Change of heart on socialized medicine

[dianebotello]

I don’t know about you but the number of stories I have heard about honest, hard working people that are simply the victim of circumstances far outweighs those I have heard of those who abuse the system. And getting healthcare coverage is different from getting a monthly welfare check. To counter your analogy with an analogy that I believe another poster used, to say a man who drinks deserves to go without healthcare coverage is like saying a woman who dresses provacatively deserves to get raped.

As an emergency room nurse for more than 20 years, I can attest to the fact that most people seeking health care for behavior related issues (drugs, alcohol, STD’s etc) far outweighed the people that had no funding and sought care through ER because they couldn’t afford a primary care provider! Almost everything is about choice. When giving prescriptions more often than not, people would state they coudln’t afford meds, but had on false fingernails, a cell phone, tobacco products and often smelled of alcoholic beverages! No one deserves to have care withheld, and God bless this country, they don’t. By law anyone presenting to the emergency room requesting care, gets it! Tax payers foot the bill!

 

[aspawloski4th]

As an emergency room nurse for more than 20 years, I can attest to the fact that most people seeking health care for behavior related issues (drugs, alcohol, STD’s etc) far outweighed the people that had no funding and sought care through ER because they couldn’t afford a primary care provider! Almost everything is about choice. When giving prescriptions more often than not, people would state they coudln’t afford meds, but had on false fingernails, a cell phone, tobacco products and often smelled of alcoholic beverages! No one deserves to have care withheld, and God bless this country, they don’t. By law anyone presenting to the emergency room requesting care, gets it! Tax payers foot the bill!

While that does happen I have relatives who were or are nurses that would beg to differ from you. If you differed from my grandmother sheo would put you in your place so fast your head would spin. Iv’e been the the emergency roo. maybe about 8 times over the years mostly for kidneystones. I took awhile to fianlly figure out what was causing them. I wasn’t dehydration or too much calcium. And the tax payers right now foot the bill less than you think, it’s money printed out of thin air paying it.

 

[fultonfish]

Yes the government has corruption and greed but nevertheless its track record is better than the private sector. Corporations are not accountable. You and I have little to no say in their policies. Government officials however, we can fire.

Corporations in this country have a long history of trying to get away with every sort of underhanded scheme that is imaginable, and ironically enough its always had to be the government that stepped in to straiten them out. Indeed many of the problems that the government gets blamed for were encouraged by the private sector.

While it is healthy to keep an eye on the government we need to remember a few things. One Capitalism != Democracy. Two, it is our system of government that made America something special and unique NOT our corporations. We are a land of laws setup by our fore fathers to protect the citizenry from the depravations of the powerful. We exercise our power through our votes in the democratic process, not in loyalty to corporate interests. America has sacrificed its ideals on the alter of greed, and have giving our power over to a plutocracy because we were fed a lie that their success equaled “liberty”.

If any business, whether it is a corporate structure or an sole proprietorship screws up enough, its customers will go somewhere else and the business will go bankrupt. Happens all the time.

The failure mechanism is the control mechanism, working through competition.

We used to have a very high cost telephone monopoly; not anymore. We used to have very high cost airline monopolies with every detail of service controlled by the Civil Aeronautics Board; not anymore. Food stores come and go depending on how well they perform; there is tremendous competition in food supply.

If you watch television, there are adverts for car insurance companies. Tough competition results in the best deals for consumers and customers.

Ditto, clothing.

Ditto, entertainment.

Watch television commercials and make lists of advertisers and then jot down the names of their competitors.

There is always another company or group of people ready, willing and willing to take their market share away.

The problem with health care is the government. There are numerous competitors and potential competitors. But the government prevents competition. If the government allowed interstate competition in insurance, the policies would be much cheaper. The competitive alternatives include MSA/HSA types of policies, catastrophic policies, allowing individuals on the same basis as employers to shop for insurance policies and other healthcare (companies can deduct everything; individuals cannot); setting up charitable trusts that would offer reimbursement for individuals who cannot afford health care or who have pre-existing conditions. The FDA restricts medications unnecessarily; safety is not the key issue; efficacy is the key issue, but efficacy does not consider biochemical individuality; the FDA applies a one-size-fits-all bureaucratic approach. HCFA controls pricing of healthcare [how many people know about HCFA?]

 

[fultonfish]

Hmmm. Government run healthcare programs in France and Germany are excellent.

The second part of your statement is true. - an alternative of nothing at all is pretty pitiful, isn’t it.

There are plenty of alternatives; see my previous post.

One of the problems with the German system was outlined in a letter to the editor of Forbes Magazine, October 19, 2009. I can’t find a link to it on the internet. So here it is in “samasdat” form.

“In ‘Somewhat Socialized Medicine’ [Sept 21, p 86] you present an admirable look at the humanist side of Germany’s health care system but gloss over the cost. Germany’s top marginal rate peaks at 45%, with another 2.5% to cover the ‘solidarity tax’. Add the VAT, which ranges from 7% to 19%, and you’ve got a tax system that will take 60 cents of every dollar earned. The emotional side of the health care debate is endless; there’s always another story of someone who would have gone on to greatness if they’d had access to adequate health care. But the fiscal side simply cannot be ignored. I, for one, am not willing to work for 40 cents on the dollar to pay for someone else’s care. Chris Bruhl, Lakewood, Colo.”

Most people remember the story of the killing of the golden goose. Generally speaking once taxation gets over 40% of GDP, a nation’s economy starts to decline. There is also the Laffer Curve. And there is not only the taxation issue but also the control issue. Government controls are “one size fits all”. And you all already know that we all do not have the same healthcare needs. We have read some individual stories just in these few threads. So we know that one size will not fit all.

Some people may honestly believe that health care is too important to be subject to budgetary constraints. However, if demands on the health care system cause the economy to tank, then no one will get anything.

Please keep in mind that the nationalized health care system working its way surreptitiously through Congress even as we speak does have controls built into it so that anyone who needs a lot of health care will be cut off. We have already discussed those provisions of the bill.

 

[apromisemade]

As an emergency room nurse for more than 20 years, I can attest to the fact that most people seeking health care for behavior related issues (drugs, alcohol, STD’s etc) far outweighed the people that had no funding and sought care through ER because they couldn’t afford a primary care provider! Almost everything is about choice. When giving prescriptions more often than not, people would state they coudln’t afford meds, but had on false fingernails, a cell phone, tobacco products and often smelled of alcoholic beverages! No one deserves to have care withheld, and God bless this country, they don’t. By law anyone presenting to the emergency room requesting care, gets it! Tax payers foot the bill!

I wasn’t talking about people seeking healthcare, I was talking about people seeking healthcare coverage.

If the only people who ever went to the emergency room were people that were sick or injured through absolutely no fault of their own whatsoever, emergency rooms would be exceedingly more quiet. I went to the emergency room a few months ago because I had a dehydration induced seizure. I could’ve made a better choice and drank more water that day .

It’s true people ought to take better care of themselves; and if they had affordable health
insurance that would actually cover annual doctors appointments and such, they would be able to do that more easily and not have to sit in the emergency room every time they got sick (not to mention save the taxpayers a bucket of money).

 

[apromisemade]

Why not get rid of all insurance and then see what the actual prices really are? Then we can talk about meeting the costs. Instead, we have this useless middleman that takes our money just in case we get sick. If, like me, someone doesn’t use it, that person never gains any value from all those years of paying.

You hit the nail right on the head.

In the ideal world, insurance companies wouldn’t be in the picture at all and it would just be a question of making healthcare affordable to everyone.

That being said, that’s the way the cookie crumbles now. People without health insurance are all to aware of how much it costs. Just the other day I read about a woman whose insurance company refused to pay for a disk replacement procedure that was FDA approved and she had to pay $60,000 dollars out of pocket. I don’t even want to think of what it would cost for some who needed chemotherapy, an organ transplant, or multiple surgeries.

 

[aspawloski4th]

You hit the nail right on the head.

Then none of us would get any medical treatment.

 

[rpp]

The US Postal Service

Amtrak

Medicare

Military procurements

Hurricane Katrina response

And now they want all of health care?

 

[aspawloski4th]

The US Postal Service

Amtrak

Medicare

Military procurements

Hurricane Katrina response

And now they want all of health care?

Bad is better than none.

 

[pathia]

The US Postal Service

Amtrak

Medicare

Military procurements

Hurricane Katrina response

And now they want all of health care?

Right now, some of us have no choice but to use the ER as our Primary Care Provider…and you want to talk about inefficiencies?

 

[rtconstant]

The US Postal Service

Really? So in the day and age of electronic communications, and online billing the Post Office which has always all but given away its services is in financial troubles? How odd. I’m not arguing that it is probably going to go under soon, but really this one is not even reasonable to bring up.

Amtrak

It should also be noted that Bush wanted Amtrak to go into bankruptcy. It wasn’t like it just suddenly happened. It was a strategy by the President. Maybe not a good one, but it was an intentional decision.

Medicare

There is a projected insolvency for Part A in 2019. Of course the trustee’s report has projected insolvencies almost every year since 1970 we’ve past many of those dates already. Certainly there is a problem that needs to be addressed, but the “bankruptcy of Medicare” is nothing new.

Military procurements

Yeah I agree with you here, spending there just got out of hand.

Hurricane Katrina response

Yup really phoned it in on this one.

And now they want all of health care?

Yeah, and they can potentially screw it up. You’re right. However, let also consider that the people that you want to keep control of it have already screwed it up, AND lets not forget that the government just pulled the private sector’s fat out of the fire with the whole bailout scandal. So while the government has definitely screwed up, the private sector’s corporations have an even worse track record.

 

[fultonfish]

Let me see if I get this right.

The United States system of health care is imperfect. So we are going to install a Canadian system only a version of it that is much more strict so that basically there will be no private insurance and no private health care providers, only the government provided system will be allowed.

BUT, there is a conflict in that logic because the hospitals in the United States along the border with Canada are filled with Canadians who are fleeing to the United States for health care because the Canadian system is unable to provide adequate health care.

Did I get that right?

[so why is the United States so determined to install a Canadian system if the Canadian system needs an “escape mechanism” to the United States which has a terrible health care system?]

Please explain.

Please also explain why criticizers of the present U.S. health care system exaggerate by saying the number of people who are involuntarily without insurance is four times what the actual number is. The actual number is 4% [difficult cases that need to be addressed] versus the claim of 16% [which still a small percentage, with 84% being insured].

Ah, yes, but the present insurance isn’t very good, they say.

But then the criticizers of the present U.S. system won’t allow competition to fix the present system even though many efforts have been made, but still they outlaw things like HSA and MSA types of policies and outlaw competition across state lines and outlaw tax credits and tax deductions for medical expenses.

And criticizers of the present system often present extremely difficult medical situations that may not be curable under ANY system. AND the proposed system has dollar limits so that the difficult cases would be shut out.

And criticizers of the present system deliberately mix discussions of health CARE and health INSURANCE.

 

[aspawloski4th]

Let me see if I get this right.

The United States system of health care is imperfect. So we are going to install a Canadian system only a version of it that is much more strict so that basically there will be no private insurance and no private health care providers, only the government provided system will be allowed.

BUT, there is a conflict in that logic because the hospitals in the United States along the border with Canada are filled with Canadians who are fleeing to the United States for health care because the Canadian system is unable to provide adequate health care.

Did I get that right?

[so why is the United States so determined to install a Canadian system if the Canadian system needs an “escape mechanism” to the United States which has a terrible health care system?]

Please explain.

Please also explain why criticizers of the present U.S. health care system exaggerate by saying the number of people who are involuntarily without insurance is four times what the actual number is. The actual number is 4% [difficult cases that need to be addressed] versus the claim of 16% [which still a small percentage, with 84% being insured].

Ah, yes, but the present insurance isn’t very good, they say.

But then the criticizers of the present U.S. system won’t allow competition to fix the present system even though many efforts have been made, but still they outlaw things like HSA and MSA types of policies and outlaw competition across state lines and outlaw tax credits and tax deductions for medical expenses.

And criticizers of the present system often present extremely difficult medical situations that may not be curable under ANY system. AND the proposed system has dollar limits so that the difficult cases would be shut out.

And criticizers of the present system deliberately mix discussions of health CARE and health INSURANCE.

There is one point you are understating. The presnt healthcare system( the financial aspect of it) isn’t a little screwed up, it’s a failure. All this tax credit here nad competition there manusha could work in many years, but when it comes to health concerns I’m concerned with today first. If it doesn’t help people who need it now, down the road is a waste of time. Before any more capitalistic mesure are used, the medical fields and all aspects connected need to be brought back to where its a way to make a LIVING, and not make it rich quick. An insurance company exceutive making a million off of saving money by denying madical care to people doesn’t serve a function.

 

[royal_archer]

There is nothing unusual about these examples. If you know where to look you can see that thousands upon thousands of people have their own health insurance horror stories to tell.

And, quite honestly, the fact that insurance companies even reserve to right to refuse to cover someone in the first place is ridiculous. And that they would refuse to cover a procedure recomended by the persons doctor and the person *dies *as a result because the company wants to save a buck is simply outrageous. These are middle class people who work hard and pay up when the monthly bill comes in and still get screwed over.

Even if a small percentage of insurance “customers” were treated this way, I would still be outraged.

Again, I ask you, what advice are these people supposed to be taking that they aren’t?

There are methods in place to deal with this. If a company breaks their contract, sue them, don’t go after innocent third parties.

 

[royal_archer]

The only way to attract industry back would be by reducing labour costs, abolishing the minimum wage and other labour laws. .

as well as EEOC and OSHA laws that go to the silly extreme. such as fines against employers because they have safety signs in the wrong shade of yellow.

Good point, but there’s the issue of who pays for the training.

Why not our high schools?

 

[pathia]

There are methods in place to deal with this. If a company breaks their contract, sue them, don’t go after innocent third parties.

You can’t sue them generally, you’re forced to go to a ‘neutral’ third party arbitration system first, which the insurance company gets to pick.

 

[royal_archer]

Pretty sure not even the republicans would want to lower the minimum wage to 50cents an hour, or lower, which is why industry moved out in the first place. Labor costs are almost negligible in countries where they can abuse their workers.

The other people who would like it are all of those people who buy cheep imported products.

 

[rtconstant]

Let me see if I get this right.

The United States system of health care is imperfect. So we are going to install a Canadian system only a version of it that is much more strict so that basically there will be no private insurance and no private health care providers, only the government provided system will be allowed.

No, the system that Obama is suggesting isn’t anything like Canada’s. Its still private insurance based. The Obama plan will state a minimum level of coverage, will require every citizen be covered, and will pay subsidies to help cover the costs of getting it going. Its very different than Canada’s which is a single payer system. In Obama’s plan you, or your employer will still pay into your insurance company. I guess the closest system would be the Swiss one, but that is an imperfect comparison, because the Swiss model made insurance companies non-profit the US one will not.

BUT, there is a conflict in that logic because the hospitals in the United States along the border with Canada are filled with Canadians who are fleeing to the United States for health care because the Canadian system is unable to provide adequate health care.

Yes and people leave the US to go to other countries for medicine and care as well. If you have money then US healthcare is awesome. When you don’t then people start looking other directions. I’ve sponsored several Canadians for citizenship all of them liked their healthcare system. Most kept dual citizenship and did everything they could to stay keep their Canadian coverage.

so why is the United States so determined to install a Canadian system if the Canadian system needs an “escape mechanism” to the United States which has a terrible health care system?

Well you could ask the same thing of Americans who escape to Canada. You obviously think Medicine is fine here, so question answered. But again for the record the proposed healthcare reform is nothing like Canada’s other than it will cover all citizens.

Please also explain why criticizers of the present U.S. health care system exaggerate by saying the number of people who are involuntarily without insurance is four times what the actual number is. The actual number is 4% [difficult cases that need to be addressed] versus the claim of 16% [which still a small percentage, with 84% being insured.

Well here is a good summary of the demographics of the uninsured, data was pulled from the EBRI.
covertheuninsured.org/content/quick-facts-uninsured

Ah, yes, but the present insurance isn’t very good, they say.

But then the criticizers of the present U.S. system won’t allow competition to fix the present system even though many efforts have been made, but still they outlaw things like HSA and MSA types of policies and outlaw competition across state lines and outlaw tax credits and tax deductions for medical expenses.

And criticizers of the present system often present extremely difficult medical situations that may not be curable under ANY system. AND the proposed system has dollar limits so that the difficult cases would be shut out.

And criticizers of the present system deliberately mix discussions of health CARE and health INSURANCE.

Care becomes a moot point if you can’t afford it. But as we die faster than the rest of the industrialized world, I guess they got care down to.
[/quote]

 

[royal_archer]

Your idea od personal responsibility goes much further than any philosepher or theologin in Christianity will ever go. With the way you are implying the definition of personal responsibility, the rape victim is resposible because she wore a bit of a short skirt. The little kid who got beat up by the bully is responsible for not fighting the bully strong enough…

There you have crossed a line. I am not advocating harming others. You who are advocating taking from others are the ones who are advocating harming others. Your annalogy of the victim who made them selves more attractive is more applicable to your treatment of the productive class whom would not be the target of your attacks had they not choosen to better themselves.

There is a word in the English lanuage called can’t, a word you need to relearn sir. No one of ligitimate language authority is looking to take it out. There happens to be some things that some CAN’T do, whether can’t is in you vocabulary or not. You have to get off the stupid mindset that anyone can do anything. Everyone has things they are able to do and things they are not able to do. I can forcast severe weather as a degreed meteorologist with the best of them, but I couldn’t sing or dance if my life depnded on it.

And I can weild a long bow better than most. But in today’s age it is a skill that is of little productive use. While I could sulk because no one wants to pay me for what I am best at, I have had much more success finding those things that I can do that people find value in. Many on public assistance have skills that are of value but they choose not to use them.

Some people are more disabled than others, I went to school around many disabled children, but you’d leave them out in the cold because no one will employthem one they becaome adult. The specific cause of Pathia’s problems may be rare, but there are many her age with other kinds of problems just as bad. What about someone who gets Lou Gehrig’s disiease? What about someone who gets altzheimers in their 40’s? What about my wife having psoriatic arthraitis? Iv’e woken up in the middle of the night more times thean I care to count from her screaming from severe pain, but you’d say she has to work, which would kill her likely sooner rather than later.

For the zillionth time (I lost count) if we didn’t have so many free loaders taking from the system, there would be plenty of charity to go to those in true need.

 

[aspawloski4th]

The other people who would like it are all of those people who buy cheep imported products.

Nah it’s just a tool for satifying them shareholders who are faceless most of the time anyway.
You are back my friend. I was actually a little worried about you.