[ETWolverine]

Well, having BEEN disabled for a time, I actually DO know how the system works.

But let's not let facts get in the way.

At no point did I say it was easy to move through the system. What I said was that it can be done. And if you are persistent enough (and apparently I'm more persistent than others on this board), you can pretty much work within the system to get coverage.

We should work to improve the system that we have to make movement easier.

But that does NOT mean that we need to dismantle it and replace it with a system that has even FEWER freedoms, lower quality, and lower accessibility.

Nobody here has bothered to challenge my point on the cost of just paying to cover those who are uninsured vs. the cost of creating a nationalized health care system.

Any takers on that point. Because THAT is the key point. It's the one that solves the basic problems with the system... including asking's personal problem of a lack of coverage.

Does anyone dispute the fact that it is cheaper and more effective to just cover those who are uninsured rather than dismantle the system?

Anyone..

[tomder55]

If the issue is costs then the President is right . Forget about expensive and innovative surgical treatment . Take the blue pill.

Can't wait until the health gestapo tells Michael J Fox he doesn't qualify for advanced Parkinson's treatment .
The American Spectator : Who Will Tell Michael J. Fox He Needs to Die?

Maybe Fox will return to Canada for treatment .

[NeedKarma]

Can't wait until the health gestapo tells Michael J Fox he doesn't qualify for advanced Parkinson's treatment .
The American Spectator : Who Will Tell Michael J. Fox He Needs to Die?

Wow, that article is nasty and full of hyperbole. You read and believe this stuff? Really?

[tomder55]

Oh I'm sure Michael J Fox will be the exception to the rule ;just like most other rich elites . But there is no doubt that the works of Peter Singer ; Tom Daschele and Dr Ezekiel Emanuel advocate a rationing of health care by a central politboro and the denial of life saving care for the elderly . I did not need this article ;no matter how over the top it is for effect ;to tell me that is exactly their plan.

[excon]

Hello tom:

I'm not sure what your point is. You don't really think that insurance companies save everybody, do you? What's the difference WHO tells you that it's over for you?

You pretend that it's going to be a NEW rationer of health care instead of just a different one. But, that's why I'm here.

excon

[speechlesstx]

Hello tom:

I'm not sure what your point is. You don't really think that insurance companies save everybody, do you? What's the difference WHO tells you that it's over for you?

You pretend that it's going to be a NEW rationer of health care instead of just a different one. But, that's why I'm here.

You know ex, I think I'd rather take my chances with a free market insurance company and provider than a government that wants to ALLOCATE care to achieve "social justice." At least now I can shop for insurance, I can shop for a doctor, I can negotiate payments with providers. Under the social justice model you'll be TOLD what treatments you can have and if you as a person are even worth treating.

Tom mentioned Rahmbo's brother who is helping shape Obamacare. This is a guy who thinks doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, a guy who thinks "guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia" is silly because they are "irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens." So much for Grandma and Trig Palin.

This is a guy who in his warped mind believes you aren't discriminating if you allocate health care by age.

"Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years." (Lancet, Jan. 31).

It's also logical that this precedent would lead to employers discriminating based on age and disability after the health care model, don't you think? If the feds are going to codify discrimination based on age and disability in health care it seems they would have to codify it in other areas. But then the left is good at not thinking the consequences through or just ignoring them as long as it doesn't affect their positions of power or interfere with their agenda.

I'll take my chances in the market over taking my chances with politicians who champion equal rights for all while saying old and disabled people are a drain on society and aren't worth the cost. Which by the way, makes me wonder, doesn't AARP support the president in this?

[asking]

If your health insurance companies are saying that you aren't elligible for THEIR services because you have a pre-existing condition, then you ARE de-facto disabled. If you are not disabled, you should be eligible for other forms of insurance than the HMO you are on. Something is not right here.

Medicare only covers people 65 and older.
"Pre-existing condition" and "disabled" are two different things.

Here is the overview from Medicare's website.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) administers Medicare, the nation's largest health insurance program, which covers nearly 40 million Americans. Medicare is a Health Insurance Program for people age 65 or older, some disabled people under age 65, and people of all ages with End-Stage Renal Disease (permanent kidney failure treated with dialysis or a transplant).

I don't qualify.

If you are being denied care by private insurance, and are not elligible for Medicare, then there is a problem with Medicare... a government-run program. Why would you trust the same government that is screwing you over now to somehow do a better job with a BIGGER program? Does that make sense to you?

Why blame Medicare for not covering people it was not designed to cover? It covers people 65 and older.

Because it isn't going to be used to pay for YOUR health care or the health care of someone working at minimum wage in Minnesota or Arkansas. It's going to be used for pork barrel spending, just like Soccial Security money is. That's why Social Security is bankrupt.

So you say. By the way, Social Security is not bankrupt. Of course it would be if the Bush administration had succeeded in putting it all into the stock market a few years ago. Phew! Close call. And yes--BECAUSE Social Security is so well endowed and so successful-- the government does borrow against it--particularly the spendthrift Republicans, but that's another issue.

While insurance companies have to pay 20-30% of their income for their employees salaries and benefits, those insurance companies only have one set of employees at a time. When someone retires from an insurance company, that's it. They no longer receive any pay from that insurance company.

Yeah. If I had been getting paid $5 million a year for 10 years, I wouldn't expect a pension either, although I expect they have stock options and other little perks even after they are gone.

Government employees are a bit different. They continue to receive pensions after they retire, and they can retire with full pension after 20 years on the job. A person who starts working at age 25 will work for 20 years until age 45. After that, HE CONTINUES TO RECEIVE HIS FULL PAY (or close to it) until the day he dies. At age 45, he can go and start a private business and rececive an income from the business AND his retirement package.

I kind of doubt it's this easy. Given your general lack of knowledge about basic rules of Medicare eligibility, I'm going to assume you have this wrong too unless you can cite an authoritative source. I do not think that government jobs allow you to retire at 45 with a full salary. In all our dreams!

So, Wolverine, what was your job? I assume you have some kind of good health insurance that you are happy with. Who is your insurer and how much is your premium? I feel like you should be willing to share the good news with those of us who haven't found such a good deal. I also assume you don't get anything from the federal government. Is that correct?

So while the cost of salaries and benefits for health insurance company employees would be 20-30% of revenues, the employment costs of the Government health care plan would be THREE TIMES AS HIGH.

This all sounds like propaganda (astroturf) from the Insurance industry. How can it possibly be cheaper to pay an executive $38 million a year than to pay some poor schmuck to push paper in a badly lit government office somewhere. Even if he was GS-15, he'd have to live to be 327 years old. Plus there the lack of a Bigelow on the floor.

No, the reason we don't is because in countries that have single-payer insurance coverage, the care is ABYSSMAL because the government can't afford to cover everyone. Take a look at how the UK is rationing drugs to cancer patients, how few MRI machines there are in Canada, and how long the lines are in France to get basic health needs met. Nationalized health care coverage is EXPENSIVE, and since the government can't afford it and can't justify raising taxes any higher, the only thing they can do is cut services.

More mythology. We already have rationing. Some people get covered for things that other people can't get. It's just rationed differently in other countries.

Anyway, lots of tests and procedures doesn't mean good care. I've had two MRIs and countless X rays and most of them were of little use to me. They are way over used in this country, because it's a way for physicians to rack up extra charges to pay for (a) their liability insurance (b) their staff for doing all the medical billing to insurance companies*, and (c) a boat or bigger house. So if you rip up your knee at work, they x ray it and tell you it's not broken.

One day, two nurses were struggling to hold down my 2 and a half year old son so they could X ray his leg, which may or may not have been broken in a fall. He was terrified, so I asked, "What will you do if it's broken?" "Nothing" they said. He wouldn't need a cast. So I told them to stop and saved the insurer another pointless charge and my poor son a few minutes of terror.

I have seen the textbooks used to teach people how to do medical billing. They are full sized textbooks. You have to take a whole course (or two?) just to learn how to get the insurance company to pay. The doctors and insurers are locked in a pitched bureaucratic battle. And the patients are just ammo. There is no way government payment could be worse. And in Canada it's much, much simpler than dealing with a PRIVATE insurance company here.

Actually, they've never been given a chance at free market solutions. There has not been a time since FDR when the government hasn't been involved in regulating, taxing, controlling and generally being involved in health care.

Well, sure, Wolverine. We could go back to 19th-century medicine and let quacks sell patent medicines (no FDA). Let's get rid of the National Institutes of Health while we are at it. No more medical research, no more expensive cancer treatments or cutting-edge surgical techniques (joke). No more new vaccines for new viruses. And I'm tired of paying taxes for building roads. I'll just buy a Hummer and romp over the potholes in dirt roads. We don't need pavement, or road signs, or cops to enforce all those pesky government mandated highway safety rules. Breathalizer, schemzalizer. We certainly don't need any regulations to prevent people from practicing medicine without a license. We don't need the government to tell doctors that ulcers aren't caused by stress but instead are caused by a bacterial infection, or that the correct treatment isn't a heavy diet of cream and cereal (which is what doctors used to prescribe for ulcers), but a two-week course of antibiotics. And let's dismantle Social Security, Medicare, and the Veteran's Administration. If those systems worked, people would be clamoring for something like that for themselves.

Oh, whoops. I forgot. They are!

Obama said that he expects that after 10 years there will still be 36 million people not covered by his health plan, no matter what he does.

Did you mean this?

A new analysis by the Congressional Budget Office has concluded that Senator Edward Kennedy’s plan to expand healthcare coverage would cost about $1 trillion over the next ten years and fall far short of providing universal healthcare coverage. According to the CBO, the plan would reduce the number of uninsured by 16 million people, but even if the bill became law, 36 million people would remain uninsured in 2017.

This is why we need single payer, so everyone can be covered, not just the wealthy and the petrified upper middle class. The current plan is a compromise solution that leaves all the private insurers in place, collecting their 20 to 30% overhead, while the government pays for the folks that aren't as lucrative to "cover"--the disabled, the sick, and the old.

There are 46 million people uninsured. Approximately 10 million of them are illegal aliens.

Oh, gosh! You are right. Let's not count them. We don't care about them. They just work here, often for 12 hours a day. Why would we want THEM to have health care? Let them go unvaccinated and die of tuberculosis and whooping cough whilst picking our lettuces and peaches or making our milk shakes and fries in the backs of greasy kitchens.

Of the remaining 36 million, approximately 15 million have CHOSEN not to have health insurance.

Right, like I'm about to CHOOSE not to pay $1400/month instead of eating and having a house. They choose not to because it's a significant expense or they unwisely choose to go uninsured. That is a bad thing, not something to crow about. They should be covered.

So we are only talking about 10 million or so that are uninsured for a period of more than 4 months... and most of those manage to get coverage within a 1-year period.

Um. That's not what the U.S. Census bureau says.
Health Insurance Coverage: 2007 - Highlights

WHY can you not change plans? IF you are not disabled, what is the issue. If you ARE disabled, there's Medicare. Either way, you can get a better plan than you have now.

You do not have to be disabled to not have coverage. If you do not have group coverage, you just have to have some kind of condition that makes the insurer believe you will cost them money sooner or later. For example, if you had cancer, you are likely to get it again, so that'll do it. If you had serious injury that required surgery or trips to a pain clinic, that can make you uninsurable. Something like lupus or MS, where you can still work but you need regular medical care will do it. They can't legally drop you, but they can raise your rates so high that you can't afford it, and no other insurer has to take you. Is that clear?

Here is a list of roughly 75 conditions that can make you uninsurable if you don't have group coverage.
Uninsurable Health Risks

Addison's Disease
      AIDS (HIV Positive)
      ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease)
      Alzheimers Disease
      Amyotrophis Lateral Sclerosis
      Angioplasty
      Ankylosing Spondylitis
      Aunria
      ARC ( AIDS Related Complex)
      Arteriosclerosis
      ASD (Atrial Septal Defect)
      Banti's Disease
      Bi-Polar Disorder (Manic Depressive)
      Bypass Surgery
      Cancer
      Chronic Fatigue Syndrone (Usually within 5 years)
      Colitis
      COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease)
      Conjestive Heart Failure
      Cirrosis of the Liver
      Collagen Diseases
      Crohn's Disease
      Cystic Fibrosis
      Cushing's Disease
      Delirium Tremors (DT's)
      Dementia
      Depression (Major)
      Diabetes
      Eating Disorders
      Emphysema
      Fanconi's Syndrome
      Heart Attack
      Hemophilia
      Hemochromatosis
      Hepatitis (Type B, C, Chronic)
      Hodgkins Disease
      Heart Murmur
      Heart Valve Disease or Replacement
      Huntington's Disease
      Hydocephaly
      Infertility Treatment (Recent)
      Ischemia
      Kaposi's Sarcoma
      Left Bundle Branch Block
      Leukemia
      Lupus
      Lymphedema
      MS (Multiple Sclerosis)
      Muscular Distrophy
      Myasthenia Gravis
      Narcolepsy
      Organ Transplants
      Pacemaker
      Paralysis / Parapelegia
      Parkinson's Disease
      Peripheral Vascular Disease
      Porhyria
      Portal or Renal Hypertension
      Pregnancy (Exisiting)
      Psoriatic Arthritis
      Psychoses
      Raynaud's Phenomenon
      Renal Insufficiency
      Schizophrenia
      Scleroderma
      Silicosis (Black Lung Disease)
      Stroke (TIA, Transient Ischemic Attack)
      Substance Abuse / Dependence
      Suicide Attempt
      Ulcerative Colitis

Very few of these would be recognized by social security as fully disabling and SS doesn't insure against partial disability--or at least that's what they told me.

Just as an aside, I personally think it's useless to make a law telling insurers that they MUST insure everyone. You can make them do that, but they'll just charge so much that the "uninsurables" will not be able to afford it and we are back to the government having to pay for the sick while private insurers "cover" those who are not. And if the government is going to be in the health insurance business, the only rational answer is to pool EVERYONE together and average our risk, just as we do for fire protection, education, national defense, military medical care, and medicare, to name a few. There is no point in having the government subsidize private insurers (with their overpaid executives) by letting them pretend to insure those who don't need much health care while the government takes care of the actually sick and injured.

asking

[N0help4u]

I heard some of his speech on health coverage
He said ''you may not want to have surgery, you can tell your mother or your doctor that you just want a pain pill and no surgery''

What in the world is that suppose to mean?
I thought his health plan was suppose to be more positive about covering your health.
That is more like not using your health coverage so what's the point?

With the review board they can decide you do not have a good enough quality of life or will not have a good enough quality of life after surgery and use that to turn you down for surgery. All about the money.

[asking]

It means that if you are dying of advanced lung cancer, you take the morphine and put your affairs in order. You try to enjoy your last year as much as possible, as a friend of mine is now doing. You and your family do not expect 5 rounds of chemotherapy and surgery when you are 80 years old and the survival rate for metastasized lung cancer is 3%. My mother in law was a sweet woman, but she was a classic example of someone who was afraid to die. Her doctors spent huge amounts of money to give her an extra few months - maybe. The treatment was grueling and meant her family had to spend many more months taking care of her. It was very hard on her family and no great pleasure to her either.

More than half of all health care costs occur in the last six months of life. It isn't just the government that would like to see this change. So would private insurers, and many doctors and hospitals recognize that it isn't in the best interests of society.

Here's the first paragraph from a 2002 article on this topic from the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

Total health care costs in the United States (U.S.) reached $989 billion in 1995 and now exceed $1 trillion, 14% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) (1).

Of this total, a disproportionate share is attributable to the care of elderly patients shortly before their deaths. According to Lubitz and Prihoda (2) and Lubitz and Riley (3), 6% of Medicare recipients 65 yr of age and older who died in 1978 and 1988 accounted for 28% of all costs of the Medicare program.

In the same two years, 77% of the Medicare decedents' expenditures occurred in the last year of life, 52% of them in the last 2 mo, and 40% in the last month. Inpatient expenses accounted for over 70% of the decedents' total costs.

Can Health Care Costs Be Reduced by Limiting Intensive Care at the End of Life? -- LUCE and RUBENFELD 165 (6): 750 -- American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine

In case it's not obvious, the numbers are from Medicare because the government already covers the elderly and the dying disproportionately, removing the burden of paying for their care from private insurers, thus indirectly subsidizing the private health insurance industry. The government is probably also better at counting and providing data than groups of individual health insurers.

When my 91 year old father learned he had metastasized cancer, he went home to die and was gone in three weeks. It was hard for me to say good bye, but I was proud of how brave he was. Some of the nurses tried to talk him into staying in the hospital and undergoing chemotherapy, but his doctor told him later that he thought he made the right decision. A month before he died he was splitting wood, cooking, and going to parties. In his last month, people came from all over to say goodbye and he was pretty happy to have so much company. A long drawn out death, with months of chemotherapy and hospitalization would not have made his life more complete.

We have to start spending our health care dollars on people who will benefit from it. Right now we are spending money preferentially on the dying. It's just rationing in a different way. Rationing this way doesn't keep people from dying and doesn't make people more comfortable in their last days.

[tomder55]

Hello tom:

I'm not sure what your point is. You don't really think that insurance companies save everybody, do you? What's the difference WHO tells you that it's over for you?

You pretend that it's going to be a NEW rationer of health care instead of just a different one. But, that's why I'm here.

excon

You should reexamine your premise then. As Steve correctly points out there are options for me if my plan does not cover treatments . I can upgrade or change providers ;I can appeal . I can negotiate directly for care outside my coverage . Often as ET points out big bad Pharma will give their product away to those without the means .I can change providers who may offer different treatment . I can get any number of diagnostic procedures to determine the best course of action .

What is my appeal when some nameless faceless bureaucratic geek plugs my numbers into the national data base and the computer determines I am unworthy of treatment ?

Would you agree that we should discriminate against the disabled ? Probably not... but ,Surprise ! That is exactly what this clown Pete Singer argues for in the NY Slimes op-ed that Steve linked to and the article I posted above cites.

He uses the case of Christopher Reeves who used his paralysis as a platform to advocate spending public funds to support research for curing quadriplegia . Singer considers this a waste of resources ,and no doubt plugging the numbers into the QALY supercomputer would indeed confirm his thesis .
Government rationing would put such bioethicists as the demented Singer into postions to make judgements on the value of the lives of every American.

You can argue that many things in our lives are already rationed. Food being one of them . My ability to obtain food is determined by my ability to pay for it. Yes there is a safety net ,and there should be for those who cannot pay for their food ,and likewise there is a safety net in place for those who do not have the means to purchase their own medical insurance . Is it perfect ? Nope .No government plan is . But , as food prices rise I hear no one telling us that it would be a good idea for the government to put us all on a food rationing plan and some central planner in Washington will put our numbers into a computer to tell us what foods we can and can't obtain .

Healthcare is rationed by a number of factors beyond your insurance coverage. There are market forces, lack of perfect distribution of available technologies, skilled providers, and other intangibles that have often been mentioned in these postings like physical location of services .

I do not want the government being the sole arbiter on who lives and dies and determining the value of the lives in the country . That is well beyond their constitutional mandate .

You claim to be distrustful of government and yet you would permit an over-bloated central planning government to make the call on whether you are worthy of treatment or not based on an abstract formula concocted by egg heads like Singer who are the modern equivalent of eugenicist ? I know you better than that .
Creating greater access for the relatively few who have fallen through the safety net can be accomplished without overturning the entire health care system and enacting a rationing scheme that would be controlled by bioethicists of the ilk of Peter Singer based on quality of life judgments.

[N0help4u]

It means that if you are dying of advanced lung cancer, you take the morphine and put your affairs in order. You try to enjoy your last year as much as possible, as a friend of mine is now doing. You and your family do not expect 5 rounds of chemotherapy and surgery when you are 80 years old and the survival rate for metastasized lung cancer is 3%.So how is it different now?
Isn't that what people already do?

Well isn't that what they are already doing? Don't you already have the choice?

My mother in law was a sweet woman, but she was a classic example of someone who was afraid to die. Her doctors spent huge amounts of money to give her an extra few months - maybe. The treatment was grueling and meant her family had to spend many more months taking care of her. It was very hard on her family and no great pleasure to her either.

If somebody is afraid to die and they want the chemo because of that are you saying the doctors and government are now going to say you can not have it because you aren't going to live anyway?

[excon]

Hello again:

Me?? I see NO difference between a bureaucrat and insurance adjuster who BOTH ration health care. One for profit (disgusting), and one for eugenics (disgusting).

But, it don't make no never mind to me. I'm dead either way.

excon

[N0help4u]

Hello again:

Me??? I see NO difference between a bureaucrat and and insurance adjuster who BOTH ration health care. One for profit (disgusting), and one for eugenics (disgusting).

But, it don't make no never mind to me. I'm dead either way.

excon

Greenie:
MY sentiments EXACTLY
I just don't want to be forced into medical insurance at all!

[tomder55]

The difference is that my coverage in an insurance plan is defined ahead of time. I can run with it or change it ;or supplement it at my will or ability to pay. That option is taken away in government rationing .

[excon]

The difference is that my coverage in an insurance plan is defined ahead of time. I can run with it or change it ;or supplement it at my will or ability to pay. That option is taken away in government rationing .

Hello again, tom:

So, you assume that your government policy won't spell out the limits, while your private one does... I don't know where you get that from.

Let me ask you this... You think you can change your policy... But, if you're a working stiff, you can't. You think that when you find out YOUR insurer won't pay for a procedure you need, you can find another insurer who will.

Do you really think that stuff?? Really??

excon

[asking]

If you have enough money to pay for chemotherapy when your insurer or a government entity says it's futile and is, frankly, a poor investment, you can always still spend your money on that. People have been trying all sorts of alternative cures for cancer for years. Insurers don't pay for laetrile...

Of course, an awful lot of expensive treatments from big pharma don't work either. Otherwise, you would have seen the headlines that we'd Cured Cancer, which hasn't happened.

None of this has anything to do with eugenics, by the way. It has to do with spending money where it will actually do some good.

I don't know the details of what Pete Singer said or even really who he is, but I do know that a staggering amount of money has been spent in the last 30 years trying to cure diseases with no result. This is because we actually don't know enough about how the body works to do solve a lot of these problems (paralysis, alzheimers, huntington's disease, for example)--at least not in a way that will both prevent or cure disease and generate a profit.

It would be like Isaac Newton trying to build a jet aircraft in his backyard. He's smart, but the state of physics, the technology and the materials just wouldn't have been available to him. He could hire more smart people to help, find a donor with deep pockets, but that isn't going to change anything. If the problem's not ripe, it's not ripe. Medical researchers have been beating their heads against a long list of problems like that. And Big Pharma and the foundations (privately funded research) have, if anything, done much worse than government funded research programs.

That's not to say, medical researchers haven't learned a lot trying, but sometimes you have to think about whether there are better ways to spend your time and money.

But remember the hype about gene therapy? Nothing. Remember the war on cancer? Hardly a dent except in the most treatable forms--breast cancer, Hodgkin's disease. (If you don't believe me, look at the numbers on cancer mortality over the last 100 years.) Pharma's idea of a new drug is a more expensive alternative to aspirin or a chemotherapy drug that can make your skin fall off (erlotinib). For the most part, the only initiatives that have made a major difference have been preventative and related to changing our environment--discouraging smoking, forcing people to wear seat belts, vaccination programs, putting folate in the food supply--all those big government programs libertarians love to hate.

[ETWolverine]

Medicare only covers people 65 and older.
"Pre-existing condition" and "disabled" are two different things.

Here is the overview from Medicare's website.



I don't qualify.



Why blame Medicare for not covering people it was not designed to cover? It covers people 65 and older.



So you say. By the way, Social Security is not bankrupt. Of course it would be if the Bush administration had succeeded in putting it all into the stock market a few years ago. Phew! Close call. And yes--BECAUSE Social Security is so well endowed and so successful-- the government does borrow against it--particularly the spendthrift Republicans, but that's another issue.



Yeah. If I had been getting paid $5 million a year for 10 years, I wouldn't expect a pension either, although I expect they have stock options and other little perks even after they are gone.



I kind of doubt it's this easy. Given your general lack of knowledge about basic rules of Medicare eligibility, I'm going to assume you have this wrong too unless you can cite an authoritative source. I do not think that government jobs allow you to retire at 45 with a full salary. In all our dreams!

So, Wolverine, what was your job? I assume you have some kind of good health insurance that you are happy with. Who is your insurer and how much is your premium? I feel like you should be willing to share the good news with those of us who haven't found such a good deal. I also assume you don't get anything from the federal government. Is that correct?



This all sounds like propaganda (astroturf) from the Insurance industry. How can it possibly be cheaper to pay an executive $38 million a year than to pay some poor schmuck to push paper in a badly lit government office somewhere. Even if he was GS-15, he'd have to live to be 327 years old. Plus there the lack of a Bigelow on the floor.



More mythology. We already have rationing. Some people get covered for things that other people can't get. It's just rationed differently in other countries.

Anyway, lots of tests and procedures doesn't mean good care. I've had two MRIs and countless X rays and most of them were of little use to me. They are way over used in this country, because it's a way for physicians to rack up extra charges to pay for (a) their liability insurance (b) their staff for doing all the medical billing to insurance companies*, and (c) a boat or bigger house. So if you rip up your knee at work, they x ray it and tell you it's not broken.

One day, two nurses were struggling to hold down my 2 and a half year old son so they could X ray his leg, which may or may not have been broken in a fall. He was terrified, so I asked, "What will you do if it's broken?" "Nothing" they said. He wouldn't need a cast. So I told them to stop and saved the insurer another pointless charge and my poor son a few minutes of terror.

I have seen the textbooks used to teach people how to do medical billing. They are full sized textbooks. You have to take a whole course (or two?) just to learn how to get the insurance company to pay. The doctors and insurers are locked in a pitched bureaucratic battle. And the patients are just ammo. There is no way government payment could be worse. And in Canada it's much, much simpler than dealing with a PRIVATE insurance company here.



Well, sure, Wolverine. We could go back to 19th-century medicine and let quacks sell patent medicines (no FDA). Let's get rid of the National Institutes of Health while we are at it. No more medical research, no more expensive cancer treatments or cutting-edge surgical techniques (joke). No more new vaccines for new viruses. And I'm tired of paying taxes for building roads. I'll just buy a Hummer and romp over the potholes in dirt roads. We don't need pavement, or road signs, or cops to enforce all those pesky government mandated highway safety rules. Breathalizer, schemzalizer. We certainly don't need any regulations to prevent people from practicing medicine without a license. We don't need the government to tell doctors that ulcers aren't caused by stress but instead are caused by a bacterial infection, or that the correct treatment isn't a heavy diet of cream and cereal (which is what doctors used to prescribe for ulcers), but a two-week course of antibiotics. And let's dismantle Social Security, Medicare, and the Veteran's Administration. If those systems worked, people would be clamoring for something like that for themselves.

Oh, whoops. I forgot. They are!



Did you mean this?



This is why we need single payer, so everyone can be covered, not just the wealthy and the petrified upper middle class. The current plan is a compromise solution that leaves all the private insurers in place, collecting their 20 to 30% overhead, while the government pays for the folks that aren't as lucrative to "cover"--the disabled, the sick, and the old.



Oh, gosh! You are right. Let's not count them. We don't care about them. They just work here, often for 12 hours a day. Why would we want THEM to have health care? Let them go unvaccinated and die of tuberculosis and whooping cough whilst picking our lettuces and peaches or making our milk shakes and fries in the backs of greasy kitchens.



Right, like I'm about to CHOOSE not to pay $1400/month instead of eating and having a house. They choose not to because it's a significant expense or they unwisely choose to go uninsured. That is a bad thing, not something to crow about. They should be covered.



Um. That's not what the U.S. Census bureau says.
Health Insurance Coverage: 2007 - Highlights




You do not have to be disabled to not have coverage. If you do not have group coverage, you just have to have some kind of condition that makes the insurer believe you will cost them money sooner or later. For example, if you had cancer, you are likely to get it again, so that'll do it. If you had serious injury that required surgery or trips to a pain clinic, that can make you uninsurable. Something like lupus or MS, where you can still work but you need regular medical care will do it. They can't legally drop you, but they can raise your rates so high that you can't afford it, and no other insurer has to take you. Is that clear?

Here is a list of roughly 75 conditions that can make you uninsurable if you don't have group coverage.
Uninsurable Health Risks

Addison's Disease
AIDS (HIV Positive)
ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease)
Alzheimers Disease
Amyotrophis Lateral Sclerosis
Angioplasty
Ankylosing Spondylitis
Aunria
ARC ( AIDS Related Complex)
Arteriosclerosis
ASD (Atrial Septal Defect)
Banti's Disease
Bi-Polar Disorder (Manic Depressive)
Bypass Surgery
Cancer
Chronic Fatigue Syndrone (Usually within 5 years)
Colitis
COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease)
Conjestive Heart Failure
Cirrosis of the Liver
Collagen Diseases
Crohn's Disease
Cystic Fibrosis
Cushing's Disease
Delirium Tremors (DT's)
Dementia
Depression (Major)
Diabetes
Eating Disorders
Emphysema
Fanconi's Syndrome
Heart Attack
Hemophilia
Hemochromatosis
Hepatitis (Type B, C, Chronic)
Hodgkins Disease
Heart Murmur
Heart Valve Disease or Replacement
Huntington's Disease
Hydocephaly
Infertility Treatment (Recent)
Ischemia
Kaposi's Sarcoma
Left Bundle Branch Block
Leukemia
Lupus
Lymphedema
MS (Multiple Sclerosis)
Muscular Distrophy
Myasthenia Gravis
Narcolepsy
Organ Transplants
Pacemaker
Paralysis / Parapelegia
Parkinson's Disease
Peripheral Vascular Disease
Porhyria
Portal or Renal Hypertension
Pregnancy (Exisiting)
Psoriatic Arthritis
Psychoses
Raynaud's Phenomenon
Renal Insufficiency
Schizophrenia
Scleroderma
Silicosis (Black Lung Disease)
Stroke (TIA, Transient Ischemic Attack)
Substance Abuse / Dependance
Suicide Attempt
Ulcerative Colitis

Very few of these would be recognized by social security as fully disabling and SS doesn't insure against partial disability--or at least that's what they told me.

Just as an aside, I personally think it's useless to make a law telling insurers that they MUST insure everyone. You can make them do that, but they'll just charge so much that the "uninsurables" will not be able to afford it and we are back to the government having to pay for the sick while private insurers "cover" those who are not. And if the government is going to be in the health insurance business, the only rational answer is to pool EVERYONE together and average our risk, just as we do for fire protection, education, national defense, military medical care, and medicare, to name a few. There is no point in having the government subsidize private insurers (with their overpaid executives) by letting them pretend to insure those who don't need much health care while the government takes care of the actually sick and injured.

asking

There is way too much here for me to respond to at once. I don't have time right now.

I will make just a couple of points.

Under the Federal Employee Retirement System (FERS), one is eligible for early retirement at ANY AGE after 25 years of service. Period. Start working for the government at age 22, rightout of college, you are elligible for retirement benefits at age 47. Look it up.

Second, with regard to Social Security, there is no money in the SS-Trust fund. That is the definition of Bankruptcy. When FDR first created social security as part of the New Deal, the funds kept in the SS-Trust were supposed to remain separate and dedicated to the purpose of paying SS benefits. Under LBJ the rules were changed and laws were written to allow the government to "borrow" money from the SS Trust Fund for use for other purposes. This is called Off-Budget Funding, and has become a normal practice in managing the federal budget. What has happened until now is that the government would pay interest on what it borrowed, and the interest was enough to cover the benefits paid to retirees for the year. The problem NOW is that the average age of the population is increasing, more benefits are being paid out, and the interest payments are insufficient to cover the benefits being paid out. So now, the government has to start paying back PRINCIPAL in order to cover the benefits. There are two issues with this. 1) The government doesn't have the money to pay back principal on those borrowings because our President has quadrupled the budget deficcit and is in the process of quadrupling the national debt. There AIN'T NO MONEY to cover the government's debt to the SS Trust. 2) Even if there was enough money to pay down principal on the loans, that would also result in lower interest payments next year, which means that next year, the government has to pay back EVEN MORE PRINCIPAL TO COVER BENEFIT PAYMENTS TO A GROWING RETIREMENT POPULATION. Within a few years, even the money owed to Social Security is going to run out.

Put simply, whether you wish to believe it or not, Social Security is already bankrupt. It has no money in its trust fund. It only has IOUs. Income from those IOUs are insufficient to cover the expenses. Therefore, it is bankrupt. The system that allowed it to become bankrupt was put in place by LBJ. As much as you would like to try to blame Bush and the Republicans for this mess, it was created by DEMS. And regardless of who it was created by, it was MANAGED by the Federal Government, which clearly screwed it up. These are the same people that you want to be running our health care system. Brilliant.

Last point. The 75 items that you listed may not be covered by private health insurance unless you are on a group plan. That still leaves at least two options.

1) Get on a group plan.
2) Pay out of pocket.

There are plenty of group plans out there that are not employer-based. There is even a group for "consultants" (people who are self-employed or even unemployed) that pretty much anyone can join that gives pretty good medical benefits. The cost for a family of 4 five years ago was about $500-800/mo. I don't know what it is now. Or you could pay out of pocket.

Which means, even if you can't get individual insurance coverage, you can still get care. Yes, it is expensive. But it is still available.

Under a single-payer system, however, if the govermment denies you benefits for these 75 items, you are SOL. You cannot pay out of pocket in a single payer system. You have no other options for coverage.

And do you think that a system that is looking to CUT COSTS in the face of adding MORE PEOPLE to its beneficiary list is going to cover these 75 items? In the UK, the government is dropping coverage of meds for breast cancer patients. Do you really think that people dying of AIDs, ARC and similar diseases are going to be given the full spectrum of care they need? Do you think that an end-of-life Alzheimers patient is going to be covered? We're talking about a system that is proposing that counselors be sent to the homes of old people to talk to them about their "death options"... a system that is looking to cut costs by cutting off care to the most vulnerable of us. Do you think that system, run by the same people who handle the DMV and the Post Office, is going to provide BETTER coverage than the private system.

You're off your rocker.

Elliot

[N0help4u]

I agree with Tom and ETW

They do not want to find cures for cancer or hodgkins or anything else because then they would be out of billions of dollars.
Often when a study comes along and say vitamin E is good for this or an alternative is good for that they taboo it saying their studies show it is ineffective as a preventative. Then when it is to their convenience they come back around and endorse it or say it wasn't as bad as we thought. Like when they claimed eggs were bad for you and then years later eggs weren't so bad after all.

Alternative medicine HAS a better cheaper way of dealing with cancer but the medical field says it is quackery. They are only beginning to accept some of it in CAM therapy.

[ETWolverine]

You should reexamine your premise then. As Steve correctly points out there are options for me if my plan does not cover treatments . I can upgrade or change providers ;I can appeal . I can negotiate directly for care outside my coverage . Often as ET points out big bad Pharma will give their product away to those without the means .I can change providers who may offer different treatment . I can get any number of diagnostic procedures to determine the best course of action .

What is my appeal when some nameless faceless bureaucratic geek plugs my numbers into the national data base and the computer determines I am unworthy of treatment ?

Would you agree that we should discriminate against the disabled ? Probably not ...but ,Suprise ! That is exactly what this clown Pete Singer argues for in the NY Slimes op-ed that Steve linked to and the article I posted above cites.

He uses the case of Christopher Reeves who used his paralysis as a platform to advocate spending public funds to support research for curing quadriplegia . Singer considers this a waste of resources ,and no doubt plugging the numbers into the QALY supercomputer would indeed confirm his thesis .
Government rationing would put such bioethicists as the demented Singer into postions to make judgements on the value of the lives of every American.

You can argue that many things in our lives are already rationed. Food being one of them . My ability to obtain food is determined by my ability to pay for it. Yes there is a safety net ,and there should be for those who cannot pay for their food ,and likewise there is a safety net in place for those who do not have the means to purchase their own medical insurance . Is it perfect ? Nope .No government plan is . But , as food prices rise I hear no one telling us that it would be a good idea for the government to put us all on a food rationing plan and some central planner in Washington will put our numbers into a computer to tell us what foods we can and can't obtain .

Healthcare is rationed by a number of factors beyond your insurance coverage. There are market forces, lack of perfect distribution of available technologies, skilled providers, and other intangibles that have often been mentioned in these postings like physical location of services .

I do not want the government being the sole arbiter on who lives and dies and determining the value of the lives in the country . That is well beyond their constitutional mandate .

You claim to be distrustful of government and yet you would permit an over-bloated central planning government to make the call on whether you are worthy of treatment or not based on an abstract formula concocted by egg heads like Singer who are the modern equivalent of eugenicist ? I know you better than that .
Creating greater access for the relatively few who have fallen through the safety net can be accomplished without overturning the entire health care system and enacting a rationing scheme that would be controlled by bioethicists of the ilk of Peter Singer based on quality of life judgments.

Here's an interesting thought.

We have seen in the past how politicians have used their influence to attack their opponents. They have used their influence to get the IRS to audit their opponents' taxes and financial records, just because they could. We have seen politicians initiate Justice Department investigations of opponents, just because they could. Politicians have been known to abuse their influence in order to attack their opponents.

What happens when the government gets control of our health care?

Will we suddenly be faces with a situation where politicians will be able to slow down how fast an opponent (or his family) receives medical care? Will we see politicians cutting off opponents' medical care completely? Will we see politicians influencing the bureaucratic decision cycle of what services a political opponent can receive?

Scary thought.

Does anyone really want to hand that much power over to the government? We've seen how some politicians wield the power they already have. Do we really want to hand them even more power?

For all you libertarians out there, do you think that the government is trustworthy enough for that kind of power? Given the history of abuses of the system, do you trust them with that kind of power?

Elliot

[tomder55]

You think that when you find out YOUR insurer won't pay for a procedure you need, you can find another insurer who will.

Do you really think that stuff?? Really??

Of course I do . I know I can because I already have supplemental insurance to cover my specific concerns. I have been through the appeals process with insurance companies and although it is a pain to do ;you can get results.

Finally ,I am not arguing for the status quo by any means. But my remedy would provide more private sector competition for health care not less as a gvt insured option would invariably do.