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you see ;they thought they worked for Govenment Motors where jobs are guaranteed .
Just bear this in mind, also known as the "big picture". Currently down to something below 4%. We should all be jumping for joy. Sadly, we are still too stupid to balance the budget, so it's anyone's guess where we go from here.
http://infographic.statista.com/norm...ent_rate_n.jpg
So back to the rise of healthcare costs. Just food for thought.
If, in 1960, you had stage 4 cancer, leukemia, serious kidney disease, serious heart disease, or some types of diabetes, you basically were going to die. Treatment was difficult and since you weren't going to last very long, not expensive. These illnesses are treatable now, at least in many cases, and that's the good news. The bad news is that the treatments can be fantastically expensive. Knew a lady one time who had cancer for years. Her treatments eventually exceeded a million dollars. She died, but the treatments extended her life by probably ten or fifteen years. Good news/bad news. I wonder how much that contributes to things. I had a heart cath done a couple of years ago. The results were positive, thank God, but that was 5 thousand up in smoke. All these new treatments are great, but very expensive. Compare that to the development of penicillin. It was the first of the wonder drugs, and was considered to be a world changer. It was cheap. Get a penicillin shot for a few bucks, go home and get better. New treatments now can be off the charts expensive. Injections for macular degeneration, untreatable fifty years ago, are a sort of wonder drug, but cost about two thousand dollars or so a treatment. Sure beats going blind, but adds greatly to the cost of health care.
Got 210 billion or so every year for 10 years in cuts? We both know any window into economics is temporary and contingent on conditions, market corrections, recessionary trends, or the business cycle. Or some rich guys gone amok. Personally I thought tax cuts for the rich without conditions to earn them was a mistake, and making them permanent was even worse and I believe intentionally so. Hey I did say LEGALIZED Stealing didn't I? Remember how Clinton balanced the budget?
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/ar...et_108853.html
Had to include this article as well,
https://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/03/u...-30-years.html
But I saved the best for last as it all ties together and makes sense during PEACE time.
Clinton Defense Budget Cuts Into Troops, Ships - latimes
I don't think we have that luxury, nor those with that mindset either.
You don't have to go all the way back to the 60's to find people that couldn't pay for health care at all and died for lack of it. Or had junk insurance that didn't cover what ailed them. What about the people who got thrown out of insurance when they exceeded a given amount (Sorry you mentioned that), or people mostly kids that required life time care? Or those now that have to meet a high deductible EVERY year? Yeah I'll I agree life is expensive enough without getting sick.Quote:
Originally Posted by jlisenbe
What on earth are you talking about? That was not what I was saying and if you think it was, you didn't read my post. Read it again, and you'll hopefully see my point was completely different than the way you responded.Quote:
You don't have to go all the way back to the 60's to find people that couldn't pay for health care at all and died for lack of it.
As to all the high costs you mentioned, that's kind of what this thread is about. Low deductibles result in higher premiums. They do nothing to lower the cost of healthcare, they just mask it. The lady I mentioned with cancer never lost her insurance. It ended up being well over a million dollars in bills. Guess who paid for that? If you guessed all the other people on Bluecross insurance, you win the prize.
Forgive me for interjecting my own thoughts and being different than your own intentions, but for me rising costs is the American way and has always been that way for my whole life and it's also about the people those rising cost affects. You mention the bigger picture and that is the bigger picture. You cannot tell me that was how the system has been designed by the profits before people crowd.
Now you can market that and spin it anyway you want, turn it upside down and around and view any angle you want, but bottom line, it gets worse until the whole plan changes, and somebody admits the model don't work well for enough people.
You should know by now my responses seldom conform to your expectation, though I'm glad you can identify some inequity in this thing even if narrower than I might like. LOL, I was really glad that your own charts and graphs were bearing out what I've been saying all along and that's amazing.
Well, I must have missed that place where you said we are in an era of amazing prosperity and practically everyone is benefiting, but I'm glad you acknowledge it now. (<:Quote:
I was really glad that your own charts and graphs were bearing out what I've been saying all along and that's amazing.
In the meantime, we have found no way to slow the growth of med costs.
actually the bigger picture is the "miracle "treatments available . Why wouldn't they cost ? 15-20 years in development and when all is done when the FDA FINALLY gives the company the NDA approval ;should they not be able to turn a major profit for their efforts ? If their research fails they get nothing for their efforts . THAT is why America leads the world in the development of life saving drugs and treatments .
Yes, what you say is true, but it all still has to be paid for. And when you throw in Medicare, Medicaid, widespread insurance, and CHIPS, then these treatments become perceived as a "right" that must be extended to everyone. So then the question becomes, how do we pay for all this stuff? There is a limit. That's what our country does not want to believe. What you buy has to be paid for, one way or another.Quote:
actually the bigger picture is the "miracle "treatments available . Why wouldn't they cost ? 15-20 years in development and when all is done when the FDA FINALLY gives the company the NDA approval ;should they not be able to turn a major profit for their efforts ? If their research fails they get nothing for their efforts . THAT is why America leads the world in the development of life saving drugs and treatments .
The longer I have to watch this mess, the more I come to believe that any congressman/woman stupid enough to introduce a spending bill without a believable means of paying for it should sent off to prison. We will have to do something perhaps a little extreme to get this stopped.
Ill tell you what will happen if free market principles don't prevail.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rin4h4cRs6Y
death panels . or Nanny Bloomy deciding that you don't need to drink that soda .
We have to come up with ways to lower costs. I don't know what that will entail, but it must be done somehow.
To summarize, what causes the high costs by Big Pharma, hospitals, doctors?Quote:
Originally Posted by jlisenbe
Seven years ago, one of the area hospitals built a new facility because the old one was crumbling and badly needing updating.The new hospital is very grand with vaulted ceilings, enormous lobbies, twelve meditation gardens (!!!), and endless hallways that have almost no offices or treatment rooms along them. It's a very handsome building but I see dollar signs all over the place. Patient rooms are single now with huge plasma TVs hung on the wall, nooks and shelves for vases of silk flowers and statuary (to give a homey feel?), and beautiful wooden storage chests and small tables. Now the hospital is fund raising to add nine more ER cubicles plus more up-to-date MRIs for cancer detection. Oh, and the hospital itself hasn't been completely paid for. I was there as a patient for three days in early May. The med my doctor prescribed for me is over $600 a month (but my pharmacy was somehow able to reduce that to a much smaller amount). Please tell me what's going on.
I'm going to guess that the newspaper ran glowing stories about the wonderful new facility. There were, of course, no protests because no one seems to make the connection you have made, that the many non-essential aspects of the hospital's construction will drive up the price of medicine. We all just seem to accept it. Maybe if everyone had a 10,000 dollar deductible, we would begin to take more notice.Quote:
Please tell me what's going on.
The answer doesn't lie in making patients pay more, if it did, medicine would be cheap, the answer lies in regulating what doctors and hospitals can charge for their services, then the incentive to build and gold plate would be removed
wage and price controls is what created the insurance mess we are in. Artificial controls on markets don't work . What do you do when physicians rebel and stop treating patients ? Already the average wait time for primary care is over 2weeks. Create a scarcity and see which way costs go.
I've already given some examples where insurance doesn't cover ;and there is competition in the market . Prices lower or are at least get stabilized .It makes a difference when patients shop around . The market reacts accordingly .
This is happening now more frequently where doctors and clinics are cutting out insurance for primary care .Instead of fees for service ,they instead make a private contract with the patient ,;usually annually for care . The patient only has to then get coverage for catastrophic care . It makes sense . We do not have insurance coverage for routine auto maintenance . Most patients can afford the costs of primary care under these terms .
Tort reform .Doctors pay a fortune for malpractice insurance . They also have to have an administrative staff to deal with this and other paperwork now mandated by Obamcare . All these costs are passed on to the patient. But the biggest impact of practicing in our sue happy society is that unnecessary tests are performed for CYA .
Got bad news for you. Patients pay 100% of the costs of medicine either through direct payments, insurance premiums, or taxes. There is no money tree.Quote:
The answer doesn't lie in making patients pay more,
As to regulating charges, that is already done. Both Medicare and insurance companies have established systems which regulate what docs and hospitals are permitted to charge. The fact that those who benefit from Medicare and many insurance programs don't even pay premiums, or at least all of the premiums, tends to mask the true cost of health care. So once, for instance, I meet my 200 dollar deductible for my Medicare supplement, I tend to not care what a doctor charges for a particular service. That's a big problem. Low deductibles do nothing to lower health care costs overall, but place a wall between the patient and what is being charged. Doing away with low deductibles would put us in a position where cost would become important each one of us as a consumer.
I just think that Wondergirl's post was so enlightening. No one really cares about controlling costs.
The same thing happens in higher education also .The costs of glitzy campuses gets passed on .Quote:
I just think that Wondergirl's post was so enlightening. No one really cares about controlling costs.
Sure rising cost apply to EVERYTHING because the whole GOAL is to make profit FOR investors FROM the consumer. That was the goal when the stock market was invented, and that has NEVER changed. More profits require MO"MONEY. The whole term whatever the market will bear only means whatever they can get (from a consumer). It's not like nobody cares about controlling costs, but the investors make the rules, and governments job is merely to regulate (Keep it HONEST). Part of the problem is our government officials know very little about how economics work, and are really behind the curb and at the mercy of those that work for and lobby the investor class for sweet deals to make MO'MONEY for themselves. LOL, Tom, even in a stable market prices and costs will rise.
That's my problem with the supply siders as they make rules for the big bucks people, and don't keep it honest or fair for the consumers, and with that kind of structure prices RISE, as do profits, from consumers. Until you balance that equation to include consumers you will never achieve an equity that benefits those consumers. This is particularly troubling with essentials like education, health, and welfare, and environmental services.
Or you could take the stigma from socialism and apply it as a good thing ..IE...Social Security. If you exam the socialism of our "enemies" it looks exactly like capitalism, but without social freedom.
Too bad health insurance companies never run discounts, sales, or buy one get one free sales. Bottom line, the only way of controlling prices, you must control PROFITS, and investors and supply siders would never stand for that.
social security is an insurance policy ….not socialism. But since it is government managed ;it is mis-managed
Back to my hospital description ...those twelve meditation gardens are now overgrown and rarely used (I was told by medical staff) except as a shortcut to another hospital wing. When I was a patient, lying in bed and staring idly at the ceiling, I was URGED by medical staff to turn on my huge tv and get involved in a soap opera or game show. I said I hate watching TV and would prefer talking with a roommate. That was met with great disappointment. "Oh, no. We want you to get well. A sick roommate won't help." Sorry, but the best part of my times in hospitals has been interacting with a roommate. Meanwhile, there was constant buzzing, dinging, ringing, banging, chirping, door slamming, and loud talking (mostly from other patients' TVs). And I was supposed to get well????Quote:
many non-essential aspects of the hospital's construction will drive up the price of medicine
I would have to look up my bill from those three days. I could have bought a fancy new car.
ADDED: $80,000-90,000 for only the hospital costs. I was anemic, received one transfusion in ER (where I hung out for ten hours "waiting for a room to be cleaned"), then two more transfusions in my hospital room.
Yes indeed. Very true.Quote:
The same thing happens in higher education also .The costs of glitzy campuses gets passed on .
1. Social security is not socialism. Not even close.Quote:
Or you could take the stigma from socialism and apply it as a good thing ..IE...Social Security. If you exam the socialism of our "enemies" it looks exactly like capitalism, but without social freedom.
2. The socialism of anyone cannot look like capitalism. They are not similar.
3. The profits of the health care industry does not even come close to explaining the incredible growth of health care costs.
Capitalism and communism and any other name you can come up with) share the same structure! A head that delegates the rest of the society. Every society on Earth shares the same social structure with only minute differences, and different names and titles, and level of sophistication. So logically every nation is suffering from rising costs. Now military spending is a huge difference. One could say nations have different PRIORITIES that their budgets reflect.
Wrong, Costs have gone up for everybody, in all things. It's not just health care, as Tom explained very well.Quote:
3. The profits of the health care industry does not even come close to explaining the incredible growth of health care costs.
Go spend a year in communist China and then come back and tell us about those "minute differences". If you really believe that capitalism and communism share the same structure, then you plainly don't understand either one of them.Quote:
Capitalism and communism and any other name you can come up with) share the same structure! A head that delegates the rest of the society. Every society on Earth shares the same social structure with only minute differences, and different names and titles, and level of sophistication.
I say that the profits of the health care industry do not explain the rise of health care costs, and you counter by saying that's wrong because costs have gone up for everybody?? That is a strange, disconnected answer.
Capitalism is predicated on exploiting the masses under the guise of freedom, communism is predicated on enslaving the masses under the guise of equality. In communism health costs are strictly controlled and don't suffer from the same exploitation obvious in the capitalist system, in capitalism health costs are allowed to escalate because the falacy of free market is in operation.
What you fail to see is that the health system can be regulated to provide fair outcomes for all, all you have to do is remove stupidity
… or GREED.Quote:
Originally Posted by paraclete
I'm open to ideas. Explain how that would work. You might also explain how to stop the exploding costs of health care.Quote:
What you fail to see is that the health system can be regulated to provide fair outcomes for all, all you have to do is remove stupidity.
As to capitalism, it is the foundation behind the economic miracle which is the United States of America. Of course if we had tried good ole socialism, we could be on the level of Venezuela, Italy, Greece, or France.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jlisenbe
You keep listening to propaganda but you can't help it you are brainwashed from birth. All systems suffer from exploitation, you are just blind to what is happening in your own backyard. Not all systems of socialism are bad but when greed takes over they degenerate. Venezuela failed because of nationalisation, Greece because of failure to raise revenue, Italy is still there but politically unstable, and the French are just stupid, but what has capitalism done for Russia? Communism has done something worthwhile for China recently after the worst excesses were thrown off. You think the US is an economic miracle, but you are living in the past century, there have been terrible excesses in the system, the GFC is just one example. The best system is a hybrid, proper regulation achieves wonders I live in a place where there have been 28 years of growth the budget has been balance more than once and soon will be again and yet we have fair taxation, health care and a dynamic economy
1. Who propagandized me, especially from birth? My parents? Really??
2. Russia is not a capitalistic economy.
3. The economic growth in China is due to the government allowing the growth of private business.
4. "The budget has been balanced more than once and soon will be again." I hope you realize what a funny statement that is. It's the general equivalent of me telling my wife, "We've been spending more than we've been making for years, but I have good news. We are going to stop doing that in just a few more years!"
5. Most Americans admire what is being done in Australia. I am one of them, but bear in mind that you are about half the population of our largest state.
6. "all you have to do is remove stupidity." You still have not explained what you mean by that. I'm open to your ideas, but you need to explain.
Yes followed by your education systemQuote:
Originally Posted by jlisenbe
Well it isn't a socialist economyQuote:
2. Russia is not a capitalistic economy.
China is closely controlledQuote:
3. The economic growth in China is due to the government allowing the growth of private business.
It is not funny it is policy and is being realisedQuote:
4. "The budget has been balanced more than once and soon will be again." I hope you realize what a funny statement that is.
Yes but I don't remember a state with a population of 50 million, but we manage an area the size of your nation, population isn't everythingQuote:
5. Most Americans admire what is being done in Australia. I am one of them, but bear in mind that you are about half the population of our largest state.
Stupidity is like madness, you keep doing the same thing and expecting change. You think one size or system fits all but your system has proven to let you down on more than one occasion and it is really the system of governance that has let you downQuote:
6. "all you have to do is remove stupidity." You still have not explained what you mean by that. I'm open to your ideas, but you need to explain.
Completely, totally, 100% false accusation. You've lost all credibility with that statement. I say that since you have no earthly idea what my parents or my teachers taught me. None at all.Quote:
Yes followed by your education system.
I'm open to your ideas, but not to yet another generic, meaningless statement. Do you have anything specific? And when you say, "You think one size or system fits all," isn't that actually what YOU are saying? I'm actually all for trying a variety of things from one state to another and comparing results.Quote:
Stupidity is like madness, you keep doing the same thing and expecting change. You think one size or system fits all but your system has proven to let you down on more than one occasion and it is really the system of governance that has let you down.
Give us a break Clete, even though I think it's the dufus and his antics making us look bad, in all honesty we had a lot of work to do before he showed up, and all he has done in two years is clown and distract us from that work, while him and his sycophants steal the money, and get a free stay out of jail card, that's permanent, and good for more rape, pillage and plunder.
Ohh. You started so well, and then you veered off the highway of reason. Still, you are correct that we have a lot to do, and if you can find a single republican or democrat that seems to be serious about the problem and has some real answers, then I'd like to know about them. We have everything from Trump to Bernie Sanders. Not good.Quote:
Give us a break Clete, even though I think it's the dufus and his antics making us look bad, in all honesty we had a lot of work to do before he showed up, and all he has done in two years is clown and distract us from that work, while him and his sycophants steal the money, and get a free stay out of jail card, that's permanent, and good for more rape, pillage and plunder.
Tal I'll give you a break when you give the rest of us a break, Trump is the manifestation of your society, reality mirroring art, but what did you have before him? Paradise? Only in your mind, only in your dreamsQuote:
Originally Posted by talaniman
https://www.arcamax.com/newspics/168/16818/1681803.gif
You guys went from this to this
https://www.arcamax.com/newspics/cac...99/1679990.jpg
It really worries me when I start to agree, even partially, with you guys. (<:Quote:
Tal I'll give you a break when you give the rest of us a break, Trump is the manifestation of your society, reality mirroring art, but what did you have before him? Paradise? Only in your mind, only in your dreams.
However, we are getting off topic. How to lower health care costs. I'd still love to know what is responsible for the incredible rise in costs over the past sixty years.
Eight minute video which seemed to have a lot of good info. Not a conservative man by any means.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSjGouBmo0M
Quote:
Originally Posted by jlisenbe
Still in denial. Look, we solved the problem this way, amid howls of anguish and predictions of the end of life as we know it I might add. The government took over the provision of health care by regulating the price of medical services and implementing a single payer system which had a levy attached to it of 1.5% that all tax payers were required to meet. Doctors could remain outside the system and charge more and the patient would receive a rebate or they could just bill the government for the regulated fee. It has required some tweeking over time. At the same time the price of drugs were regulated amid screams from pharma. Services in public hospitals are free. There is a private system outside of this, expensive but insurable and the health funds are regulated. Today about 80% of doctors work within the system and prices have been held down because the government doesn't allow the prices to escalate
Not sure how you get the "still in denial" remark, but at any rate I do hear what you are saying. It just makes me suspicious. "Why, we just hold down the price of health care." Ok, but if it's all just that simple, then why not do the same thing with food? Why not just say that milk producers can only sell milk for 2 dollars a gallon? That would be nice except that the supply of milk would be cut tremendously since you cannot sell milk at that price and stay in business. So I wonder if the same dynamic works with health care. It will be interesting to see how it all works out over the next decade.
The video I linked above said a person can get an MRI in Japan for 150 dollars, but in the U.S. it is a couple of thousand or whatever it was. That just strikes me as strange. How do you go from 1500 in the U.S. to 150 bucks in Japan? It just makes me wonder how they are doing that. Is the quality the same? Is the government subsidizing? What makes the difference of 90% in price?
What is the 1.5% levy? 1.5% of what?
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