After posting the piece about Nurses traveling to Germany and reading the feedback. I would like to open up a debate on this BB about "Universal Health Care" or "Single Payor Systems"
In doing this I hope to learn more about each side of the issue. I do not want to turn this into a heated horrific debate that ends in belittling one another as some other charged topics have ended, but a genuine debate about the Pros and Cons of proposed "Universal Health Care or Single Payor systems" I believe we can all agree to debate and we can all learn things we might not otherwise have the time to research.
I am going to begin by placing an article that discusses the cons of Universal Health Care with some statistics, and if anyone is willing please come in and try to debate some of the key points this brings up. With stats not hyped up words or hot air. I am truly interested in seeing the different sides of this issue. This effects us all, and in order to make an informed decision we need to see "all" sides of the issue. Thanks in advance for participating.
Michele
I am going to have to post the article in several pieces because the bulletin board only will allow 3000 characters.So see the next posts.
it faces many challenges --the most evident being unsustainable cost increases and diminishing accesss. for decades , attempts at reforms have been unsuccsesful. one reason our traditional approaches have not worked is that we who serve have not brought to those efforts sufficient reflection concerning the deeper, values level attitudes concerning reform."
I guess that "product" would be roughly 50% of your hospital's revenue.
Well I know it is a balance.
We thought it was bad when hospitals and doctors provided more care than was necessary. I remember being concerned with so many tests and people admitted for a check up.
Now the insurance companies delay and deny needed care. It took 18 weeks for me to start treatment after an injury. I couldn't work because the pain made critical thinking difficult and I couldn't move my arm. Taxpayers paid me to be on disability.
Some die waiting for authorization for tests and treatments the physician ordered. Other doctors don't tell patients about specialists or therapies they fear will be denied.
Of course public administration won't be perfect. But we will have a health care system. One beholden to the patients not the shareholders.
It will take us citizens monitoring it to keep it from wasting our money or denying us care.
i have the perfect idea for expanding healthcare coverage by gov't further up the poverty line.
most districts in this nation fund a hefty chunk of education through property taxes. let's create a national voucher system that allows parents to opt out with a voucher at near 60% of the value of public education with all the excess tax proceeds going to a healthcare pool.
if we allow parents to opt out of the system with a 5,000 dollar voucher, to be given to the private school of their choice with a mandate that it must cover 80% of the cost of tuition (parents would only have to pony up a grand a year), then for every parent that chooses to opt out of the public education system, we could take the 4,000 dollar savings to gov't and pool it into an 'insurance' fund that expands further up above the poverty line. the more parents that opt out, the more people get covered.
in the field of education, politically conservative reformers and their well-funded think tanks passionately advocated free-market philosophy as the best way to force public schools to improve. they called for charter school laws to deregulate what they saw as an overly regulated public education system. they wanted more public money in the hands of private and independent school operators. they claimed that these more autonomous schools could do a better job with less money and thus force the public schools to either compete or go out of business.
...
now the national test scores support what state-level studies of charter schools have suggested for years -- that free-market principles are not what is needed to improve public schools. carrying out market-based school reform on the cheap requires people with the experience to educate children, the business acumen to run an autonomous institution, the political connections to raise the private funds needed to keep the school afloat, and the ability to forsake their personal life to work six or seven days a week, 12 to 14 hours a day. it turns out that there are a limited number of people who can or will do charter school reform well. thus, most charters schools hire younger, less experienced teachers and have high rates of teacher and administrator burnout and turnover.
We thought it was bad when hospitals and doctors provided more care than was necessary. I remember being concerned with so many tests and people admitted for a check up.
Now the insurance companies delay and deny needed care. It took 18 weeks for me to start treatment after an injury. I couldn't work because the pain made critical thinking difficult and I couldn't move my arm. Taxpayers paid me to be on disability.
Some die waiting for authorization for tests and treatments the physician ordered. Other doctors don't tell patients about specialists or therapies they fear will be denied.
Of course public administration won't be perfect. But we will have a health care system. One beholden to the patients not the shareholders.
It will take us citizens monitoring it to keep it from wasting our money or denying us care.
I hope you are right. I hope our citizens can control this monster. Karens article in the New York Times has me convinced that universal health care is inevitable. Most Americans don't feel their health care should be their responsibility.
I think I need to take a break. This whole subject has got me down in the dumps.
I just recently got my RN license (hence greenhorn). I just bought my first house. I feel I am finally on the right track in my life. And part of this "upward mobility" is due to my better than average salary as a nurse.
I may not be "progressive" or an "intellectual" but neithor am I a "cold hearted greed demon." I am proud my recent choices to better my life. I am afraid that my salary and all my hard work will suffer. I'd hate to start over again in order to provide health care for "the common good."
According to the 2006 1040 tax booklet: 37% of my tax dollar went for medicare/SS, and 20% went to "other social programs." I don't see how in the current political climate we can fund a national health program without raising taxes, alot. How many people are on medicare vs. how many people are in the US?
Something has got to give. And I feel it will be the middle class who suffers. I pray I am wrong.
Cheers--- I think I'll go have a German beer! Or maybe two.
I hope you are right. I hope our citizens can control this monster. Karens article in the New York Times has me convinced that universal health care is inevitable. Most Americans don't feel their health care should be their responsibility.
I think I need to take a break. This whole subject has got me down in the dumps.
It is only inevitable if folks like you and I give up.
Allow me to stipulate that any editorial article you all find at the New Democracy Project, The Nation, Columbia University, etc, are going to be supportive of your position. That said, perhaps we can take up a little less bandwidth with posts of things written by others.
As to Spacenurse’s posting, what is interesting about what Dr Angell’s comments is more what she didn’t say, rather than what she did say. For each of the 4 "myths," her response essentially boiled down to "it doesn’t’ have to be that way." I will grant that it doesn’t have to be that way. 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. Are you aware that most government positions are paid according to how many other employees the position supervises? As such, it is in the interest of managers to create positions within their departments, making each department as large and as cumbersome as is possible.
There still stands several unanswered challenges for all those who support the idea of universal health care. You must demonstrate how we are going to form such an agency without it being an administrative behemoth. You must demonstrate that the majority of Americans won’t suffer from such establishment. I’ve said that for the majority (about 85%), if they wish to have healthcare at even the same level they now enjoy, their expenditures on health care are going to go up, not down. And so far unspoken, this will create an even worse two-tier level of healthcare delivery than what exists now. There are still other points that have yet to be addressed, but you get the point. We would be beyond foolish to charge headlong into such a massive change without some real forethought. Without that forethought, most Americans would be far worse off than what they are now. And that is simply unfair.
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. Beyond that, it assumes that the "haves" have a responsibility to provide more and more for the "have nots," world without end, amen. This, of course, relieves the "have nots" of any responsibility to society whatsoever. It not only "levels the playing field," it levels the outcomes, which is so irresponsible as to be criminal. Knowing that I will have the same benefits and lifestyle whether I work or not, exactly why should I continue to bust my backside? I submit that if I have a brain in my head, your idea of a social conscience makes it far more desirable for me to become unemployed. I submit that our responsibility to society is to support ourselves and our families to the best of our ability. We have a moral obligation to provide for those who are truly unable to support themselves, but that is actually a far smaller number than those currently on public assistance. Beyond which, we cannot give "moral obligations" the force of law, because each of us perceives morality differently, according to our beliefs.
There is one other question I’ve asked that I’d really like answered. What’s next? Where does my "social responsibility" end? If you manage to plow over the objections you admit are valid and push this through, what social program will we next be forced to accept to assuage your "social conscience?" What money must next be taken from us in order for us to meet your ideal of "social responsibility?" Or are you willing to say "this is it, after this, no more expenditures on social programs?"
Edited to add: When I talk about social responsibility, understand that I am not talking about the "ideal." Clearly, if each of us was willing to work for the betterment of society as a whole, rather than for our own advantages, the world might be a far better place. Whether you recognize it or not, this is hive mentality. Unfortunately, we are not ants. Such an ideal ignores human nature, which was the ultimate downfall of Marx' theory. People do not work for abstracts. People do not work for the betterment of society, their own condition ignored. And until you can address this fundamental point of human nature, your arguments are philosophically dead in the water.
One other point supporters of universal healthcare have ignored: In all the swooning over how much better it will be, how we will cut the administrative costs so drastically, how everyone will be covered, all of you have ignored the most telling point so far posted. The medicare prescription drug program, hailed as such a social boon, not even five years after it has passed, has now been determined to be far more expensive than the government initially thought. On the order of triple the cost. This is just a drug program for a small percentage of our population. How the heck are they going to accurately estimate and control the entire bill for all healthcare in this country, when they can't do it on such a vastly reduced scale?
With all this talk about "social responsibility", why do we expect our employers to pick up all or part of the cost for our health insurance, when we buy our own car insurance? In fact, I have alot more choices for car insurance than I do for health insurance. It is also less restrictive.
With all this talk about "social responsibility", why do we expect our employers to pick up all or part of the cost for our health insurance, when we buy our own car insurance? In fact, I have alot more choices for car insurance than I do for health insurance. It is also less restrictive.
Fuzzy
It's a throwback to the 'fringe' benefits offered during WWII in order to recruit employees with incentives other than salaries, which were subject to a 'freeze' because of the war. A few years after WWII, Congress codified the practice by giving employers a tax break for doing so.
In actuality, employers SHOULDN'T be offering health insurance. We don't need employers to achieve the tax breaks for health insurance, they could be offered to us directly, something Pres. Bush advocated in his State of the Union address.
If we divest health insurance from employers, the issue of 'portability' would be moot. Also, salaries would go up because employers wouldn't be spending that money on a portion of your health insurance and that would almost offset the increased cost of purchasing on your own, combined with the tax breaks for doing so.
And THEN, you would have your choice, providing that the regulations the gov't hangs on employer for expensive plans doesn't translate to individuals: individuals should be free to choose the coverage that best 'fits'. For example, I'm a divorced male with three boys at home. I simply DON'T need coverage that mandates birth control pills or any of a variety of 'female services'. That's not to say those services aren't important, if you are covering a female; they just aren't important to ME. By having the option of choosing coverage that 'fits', I could save money on the cost of my own coverage.
their concerns include the fact that nearly 3 million new yorkers are uninsured and many more are underinsured, while others have insurance that does not cover significant items like medications.
the doctors also complain that dealing with multiple insurance plans, with their different rules, forms, and procedures wastes an estimated 20 percent to 30 percent of the health care dollar.
a single payer health plan is the best way to control costs and reduce administrative waste, say the doctors.
interesting that doctors advocate universal healthcare, some have argued that healthcare workers will be hurt financially by a single payer system.
Simplepleasures
1,355 Posts
who really wants health care justice?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=retrieve&dopt=abstractplus&list_ui
"us healthcare is at a crossroads........
it faces many challenges --the most evident being unsustainable cost increases and diminishing accesss. for decades , attempts at reforms have been unsuccsesful. one reason our traditional approaches have not worked is that we who serve have not brought to those efforts sufficient reflection concerning the deeper, values level attitudes concerning reform."