The future of Obamacare

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Specializes in burn, geriatric, rehab, wound care, ER.
That aside, you are giving ONE example by ONE executive at ONE hearing, and condemning the entire system.

http://bluecrosssucks.com/consumer.htm

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/11/opinion/11krugman.html

http://www.guaranteedhealthcare.org/stories

http://www.sickofbluecross.com/consumer_stories/

http://www.journalstar.com/news/local/article_015572ba-15e4-5691-9952-7b4302f280e7.html

http://www.thestilettomom.com/2009/07/17/insurance-horror-story/

http://www.tokoni.com/story/5048/modern-day-horror-story-a-diabetic-without-health-insurance.html

http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/health-care-for-all/1508

http://agonist.org/ian_welsh/20070905/stories_from_the_health_insurance_front

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1883149,00.html

http://www.miamiherald.com/323/story/973158.html

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Specializes in He who hesitates is probably right....

I'm sure you can do better than a bunch of left-leaning blogs.

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Specializes in burn, geriatric, rehab, wound care, ER.

"I'm sure you can do better than a bunch of left-leaning blogs."

I guess you want to continue to assume your ostrich stance

"Republicans Propagating Falsehoods in Attacks on Health-Care Reform

By Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post

Friday, August 7, 2009

As a columnist who regularly dishes out sharp criticism, I try not to question the motives of people with whom I don't agree. Today, I'm going to step over that line.

The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they've given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They've become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.

There are lots of valid criticisms that can be made against the health reform plans moving through Congress -- I've made a few myself. But there is no credible way to look at what has been proposed by the president or any congressional committee and conclude that these will result in a government takeover of the health-care system. That is a flat-out lie whose only purpose is to scare the public and stop political conversation.

Under any plan likely to emerge from Congress, the vast majority of Americans who are not old or poor will continue to buy health insurance from private companies, continue to get their health care from doctors in private practice and continue to be treated at privately owned hospitals.

The centerpiece of all the plans is a new health insurance exchange set up by the government where individuals, small businesses and eventually larger businesses will be able to purchase insurance from private insurers at lower rates than are now generally available under rules that require insurers to offer coverage to anyone regardless of health condition. Low-income workers buying insurance through the exchange -- along with their employers -- would be eligible for government subsidies. While the government will take a more active role in regulating the insurance market and increase its spending for health care, that hardly amounts to the kind of government-run system that critics conjure up when they trot out that oh-so-clever line about the Department of Motor Vehicles being in charge of your colonoscopy.

There is still a vigorous debate as to whether one of the insurance options offered through those exchanges would be a government-run insurance company of some sort. There are now less-than-even odds that such a public option will survive in the Senate, while even House leaders have agreed that the public plan won't be able to piggy-back on Medicare. So the probability that a public-run insurance plan is about to drive every private insurer out of business -- the Republican nightmare scenario -- is approximately zero.

By now, you've probably also heard that health reform will cost taxpayers at least a trillion dollars. Another lie.

First of all, that's not a trillion every year, as most people assume -- it's a trillion over 10 years, which is the silly way that people in Washington talk about federal budgets. On an annual basis, that translates to about $140 billion, when things are up and running.

Even that, however, grossly overstates the net cost to the government of providing universal coverage. Other parts of the reform plan would result in offsetting savings for Medicare: reductions in unnecessary subsidies to private insurers, in annual increases in payments rates for doctors and in payments to hospitals for providing free care to the uninsured. The net increase in government spending for health care would likely be about $100 billion a year, a one-time increase equal to less than 1 percent of a national income that grows at an average rate of 2.5 percent every year.

The Republican lies about the economics of health reform are also heavily laced with hypocrisy.

While holding themselves out as paragons of fiscal rectitude, Republicans grandstand against just about every idea to reduce the amount of health care people consume or the prices paid to health-care providers -- the only two ways I can think of to credibly bring health spending under control.

When Democrats, for example, propose to fund research to give doctors, patients and health plans better information on what works and what doesn't, Republicans sense a sinister plot to have the government decide what treatments you will get. By the same wacko-logic, a proposal that Medicare pay for counseling on end-of-life care is transformed into a secret plan for mass euthanasia of the elderly.

Government negotiation on drug prices? The end of medical innovation as we know it, according to the GOP's Dr. No. Reduce Medicare payments to overpriced specialists and inefficient hospitals? The first step on the slippery slope toward rationing.

Can there be anyone more two-faced than the Republican leaders who in one breath rail against the evils of government-run health care and in another propose a government-subsidized high-risk pool for people with chronic illness, government-subsidized community health centers for the uninsured, and opening up Medicare to people at age 55?

Health reform is a test of whether this country can function once again as a civil society -- whether we can trust ourselves to embrace the big, important changes that require everyone to give up something in order to make everyone better off. Republican leaders are eager to see us fail that test. We need to show them that no matter how many lies they tell or how many scare tactics they concoct, Americans will come together and get this done.

If health reform is to be anyone's Waterloo, let it be theirs."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/06/AR2009080603854_pf.html

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Specializes in Critical care, tele, Medical-Surgical.
Coincidently Mr Wendell Potter " began his trip from health care spokesperson to reform advocate while back home in Tennessee. Potter attended a "health care expedition," a makeshift health clinic set up at a fairgrounds, and he tells Bill Moyers, "It was absolutely stunning. When I walked through the fairground gates, I saw hundreds of people lined up, in the rain. It was raining that day. Lined up, waiting to get care, in animal stalls. Animal stalls."

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07102009/profile.html

The health care expedition he referenced is "Remote Area Medical" a volunteer group.

http://www.ramusa.org/

I say coincidentally as they are holding a week long event in Inglewood, Ca from August 11-18 to provide free medical, vision and dental services to the uninsured, underinsured, unemployed and those unable to pay.

http://www.ramusa.org/expeditions/2009/ramla2009.htm

I was surprised to learn that Los Angeles is considered a "remote area" -who knew!

I'll be volunteering twice this week. It should be rewarding.

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Specializes in He who hesitates is probably right....
"I'm sure you can do better than a bunch of left-leaning blogs."

I guess you want to continue to assume your ostrich stance

"Republicans Propagating Falsehoods in Attacks on Health-Care Reform

By Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post

Friday, August 7, 2009

As a columnist who regularly dishes out sharp criticism, I try not to question the motives of people with whom I don't agree. Today, I'm going to step over that line.

The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they've given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They've become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.

There are lots of valid criticisms that can be made against the health reform plans moving through Congress -- I've made a few myself. But there is no credible way to look at what has been proposed by the president or any congressional committee and conclude that these will result in a government takeover of the health-care system. That is a flat-out lie whose only purpose is to scare the public and stop political conversation.

Under any plan likely to emerge from Congress, the vast majority of Americans who are not old or poor will continue to buy health insurance from private companies, continue to get their health care from doctors in private practice and continue to be treated at privately owned hospitals.

The centerpiece of all the plans is a new health insurance exchange set up by the government where individuals, small businesses and eventually larger businesses will be able to purchase insurance from private insurers at lower rates than are now generally available under rules that require insurers to offer coverage to anyone regardless of health condition. Low-income workers buying insurance through the exchange -- along with their employers -- would be eligible for government subsidies. While the government will take a more active role in regulating the insurance market and increase its spending for health care, that hardly amounts to the kind of government-run system that critics conjure up when they trot out that oh-so-clever line about the Department of Motor Vehicles being in charge of your colonoscopy.

There is still a vigorous debate as to whether one of the insurance options offered through those exchanges would be a government-run insurance company of some sort. There are now less-than-even odds that such a public option will survive in the Senate, while even House leaders have agreed that the public plan won't be able to piggy-back on Medicare. So the probability that a public-run insurance plan is about to drive every private insurer out of business -- the Republican nightmare scenario -- is approximately zero.

By now, you've probably also heard that health reform will cost taxpayers at least a trillion dollars. Another lie.

First of all, that's not a trillion every year, as most people assume -- it's a trillion over 10 years, which is the silly way that people in Washington talk about federal budgets. On an annual basis, that translates to about $140 billion, when things are up and running.

Even that, however, grossly overstates the net cost to the government of providing universal coverage. Other parts of the reform plan would result in offsetting savings for Medicare: reductions in unnecessary subsidies to private insurers, in annual increases in payments rates for doctors and in payments to hospitals for providing free care to the uninsured. The net increase in government spending for health care would likely be about $100 billion a year, a one-time increase equal to less than 1 percent of a national income that grows at an average rate of 2.5 percent every year.

The Republican lies about the economics of health reform are also heavily laced with hypocrisy.

While holding themselves out as paragons of fiscal rectitude, Republicans grandstand against just about every idea to reduce the amount of health care people consume or the prices paid to health-care providers -- the only two ways I can think of to credibly bring health spending under control.

When Democrats, for example, propose to fund research to give doctors, patients and health plans better information on what works and what doesn't, Republicans sense a sinister plot to have the government decide what treatments you will get. By the same wacko-logic, a proposal that Medicare pay for counseling on end-of-life care is transformed into a secret plan for mass euthanasia of the elderly.

Government negotiation on drug prices? The end of medical innovation as we know it, according to the GOP's Dr. No. Reduce Medicare payments to overpriced specialists and inefficient hospitals? The first step on the slippery slope toward rationing.

Can there be anyone more two-faced than the Republican leaders who in one breath rail against the evils of government-run health care and in another propose a government-subsidized high-risk pool for people with chronic illness, government-subsidized community health centers for the uninsured, and opening up Medicare to people at age 55?

Health reform is a test of whether this country can function once again as a civil society -- whether we can trust ourselves to embrace the big, important changes that require everyone to give up something in order to make everyone better off. Republican leaders are eager to see us fail that test. We need to show them that no matter how many lies they tell or how many scare tactics they concoct, Americans will come together and get this done.

If health reform is to be anyone's Waterloo, let it be theirs."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/06/AR2009080603854_pf.html

The Washington Post? Any farther left and it would tip over :D.

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Specializes in burn, geriatric, rehab, wound care, ER.

Do you even show me the courtesy of reading my posts/ following the links or are you wandering around with your eyes closed, fingers in your ears, shouting "La, La, La -I can't hear you"

Just wondering

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Specializes in burn, geriatric, rehab, wound care, ER.

"Conservatism And Healthcare by Andrew Sullivan

I find myself again in agreement with David Frum. It was one thing to oppose greater government involvement in healthcare in 1993. It is another to do so in 2009. There are several reasons for this and it is hard to improve on David's summary of them. The status quo means:

(1) flat-lining wages, (2) exploding Medicaid and Medicare costs and thus immense pressure for future tax increases, (3) small businesses and self-employed individuals priced out of the insurance market, and (4) a lot of uninsured or underinsured people imposing costs on hospitals and local governments. We’ll have entrenched and perpetuated some of the most irrational features of a hugely costly and under-performing system, at the expense of entrepreneurs and risk-takers, exactly the people the Republican party exists to champion.

I'd add the crippling health costs for the private sector - costs that are slowly killing their global competitiveness. But the deepest reason for reform is fiscal. No serious plan to reduce deficits without hugely increasing taxes excludes healthcare savings. There's no way to get from spiraling debt to stable public finances without tackling the exponentially rising costs of healthcare. So this is a fiscally conservative issue.

Instead of pulling a Palin, conservatives should propose real reforms: ending the tax exemption for businesses; medical malpractice reform; an independent body to provide some kind of data on the relative effectiveness of treatments; incentives to reward doctors less for any and all services provided than for health outcomes within clear budgets. This, actually, is not far from the Romney model, as the NYT notes today. Real conservatives should point out that the current proposals are not tough enough on costs - and criticize Obama for that, not for fantasies like a communist takeover or euthanasia program for special needs kids.

The Romney-Obama model will require fiscal boundaries to healthcare provision and this will mean a trade-off that will be hard to postpone much longer. We'll get less innovation, and probably some rationing at some point. But that is already happening - the rationing is done by insurance companies.

One final thing: most Americans do not want people dying in the streets.

If you have guaranteed emergency room care for the uninsured at public expense, you have already effectively socialized medicine. It makes no sense not to bring these people into the insurance system, and to offer less expensive, long-term preventive healthcare. To insist that ideology stand in the way of this piece of compassionate common sense is irresponsible.

I've come to accept that the fiscal and economic costs of the current system, however wonderful it has been for a few decades, simply cannot be sustained much longer. I say that not because I have become a socialist, but because the US is on the brink of the kind of bankruptcy it will be very hard to recover from if we do not tackle its source now. Taking measures to avoid fiscal collapse even greater than today's is a conservative impulse. Letting one sector of the economy destroy the rest of it - and public finances too - is sheer recklessness.

What do you want, GOP? A permanent populist culture-war? Or actual solutions to pressing problems? Let us know when you've matured enough to answer that question."

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/08/conservatism-and-healthcare.html

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Specializes in He who hesitates is probably right....

The USA isn't on the brink of bankruptcy, it IS bankrupt. I will not argue that health care needs to be improved, it does. However, nobody has shown any way of paying for improvement, short of jamming their hands into my already empty pockets. Enough. Take a look at all of the "special interest agitators" on the news. Appears they've had enough as well. Time will tell...

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I would like to just say that I have a friend from Toronto, and she is not a fan of the universal health care system in Canada. Her uncle had to wait 7 months for basic hernia repair surgery. It was a long, painful 7 months for him. If you think it won't happen here, don't be sure. Where is the tort reform? A big part of the astronomical cost of health care is because of all the litigation fears that doctors have, and they need huge insurance themselves to protect their lively hood. Obama himself stated in his speech last week that doctors are repeating tests and doing unnecessary tests...well maybe the doctor is afraid that if he doesn't do everything or God forbid, misses something...he will lose his orifice and his practice to a mother lawsuit. See many in congress are lawyers or have friends in high places that are lawyers, so they don't want to cap any profits they and their cronies may be able to pull in with big litigation and class action lawsuits. Cap these claim amounts, and that will reform part of it quickly. Also, where do you think this money will come from? Your's and my paychecks. When healthcare is no longer a capitol venture, what do you think will hapeen to nurses and other healthcare worker's salaries? They will not be going up, that's for sure. We need reform, but why so fast? Can't this be hashed out a little more, let's slow it down, and why can't anyone in government who is gung-ho even listen to any other ideas? Because they themselves don't even know what is all entailed, most admit to not reading the bill....wow. We just want the facts...where are the facts? And Obama himself has in so many words stated that people that don't agree can "get out of the way." Really? This is not the America I remember growing up in....And because someone disagrees with a government proposed policy they are "un-american?" That is straight from the speaker of the house herself. That does not make someone stupid, a teabagger, a thug, etc. It is our constitutional right as an American, freedom of speech. You would not be who you are today if people did not fight for your right to freedom, and probably they questioned loudly when they weren't being heard as well.

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And because someone disagrees with a government proposed policy they are "un-american?" That is straight from the speaker of the house herself. That does not make someone stupid, a teabagger, a thug, etc. It is our constitutional right as an American, freedom of speech. You would not be who you are today if people did not fight for your right to freedom, and probably they questioned loudly when they weren't being heard as well.

She didn't say disagreeing with the proposed policy was "un-American," she said that disrupting public meetings and shouting people down in order to prevent any real discussion/debate of the issue is un-American, and I agree with her. And, having seen the video coverage of some of these town meetings being disrupted, I think "thug" is an apt description of some of these people. I doubt they're winning many people over to their "side"; they're just making themselves look bad.

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Kind of like when a conservative goes to a university and the libs try and disrupt and shout out the lecturer? Oh the inhumanity when the shoe is on the other foot. Besides I thought Hillary in her shrill voice said "We are Americans and we have a right to disagree with any administration". Just not when it is a Democrat administration.

She didn't say disagreeing with the proposed policy was "un-American," she said that disrupting public meetings and shouting people down in order to prevent any real discussion/debate of the issue is un-American, and I agree with her. And, having seen the video coverage of some of these town meetings being disrupted, I think "thug" is an apt description of some of these people. I doubt they're winning many people over to their "side"; they're just making themselves look bad.
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How soon we all forget about the "thugs" from the left during the Bush administration. Remember Cindy Sheehan? She was anything but calm, and went over the line many times in her war-protesting rants. Left wing media made her out to be a hero. Speaking of anti-war protesting...I recall many people protesting "Bush's war" during his administration on different occasions. I recall very vividly a poster with his face and a gun pointing at his head..."Dead or Alive" with the alive crossed out. Were they un-American people for screaming hatred and dissapproval of Bush and his war plans? These were supposed "left wing radicals." Every party has them. Each party will use propaganda style video to further there partisanship. I have seen only a handful of specific townhall meeting clips. There are many more we have not seen that I am sure are controlled discussions, so you don't see that video footage on the primarily liberal media outlets, plain and simple. Aside from getting into a heated political debate (I am neither republican or democrat, for the record,) I just feel we need more information before rushing into some "plan" that none of our representatives or even our president have given specific details about (most admit they haven't read it!) The AARP issued a statement just today because Obama yesterday stated that the AARP is behind the new healthcare plan, but guess what? They are not. Most of the "crazy" people you see at these meetings are probably AARP members, the senior population. They already have government healthcare....it's called medicare. If they were so happy with it, why are they speaking out against more government involvement in their healthcare? My parents are on medicare. My mom is now in the "donut hole" with her prescriptions. She had breast cancer and has to take estrogen blocking medication for 3 more years. Guess what? She now has to pay $330 a month for this one medication now until the new year because she has maxed out her medicare drug coverage 2009. How is that working for her? Her only income now is- guess what? Another failing government run program - social security. They own the banks, the car industry, and now they want our health, and I don't like it. Governament healthcare is not working in Canada or Europe, what makes the USA any different? Do you wnat an "end of life" counselor (a governmet beaurocrat no less) knocking on your door someday to take notes on what choices you will have when you are near death? Our government has overspent our money beyond compare so far, do you trust them? BTW...Pelosi accused our own central intelligence agency of "lying, they do it all the time." This organization protects your very freedom. That is pretty "un-American."

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