Catholics VS Health Care in America: Morally Embarrassing

[dmelosi]

Scaremongering is one of the favourite tricks to defend the status quo…

I haven’t had time to reply to Cyrus the Great regarding Obama’s argument on the infants born alive act. I gave the links earlier and Obama did not say those exact words, but it was very clear that he argued that if the abortion failed and the baby lived that it is ok to withhold medical care and let the baby die. The link again for anyone to research and see for themselves is here…jillstanek.com/archives/2008/08/baipaobamamp3.html

In response to tonyrey…just because you are arguing that it is ok for you to pay for abortions (you do pay for the abortions by paying in to your universal health care) for others…pro life Catholics do not agree with you.

Notice the wording in the response by pro death organizations in the following link.

newyork.cbslocal.com/2012/02/…trol-payments/

Notice this comment "But pro-choice groups said they will fight the church and fight for the right of employees of Catholic institutions to have birth control and other services paid for.

“The Catholic hierarchy seems to be playing a cynical game of chicken and they don’t seem to care that the health and well being of millions of American woman are what’s at stake here,” National Abortion Rights Action League President Andrea Miller said."
Notice the words in the quote “other services paid for.” The slope is slipperier. It is leading to where we are being forced to being a part of killing these most innocent babies, by paying for it.

 

[endoentropism]

By that same logic, couldn’t you say that buying a ticket to a football game indirectly supports gambling because it helps perpetuate the NFL?

People choose to have abortions, but they do not choose to get cancer or diabetes or any number of illnesses - it seems callus to limit treatment to the needy because some unscrupulous people may use the resources to get an abortion.

 

[dmelosi]

By that same logic, couldn’t you say that buying a ticket to a football game indirectly supports gambling because it helps perpetuate the NFL?

People choose to have abortions, but they do not choose to get cancer or diabetes or any number of illnesses - it seems callus to limit treatment to the needy because some unscrupulous people may use the resources to get an abortion.

Not even close to the same logic, you are comparing gambling with killing an innocent human being.

I think callous is a good word here. That is exactly what these Catholics married to their party have become. They are choosing to take the easy way out and accept whatever Obama crams down their throat without taking a stand even on this mass killing.

 

[endoentropism]

I think callous is a good word here. That is exactly what these Catholics married to their party have become. They are choosing to take the easy way out and accept whatever Obama crams down their throat without taking a stand even on this mass killing.

But again – at what cost?

Is it worth it to deny necessary medical treatment to millions if it means stopping some individuals from choosing to have an abortion?

If you want to talk about killing innocent human beings, you could say paying any taxes whatsoever helps fund a military whose foreign interventions necessarily means the deaths of (hundreds of) thousands of innocent civilians.

 

[dmelosi]

But again – at what cost?

Is it worth it to deny necessary medical treatment to millions if it means stopping some individuals from choosing to have an abortion?

If you want to talk about killing innocent human beings, you could say paying any taxes whatsoever helps fund a military whose foreign interventions necessarily means the deaths of (hundreds of) thousands of innocent civilians.

You are saying that there are millions denied healthcare now? Are you saying each year millions are denied healthcare?

That opens the door to another debate, is it a just war or not?

Again your comparison is way off, all it would take for this mass killing to almost end would be for Catholics to vote according to their faith 1 election. Some Catholics do vote their faith, but the vast majority vote only self interest. I have said that I am not against some type of health coverage for all, but not as it is.

 

[anthony022071]

So…

1. What do you base that on, since we’ve never had universal health care in the United States so as to demonstrate the truth of this?

It’s based upon the fact that the health care bill contained provisions for abortion.

1. Aren’t you acknowledging that if we did have Catholics to stand up against abortion that universal health care could exist without it?

Abortion is legal,and the people who draft health care laws in Washington support it,so the government cannot be trusted to exclude abortion from a universal health care mandate. Even if it were possible to keep abortion out of universal health care,it would still be a big mistake,because it would give the government control over the people’s private matters and make them dependent upon it.

 

[anthony022071]

Christian charity** is done **through government control over people’s property and private affairs in many countries even when not all - or even none - of the members of the government are Christians!

No,charity isn’t done that way. Charity is not mechanistic. It is not done through government confiscation and rationing. Neither is Christian social justice done that way.

 

[endoentropism]

You are saying that there are millions denied healthcare now? Are you saying each year millions are denied healthcare?

That opens the door to another debate, is it a just war or not?

Again your comparison is way off, all it would take for this mass killing to almost end would be for Catholics to vote according to their faith 1 election. Some Catholics do vote their faith, but the vast majority vote only self interest. I have said that I am not against some type of health coverage for all, but not as it is.

What would voting their faith mean? Santorum who wants to launch a war with Iran? Romney who wants to raise taxes on the least wealthy and lower them for the most wealthy?

For me it’s a matter of objective good versus subjective evil. Millions were uninsured prior to ObamaCare because they could not afford health insurance. Even those who could afford very basic plans – the #1 cause of bankruptcy in the United States is healthcare costs even among people who had some sort of health insurance:

Medical problems caused 62% of all personal bankruptcies filed in the U.S. in 2007, according to a study by Harvard researchers. And in a finding that surprised even the researchers, 78% of those filers had medical insurance at the start of their illness, including 60.3% who had private coverage, not Medicare or Medicaid.

To deny affordable healthcare for everyone, because some individuals use the resource to fund their abortion, seems (again) callous. You can educate people why abortion is wrong but you cannot educate people not to get sick. Why should every cancer patient suffer because some individuals choose abortion?

 

[Ubenedictus]

What would voting their faith mean? Santorum who wants to launch a war with Iran? Romney who wants to raise taxes on the least wealthy and lower them for the most wealthy?

For me it’s a matter of objective good versus subjective evil. Millions were uninsured prior to ObamaCare because they could not afford health insurance. Even those who could afford very basic plans – the #1 cause of bankruptcy in the United States is healthcare costs even among people who had some sort of health insurance:

To deny affordable healthcare for everyone, because some individuals use the resource to fund their abortion, seems (again) callous. You can educate people why abortion is wrong but you cannot educate people not to get sick. Why should every cancer patient suffer because some individuals choose abortion?

The use of callous is unwaranted, these are your views others expressed theirs. Be careful when using the principle of lesser of two evils, it does not make anything right, just be careful one may sin using that principle. Poverty and suffering against death what would your principle choose.
Ubenedictus

 

[Ubenedictus]

By that same logic, couldn’t you say that buying a ticket to a football game indirectly supports gambling because it helps perpetuate the NFL?

People choose to have abortions, but they do not choose to get cancer or diabetes or any number of illnesses - it seems callus to limit treatment to the needy because some unscrupulous people may use the resources to get an abortion.

do u know that gambling is not a sin. This is not callous, the callous one is a government that talk about basic health care and adds abortion, pls when did having a child become a sickness.
Ubenedictus

 

[Monte_RCMS]

**the #1 cause of bankruptcy in the United States is healthcare costs **

It is essential to the discussion to examine the details of this statement.

In the United States, medical insurance has always been controlled by the government.

For example, my employer has almost always provided “unlimited major medical” … but I as an individual could not purchase a plan like that. And the reason was that the government prohibited it.

Simple explanation.

I can purchase any kind of individual car insurance or home insurance policy. With an umbrella that covers all losses and with additional layers of insurance. Inexpensively.

But the government will not allow me to purchase the kind of medical insurance that I have wanted to purchase, even though it was offered by the insurance industry.

When I needed to purchase my own medical insurance, it could only be done by setting up my own company and it had to have more than one employee. So we included my wife as an employee. The IRS actually has a phone number manned 24 hours a day, seven days a week to provide employer identification numbers just for that purpose. BUT, if I wasn’t married or didn’t have a friend I wanted to include as an employee, then it would not be possible. WHY? Government regulations.

The insurance industry made available the HSA policy. I wanted to buy one. NOPE. The Federal government prohibited it except in cases that didn’t apply to me. WHY? Because the Feds were setting us up for government controlled medical insurance. Thank you, Senator Teddy Kennedy, RIP. And some states prohibited it, as well.

In the state of Indiana, that IS the Indiana Plan. Google " Indiana Plan " … it’s a system of popular, low cost HSA’s. And that is partly the reason why Governor Mitch Daniels was being pushed to campaign to get elected President of the United States.

So, there are “innovative” approaches to medical insurance.

The problem is the desire within the bureaucracy for more control over the daily lives of the people.

There is absolutely NO NEED for an agency such as HCFA … the Health Care Finance Administration … that write rules and regulations for insurance reimbursements.

So you need to look at the details of those medical bankruptcy cases closely.

In addition, there is absolutely no need to get the government involved in diagnoses and treatment alternatives … at all. How? Simple. Build the cost issue into the income tax form.

Right now you cannot deduct ALL of your medical expenses. So, simply change that.

If you are poor, you cannot now get a tax credit for medical expenses. So, simply change that.

And you could also build mechanisms to protect people with chronic debilitating diseases. Without causing their bankruptcy.

But the government has decided it won’t do that.

There ARE many cases involving the spend down of assets to allow people to participate in Medicaid. Which is a totally different situation.

And there is Medicaid fraud. But the government won’t address those situations.

 

[Monte_RCMS]

Remember how I said, you MUST check out the details?

Well, I did a check:

**In 2009, over one million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy; here are the five most common reasons:

1. Medical Expenses
   According to a recent Harvard study, an astounding 62% of all personal bankruptcies filed in the U.S. in 2007 were caused by medical problems. And with health care reform being the topic of the hour, it may surprise you that over three-quarters of those people had some form of health insurance at the start of their illness.

According to the study, high medical bills caused 92% of the reported medical bankruptcies, with out-of-pocket costs averaging $17,943 per medically bankrupted family*. Many patients faced job and income loss, and this, coupled with expensive medical bills, quickly wiped out savings, retirement funds, and home equity, pushing them over the edge.
Source: investinganswers.com/personal-finance/debt-bankruptcy/learn-top-causes-bankruptcy-and-how-avoid-them-1124

In other words: with additional insurance coverage averaging only $18,000 the bankruptcies could have been prevented.

So, we are not talking catastrophic huge medical expenses.

A modest increase in insurance coverage and/or tax policy would solve the medical bankruptcy issue.

Absolutely no need to throw out the entire U.S. medical establishment and install the world’s largest bureaucracy … when a minor fix would solve the whole problem.

So basically the whole issue is a lie. Outright fabrication, created by our government. YOU are not PERMITTED to purchase the coverage that would protect you.

I have had numerous conversations with insurance brokers. I said I wanted a full coverage policy. Instead of showing me a table of coverages and policy premiums, they said, they were not permitted to sell that kind of policy.

[In addition, we do not know the details of the bankruptcies. Were the families “wiped out” … lost their homes, etc? Or were they merely protected against claims from hospitals and creditors? Were the hospitals encouraging bankruptcy filings so that the hospitals could recover cost claims from their insurors or from the government?

Again, the details are essential.]

[Did you ever wonder why hospitals don’t sell medical insurance? I mean it would be so easy for a community hospital to offer medical insurance to area residents. ]

 

[Monte_RCMS]

The details get very illuminating:

medicalcostadvocate.com/blog/?tag=medical-bankruptcy

Excerpts:

“That was actually the predominant problem in patients in our study — 78 percent of them had health insurance, but many of them were bankrupted anyway because there were gaps in their coverage like co-payments and deductibles and uncovered services,” says Woolhandler. “Other people had private insurance but got so sick that they lost their job and lost their insurance.”

However, Peter Cunningham, Ph.D., a senior fellow at the Center for Studying Health System Change, a nonpartisan policy research organization in Washington, D.C., isn’t completely convinced. He says it’s often hard to tell in which cases medical bills add to the bleak financial picture without being directly responsible for the bankruptcies.

“I’m not sure that it is correct to say that medical problems were the direct cause of all of these bankruptcies,” he says. “In most of these cases, it’s going to be medical expenses and other things, other debt that is accumulating.”

 

[Monte_RCMS]

What would voting their faith mean? Santorum who wants to launch a war with Iran? Romney who wants to raise taxes on the least wealthy and lower them for the most wealthy?

For me it’s a matter of objective good versus subjective evil. Millions were uninsured prior to ObamaCare because they could not afford health insurance. Even those who could afford very basic plans – the #1 cause of bankruptcy in the United States is healthcare costs even among people who had some sort of health insurance:

To deny affordable healthcare for everyone, because some individuals use the resource to fund their abortion, seems (again) callous. You can educate people why abortion is wrong but you cannot educate people not to get sick. Why should every cancer patient suffer because some individuals choose abortion?

source:

medicalcostadvocate.com/blog/?tag=medical-bankruptcy

Medical bankruptcies a continuing problem, study finds

A recent survey reveals that medical bankruptcies continue to plague families in Massachusetts.

The Boston Globe

Kay Lazar, Globe Staff

The 2006 Massachusetts law that required nearly everyone to buy health insurance has not significantly staunched residents’ pain from medical bankruptcies, according to a new study.

A survey of Massachusetts residents who filed for bankruptcy in July 2009 found that 53 percent cited a medical cause, down from 59 percent who blamed a medical cause in a survey done in early 2007, before the state law had been fully implemented. But because of the small number of people surveyed, the difference was not statistically significant, according to the study in today’s American Journal of Medicine.

Lead study author Dr. David Himmelstein said medical bills are still causing bankruptcies because health costs in the state have continued rising sharply. High premium costs, along with large co-payments and deductibles, often expose families with insurance to substantial out-of-pocket costs, said Himmelstein, a professor of public health at City University of New York.

“People think they have reasonable insurance until they try and use it,” Himmelstein said. “You are carrying an umbrella and it starts to rain and you put it up and it’s full of holes. For most people, it just hasn’t rained yet.”

Himmelstein, who conducted the research while working as an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, is co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program, an organization that pushes for national health insurance.

He said his findings suggest that the national health overhaul, which was largely modeled on the Massachusetts law and will take full effect in 2014, will not ease the number of medical bankruptcies, either.

 

[Monte_RCMS]

Oh, yeah, about that Harvard study:

But the researchers’ methodology has been criticized as defining medical bankruptcy too broadly and for the ideological leanings of its authors, some of whom are outspoken advocates for nationalized health care.

The link says that the numbers and data in that Harvard study are not reliable.

But just figuring some rough numbers.

There were 1,000,000 personal bankruptcies.

Say half were attributed to medical expense issues.

So that would be 500,000.

And the average unreimbursed out of pocket cost issue was $18,000.

Let’s say $20,000 just for the sake of ease of calculating.

So, multiplying 1/2 million bankruptcies from medical costs x $20,000

Equals $10 billion dollars per year.

Did I do that right?

So, we are throwing out the entire medical hodge podge system … around 15% of the whole United States GDP … , and which could be repaired easily. Because some people want to save $10 billion per year. Which could be easily included into other means of repair.

[And because some people have control issues … they want to control us.]

The ObamaCare system -]would/-] will … is going to … cost something of the order of $3000 billion per year.

Unless we repeal it in its entirety.

And replace it and HCFA with a simple voluntary HSA system and a minor tax code change.

And offer a solution that costs 300 times more than the problem we are trying to avoid.

And as experienced in Massachusetts … doesn’t even solve the problem of medical bankruptcy …

AND introduces a whole slew of additional, new problems … ranging from abortion to pain pills.

IF, medical bankruptcies are the problem [or part of the problem] … they can be solved with $10 billion.

And the government collects $5 billion per day in taxes … just as an order of magnitude of the problem.

So, we could avoid a a $3000 billion bureaucracy, by amending the tax code to the tune of two days tax collections.

Just a minor trivial change to the tax code would solve everything.

 

[cargau]

Christain charity is always an act of love that comes from the heart. What you are describing is a redistribution of wealth that is designed to garner votes. Get real!

Your post is a feeble excuse for doing nothing to help the needy…

No, it’s a clarification of terms. It really has nothing to do, one way or the other, with aiding the needy. I do find it somewhat amusing, however, that those who favor ObamaCare are very content to allow others (namely, the so called rich) to pay for the “charity”.

Real charity means digging into your own possessions to provide for the needy. That is what Christ called for.

 

[endoentropism]

I appreciate the effort you went to with all that information, Monte RCMS, and I agree that ObamaCare is an inadequate compromise, but I read what you’re saying more as an argument for universal healthcare than anything else.

You’d be hard pressed to find a statistically significant population in Canada or Germany or Norway or (I’m sure) even England who would trade their healthcare system for America’s. Like so many institutions in the United States, it favours the wealthiest and most able while leaving the poorest behind.

 

[dmelosi]

I appreciate the effort you went to with all that information, Monte RCMS, and I agree that ObamaCare is an inadequate compromise, but I read what you’re saying more as an argument for universal healthcare than anything else.

You’d be hard pressed to find a statistically significant population in Canada or Germany or Norway or (I’m sure) even England who would trade their healthcare system for America’s. Like so many institutions in the United States, it favours the wealthiest and most able while leaving the poorest behind.

2 points…

1. You only know about the health care in the U.S. what you read. It does not leave the poorest behind no matter how much you are brainwashed into believing that.
2. It is very sad that the significant population in the countries you state have accepted killing and even paying for all of those most innocent that they are so selfish to not consider that.

 

[endoentropism]

2 points…

1. You only know about the health care in the U.S. what you read. It does not leave the poorest behind no matter how much you are brainwashed into believing that.

Well, objective evidence disagrees. Do I really need to do a Monte RCMS data dump?

Even his own numbers indicate that healthcare costs disproportionately affect the least wealthy. Whether or not you agree with UHC or Monte RCMS-style insurance reform, the fact is that - right now - people lose their lives and livelihoods to a broken healthcare system.

1. It is very sad that the significant population in the countries you state have accepted killing and even paying for all of those most innocent that they are so selfish to not consider that.

Yes, it is very sad. Unfortunately, abortions will happen whether or not it is accepted. That is a fact of life. The best you can hope to do is educate your children why they should not get abortions, and to discourage the practice in your community. In the meantime, I do not believe it’s justified to deny affordable and accessible healthcare to everyone because a minority of individuals choose to have abortions.

 

[dmelosi]

Well, objective evidence disagrees. Do I really need to do a Monte RCMS data dump?

Even his own numbers indicate that healthcare costs disproportionately affect the least wealthy. Whether or not you agree with UHC or Monte RCMS-style insurance reform, the fact is that - right now - people lose their lives and livelihoods to a broken healthcare system.

Yes, it is very sad. Unfortunately, abortions will happen whether or not it is accepted. That is a fact of life. The best you can hope to do is educate your children why they should not get abortions, and to discourage the practice in your community. In the meantime, I do not believe it’s justified to deny affordable and accessible healthcare to everyone because a minority of individuals choose to have abortions.

Your quote says that it leaves the poorest behind. Yes please do the data dump.