The United States National Health Insurance Act establishes an American-styled national insurance program.
The bill would create a publicly financed, privately delivered health care program that uses the already existing Medicare program by expanding and improving it to all U.S. residents, and all residents living in U.S. territories. The goal of the legislation is to ensure that all Americans, guaranteed by law, will have access to the highest quality and cost effective health care services regardless of ones employment, income, or health care status.
i suppose you are actively campaigning against libraries, public waste treatment, police and fire services too?
read the constitution...
" we the people of the united states, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the united states of america
those things that you mentioned police fire etc are covered establsih security; insure domestic tranquility; and promote the general welfare... notice it does not say "provide the public with welfare". sorry.
or perhaps we should ask those to pay for service every time they dial 911 and only provide help to those who have cash on hand.
uhh... if you need treatment... go to the ed you will get treatment regardless of financial situation. and often times; if you activate ems you do in fact get charged for the response; especially if the cause of your distress was your own fault.
health care is absolutely the concern of all on a societal level. the health of the whole affects the health and wellness of the individual. public health is the reason that we immunize our children despite the risks. please review your nursing pledge...to educate and advocate for health and wellness in your community. i don't believe any of us took the oath to advocate only for those who can pay.
i am not advocating for only those that can pay. and to be honest... since i was trained in the military... i never took a nursing pledge. i have; however, swore an oath to the constitution to defend it from all enemies both foreign and domestic. and this sort of unchecked socialism is a domestic threat.
our country has survived over 200 years without socialistic healthcare; why do we need it now?
reform can be accomplished only when attitudes are changed.....we commit ourselves to any wrong or degradation or injury whenever we do not protest against it.
lilian wald, rn, activist, reformer 1867-1940 the founder of public health
here is a quote that all should know and remember.
"people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
- george orwell and from the same...
all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.
what will happen as we move more and more towards the left.
and btw i guess i could say that i suppose that you actively campaign to deny we the people of our 2nd ammendment right.
I guess that depends on your interpretation of the second ammendment... there are many
but only one is right... the way that it reads.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Nothing seems obscure to me... right to bear arms not to be infringed...
pretty cut and dry...
If you want to interpret the first part... that means to have a militia; you have to have people with guns... you see, in the beginning... people had to fend for themselves and furnish their own weapons. especially the militias...
If so why not figure out how to do so efficiently?
Safe, effective, therapeutic health care for everyone?
Spacenurse;
I have to wonder why you believe that government can provide care and set up a program that will cover all citizens within the United States.
I would like to see cost assessments and what they base their conclusions on. I will seek out assessments and studies that predict the cost of such programs.
I know that the NHS annual budget is 90 billions pounds which is about...90 billion British pounds = 176.27400 billion U.S. dollars.
And they only cover about 57 million people. The United states has approximately 6 times the number of people 6*176 billion = equals over a trillion dollars a year. This does not include anystart up costs. One trillion each and every year; taxes will have to be raised and the rationing of care will still occur.
The only one of things that you listed that would be covered is "for everyone." effiecent and effective would be left out flapping in the breeze.
"yes it is... ANY VERSION of "From each according to his ability; to each according to his need" is a form of socialism whether you want to call it that or not. Any time that you take the dollars that I have worked my tail off for and distribute them via programs such as this... in whatever form... it is socialism/communism."
I would like to point out that we live in a mixed economy. You ride on public roads, kids go to public schools, the FAA monitors air traiffic, you depend on public police departments, public judicial systems, public fire departments, public libraries. etc. We depend on government regulations to ensure the safety of the planes we fly and the cars we drive. Need I go on? Nothing works perfectly, but I really wouldn't like to live without any of the above.
I once held your views, because we've all been scared by the big boogie of communism, and rightly so. I've been to a communist country years ago, and a former communist country a couple of years ago, and we do NOT want that system of government.
However, be that as it may, we DO have a mixed economy right now, and part of the reason our economy is doing so badly is that our companies have to compete GLOBALLY with other companies that do not have to play healthcare costs for their employees. One reason - yes - but a fact, nevertheless. We are the ONLY industrialized nation in the world without a sane healthcare plan for its citizens.
The FACT is that citizens in other countries pay much less than their American counterparts for healthcare. Each country does it differently; some are worse than others. I wouldn't want the UK plan - which is socialized medicine - because the government actually employs the health personnel. I would prefer a system like France, where everyone pools their money in order to have giant healthcare/risk management pools. Most clinics, hospitals, doctors, nurses, etc. DON'T work for the government, but they are reimbursed by what amounts to a large insurance company - the healthcare division of their government. In that way, competition is still a factor in driving one of the world's best healthcare systems. In fact, the WHO rates France as having the best healthcare system in the world.
Here in the U.S. we see one insurance CEO making the same amount of money as thousands of hospital employees, and that includes all staff, including those big money-making surgeons! No wonder our health care is so expensive! Then there's the layers and layers of beurocracy within the insurance companys, hospitals and doctors' offices. And then there's the stockholders of the insurance companies. Imagine if this money was actually spent on healthCARE. What a concept!
Furthermore, I don't think you know how vulnerable you are, even when you do have healthcare. My mother had cancer, and here are some of the tricks used to deny payment:
1) Simply deny the claim. Deny the claims for so long, that the patient starts to worry about her credit rating and pays the darn bill herself.
2) Deny that the procedure was ever pre-certified with the insurance company. My mother is fighting thousands of dollars worth of bills because the insurance company insists that the lab wasn't pre-certified. The surgeon was pre-certified, the hospital was pre-certified, but the insurance company insists that the lab was not pre-certified. (Surgeon insists lab was pre-certified.) I'm talking about thousands of dollars of money that the insurance company is refusing to pay, and that my parents are legally responsible for. (This includes several procedures including needle guided biopsies, and surgical biopsies of cancerous tissue removal and nodes.)
I could go on and on, but either people understand that stuff like this happens every day, or they don't. You may think you have taken care of you and yours, but think again. You can get screwed by your insurance company when you have coverage, dropped by your insurance company, or denied coverage by any insurance company. Got IBS? Tough luck. Had cancer? Tough luck. Your spouse has diabetes? Tough luck. Your kid has juvenile RA? Tough luck.
You know what really sucks? My dad is stuck at his present job because my mom now has a pre-existing cancer condition.
And how about this: my sister was very ill during college, but if she dropped out of college, my parents would have lost her insurance coverage.
DOES this method of healthcare insurance make any sense when you REALLY think about it? Just when you need it, you don't have it? You pay for insurance for years, and then you can be dropped just when you need it? It makes no sense if we're talking about healthcare, but it makes perfect sense if we're talking about insurance company profits. (Insurance companies exist for one reason - profit for their stockholders.) Hey, I'm not against profit. I'm all for profit, but when profit stands in the way of your health after you've paid into an insurance company for decades, there is a problem. A big problem. A problem that you have no control over.
Have you ever watched a friend go to work day after day because they will lose their insurance coverage if they quit their job? Would you like to watch one of your parents work until they are almost dead because they can't afford the COBRA payments to pay for their cancer treatments?
Think carefully what we have done in this country: we have tied healthcare to employment for most people. This doesn't make any sense. It just seems to make sense to you because you are accustomed to it.
And about those waits in Canada. Canada insures its citizens by province. Some provinces have little to no wait time for "certain" procedures, while others do. The great thing about this is that wait lists are published, so that those in charge of the provinces are motivated to do something about it. When my mother had cancer here in a large urban area, she had very short wait times - days to maybe three weeks for certain procedures. When my grandmother had cancer, she waited much, much longer. Why? Because she's in a rural area with less technology and fewer specialists. The situation is similar in Canada.
Watch SICKO if you haven't seen it. I'm not a fan of Michael Moore, and it's pretty easy to recognize the propoganda in the film, but at the same time, there's a lot of truth in it that Americans need to face.
All valid points; but it is NOT a public problem - it is an individual problem.
I beg to differ. When it's 1 person or 10 people, it's an individual problem. When it's 45,000,000 people or 15% of our population, it's a public problem.
The problem with our healthcare system NOW is insurance companies...
Yep, exactly. That's why we need to get rid of the profit motive in medical insurance and adopt a single-payer plan. I've got no problem if that's contracted out to a non-profit entity rather than created as a government bureaucracy. Probably better that way.
MBANurse
132 Posts
read the constitution...
those things that you mentioned police fire etc are covered establsih security; insure domestic tranquility; and promote the general welfare... notice it does not say "provide the public with welfare". sorry.
uhh... if you need treatment... go to the ed you will get treatment regardless of financial situation. and often times; if you activate ems you do in fact get charged for the response; especially if the cause of your distress was your own fault.
i am not advocating for only those that can pay. and to be honest... since i was trained in the military... i never took a nursing pledge. i have; however, swore an oath to the constitution to defend it from all enemies both foreign and domestic. and this sort of unchecked socialism is a domestic threat.
our country has survived over 200 years without socialistic healthcare; why do we need it now?
here is a quote that all should know and remember.
- george orwell and from the same... what will happen as we move more and more towards the left.and btw i guess i could say that i suppose that you actively campaign to deny we the people of our 2nd ammendment right.