[pickledpepperRN]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/18/bu...gewanted=print

YOU may find it shameful that some 45 million Americans lack health insurance. Well, by reallocating money already devoted to health insurance, the government could go along way toward solving the problem. But you may not like the solution. ...

[oramar]

Interesting, I have heard several people say that the goverment's total health care spending already exceeds the cost of a universal health insurance program. Never heard it put this way before.

[willtm]

Our night charge nurse came to work the other night with her hand in an ace wrap. She had injured her hand at home and could not afford the $100 co-pay for an ER visit that our insurance requires. She would not be in the income range to have her health insurance provided in the universal coverage this is talking about. If she can't afford a co-pay of $100 how on earth would she afford to pay $11,000 per year for health insurance?

Further more, my family is in a similar postition. My 2 year old did not go for her annual check up this year because we could not afford to pay for it--our current insurance has $1000 deductible that must be met before they pay anything at all. We also would not be in the income range to receive the universal coverage.

The cost of the natural gas that we use to heat our home almost DOUBLED this month, not to mention the cost of gas for our cars. when these things go up so does the cost of everything else. A poverty level of $19,000 for a family of 4 is far too low.

Healthcare is spiraling out of control. It is a state state of affairs when nurses/health care workers can not afford the care they provide to others.

Originally Posted by spacenurse

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/18/bu...gewanted=print

YOU may find it shameful that some 45 million Americans lack health insurance. Well, by reallocating money already devoted to health insurance, the government could go along way toward solving the problem. But you may not like the solution. ...

[Dayray]

OMG!
Universal health care has been a debate for years and years. Every time it gets recycled it amazes me how frggin far out people go. They look for ways to vilify and accuse the supposed upper class.

This article says families making $75,000 or more are stealing money from the underprivileged by enjoying the tax break for insurance premiums. They make it sound as if $75,000 some huge amount. However this is the range that most of us as nurses (if our spouse is working) fall into.

The proposal this guy makes is that the government remove the tax break your employer gets for paying part of your health insurance. What would happen would be that your employer would no longer pay those premiums and you would have to. You would also end up paying taxes on it so what your talking about is like $5000-$9000 more you would have to pay for health insurance.

This idea wouldn’t make health insurance universal it would just redirect that money at the underprivileged and take it away from the middleclass. It also wouldn’t come close paying the total cost of insuring the underprivileged all it would do would be to increase the burden on the middle class.

Universal health insurance is a great idea but it will not work in our country. People always get all hot about it but it simply doesn’t work. There isn’t a magical piggybank that is going to pay for this very expensive thing. What would have to happen would be that the middle class would end up paying for it. I'm all for poor people getting health insurance but I don't want to pay for it.

I have spent 4/5 of my life under the poverty line and worked hard to get out of it. It would really suck if all of a sudden I was placed back there by some crackpot scheme to get universal health insurance.

People, who insist Universal health insurance can work, need to talk to people from Canada. It's easy to find them because many of them come here and pay out of pocket for healthcare. Waiting lists can be as long as 2 years for things like cardiac cath. Still a middle class family can pay as much as 33-50% of their income in taxes.

Healthcare is a problem for us in the U.S. but there are other things that can be done to lower the cost. One would be better regulation of drug companies and drug pricing. Another would be changes to the way the FDA evaluates drugs. Still another would be to look into the cost of a medical education. Yet another would be to allow more autonomy to nurse practitioners. There are allot of ways to do it. The problem is that any of theses would cut into the profits of corporate America or the AMA and they would lobby them out before they were passed. So if anything ever does happen it is going to be at the expense of the middle class. The middle class is too busy working to organize and lobby against these things so we are the ones who are going to get hit with the bill.

[jyoung1950]

Two myths About the U.S. Health Care System (by Montreal Economic Institute):

http://www.iedm.org/uploaded/pdf/juin05_en.pdf

[willtm]

This is using data from 1998. In 1998 my insurance was free--my employer paid for it, and the copays were minimal. This year my part of the premium will cost $90 per pay check ($2340.00) for the year. If I go to the ER it will cost me $100, My ob/gyn will cost $40 and my kids pediatrician will cost $25 and prescriptions will cost $25 and up depending on the drug. To get this coverage I had to go back to school to go from being an LPN to an RN (increase pay to cover the costs of working) and go to work full time because my husband's company raised all the costs in 2005 to the point that it was not worth having the insurance. We actually considered dropping the coverage because we could not afford to go to the doctor and pay the premiums too! We ended up keeping the coverage--murphy's law, if we dropped it one of the kids would break an arm or something--and skipped going to the Dr.


There are people out there making the decision to not eat or eat less in order to keep their coverage. As for medicaid as this article suggests--we wouldn't come close to qualifying. The hospital would take it out of my paycheck if I was unable to write them a check on the way out the door. Things have changed drastically since 1998.

Originally Posted by jyoung1950

Two myths About the U.S. Health Care System (by Montreal Economic Institute):

http://www.iedm.org/uploaded/pdf/juin05_en.pdf

[rehab nurse]

Health insurance is crazy. I had to just recently cut down to two days a week (from four eight hour shifts) due to a severe back injury and a lot ofpain. I pay 325.00 per check (biweekly) now for coverage for me and two kids. This past year I made 31,000 (living in michigan where cost of living isn't cheap!), paid over 6,000 in insurnce premiums, another 5,000 in copays and prescription drugs (thanks to insurance dictating what they will and will not pay for---why do they get to play doctor?) i see my pain doc monthly, and my rheumatologist and neuro every other month, my family doc about every 3 (unless i get really sick inbetween). i tried applying for social services, but was turned away for making "way too much money". i curretnly bring home about 700 a paycheck. a lot of times i have to decide whether i get to eat or buy my rx drugs. and i'm only 28. i don't get child support cause my ex doesn't work. i hate scraping by and hoping i don't end up so ill i can't work, or my kids will be in dire straights.
i have a friend just across the river here in canada who comes here for health care.
i truly resent being told i make too much money. sigh. but at leastl my kids are healthy, i am thankful for that.

[SFCardiacRN]

The compassionate side of me wants universal health care but the rational side doesn't want to pay for it. Since nursing pay is every hospitals biggest expense, where do you think the money will come from? I also look at countries with universal care. They have very high tax and crummy health care systems. That's why the world rich class come to the US for health care. Unfortunately, the rights we have include the right to be poor.

[SmilingBluEyes]

We ARE paying for a lot of others' health care now. That is the thing. Not just for our own insurance, but indigent care and others...we are paying the tab. I think we MUST find a way to cover all legitimate citizens. And somehow, we must reign in costs of indigent and illegal citizen care. We have no choice, money is running out---we need to have every legal citizen covered somehow. We can't do well without healthy Americans. And it's not healthy to skip well-child care or dental care because one can't afford it. In the end, we all pay for this somehow or another, inevitably.

And Dayray, not all Canadians I personally know tell a horror story about their health care system. I personally can think of 4 people I know and talk to regularly, one from Alberta and two from BC, and one who lives in Montreal, who do a lot better than we do as far as getting what they need at reasonable personal cost. My one friend (in Alberta), is having all kinds of dental work done on herself and the kids that is totally out of my reach here, unless I put it all on credit cards. None of these 4 has ever felt need or desire to come to the USA for "better" or "faster" care. All their well child checkups and adult checkups are paid for. Their meds are affordable. In fact, one lady I know moved back to BC after having lived here in WA for several years; she was that sick of the way things worked here.

I know there are stories of Canadians coming here for procedures they had to wait years for there---but there are also stories I know personally where that simply is NOT the case, at least in the cases I mention here. I also know quite a couple stories where people I know (one of them our family priest), went to Canada for dental care they could not afford here.

I guess: Depends on whom you ask.

[SFCardiacRN]

Many people go to also go to Mexico for dental care. But that is not a good measure of a health care system. Look at catastrophic illness as a better measure. Canada, England, Sweden and other universal systems fail miserably when people are severely sick. Our best hope of keeping quality care is to concentrate on preventative medicine.