The Health Care PR Movement
Doug Ross rounds up the incredible PR effort being employed to sell Obama's Health Care agenda. I heard the clip of Obama claiming that his only rationale for forming a public insurance option was to encourage insurers to become more competitive. Really? Someone needs to ask him to name one area in which the Federal government has proved itself capable of accomplishing something more efficiently and cost effectively than the private sector. There is nothing he can name. Such a move is guaranteed to put private insurers out of business eventually. There can be no other ultimate design.
Government is structured to do only those things which the private sector can't or won't provide on a broad scale but require a single coordinated planning and operations approach at the top level. And it always accomplishes it by taxing the population to underwrite on going operations openly, or below the radar somehow.
Obama knows if he sets this course there will be no other outcome, whether it happens on his watch, or not. There will be no going back. Once the government subsidizes coverage for a portion of the population, it will never win political support for removing it. From there, the government will be positioned to manipulate the market until private insures simply can't or will refuse to compete.
When that happens, the government will be the single payer in the system Obama has acknowledged he prefers. Once there, it isn't even a hop, skip and jump to dictating everything from doctor incomes to acceptable treatment options and the various criteria they will establish to determine what you can or can't get in terms of care. It will all be justified by cost-effectiveness and "good government". Much of it will then be accomplished through regulations upon which you wll never get to vote.
What it will be is socialized medicine, clear and simple. He's only muddying the water now in hopes of keeping people confused, uncertain and undecided enough for him to pull it off. And he is in a hurry because he knows he must be. They were in a hurry on the stimulus, yet have still only managed to spend a small percentage of it as of now. What was the big rush? Simple, let's get it done before the people have a chance to think it through and figure it out.
His window could easily close in 2010 with just enough Republican gains in the Senate. If you believe that the private sector brings real value to our current system, no matter how problematic, or expensive it might be – you owe it to yourself and the generations that will come after you to do everything you can to oppose him on this. It will be your last chance.
Doug's same item from above is here.
The AMA was sucker punched into the big PR and photo-op when the spin was that insurance companies, hospitals, doctors are all making an effort to reduce costs, etc. The plan that King Barry wants to launch will use medicaid reimbursment 75% or less than what commerical insurance companies pay docs and hospitals.
What this means is that doctors will be out of business in no time! They will be forced to work in government and hospital clinics = MEDICAID MILLS!!
Thats what I call quality healthcare!
the pr is too late.
i’m looking around rasmussen…
less than 49% believe healthcare is an important issue, 7th on their list of priorites. it’s down from 61% in may
economy? #1 with 81%. I’m sure the dems would like to tie healthcare to the economy, but the gop is going to tie the economy to healthcare as well in a much less kinder light.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/mood_of_america/importance_of_issues2/importance_of_issues
this is going to be obama’s first big loss, unless he chickens out. and he will chicken out.
He will make a healthcare speach of epic proportion..the media will report that it is the “most important speach of the history of the universe”…then he will chicken out or be taken to the wood shed!
If Obama believes competition with the private sector is key to effective govt programs, then Obama must favor letting us keep our own private social security accounts?
The last six months of life is the most expensive re medical costs. Obama is out to solve that. Eliminate those old people quickly, make it cheap. Nursing homes will go out of business first. Hospice care will sky-rocket, drug them til they die.
I actually think the money we spend on end of life care is wrong, it makes no sense to do open heart surgery on an 85 year old cancer patient who has only months to live anyway, it seems to me it would be a better way to die to just be given enough pain medication to go peacefully. But I don’t think that really plays much of a part in Obama’s plan.
All he wants to do is wrest control of health care from the private sector and give it to government
The details of how a public option would work haven’t been set yet. If it’s not subsidized with tax dollars, what are the insurance companies so scared of? What, they don’t think they can compete with our hugely inefficient government that can’t do anything right?
“If it’s not subsidized with tax dollars, what are the insurance companies so scared of?”
But it is going to be subsidized with tax dollars. It is a government entity that will draw from the general fund to cover its costs.
The whole “health care” scam is nothing more than the Obama Party’s attempt to capture $2 trillion per year in peoples’ earned cash that they then can replace with IOUs, totally subject to their discretion as to when, where, how, and if it is ever paid back.
If your health insurance company or doctor doesn’t provide you good service, you can change carriers. That won’t be an option under ObamaCare.
There is no way a private company can compete with the government because the government is able to offer a service at a loss if they so choose…the government is also larger than any private company and so would be able to get volume discounts that no private company would be able to get, and lastly, if all else fails, the government can set regulations in such a manner as to make it impossible for private companies to compete.
PS…how could a public option NOT be subsidized with tax dollars? If its a public option, eg. government run then by definition it is already subsidized with tax dollars.
The details of how a public option would work haven’t been set yet.
Of course not. As the link outlines, tax cheat Daschle, who is Obama’s lead driver on this, specifically says that the plan should NOT outline the details, but should let them be filled in later at Obama’s complete discretion.
Now, Nishner, since you’re not just a liberal puppet and Obama supporter, you should want all the details spelled out before the vote is taken, right? Certainly you can hold your Obama accountable for the fact that he and his tax cheat advisors are planning to push through a plan with no details and lie to the American public, can’t you? You can demand that the liar Obama who claims no tax dollars will be used to subsidize the public plans put that in writing and spell it out specifically, can’t you?
“— The last six months of life is the most expensive re medical costs. Obama is out to solve that. Eliminate those old people quickly, make it cheap. —”
*cues the theme song to “Logan’s Run”*…
Daschle’s not a part of the administration.
Again, the details of the plan haven’t been released. It’s Congresses job to fill in the details, not Obama’s.
By the numbers, we pay more per-capita than any other country and still leave tens of millions uninsured. There are lots of ways to deliver health care, we just happen to have the most expensive.
ND30, Nishner just dances to the tune of his Statist Masters.
If the Great Zero and his abettors say that they will push thru their socialized medicine scheme, you can be *blamed sure* that it will be done in such a manner so as to eliminate all possible private sector competition, and force us into a horrid public health service such as the Canadians or the British suffer under.
And it will be done in such an obtuse, obfuscated way that the public will shrug their arms up in disconcern, being much more worried about more important things like EATING and having a job, than the 40M souls who are (mostly either in between jobs, or young/healthy enough not to be bothered about it) either uninsured or under-insured.
Remember kid, that thing that the socialist FDR pushed through in the 1930s that reallly put a crimp on economic recovery, called the “New Deal”…?
That item which the SCOTUS of the time thought was a bad idea, and FDR threatened to pack the courts with fellow-traveling socialist judges over?
That same New Deal that brought us the ponzi scheme called “social security”, that mercilessly and forcibly robs us of around 15%-20% of our wages, that those of us born after the baby boom will likely never see again?
Just wait till Socialised Medicine finally passes. You ain’t seen nuttin’ yet.
What private sector competition? The US pays almost 50% more per capita than any other country in the world. I though competition was supposed to control prices, not drive them through the roof.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_hea_car_fun_tot_per_cap-care-funding-total-per-capita
The US also pays more per capita on public education than most of the rest of the West and yet still ranks near the middle or bottom in terms of results.
So, what makes you think that the government which cannot either successfully educate its children—which deals with a very small and finite group of stakeholders–will do a better job at delivering health care to its citizens, something that involves dozens of stakeholders and is immeasurably complex????????????
If medicaid is any example then it will make being a doctor on par with being a post officer worker.
Apples and Oranges. The federal government doesn’t run local school systems.
There are multiple examples of health care systems in other industrialized countries that deliver as good or better care than we have at a substantially lower per capita cost.
The GOVERNMENT runs the public schools, so that’s apples to apples.
What is going to happen to the jobs in the managed care/insurance industry? Are they going to become gov. workers or be fired? If they become gov. workers, then how will this save any money unless they take a pay cut?
How is the government going to reduce health care costs unless it reduces the $ spent on health care: and that means reducing payments to doctors and hospitals. What will the impact be on private practice doctors?
How is the government going to reduce health care costs unless it rations health care the same way the insurance companies do?
If you can’t answer any of these questions then ‘single payer’ is nothing more than a meaningless propaganda term of art.
No, local government runs the education system not the Feds, who would under a true single-payer system. Some school systems perform great, comparable to schools anywhere in the world, other school systems don’t. And much of local education is tied to property taxes and funding varies greatly from one system to the next.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=1
Health care is already rationed – there are 10′s of millions of people without coverage.
And the latest meme of the Obama parrots.
“By the numbers, we pay more per-capita than any other country and still leave tens of millions uninsured.
What private sector competition? The US pays almost 50% more per capita than any other country in the world.”
You see, what the leftists like Nishner leave out is the reason that we pay more is because we can choose to pay more, and the reason we have uninsured people is because we can choose to be.
Nishner is looking at the cost of buying a meal at a government cafeteria versus at Whole Foods and claiming that the latter is wasteful and inefficient because it costs more per calorie. He’s then arguing that it’s some kind of failing that people are choosing not to eat at Whole Foods OR the government cafeteria and spend their money on something else.
I have an easy solution for the Obama nanny-statists: start a chain of free hospitals and clinics that don’t charge, funded by a 100% levy on all Obama Party members who make more than $250k. That way, you’re providing the free healthcare without having to tax a single working family.
The interesting thing that the Obama Party nanny-statists like Nishner leave out is the fact that there’s an easy way to control per-capita spending: limit access, disallow the use of new drugs, underpay medical providers, and deny treatments.
You know, all the things they whine about when private insurers do them.
The difference is that now, if you are having problems, you can switch carriers, go to different providers, and pay out of pocket.
Under Obamacare, you won’t have that choice. You won’t be able to pay more for better service. You won’t be able to go to whatever doctor or clinic you want; you’ll have to go to where Obama and Nishner tell you is the cheapest so they can hold down their “per-capita” cost.
Furthermore, you’re no longer going to be able to pay less for your choice to not smoke, to exercise, and to limit your risk factors. That has to be “redistributed” because it’s more important that smokers like Obama get cheaper healthcare.
State government mandates drive up the cost of insurance. Get the government out of insurance and the price will come down. Let us choose how we want to be insured. Some people would be happy with just a catastrophic policy, i.e., major medical.
What’s really funny is that the Obamacare plan has already been tried once, as Patterico pointed out, with disastrous results.
http://www.heritage.org/research/healthcare/bg1121.cfm
take a look at bill frist and his company hca…
they agreed to pay back at least a billion dollars which they defrauded from medicare.
missed anyone getting jailtime.
you get caught ripping off the govt, and you just give the money back. you steal a car and you don’t get the same option.
if you have govt controlling/spending more money, you will create an environment of more fraud with infinitely less deterrence.
so we save 10% on healthcare by changing it to fall further under govt’s control…
we’ll lose 15% as the graft increases.
until govt is capable of reforming itself, why should they even be going near healthcare?
simple question nishner…
do you believe govt is efficient?
doctor, heal thyself.
NDTool, as usual, is confused. And prefers to lie and distort.
“Choice” is a red herring. Most of your health care decisions – whether or not you’re approved for a procedure, how much of it will be paid, what specialist you can see – is decided by a clerk sitting in some insurance office someplace.
And try exercising your “choice” once you get seriously sick. Insurers are in the business of making a profit – you can’t do that if you insure sick people. That’s why they like to raise premiums on people that have the misfortune of getting really sick. And guess what the leading cause of bankruptcy in the US is? Medical bills. Great system.
The quality of care in the US isn’t higher than in Germany, France, Japan, etc. It does cost a helluva lot more though. I thought conservatives actually believed in getting the most for their dollar. I guess that doesn’t apply when you talk health care.
One of the reasons we pay more because we have a system with major inefficiencies built in. Our administrative costs are the highest among industrialized nations.
Access is already limited / rationed – there’s 40 million or so uninsured. Most carriers cap prescription drug benefits, so if you really need some exotic new drug, you’ll probably have to pay for it out of pocket. Our drug costs are also higher than any other industrialized nation. And George Bush, in all his wisdom, passed a Medicare bill that barred negotiating for lower prices. That’s Republican Health Care in a nutshell.
If you want, you’ll STILL be able to go out and buy you’re gold-plated health care.
You keep talking about Obamaacare but there’s no bill yet, no details have been written yet. You’re attacking something you have no clue how it will actually work. Brainwashed?
“do you believe govt is efficient?”
Government run health care programs are much more efficient – lower administrative costs – than is our private health care system.
****
The United States has $480 billion in excess spending each year in comparison to Western European nations that have universal health insurance coverage. The costs are mainly associated with excess administrative costs and poorer quality of care.
http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/rp/healthcare/accounting_cost_healthcare.asp
do you believe govt is(as in “=”) efficient?
you cannot cure the inefficencies in others if one is incapable of following their own prescription.
the goal is to provide something that actually works…
even if govt run healthcare is an improvement, the “patient” is still going to die.
centralized govt leads to centralized fraud. the crime still occurs, but you just made it easier and more lucrative.
a govt run program designed to make things affordable?
the first thing that comes to mind is fannie and freddie.
10 million dollar+ bonuses? check.
absolute mismangement? check.
did they accomplish the task of making housing more ‘affordable’? not really. they just made ‘borrowing’ more affordable.
if there is a govt program which you could offer as an example of success, I’ll be receptive.
centralizing healthcare decisions will lead to conglomerization and less competition. When these conglomerates swindle the govt, are they going to be shut down, or will they be deemed to big to fail?
You still have a CHOICE of which provider to use and how much to pay and for what options…young healthy people can go for dirt cheap HMO coverage, while middle managers can pay more for better services or different services, HMO, PPO, old fashioned 80/20 split.
With single payer, ALL of those choices will disappear for everyone EXCEPT THE RICH, who pay extra for private insurance riders to ensure they still get private rooms etc.
I mean, do you think that Medicare and Medicaid don’t ration health care?
Do the Kos Kids really think that a single payer system is going to ensure that every single American has access to the ‘gold standard’ of care, and they can go to Sloan Kettering or MGH for specialized care??!?!?!?!
It always saddens me when people show me they are exactly as stupid as I think they are.
Why are our per capita costs 50% or greater than other industrialized nations?
What do we get for all those hundreds of billions spent?
If you really don’t know the answer to those questions then you probably don’t know enough to be advocating for any position at all, let alone a massive transfer of all health care for Americans being put in the hands of the federal government.
I hope you live long enough to see the debacle that single payer health care will end up being in this country.
“Why are our per capita costs 50% or greater than other industrialized nations?”
Easy. In our system, you’re allowed to demand antibiotics for a cold, an extra MRI to “just make sure”, an additional night of hospitalization to “cover our bases”, an electric wheelchair rather than a manual one…the list goes on.
That is directly correlated to what the report you quoted actually said:
“Instead, MGI found that the overriding cause of high U.S. health care costs is the failure of the intermediation system — payors, employers, and government — to provide sufficient incentives to patients and consumers to be value–conscious in their demand decisions, and to regulate the necessary incentives to promote rational use by providers and suppliers.”
http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/rp/healthcare/accounting_cost_healthcare.asp
In other words, we pay more because we use more. Furthermore, the reason we don’t have “sufficient incentives” and regulate “rational use” is because Obama Party parrots like yourself are constantly demanding that copays and other things that provide a reason to actually question costs and value be LOWERED to “improve access”, and are screaming bloody murder about “denial of claims” when people don’t get exactly what they want.
If you dimbulb Obamabots actually looked at the states where you got your way on healthcare, i.e. Massachusetts and Washington, you would recognize that costs SOARED. When you don’t charge people for something, they use more of it, whether they need to or not.
In addition, in our system, there are no limits on the number of lawsuits you can file, the amount of fees lawyers can collect “on contingency”, or the amount of money you can get if your medical results are less than perfect. In other countries, there are loser-pay provisions that require you to pay for your frivolous lawsuits, elimination of or restrictions on contingency-fee filings that encourage lawyers to file frivolous suits and jury shop, and caps that preclude the massive jackpot awards that the lawyers keep advertising on daytime TV.
If Obama really wanted to fix healthcare, he would tell his party to shut up and let the insurance providers incent value. He would also take on the tort wing of his party and tell them that there will be limits on the lawsuits that underpin the additional tests and whatnot “just to be sure” that make our system so much more costly.
But he doesn’t. What he wants is his hands on our money, so he’s promising parrots like Nishner free healthcare, no questions asked, no claims denied, whenever and wherever you want, just like he does on everything else.
Nim-Rod the resident troll medical expert states,
“The quality of care in the US isn’t higher than in Germany, France, Japan, etc.”
Bullshit! Got proof? Have you ever spent ONE day treating patients, I have more than 20 years of expertise in my field!
“Health care is already rationed – there are 10′s of millions of people without coverage.”
Included in your “10′S OF MILLIONS” are 12-15 million illegal aliens! Also are millions more that are elligble for medicade or SCHIP that are simply not signed-up. Still millions make more are 2-3 times the “poverty line” and choose not to buy health insurance. Just like the trophy family that was trotted out a couple of years ago where the dad was a “self-employeed” deadbeat driving around in in a new big ass F-250, a Volvo SUV and another car for he and his wife. The point is these folks can provide insurance for themselves but “choose” not to.
The constant Daily Koz talking points spread here by Nim-Rod, Lame-O and others about healthcare shows them to be unread and uninformed about a subject they know absolutely nothing about!
Oh yea take two asprin and watch your tumor grow! Then call me a couple of months when we finally get that CT scan scheduled!
Sorry all of those pesky breast patients out there we just don’t have enough money to go around to supply you with those fancy experimental drugs to keep you alive for a few more months. Oh and you troublesome terminal lung tumor patients just ignore that fancy SBRT treatment stuff we can’t afford to invest in that new technology crap. Can’t you just go home and die already?
Government run healthcare means for someone with a catastrophic illness you have two choices, What song to play at your funeral and where do you want to be buried!
Still no explanation for what we get for all that extra money. Lots of name-calling though.
None of you seem to have a solution other than “trust the insurance companies”. Thanks, but that’s pretty much what got us here.
Here’s some doctors that don’t seem to agree with STM:
“Currently, the U.S. health care system is outrageously expensive, yet inadequate. Despite spending more than twice as much as the rest of the industrialized nations ($7,129 per capita), the United States performs poorly in comparison on major health indicators such as life expectancy, infant mortality and immunization rates. Moreover, the other advanced nations provide comprehensive coverage to their entire populations, while the U.S. leaves 45.7 million completely uninsured and millions more inadequately covered.”
http://www.pnhp.org/facts/single_payer_resources.php
Who said “trust the insurance companies”?
Who said that U.S.healthcare wasn’t too expensive and inefficient?
Your problem is that all you have are talking points and no understanding of the actual issues and apparently no ability or desire to think through the consequences of the policy that you advocate.
Still no answer on what happens to all the HMO/insurance companies and their employers, or how you think we’re going to provide health care to millions more people at less cost WITHOUT rationing care, just like it is rationed in the single payer systems in Europe.
Do you think that everyone in Europe is getting MRIs at the drop of a hat or the most comprehensive cutting edge cancer treatment? Or that Europeans are able to get in to the the doctor the next day? And have whatever tests they want within a week or two, always?
The idea that U.S. healthcare is expensive and inefficient and needs to be modified doens’t mean that you have to believe that putting it in the hands of the federal government is the answer.
You also don’t address any of the points that others have brought up about exactly WHO comprises the “millions” of uninsured.
Infant mortality: expanding health care won’t do anything about that because the poorest people in the country already have access to free prenatal care and health care via Medicaid and other programs.
Immunizations: same deal, though I question whether the immunization rate is really a reasonable indicator of anything beyond the rate of immuinzation.
Life expectancy: hmm, given the obesity problem in the U.S. I somehow doubt that free health care is going to do much in terms of life expectancy, either….because ‘life expectancy is made up of a huge number of variables including diet, exercise, climate, environment, heredity and yes, health care availability, to believe that single payer health care is a magic wand that is going to improve all these stats is almost criminally naive.
Strange, I asked a couple simple questions and you replied: “If you really don’t know the answer to those questions then you probably don’t know enough to be advocating for any position at all”
But you ask similar basic questions and want me to answer them all.
Who are the uninsured: http://aspe.hhs.gov/health/reports/07/uninsured/index.htm
As for the Wait Time bs, this from BusinessWeek:
“In reality, both data and anecdotes show that the American people are already waiting as long or longer than patients living with universal health-care systems”
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_28/b4042072.htm
Turns out there’s plenty of MRIs and CTs in Europe, a number of countries have more per capita than we do.
http://books.google.com/books?id=kf0m8iulwiIC&pg=PA42&lpg=PA42&dq=Availability+of+MRIs+per+country&source=bl&ots=2HY2qQuk6L&sig=AOZQPv52DkJQ6C4ZgpBiauC6fTI&hl=en&ei=QLAySri0GYa0NajB4P4J&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2#PPA43,M1
Health care providers in HMOs will be fine. Bureaucrats / paper-pushers will have a problem.
1. The governments of all advanced industrialized nations EXCEPT the United States have in place largely universal health plans that use a differing set of strategies to cover close to 100% of their population
2. ALL those countries pay substantially less than we do per capita
3. Statistically, all those countries have as good or better health than the United States despite spending much, much less per capita.
Do you have any idea how many um ‘bureaucrats and paper pushers’ are employed by United Healthcare, Kaiser Permanente, Cigna, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, and the rest of the health insurance companies out there?
I might be wrong, but I’d say there is a very strong liklihood that there are more of these workers than there are UAW members, but oddly, you don’t care about them, their jobs, their families, their mortgages.
Interesting, a third of the uninsured are 18-24, meaning probably 90% of them are healthy and don’t really need insurance, 40% of them are families making $50K and 20% of them are families making $75K.
From this data it appears to me that most of the uninsured don’t need insurance, don’t want it and/or are not willing to pay for it, rather than the idea that THEY CANT GET IT OR AFFORD IT.
Whatever, you are a broken record, and its clear that you either don’t read or don’t understand your own links because they don’t really support your premise that the ONLY way to reduce health care costs is to put it all under the control of the federal government, cause they do such a good job controlling costs overall. LOL
Nishner loses the perjorative, name calling contest hands down. He does win the citation war though. I am not seeing any links to any website that is remotely impartial that support the numerous claims above that the U.S. health care system is better or even as good as those partly socialized systems in the rest of the industrialized world. BTW, The Heritage Fdtn., which receives funding from the insurance and drug industries, just might not be considered impartial. See link: http://www.heritage.org/About/upload/AnnualReport06.pdf
BTW, when all government agencies (city, county, state, bi-state, multi-state, federal agency or quasi-governmental) with their different jurisdictional, funding, management, oversight and legal responsibilities are all lumped together, the correct term is “gub’ment.” E.g., “I wish the gub’ment would just give me my mortgage, children, highway, drug research, disease prevention, police, fire, energy, and agricultural subsidies, and then just shut up and leave me alone.”
BTW, here is one little nugget. The CEO of Aetna made $24 million last year. The head of Medicare makes about $150 thousand. That would buy a lot of aspirin.
From the amount of waste there, a lot. Yeah, reforming the system won’t be easy or pleasant, but that’s not an argument for the status quo.
Not a lot of United Auto Workers (UAW) at HMO / Insurance companies.
The problem isn’t with uninsureds that are healthy, it’s with ones that are sick who don’t get preventative care early and consequently don’t enter the system until it’s too late and end up in emergency rooms, which is the most expensive alternative.
I’m not the one that continues to make claims that aren’t back by the facts.
You should reread those links. The one on MRI’s makes it clear there’s no MRI gap, contrary to your claim. The one on wait times makes it clear they exist in the US and it’s actually easier to see a GP in many other countries, again, contrary to your claim.
Your own grasp of our health care system and it’s problems seem to go little beyond HMO and insurance company press releases.
ROTFLMAO
I didn’t say that United Auto Workers members worked at HMO/Insurance companies, I said that the total number of people who worked at HMO/Insurance companies was probably greater than the UAW membership, and I find it odd that you aren’t concerned about these ‘workers’ and their jobs and houses and families.
Again, the idea that ‘preventative care’ is going to save millions or billions is more bunk. A physical isn’t going to turn up signs of cancer, the efficacy of mammograms and prostate tests are highly disputed in terms of doing more harm than good. A physical isn’t going to show much in terms of your potential for a heart attack other than your cholesterol, and again, the science on this is fairly dubious in terms of how much heredity plays into it. So, that leaves thyroid disease and maybe diabetes. I mean, really. It’s a joke. The HMO’s tried it and it does not save enough money to even pay for itself.
So, what diseases exactly are people ending up in the ER when preventative care would have saved them?
Asthma is about the only thing that routinely results in ER visits that is controllable by previous medical intervention…
Or, maybe you can educate me on what preventative care, specifically, is going to do in terms of reducing ER visits, for what conditions? diseases?
Your own statistics have already indicated that AT LEAST ONE THIRD of the uninsired are healthy, young adults. All senior citizens are covered by Medicaid so that lets out everyone over 65/67. All poor people [who bother to sign up] are covered by Medicaid.
So, I mean, where is there any proof of all these sick people who need health insurance? Lack of health insurance does not equate with need, a healthy 18 year old does not “need” health insurance, though it would be good if they had at least some kind of catastrophic coverage, nor do they really “need” preventative care which is basically going to get a physical every year.
Nowhere have I argued for the status quo or argued on behalf of HMO’s or insurance companies, I have consistently argued that the federal government will do a worse job, that the federal government will have to ration health care in the same way that insurance companies do, that they 70% of people who have health care via their employers are the ones who will be the losers under single payer, and that the projected savings from preventative care, administrative savings and EMR are rainbow projections totally unhinged from reality.
I have never said the US healthcare system is good as it is, doesn’t need improvement or that we shouldnt find a way to extend health insurance to more people.
“I am not seeing any links to any website that is remotely impartial that support the numerous claims above that the U.S. health care system is better or even as good as those partly socialized systems in the rest of the industrialized world.”
But of course, the Obama parrot Wally claims that a website titled “Physicians for a National Health Plan” is “impartial”.
“The problem isn’t with uninsureds that are healthy, it’s with ones that are sick who don’t get preventative care early and consequently don’t enter the system until it’s too late and end up in emergency rooms, which is the most expensive alternative.”
Another easily-debunked Obama Party talking point.
“The visit rate for Medicaid patients (81.0 per 100 persons with Medicaid, SE = 3.8) was higher than those with Medicare (52.4 per 100 persons with Medicare, SE = 2.5), no insurance (41.4 per 100 persons with no insurance, SE = 2.4), and private insurance (21.5 per 100 persons with private insurance, SE = 1.0)”
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/ad/ad358.pdf (page 6)
And a prime example of that in action:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002059602_emergency11m.html
In short, those patients on government health plans, who you whined needed to be there for “preventative care”, are the ones who are using the emergency room the most often. THEY are the ones who are creating the most unnecessary expense, not the privately-insured or those without insurance.
The reason why is simple; Medicare and Medicaid charge nothing (or a pittance) for emergency-room visits. Private healthcare companies require people to share the costs, and obviously those without insurance who will be paying the full cost are thinking twice before going to the most expensive provider. Private health insurance companies are doing what your McKinsey report above said needed to be done, which is to “provide sufficient incentives to patients and consumers to be value–conscious in their demand decisions, and to regulate the necessary incentives to promote rational use by providers and suppliers.”
But of course, you and your fellow leftists scream and throw fits about that, claiming that it’s “evil”. Instead, you leftists claim you’re going to reduce costs by putting everyone under your government plan, although the evidence shows clearly that those on your government plan cost MORE.
And remember how Nishner and Wally said this was going to be a freebie, that it wasn’t going to cost us anything?
Oopsie.
“Health-care overhaul legislation being drafted by House Democrats will include $600 billion in tax increases and $400 billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel said.
Democrats will work on the bill’s details next week as they struggle through “what kind of heartburn” it will cause to agree on how to pay for revamping the health-care system, Rangel, a New York Democrat, said today. He also said the measure’s cost will reach beyond the $634 billion President Barack Obama proposed in his budget request to Congress as a down payment for the policy changes.
Asked whether the cost of a health-care overhaul would be more than $1 trillion, Rangel said, “the answer is yes.””
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aqLNecbH0dcg
So let’s see, with just a little over 300 million people in the US, that’s a new assessment of $2,000 in taxes for every man, woman, and child in the country on top of what we’re already spending.
On top of that, they’re cutting $400 billion in Medicare and Medicaid without reducing the tax burden put on us by either — so we’re paying even more to get less.
Again, this is the Obama Party at work. They want our cash now, but have no intention of ever keeping the promises or providing the services for which they’re ostensibly taking it.
“although the evidence shows clearly that those on your government plan cost MORE.”
BS, health care systems in Germany, Britain, France, Japan, Taiwan, Canada, Switzerland, etc, which cover close to 100% of their population run at much lower per capita costs than ours does.
But you won’t even look at those systems to borrow any ideas – or even discuss them, even though they’re proven to work. Instead, it’s all name calling and ooooooh, the government’s coming, the government’s coming.
You’re doing it again.
Repeating over and over that health care systems in Europe cost less than the one in the U.S. doesn’t get us from A to B. We already know that, it doesn’t answer any of the questions about what is going to happen to the MILLIONS of people who work in health care now or what nationalizing health care will do to the 25% of the economy that is health care related.
Nor do you have any kind of answers for statistics like those above that show that the people who pay the LEAST for health care utilize the MOST expensive services….that should certainly be a red flag that making health care ‘free’ isn’t going to decrease visits to ER, but in all probability will increase it, because if its free, why wait until Monday to see your doctor when you can go to the ER on saturday, even if it isn’t a real emergency….why drive yourself if the ambulance is “free”
Nevermind that nobody even has a program on the table and the idea that the 70% of people who already have health care aren’t going to get hit with HUGE TAX INCREASES has already bitten the dust…and if they’re talking about tax increases this early, you can bet your a$$ that the real cost will be at least double or triple the current projections.
“But you won’t even look at those systems to borrow any ideas – or even discuss them, even though they’re proven to work.”
My dear Nishner, they work in four different ways:
1) Ration care
2) Underpay medical providers
3) Eliminate or strictly limit lawsuits by making frivolous ones expensive, since the loser has to pay for them, by eliminating or strictly limiting contingency fees, which reduces the jackpot incentive for the John Edwards wing of the Obama Party, and cap payments, which reduces the jackpot incentive for both lawsuit filers and ambulance chasers.
4) Impose restrictive laws or outright bans on private insurance or private medical practice that make it impossible for people to avoid 1) or providers to avoid 2).
I’m fine with 3, but you’d lose massive amounts of support and political contributions in your Obama Party, which is why it will never happen.
Perhaps you ought to read this, which nicely lays out the provisions of the Obama plan and why they fly in the face of facts and common sense.
http://money.cnn.com/2009/06/11/news/economy/obama_health_plan_no_bargain.fortune/index.htm
My personal favorite:
“In its purest form, community rating requires that insurers charge the same premiums for all their patients, regardless of their age, obesity or any lifestyle differences. New York, New Jersey and a half-dozen other states have stringent community rating laws. In most states, insurers can charge their customers according to their actual costs, so a 62-year-old smoker would pay, say, $10,000 for a policy versus $800 for a 20-year-old marathoner.
The senate plan would impose a strict, narrow band on all premiums nationwide: Insurers could never charge more than twice as much in premiums for their most expensive patient versus their least costly. So the 62-year-old’s policy might fall to $5,000, and the 20-year-old’s would go to $2,500. The senior would get a big subsidy, and the youngster would pay far more than his real cost.”
What a surprise. It’s just like Obama’s demand that those of us who took out mortgages we could afford and watched our spending be taxed to subsidize those who did the exact opposite.
You know Dallas once the trolls start spinning they just never stop!
Nim-Rod tries to link shit he knows absolutely nothing about. How about it Nim-Rod ever treated a patient with cancer?
And being the radiology expert that you are I’m sure you knew about the shortage of MRI and PET scanners just over the border in Canada right?
http://secure.cihi.ca/cihiweb/dispPage.jsp?cw_page=media_21aug2008_e
“As of January 1, 2007, there were 18 PET/CT scanners in Canada and 13 PET scanners”
We have 3 PET/CT scanners within 10 miles of where I sit right now! These are used to properly stage tumors and allow for the physican to more accurately plan the patients treatment.
Canada had 18 IN THE ENTIRE COUNTRY in this survey.
So go on about “per capita” statistics and compare a country like Sweden with a high population density and a few million people to a country like America with 300+ million spread over a huge geographical area.
Next you’ll link the famous WHO study that claims the US has “lower” quality than Uganda!
You and your fellow trolls may want to jump on the free ride express but don’t waste your time trying to come across as some kind of medical expert when you obviously know NOTHING about the subject!
Please do continue to use your Google search engine to link your favorite troll sites! The reading is entertaining!
1. All systems ration health care including ours.
2. Doctors in other countries are well paid – in fact, many are MORE satisfied with their work since they get to practice medicine rather than fill out forms.
3. The US has already put in significant tort reforms limiting malpractice awards. And malpractice costs amount to less than 1% of total medical costs.
4. Obama’s not proposing any ban of private insurers.
So propose a solution because if somebody doesn’t make a serious effort to fix it, it’s going to collapse.
Again, there are successful models of how to run a health care system at much lower cost than we pay. Why doesn’t anyone want to examine those and take the best from them? All you have to offer are distortions and scare tactics.
You’ve been given a gazillion very specific reasons and statistics on why single payer is not going to be the panacea for health care costs that you think it will be, but you don’t seem to absorb or even read any of it.
So, I’m not sure what distortions or scare tactics you are talking about. The Democrats are talking about SIX HUNDRED BILLION IN more TAXES and that is at this early stage, if that isn’t a wake up call, nothing will wake you up.
I could spend a lot of time explaining in detail how the population of the U.S. differs substantially from all of those small European countries, which makes comparing the systems not nearly as helpful as you seem to think it, but you would continue to ignore them, so its pointless.
Just remember you were warned that your solution will cause more problems than it solves and it will end up decreasing the quality of health care for 70% of the country.
“Doctors in other countries are well paid – in fact, many are MORE satisfied with their work since they get to practice medicine rather than fill out forms.”
Which is why, of course, the paradise that is Canada, for example, is having to import them by the boatload from the Third World to replace the thousands that are going across the border.
http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7011204071
http://www.aafp.org/online/en/home/publications/news/news-now/professional-issues/20070502canadiandocs.html
Of course, the reasons why are pretty straightforward:
“These trends are fairly easy to explain. In the United States, there is a greater opportunity to practice subspecialty medicine, and subspecialists can earn two to three times more here than they can in Canada. In addition, the abundance of prestigious U.S. institutions, such as the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and other world-renowned medical centers, provide an incentive for subspecialists to emigrate because Canada does not have institutions that are as well known.
Rosser, meanwhile, is convinced that the majority of Canadian-trained family physicians in the United States left Canada because they were dissatisfied with the policies of the Canadian government. In the late 1990s, the country’s Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care said it was going to make all new medical graduates practice in underserved areas, a pronouncement that convinced a lot of family physicians to leave Canada for the United States, Rosser said.”
My, my. Isn’t it amazing what systems in which physicians and expertises are actually valued can produce? I understand that leftists like yourself don’t value hard work and education, but your leftist systems of treating doctors like crap just isn’t going to fly in a mobile world. No wonder the Canadians want us to duplicate their system; if you can’t compete, get rid of the competition.
Meanwhile, your claim that Obama doesn’t want to get rid of private insurers doesn’t match what’s coming out of the Messiah’s mouth:
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/06/12/video-the-public-plan-deception/
“I am not seeing any links to any website that is remotely impartial that support the numerous claims above that the U.S. health care system is better or even as good as those partly socialized systems in the rest of the industrialized world.”
done.
{in europe}”The age-adjusted 5-year survival rates for all cancers combined was 47.3% for men and 55.8% for women, which is significantly lower than the estimates of 66.3% for men and 62.9% for women from the US Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program ( P < .001)."
"Survival was significantly higher in the United States for all solid tumors, except testicular, stomach, and soft-tissue cancer, the authors report. The greatest differences were seen in the major cancer sites: colon and rectum (56.2% in Europe vs 65.5% in the United States), breast (79.0% vs 90.1%), and prostate cancer (77.5% vs 99.3%), and this "probably represents differences in the timeliness of diagnosis," they comment."
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/561737
this isn’t a state secret. yes obama wants to save money on redundant testing, but to truly be like europeans we need to reduce testing altogether.
we currently have 16.4 million people who have been dx for cancer at one time in their life…
two ways to look at this…number of europeans who would be alive with US care, or number of americans dead, were they treated by europe.
guessing 50% male/ 50% female…
1.55 million men, 533k females–
over 2 million of the 16 million americans who were dx for cancer would not have survived had they been treated in europe.
let me provide the narration for the above information of a possible commercial:
over 16 million americans have been diagnosed with cancer(start soft violin)
of those 16 million, over 10 million will go on to survive beyond five years. sadly, almost 6 million will not.
the president and democrats are seeking to replace our existing healthcare system with a european style system of care, for the sake of saving money.
what kind of results would we see?
2 million fewer fathers, mothers, grandparents, and (in a hushed voice) children.
(why do democrats want more children dead?)
So what’s your solution?
“Survey results suggest that levels of professional dissatisfaction among physicians have doubled in only a few decades. In 1973, less than 15 percent of several thousand practicing physicians reported any doubts that they had made the correct career choice. In contrast, surveys administered within the past 10 years have shown that 30 to 40 percent of practicing physicians would not choose to enter the medical profession if they were deciding on a career again, and an even higher percentage would not encourage their children to pursue a medical career.”
http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2007/4/emw516822.htm
The current system is unsustainable. Costs are going up way faster than inflation. Insurers keep increasing premiums and co-pays. More people are uninsured. But you’ve offered no solutions other than some amorphous appeal to increased competition.
And Obama’s NOT PROPOSING SINGLE-PAYER.
*********
http://www.medpagetoday.com/Psychiatry/PainManagement/7103
IRVING, Tex., Oct. 25 — Half of physicians from ages 50 to 65 are frustrated with their practices and plan to sharply cut back or abandon patient care within the next three years, according to a survey.
Fifty-two percent of these older physicians said they find medicine has become less satisfying over the past five years, according to a survey by Merritt Hawkins & Associates, a national physician search and consulting firm.
Only 10% of nearly 1,200 responding physicians said the practice of medicine is “very satisfying,” down from 20% in earlier surveys.
“But you’ve offered no solutions other than some amorphous appeal to increased competition.”
Sure we have.
First one: eliminate the barriers that prevent people from buying insurance in other states. Let there actually BE competition instead of the 50 different markets that we have today.
Second one: institute “loser pays” laws that require frivolous lawsuit filers to pay the costs of defending against their cases and ban contingency fees for trial lawyers.
Third one: cap Medicaid and S-CHIP eligibility at 200% of the poverty level and crack down on the $60 billion in fraud that is estimated to take place in Medicare every year.
Fourth one: pass a law disallowing the use of tax dollars in any “public plan” and requiring it to be supported solely by premiums.
Fifth one: pass a law specifically forbidding the Federal government from imposing any type of price cap on health insurance plans.
“Half of physicians from ages 50 to 65 are frustrated with their practices and plan to sharply cut back or abandon patient care within the next three years, according to a survey.
And of course, the solution for that is to cut their pay and make them government workers, as is in Obama’s plan and is in Canada.
Isn’t it amazing how Canadian physicians are streaming across the border precisely because they get MORE respect, MORE pay, and MORE prestige in our system?
Nice plan – rearrange the deck chairs while the ship sinks. And then you’d probably end up with even more uninsured than today.
And you accuse me of being unrealistic.
And you STILL haven’t answered the most basic question of why we spend so much more than anyone else.
Please explain that.
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