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Posted by: SpareChange 4 months, 1 week ago
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SpareChange4 months, 1 week ago
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Again, another CON not coming up with any solutions just bitchin bout Dems...
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We need to bring costs down, we need to get coverage for those who don't have it or have lost it.
All the Republicans care about is siding with the insurance companies. All Republicans want it to protect these corporate massive profits.
They don't complain about billions in subsidies to corporations, but the sure do get their panties in a bunch about someone who just got laid off gets some help with healthcare.
We're going to pay more down the road if we do nothing.-
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rbiii4 months, 1 week ago
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I like John Mackey's ideas.
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I'm for anything that increases TRUE competition. This massive government intervention doesn't do that. It solidifies the oligopoly in such a way that it will lead to a government run monopoly.
That will not bring costs down and will we will pay even more down the road than we are already on the hook for right now.
I love how you morons will dismiss alternatives as "not being a solution" simply because the solutions don't happen to involve a government run option.
There are alternatives, you just don't want to listen to them.
I am not siding with the insurance companies. I'm siding with the market, the private sector. I'm siding with real competition.
What you statists refuse to realize is that the mess we're in was CAUSED BY THE GOVERNMENT, not the insurance companies. The insurance companies have taken advantage of the system the government set up.
One day it will sink in for you.-
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SpareChange4 months, 1 week ago
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WHAT? Who's been jacking up the premiums for everyone's health care? Who's dropping care and refusing to cover people with pre existing conditions
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THIS WAS CAUSED BY THE INSURANCE COMPANIES
One day, you'll be like the millions of americans who think their covered until they're sick and realize that their tests and procedures they need to stay alive and be physically comfortable aren't covered. I have friends who've gone bankrupt because of medical bills.
Medical bills will sink us.-
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rbiii4 months, 1 week ago
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If you learned how to read, among other things, you would see where I said that the insurance companies take advantage of the system the government set up.
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Government intervention has led to the problems we face because the government LIMITS the ONLY thing that can keep costs down: Competition.
Again, one day this will sink in for you.-
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Beeboppin714 months, 1 week ago
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You are quite pompous for one who understands very little about this topic.
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The congressional Budget Office conducted various studies concerning restrictions on HMO's which were placed under a lot of restrictions. Here is a portion of their findings:
"By the end of the 1990s, however, many consumers and providers had come to oppose the restrictions imposed by HMOs, and the plans began to relax those restrictions as enrollment in more loosely managed PPO plans grew. (PPO plans now enroll about 60 percent of individuals who receive health care coverage through their employer.) At the same time, private health care spending also increased: between 2000 and 2004, that spending rose at an average annual rate of 8.4 percent, and health care’s overall share of GDP grew to 16 percent. That share is now projected to reach 20 percent by 2015. Not surprisingly, purchasers of health insurance have looked for new ways to help control those costs."
Loosening restrictions DOES NOT reduce the cost of care.-
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Endoscopy4 months, 1 week ago
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The only things that will lower the cost of care is the following list in order of their impact on the costs.
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1. Tort reform to limit punitive damages.
2. Lessen the impact of Federal laws that causes the providers a paperwork nightmare. HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, etc.
3. Paperwork for Medicare and Medicaid.
4. Easier paperwork for the insurance to collect.
The top one Obama has taken off of the table for his lawyer friends. The rest will be made worse with the 36 brand new bureaucraciws that will have to have thier paperwork filled out.
http://docs.house.gov/gopleader/House-Democrats-He...
Lovely block diagram of the Obama health care isn't it.
By the way there is very limited competition in the insurance industry. You can only buy insurance from companies operating in your state under the state regulations.-
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Beeboppin714 months, 1 week ago
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It's not a lie. The Obama bill is NOT single-payer. It is the Obama plan. Even if it is meant to pave the way to single payer, the bill as it stands today, is not single payer!
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Single - payer completely eliminates private insurance and even you must know that is not in the proposed bill. -
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Beeboppin714 months, 1 week ago
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I'm assuming that you got this information from the McCain Plan.
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"Senator McCain’s proposal envisions a relatively unregulated national market for nongroup insurance in which families would buy insurance on their own or as members of fluid, voluntary associations, such as churches or clubs. In this market, consumers could select insurers licensed in any state. With more choice and competition, he believes that costs would fall and service quality would increase.
Everything we know about nongroup insurance markets, however, suggests that this vision is wrong. Health care is the ultimate local good: it is provided face to face, between doctor and patient. Today, most health plans negotiate contracts with local providers, directly or through intermediaries. The only truly national plans are traditional indemnity plans that do not negotiate with local provider networks. Such plans were once the backbone of American health care. They lost out to more tailored plans, however, because they could not compete effectively. Without an informed local network, their prices were higher and quality was lower. There is no reason to think that this has changed.
The main effect of establishing a national market would be to undo state laws designed to establish minimum levels of coverage and protect consumers. In a national market where state licenses are not required, insurers will charter in places where regulations are scarce—much like credit card companies do today. As a result, people guaranteed basic benefits today would find those benefits eliminated under the McCain plan. People in most states would lose access to procedural protections, such as requirements that disputed decisions by managed care plans be subject to external review. People also would lose access to many benefit protections. For example, forty-seven states now require mental health parity, forty-nine states require coverage of breast cancer reconstructive surgery, and twenty-nine require coverage of cervical cancer screening. All of these requirements—as well as regulations in several states that limit the rates that can be charged to higher-cost consumers and that limit who can be excluded from a health plan—would be eliminated under the McCain plan. Without legal requirements in place, plans would no longer offer these benefits at all in many markets, even if many consumers want them."
http://www.pnhp.org/news/2008/september/cost_and_c...-
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Beeboppin714 months, 1 week ago
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In a single payer system, all medical decision are left to the patient and the doctor. It doesn't change the way things are now. The only thing that changes is whether or not the doctors submit an insurance claim to one company or fifteen.
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Most of the misunderstandings involved with single -payer stem from people confusing it with other types of plans and buzz words.
The term socialized medicine is often used to conjure up images of government bureaucratic interference in medical care. That does not describe what happens in countries with national health insurance where doctors and patients often have more clinical freedom than in the U.S., where bureaucrats attempt to direct care.
Socialized medicine is a system in which doctors and hospitals work for and draw salaries from the government. Doctors in the Veterans Administration and the Armed Services are paid this way. The health systems in Great Britain and Spain are other examples. But in most European countries, Canada, Australia and Japan they have socialized health insurance, not socialized medicine. The government pays for care that is delivered in the private (mostly not-for-profit) sector. This is similar to how Medicare works in this country. Doctors are in private practice and are paid on a fee-for-service basis from government funds. The government does not own or manage medical practices or hospitals.
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Beeboppin714 months, 1 week ago
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"That [single-payer] will not bring costs down and will we will pay even more down the road than we are already on the hook for right now.
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You're wrong. For the past 28 years studies have been done on health care reform. Numerous ideas were studied including increasing competition between insurance companies and removing Government regulations. The only plan that effectively reduces the cost of health care while ensuring coverage for all is a single-payer plan.
Let's look at it on a state level. I chose New Mexico because of the influx of illegals living there. The study that I'm about to quote was done by an independent firm with no political bias:
"The Lewin consulting group was hired to perform a fiscal study of alternative reform plans for the state of New Mexico. The study looked at single payer, managed competition, and an individual and employer-mandate.
The study concluded that a single-payer system with modest cost-sharing was the only plan that would cover all the uninsured and save over $150 million per year (estimates given for 1998). Such a plan could be financed with a payroll tax of 7.92 percent (employer 80 percent/employee 20 percent) and a 2 percent tax on family income. If patient cost sharing was eliminated, the single payer program would cover all the uninsured for a net increase in costs of $9.1 million.
The group’s estimates of administrative savings were very conservative, about half of what other estimates have found. Thus, it is likely that a single payer program in the state of New Mexico could provide coverage for all the uninsured with no increase in current health resources."-
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Beeboppin714 months, 1 week ago
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There have been far too many studies to list considering the effects of single-payer on a national level. These are studies done by the Congressional Budget Office:
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"A single- payer bill would raise national health expenditures at first, but reduce spending about 9 percent. As the program was phased in, the administrative savings from switching to a single-payer system would offset much of the increased demand for health care serv-ices. Later, the cap on the growth of the national health budget would hold the rate of growth of spending below the baseline. The bill contains many of the elements that would make its limit on expenditures reasonably likely to succeed, including a single payment mechanism, uniform reporting by all providers, and global prospective budgets for hospitals and nursing homes.
Another study done later by the Congressional Budget Office states:
"Single - payer would raise national health expenditures above baseline by 4.8 percent in the first year after implementation. However, in subsequent years, improved cost containment and the slower growth in spending associated with the new system would reduce the gap between expenditures in the new system and the baseline. By year five (and in subsequent years) the new system would cost less than baseline. -
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Endoscopy4 months, 1 week ago
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You ramble on and on in ignorance. All you have to do is look at Medicare and Medicaide. Medicare was started in 1965 and was supposed to be for $3 billion a year. in three years it went to $6 billion and has never stopped. It is at $413 billion and rising. This program does not pay the providers their costs for services. Therefore many providers refuse to take it. those that do have to charge the other patients more to cover the costs. Medicaide is bankrupt and Medicare is getting there fast. This is the great example of single payer for health care of the elderly and poor. This is what you are trying to tell people is so efficient???? What planet are you from????
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Beeboppin714 months, 1 week ago
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You ramble on in ignorance. Medicare/aid are failing because there are no healthy people in those plans to help cover the costs of the sick ones. In a single - payer plan all the healthy people are under the same umbrella as the sick ones and that helps to offset the costs.
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Keep researching though. You're doing so much better! I'm actually a little proud of you!
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Beeboppin714 months, 1 week ago
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Well, sure. But that tax increase will be offset by the loss of a high monthly insurance premium.
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We all know that nothing is free. The good news is that the majority of the funding is already there. Right now we pay 64% of health care costs through our taxes. Those funds cover citizens that are on Medicare/aid, the VA, public employees, and teachers, elected officials, the military, and tax subsidies to employers for offering insurance to employees. The citizens are currently paying 17% for health care out of their pockets. Employers that offer insurance pay 19% of the cost out of their profits. In fact, 25% of their payroll is dedicated to the cost of health care.
Under a single payer system, we will be saving the $350 billion dollars wasted by the insurance industry per year. Along with those savings, the payroll taxes for employers will be reduced to about 7% saving them 12% of their profits. Citizens will contribute about 2% of their payroll taxes. The plan actually gives the average citizen a 10% raise.
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Beeboppin714 months, 1 week ago
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"I love how you morons will dismiss alternatives as "not being a solution" simply because the solutions don't happen to involve a government run option.
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There are alternatives, you just don't want to listen to them.
Allow me to reiterate, the studies have been done on the alternatives. They do not meet the criteria that is needed to reform care. The alternatives do not simultaneously reduce costs and cover all U.S. citizens.
In a way, I wish that deregulation and increasing competition did do both. It would be far easier to pass a bill like that. -
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Beeboppin714 months, 1 week ago
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"What you statists refuse to realize is that the mess we're in was CAUSED BY THE GOVERNMENT, not the insurance companies. The insurance companies have taken advantage of the system the government set up."
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I hope you don't get upset when I start to call you names. The regulations were put into place because someone filed a law suit against an insurance company that was trying to bend the rules that were already in place. The more rules they tried to bend, the more regulations they received for their efforts. The mess was and is being caused by the insurance industry.
Let's take a look at a few other ways that insurance companies drive up costs.
Private insurers necessarily waste health dollars on things that have nothing to do with care: overhead, underwriting, billing, sales and marketing departments as well as huge profits and exorbitant executive pay. Doctors and hospitals must maintain costly administrative staffs to deal with the bureaucracy. Combined, this needless administration consumes one-third (31 percent) of Americans’ health dollars. That's $7,129 per capita.
That's only the effects of the insurance industry. Add to that the overhead, sales and marketing departments, huge profits, exorbitant executive pay, and the development of product of the drug companies, and the amount of care increases even further.
Now add to that the lobbies. And so on....
All of these factors are increasing the cost of our health care and the only way to bring it down is to either control these industries or rid ourselves of them entirely. -
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PapaWolf4 months, 1 week ago
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>>hey ace do you remember Nancy Pelosi changing the rules and blocking out the GOP on everything Congress was writing.........
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keep believing that, pc. is that why the 1 committee is blocking out ALL participants except 3 Dems & 3 Repubs?
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Endoscopy4 months, 1 week ago
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So tell me what is wrong with the Republican proposals now and under Bush. The Democrats never allowed them to be acted on. Why??? Then libs rant about the conservatives when they are doing what the Democrats did before. Good for the goose but not good for the gander is it???
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