you have public opinion strongly on your side, than you can just power through and tell the special interests where to stick it. If, like Obama, you’re going to push through a controversial bill, where you know you’re going to have a lot of opponents, then you are going to make lots of deals to get lobbyists on your side and bastardize your ideal in the process. This happened to Waxman-Markey, and from the looks of it, healthcare is going to get the public choice treatment even worse.
Wal-Mart the world biggest employer and the greatest profit maker on the globe does not want health care. What a surprise. They have taxpayers paying for it now. Why do they want to have to cover employees? Their lobbyists and political power will be stomping on any pol that wants to fix the system. They are making tons just like it is. They have no interest in the welfare of those who work for them. They do not care.
I would argue that the best chance of reducing costs includes a single payor system. Medicare insures the most expensive patients in our system and a lot of that has to do with the compensation system but even more of it has to do with how we spend our money.
The average person in America spends about half their lifetime health care dollars in the last few months of their life when they are in and out of the ICU trying to summon the miracles of modern medicine to extend life by another week, another day, another few hours. I don’t know how we get there but at some point we have to come to terms with the fact that people have to die. You can pay your own way if you want but when we determine what the government pays for I think that we have to ration health care a lot more than we do now even in the medicare system.