50 Million Americans Uninsured? How to Choose Your Health Insurance Plan »
Posted By WikiMap 6 months, 2 weeks ago in News“O health! Health! The blessing of the rich! The riches of the poor!” (Ben Jonson). You need to understand the choices and pick what is best for you. Medicare provides health insurance coverage for forty million American over the age of 65.
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CHAM6 months, 2 weeks ago
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Wiki. This is a very important subject to the people. First thing to consider is what is the best value and how much security do you have that it won't change without your permission.
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Any Senior citizen will tell you that their Non- Government prescription policy can be changed at the will of the company. And this can be costly to the policy holder.
All these companies that I know of won't cover the most expensive medicine, even if they are the best. That old statement that Generics are equal is a canard. And even if they cover an expensive medicine, they can drop the coverage at will. Now they will say they won't, but you need to read the fine print.
As to what coverage should be the least costly, it should be in this order;
A Government paid plan ( No middlemen involved ) The cost should be the cost of the plan period. Kind of like a company I once worked for: They had a cafeteria for employees. The cost of the food, preparing it, and providing the cafeteria, was what was charged, there was no profit allowed. The meals were great and the cost was extremely low.
A Government paid plan, run properly, would be mandatory to be successful. Obviously Insurance companies would be against this plan, it would put them out of business.
Next would be a Company paid plan. A problem here is employment. And then there is the risk of the Government taxing the "benefit", it is a very likely thing of the future. And if some raise the cry of this being better than the Govt plan because of freedom of choice, that person needs to extract their head and think of PPO's and such and how that can be made much more restrictive.
Finally the absolute worst is Private Insurance. If you can afford this Plan you don't need coverage, you've got the money to take your chances. You have to consider that all costs that Govt and Company have for their plans, so will the Private Companies plus on top of that they must make their profits. -
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EDWARDIII6 months, 2 weeks ago
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Everyone who believes the grass is greener on the other side of the Socialist fence, remember a few things--
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Medical care is never satisfactory. There are always limitations. Some private companies are better than others. If you want a quick way to sort them out, find which ones are most commonly selected by British and Canadian doctors who send their family members here for care. Some people will tell you that doesn't happen, but it does.
The current attempt to hybridize insurance into a cartel of government and big insurance will have the effect of driving small companies out of business limiting choice and rationing health care.
Pharmaceutical companies will no longer be willing to risk research dollars for drug pipelines that lead into price-controlled product. They will surrender the field to East Asian companies which will have weak quality control, but will charge even more for novel pharma. And we will pay it out-of-pocket because there will be no alternative except death.
Current claims of low levels of bureaucracy in Medicare comes at the expense of vast fraud. Further, government bureaucracy never shrinks, (except under a Reagan) and has always expanded.
Single-payer health, whether government or a cartel, must be a defacto expansion of Medicare. Current budget gymnastics authored by the existing administration will result in huge deficits, which will reach their worst effect at just the time that current Medicare entitlements will overwhelm the system--10 years by some estimates. If we further encumber the healthcare dollar with a massive program it will cease to exist at that point in future-- the point at which Obama gets to blame a new administration for the meltdown.-
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engineer6 months, 2 weeks ago
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This is not so. We are the bottom are far as rankings in the civilized world in health care. We now spend more than 14 percent of our GNP on health care with one in six not having health care where the others ranking higher are single payer with 100 percent of its citizens covered. If we interpolate, for everyone to be covered with health care it would be almost 18 percent. the other countries use only 6 percent under the single payer. So much for deficits.
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1. People who are uninsured would not use emergency rooms as primary physicians
2. Obscene profits and bonuses would not be given to execs at HMOs
3. Bonuses would not be paid to insurance approvers to deny procedures.
4. Doctors would be paid enough to keep medicine desirable and you could choose your doctor without looking at their plan.
5 Drug companies, who spend 40% of their money on advertising to advertise the over-the-counter drug on prescription until the patent runs out would not be able to do this. Don't buy the garbage of the development cist being so high to justify their gouging. Lipitor makes 4.4 Billion dollars per year for on a drug which cost 800 million dollars to develop Also the medicare bill has to be rewritten. Zocor can be bought buy the VA for 127 dollars be cause thay can negotiate. Medicare pays $1,425 for the same drug.
6. Limit law suits and reduce the malpractice awards.
The rest of the civilized world shows single payer universal health care works much better than our system
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CHAM6 months, 2 weeks ago
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EDWARDIII. You responded to Engineer but I hope its OK for me to respond to your question since originally you responded to my first comment.
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If the Doctor performs malpractice in a Socialized System is he more likely to be prosecuted by the Government or would he under our current system be more likely to be prosecuted?
I think you know the answer.
There is insurance against Malpractice, but only an extremely low risk of prosecution. How many doctors are stopped from practicing in the United States for Malpractice? Pretty close to none right?
Why would it be so bad to have a system where there is no Insurance Company to worry about?
I'm retired and my Medicare, Medipak, and Prescription Drug premiums for my wife and I are about $7,608 per year. After deductibles and co-pays plus the bubble we spend another $15,000 per year.
Now I know my wife and I are not typical but what if $10,000 total is typical for the normal family of 4 per year? Then the Public would be spending (308,000,000 /4) X $10,000 per year = $770 Billion Government expenditure per year.
The below survey summary showed that by 2004 Family Plans for Company sponsored Health Insurance had risen to an average of
$10,217 per year. Here is what was said by the CEO:
“The cost of family health insurance is rapidly approaching the gross earnings of a full-time minimum wage worker,” said Drew Altman, President and CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation. “If these trends continue, workers and employers will find it increasingly difficult to pay for family health coverage and every year the share of Americans who have employer-sponsored health coverage will fall.”
The point is that Insurance Companies are a major driver of health costs. A mandatory Government plan should eliminate the amount that goes to insurance companies.
If you disagree with this maybe you could illustrate why. -
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EDWARDIII6 months, 2 weeks ago
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Yes I think I know the answer, though I'm open to correction. Under a single payer system, which is to say government, which is to say socialized medicine-- that's the logical extension-- malpractice complaints will go through the same system that VA benefits go through. That is to say unending red tape until or unless some reporter thinks it's worth a headline and exposes a pattern of abuse like the events at Walter Read, in which case a few heads get chopped off and it's back to business as usual.
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The fact that tens of millions of people (including those who smuggled themselves into the country) don't have health insurance is a problem to be dealt with. The fact that no person is ever satisfied with their health care as long as death is certain can not be dealt with, but it is used as fuel to stoke resentment against private insurance in a public where any capitalist is held up as a robber who takes away our wealth and our lifespans through his own greed.
Health care supplied effortlessly to everyone encourages moral hazard. That is to say people behave with more risk in any environment where someone else pays for the results. In a system where you can have better care by working harder or sacrificing more to get better coverage and where there is vast variety of choice people take responsibility for their own health. I will take the chance that everyone who blogs here would protect his/her health in any circumstances, but that is not true for masses of people who are complacent.
More choice is better. Less is worse. When health care providers compete consumers win. When government enters the scene competition and variety go away. As government takes over bureaucrats get more entrenched and less answerable to the patient. People who grow up under the system come to accept government control as axiomatic and don't realize that other ways exist.
Socialized med in GB & Can. may have leveled the field but capitalism, with all its criticisms, created the level of sophistication that exists today. We may legalize embrionic research but it will not accomplish much unless someone can make a lot of money off it. Just incidently those who make the most agrigate money from pharaceutical advancements are pension funds. -
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CHAM6 months, 2 weeks ago
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Ed. My best friend is also my family doctor. He owns a clinic. I asked him what was the most egregious thing he has to deal with, Medicare or the Insurance Companies.
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He told me their was no contest, it is the Insurance Companies. From my own experience I have to agree with him.
I said above the point is that Insurance Companies are the Major Cost drivers in the Health system. This has nothing to do with pension funds. I'm talking about the cost of health care passed on to the patient.
Whether the Quality of care would decrease or not, I cannot say. But I do know that there is no difference in care at the clinic between those that have Medicare and those who have Private Insurance.
Finally the Doctor gives about 10% each year of unpaid (free ) health care for uninsured people.
Can't you just see an Insurance Company doing that?
There are bad apples everywhere in this industry. But the baddest of the bad are the Insurance Companies. By the way years ago I used to be in Insurance.
When an Insurance Company uses a buffer to deny claims, pays bonuses to deny claims, searches for reasons not associated with the claim to deny benefits, Ed you should realize that you are dealing with a crooked organization.
But then again that's how to get the increase the bottom line. -
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EDWARDIII6 months, 2 weeks ago
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I'm not against reform and I'm not against helping the uninsured, but a government monopoly (or government/industry cartel) is no solution. The government program that exists might go through a period of making some people happy but its expansion to the exclusion of all options is in principle dangerous to society. The future holds a disaster for us as medicare is likely to default in ten or twenty years, even sooner than social security. Couple that with the fact that we are entering a period of multi-trillion dollar debt expansion supported by inflationary monitary policy and you apprehend a future in which bottled asprin becomes the new substitute currency.
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I don't want to write a book here. I have to oversimplify. You can have the last word. I would rather have a system where the crooks compete for my good will and my dollars than a system where the crooks run a monopoly with the backing of the president and congress. Look at the crooks in pentagon procurement. Look at the crooks in education funding. Look at the crooks in the IRS. They operate for their own purposes and are not answerable to the tax payers. Their greed may express itself in laziness (Greed = reward divided by effort. It grows as reward gets bigger or effort gets smaller but it's still greed.) as well as in aquisitiveness. Greed in government becomes unasailable and unchangeable. Only a fluid market can be amended by the consumer.
But if you're a socialist none of this matters and I won't change your position. Next year is 1984. Your turn. I won't say more on this line. -
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CHAM6 months, 2 weeks ago
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OK but: I am not a Socialist, I am a Populist. I point out that the system we have now is broken. I have always believed that Greed is the number one cause of problems, and greed of Insurance companies was what I was speaking of.
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Since those companies have proven their corruption and unethical practices, they won't reform themselves and unless they have serious competition they still won't change.
The threat of their hog trough being given to some other entity, will cause them to go out of business or change.
Nothing else will do it.
That, is why I'm for Government run Health care. With the Government we at least get to vote on their performance. We don't have that luxury with Insurance Corporations. And they work together.
And as to Medicare. I was against it and wrote an article warning about its impending cost, and was scorned for writing such crap. I think history has proven me right. My question then was why a new System? We already had a Health care program for people who couldn't afford it. I predicted that the day would come when it would cost the average wage earner more than Income Tax.
As to Social Security I looked up the income and outgo from our Government records. We have drawn a surplus for many, many years and we are projected to continue to do so until 2037. The Government took that surplus and spent it in the General Fund over these years. And I calculated that those funds taken involuntary from the public, if invested and returned just 3%, would have carried us through 2078.
But I do think this discourse does have its value. I learn something every time I speak with someone who has another view. -
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