[HM2Viking]

Originally Posted by ingelein

Discusses how even PERSONALLY RESPONSIBLE hard working middle class families cannot bare the burden of runaway medical debt.

Sick and Broke
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2005Feb8.html

Nobody's safe. That's the warning from the first large scale study of medical bankruptcy.Health Insurance?That didn't protect 1 million Americans who were financially ruined by illness or medical bills.

A comfortable middle class life style?Good education? Decent job? No safeguards there.Most medically bankrupt were middle classhomeowners who had been to college and had RESPONSIBLE jobs--until illness struck.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/insurance
insurance - promise of reimbursement in the case of loss;

http://www.insurance.za.org/insuranc...-insurance.htm

Reimbursement is made from a fund to which many individuals exposed to the same risk have contributed certain specified amounts, called premiums.

Payment for an individual loss, divided among many, does not fall heavily upon the actual loser. The essence of the contract of insurance, called a policy, is mutuality.

http://www.wordwebonline.com/en/SOCIALINSURANCE
social insurance 'sowshul in'shûruns

1. Government provision for unemployed, injured, or aged people; financed by contributions from employers and employees as well as by government revenue

At the base level any insurance program involves a socialization of risk. In other words spreading the risks over a group so that no one loss is too great to bear. By definition smaller groups and individual policies increase the loss exposure risk for the individual. The smaller the group the greater the administrative costs with fewer dollars available for payment of health benefits. We are paying on average 31% of our health care dollars for administrative costs and benefit denial specialists. We can and must do better for the people of our society.

MEDICARE FOR ALL! Everyone in the boat together!

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/conten.../050829fa_fact
Canada and Germany and Japan and all the other industrialized nations with universal health care follow the social-insurance model. Medicare, too, is based on the social-insurance model, and, when Americans with Medicare report themselves to be happier with virtually every aspect of their insurance coverage than people with private insurance (as they do, repeatedly and overwhelmingly), they are referring to the social aspect of their insurance. They aren’t getting better care. But they are getting something just as valuable: the security of being insulated against the financial shock of serious illness.

[HM2Viking]

[quote=passgasser;2096452]

However, given the US government’s history of involvement in social programs, it will take more than "it doesn’t have to be that way" to get me to agree. Show me an efficiently run social program. Show me a program that is not weighted down by an overwhelming administrative burden.

As to the idea of "social responsibility," that’s simply nonsense. This idea is based on the fundamentally flawed principle that I have an equal or greater responsibility to support others as I do to support myself and my family, and that is a recipe for disaster.
quote]

Malcolm Gladwell has a strong rebuttal to your objections. See: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/conten.../050829fa_fact
If your teeth are bad, you’re not going to get a job as a receptionist, say, or a cashier. You’re going to be put in the back somewhere, far from the public eye. What Loretta, Gina, and Daniel understand, the two authors tell us, is that bad teeth have come to be seen as a marker of “poor parenting, low educational achievement and slow or faulty intellectual development.” They are an outward marker of caste. “Almost every time we asked interviewees what their first priority would be if the president established universal health coverage tomorrow,” Sered and Fernandopulle write, “the immediate answer was ‘my teeth.’ ”
The U. S. health-care system, according to “Uninsured in America,” has created a group of people who increasingly look different from others and suffer in ways that others do not. The leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States is unpaid medical bills. Half of the uninsured owe money to hospitals, and a third are being pursued by collection agencies. Children without health insurance are less likely to receive medical attention for serious injuries, for recurrent ear infections, or for asthma. Lung-cancer patients without insurance are less likely to receive surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation treatment. Heart-attack victims without health insurance are less likely to receive angioplasty. People with pneumonia who don’t have health insurance are less likely to receive X rays or consultations. The death rate in any given year for someone without health insurance is twenty-five per cent higher than for someone with insur-ance. Because the uninsured are sicker than the rest of us, they can’t get better jobs, and because they can’t get better jobs they can’t afford health insurance, and because they can’t afford health insurance they get even sicker. John, the manager of a bar in Idaho, tells Sered and Fernandopulle that as a result of various workplace injuries over the years he takes eight ibuprofen, waits two hours, then takes eight more—and tries to cadge as much prescription pain medication as he can from friends. “There are times when I should’ve gone to the doctor, but I couldn’t afford to go because I don’t have insurance,” he says. “Like when my back messed up, I should’ve gone. If I had insurance, I would’ve went, because I know I could get treatment, but when you can’t afford it you don’t go. Because the harder the hole you get into in terms of bills, then you’ll never get out. So you just say, ‘I can deal with the pain.’ ”

Comment: Read between the lines, these are people who are capable of greater economic attainment and because of the non-system we as a society are helping them to fail instead of succeed.
...
Instead, the United States has opted for a makeshift system of increasing complexity and dysfunction. Americans spend $5,267 per capita on health care every year, almost two and half times the industrialized world’s median of $2,193; the extra spending comes to hundreds of billions of dollars a year. What does that extra spending buy us? Americans have fewer doctors per capita than most Western countries. We go to the doctor less than people in other Western countries. We get admitted to the hospital less frequently than people in other Western countries. We are less satisfied with our health care than our counterparts in other countries. American life expectancy is lower than the Western average. Childhood-immunization rates in the United States are lower than average. Infant-mortality rates are in the nineteenth percentile of industrialized nations. Doctors here perform more high-end medical procedures, such as coronary angioplasties, than in other countries, but most of the wealthier Western countries have more CT scanners than the United States does, and Switzerland, Japan, Austria, and Finland all have more MRI machines per capita. Nor is our system more efficient. The United States spends more than a thousand dollars per capita per year—or close to four hundred billion dollars—on health-care-related paperwork and administration, whereas Canada, for example, spends only about three hundred dollars per capita. And, of course, every other country in the industrialized world insures all its citizens; despite those extra hundreds of billions of dollars we spend each year, we leave forty-five million people without any insurance

As to the arguments about Admnistrative bloat the data shows the current American system is far more bloated than the rest of the world. We do have efficient social programs in the US. SS costs less than 1% to administer. Medicare's administrative costs are only about 5%.

Why is our current system superior when it fails on so many patient outcome measures when compared to single payer systems AND COSTS MORE?

[HM2Viking]

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/conten.../050829fa_fact
The issue about what to do with the health-care system is sometimes presented as a technical argument about the merits of one kind of coverage over another or as an ideological argument about socialized versus private medicine. It is, instead, about a few very simple questions. Do you think that this kind of redistribution of risk is a good idea? Do you think that people whose genes predispose them to depression or cancer, or whose poverty complicates asthma or diabetes, or who get hit by a drunk driver, or who have to keep their mouths closed because their teeth are rotting ought to bear a greater share of the costs of their health care than those of us who are lucky enough to escape such misfortunes? In the rest of the industrialized world, it is assumed that the more equally and widely the burdens of illness are shared, the better off the population as a whole is likely to be. The reason the United States has forty-five million people without coverage is that its health-care policy is in the hands of people who disagree, and who regard health insurance not as the solution but as the problem.

[ingelein]

Dont let politics subvert effort to provide health care for all residents.

http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/...703060539/1273

Three laudable proposals, two of which have enjoyed bipartisan support,will be introduced to the state legislature soon.One of them , the Wisconsin Health Plan, would offer affordable health insurance alternatives to all Wisconsonites while preserving the current employer- and insurer company driven structure. Another , the Wisconsin Health Care Partnership Plan, would require employers to pay for a single administrator to provide coverage for Wisconsin employees and their families while allowing others to buy into a seperate pool for the same coverage. A third alternative, offered by the Coalition for Wisconsin Health, would create a comprehensive single payer sytem that would cover every resident of Wisconsin , period.

Opponents of these kinds of innovative proposals claim that universal access to healthcare is impractical or too expensive.

But a new realistic interpretation of these plan's failure to move forward is a shortage of political will to overcome the resistance of entrenched interests that benefit from the current system.

(Wisconsin has it goin' on !):biere:

[burn out]

I am just so sick of the control that insurance companies have over our lives and the government and banking laws not only allow it but promote it. A friend of mine just moved back from Florida after one year she said that the cost of housing insurance has caused the monthy house payment to go up by as much as $700 a month..this does not mean the quality of the house has been improved this is just in insurance cost. We can't get medical care unless we have insurance, we can't own a home without insurance, we can't have a car without insurance, when will malpractice insurance be mandated. Insurance companies have been given too much power and too much money it is time they were stopped. Where have our freedoms gone...they are tied to insurance companies.

If we don not have universal healthcare it will be becasue the insurance companies have prevented it from happening with their power base and money.

[ingelein]

Originally Posted by burn out

I am just so sick of the control that insurance companies have over our lives and the government and banking laws not only allow it but promote it. A friend of mine just moved back from Florida after one year she said that the cost of housing insurance has caused the monthy house payment to go up by as much as $700 a month..this does not mean the quality of the house has been improved this is just in insurance cost. We can't get medical care unless we have insurance, we can't own a home without insurance, we can't have a car without insurance, when will malpractice insurance be mandated. Insurance companies have been given too much power and too much money it is time they were stopped. Where have our freedoms gone...they are tied to insurance companies.

If we don not have universal healthcare it will be becasue the insurance companies have prevented it from happening with their power base and money.

Yes , the insurance companies have us by the short hairs, dont they. All the more reason to let NOTHING stop the badly needed reforms. I hope that intelligent thinking people can continue to grow politically stronger and vote in the people who are going to make change happen, IF they dont, its up to the citizens of this country to get them out of office.Ive been trying to figure out why working class people who post on these forums are so blind to what is really going on in this country, how did they get so misinformed, I blame it on political hacks like Rush Limbaugh and others who for the last 6 years have been spewing hate, inequality, that greed is good and normal, etc, etc, etc. But I really think it goes much deeper, our society has lost its social conscence and the ME society has taken its place. I know Im asking to get flamed here, but we need to take a good look at ourselves. And I do not believe by caring for others we harm ourselves, the American dream is not something that has to be wrapped up in greenbacks.

[cozmo_blozmo]

No one is forcing you to take the health insurance. Go without the insurance and the pills from the evil drug companies.

[SmilingBluEyes]

Please: Keep the posts polite here. Sure, this is a hot topic and bound to get people hot under the collar. Before you post something rude or inflammatory, please take a break and walk away before hitting the reply button. Also, please stay on topic. Thank you!

[awilhelm]

I have read a lot of the posts in this specific topic forum. Most of you are very supportive of socialized health care. Some of you have turned this forum into a complaint department for insurance companies. BTW- "they don't care."
I must add my my own opinion. In theory socialized health care would be wonderful; however, as Americans we can not take the step to socialize health care. We are a democratic country. We can not allow the country to dictate health care. The country miserably fail at providing this. Our country is failing in Social Security already. This country is not based on socialism. It just can't work.
If we had socialized health care, taxes would be much higher. Most of us in this forum are nurses and should have insurance. It is nice and altruistic to lobby for social health care for our patients, but none of us would enjoy losing our money to taxes.
I could spend all night offering arguments against socialized health care, but I am going to bed. I will leave with one question.
Do we want to allow the government to manage our chosen career field. The government would surely cut corners and make our job miserable. Our pay would take a halt. Overtime would be cut back. Staffing ratios would be worse. Do we want an organization that feels that faulty wars are more important than feeding starving children in our own country to write our paychecks?

[pickledpepperRN]

I do not want the fire departments privatized.
Not the police or EMS services either.
When it is life or death profit should not be a reason to deny services.

And it will not cost more. We already insure those over 65, the disabled, and dialysis patients.
The for profit insurance companies cover low risk younger individuals.