Affordable Healthcare for All Americans (Barf)

email received 3/19 | 3/19/04 | Nancy Pelosi, Tom Daschle, John F'n Kerry

[listenhillary]

(COME TOGETHER $10 MILLION IN 10 DAYS So far we've raised $3,620,110)

We're writing to urge you to support John Kerry for President. We have an opportunity to elect a leader whose wisdom and experience will lead America back to a place of pride.

We are facing big problems -- such as the high cost of health care. This administration has done nothing to address this very important issue. It's an issue that touches our children, our parents, our neighbors and ourselves. In our weakest moments, when help is most desperately needed, our system lets us down. A sick child goes without seeing a doctor because her parents can't afford it. A woman finds out she has late-stage breast cancer, because she couldn't afford a mammogram. An elderly woman faces a choice between medicine and food, and goes hungry.

When given the opportunity, this President chose tax giveaways for the wealthy over affordable health care for all Americans. He promised us a prescription drug plan that would stop America's seniors from being forced to choose between their medicine and their groceries, but instead his prescription was a Medicare bill that is nothing but a $139 billion giveaway to the big drug companies. Now he's breaking another promise by having no plan to fix our health care crisis.

The time has come to make affordable healthcare for all Americans a reality. John Kerry is committed to it, and we're committed to helping him achieve it.

This President has the wrong priorities for the American people. He underestimates how frustrated and impatient for change we have become.

Let's show him how wrong he is. Support John Kerry today. His priorities are America's priorities.

Sincerely, Tom F'n Daschle and Nancy F'n Kerry

[listenhillary]

Lets really F'n up our healthcare system. Jeeze!

The COME TOGETHER with the picture of Tom Daschle and Nacy Pelosi right below is almost too much to stomach. I will probably have nightmares for weeks.

[WhiteGuy]

What a lying sack of doody.

his prescription was a Medicare bill that is nothing but a $139 billion giveaway to the big drug companies.


$139 Billion? Try $539 Billion

[GeorgeW23225]

What good is Health Care coverage, if we're all dead from a terrorist attack ??

Let's prioritize, shall we???

[Agnes Heep]

I thought all this was taken care of during the enlightened Clinton administration. What happened?

[Prime Choice]

There's a very simple way to make health care affordable again.

1. Eliminate all insurance coverage for simple office visits and annual exams.

2. Only provide insurance coverage for serious illnesses and injuries that *require* medical attention.

3. Put a cap on malpractice awards so the focus is put on remedial care and compensation and less on abstract notions of "pain and suffering."

Those three steps alone would erase more than 80% of medical insurance payments and bring malpractice insurance down to reasonable levels, thus making medical care more affordable to everyone.

Not that John Kerry would do any of these things. Democrats are whores to the trial lawyers. That's an indisputable fact.

[M. Dodge Thomas]

IMO (and I started and ran a successful start-up in a highly competitive industry, in the black, for 54 consecutive quarters; if you are working for someone else I'm the boss who lives off you efforts ) the biggest bar to unleashing American creativity and productivity is the fact that basic health insurance is tied to employment.

You want to see what "American Ingenuity" can really do? Collect the taxes to provide such services, and half the people here (at least) would be starting businesses that provide the products and services their employers do now, but more creatively and efficiently.

And IMO as a nation we would be way ahead of the game – the additional taxes collected on increased economic activity would more than cover the costs of freeing America wage-slaves from the fear that a medical crises and bankruptcy was as close as the second or third missing paycheck.

[listenhillary]

I'd like to be able to use a comparison shopping service for doctor services. With doctor/service ratings by patients. No ratings? Maybe the patient didn't survive..

True competition would do wonders for making healthcare affordable.

pricegrabber search "heart bypass surgery"

[Republic If You Can Keep It]

Collect the taxes to provide such services,

So you want us to become Canada.

[DLfromthedesert]

You want the "poor" to pay for their own office visits? Then how will they afford their cell phones and their cigarettes?

[CrucifiedTruth]

There's a very simple way to make health care affordable again

Not enough. Not even close. The major problem with helthcare is lack of competition. Addmissions to med schools have been capped at the same level for 25 years. Same goes for the number of residencies. On top of that doctor's records are "private" - there is no rational way to select a doctor. Add to that the heavily protected drug market etc, etc. There is nothin even resembling a market in the medical field. Republicans and Dumbocrats ain't changing this. I would like to know why but I don't.

[LurkedLongEnough]

This President has the wrong priorities for the American people.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! Give it up, Dim-wit losers!

As far as prescription drugs go, some "seniors" I know are taking too many d@mn medicines anyway, all doped up. Maybe that's what keeps them pulling the "D" lever. Those poor people need something other than CNN to watch all day while they pop their chemical placebos.

[BenLurkin]

[M. Dodge Thomas]

I can agree with most of that, the one thing I'd question is "Eliminate all insurance coverage for simple office visits and annual exams" - from what I've read some kinds of testing are pretty cost effective. (For example identifying and treating high blood pressure before it causes problems that make employment difficult or impossible, a situation where taxpayers often end up footing the bill on way or another (even if we wern't paying the medical bill, there's the still productivity drag.)

The other tough issue I'd want to address is the fact that end-of-life health case eats up around 30% of the current health care budget.

IMO The current system is nuts, sometimes it appears to me that Americans think death is optional.

For examply my MIL is 89 and has "had enough", so she elected hospice care.

If she had continued the previous routine of acute congestive heart failure -> hsopitalization -> "Rehab" -> back home -> ACHF-> hospitalization -> and so on, Medicare would pay most of her costs. Instead, in hospice, (which costs taxpayers a *lot* less) my wife and I pick up most of the same costs out-of-pocket.

For the majority of people (who can't afford to lay out one earner's entire paycheck (or more) for this kind of care) the incentive to "game" Medicare is very difficult to resist.

[DLfromthedesert]

I agree that health care should not be tied to employment. People should BUY their own insurance, you know, like auto and home insurance?

Taxed by whom? The federal, state, or local government? I don't think they belong in the business, and the fact that, through Johnson's "Great", yeah, right, Society, the federal government was brought in through programs for seniors and the poor, has HELPED to drive the cost through the roof.

With the government involved, we get mandates and arbitrary regulations that do nothing to improve the quality but definitely drive up the amount of paperwork and costs.




With the government comes mandates and

[M. Dodge Thomas]

"You want the "poor" to pay for their own office visits? Then how will they afford their cell phones and their cigarettes?"

You're right: lots of people will buy pay-as-you-go cell phones (at $.70 a min.) and ciggies - and probably with cash raised via a "payday loan" ar 525% yearly interest, to boot.

The choice the rest of us have is: "do we want to pay for preventable expensive chronic health problems *as well*."

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(BWT, cigarette smokein is actully a highly altruistic act; smokers on the average die early enough so that they collect sufficienty fewer benefits (SS, Medicare, and VA primarily) that, net, the rest of us come out ahead. So the next time someone asks to wipe your windshield for a buck, give him two or three cigarettes instead of a dollar and smile - his loss will be your gain.

[mewzilla]

I heartily recommend that anyone who thinks socialized medicine is a spiffy idea should spend some time in a country that has it. I guarantee you'll change your mind.

[Savage Beast]

Health care will never be affordable until lawyers and malpractice awards are eliminated from the system.

All the campaigning, all the promises, all the government management, all the brain-storming--everything will fail, until that joker is removed from the deck.

[listenhillary]

Never been to a country with socialized medicine. Just common sense that if an item is free, the demand will outstrip the supply. There is no way around it.

[dirtboy]

The time has come to make affordable healthcare for all Americans a reality. John Kerry is committed to it, and we're committed to helping him achieve it.

Yeah, John Kerry is committed to it. And how does Kerry plan on dealing with it?

Well, he typically is short on specifics, but, since he's a liberal dem, his most likely solutions will be a combination of price controls and throwing federal tax dollars at it.

Which any one who managed to stay awake through ECON 101 will tell you won't do squat to solve the problem - price controls + more money = an even bigger mess.

We've got a really screwed up health care system in this country, and IMO it all stems from sixty years of having health insurance being a tax-free employer benefit - that might have made sense for a few years but now has created a bizzare scorpions' dance between employers, providers, insurers and consumers.

The dynamic goes like this: insurer jacks up the rates. Employer and employee negotiate who pays how much. Once that is established, employee proceeds to try and use as many health services as possible, which causes the insurers to squeeze more money from the doctors while raising rates...

I think the solution is rather simple. We get employers out of the business of providing health insurance. We come up with a mechanism where consumers can create pools to buy catastrophic insurance. And we re-define the meaning of health insurance. Your car insurance doesn't pay for your oil changes or maintenance. It's there for when something out of the ordinary happens.

Likewise, health insurance should protect you from really bad medical events. And MSAs should be used to allow consumers to pay for routine medical expenses tax-free and to build up cushions to supplement cat insurance when things get bad. Of course, that means people taking responsibility for their own health care financing and management...

[M. Dodge Thomas]

"People should BUY their own insurance, you know, like auto and home insurance?"

Ever get hit by an uninsured driver?

About the only way your costs are going to made good is via "uninsured motorest" coverage - which *you* are paying for.

IMO lots of health care is the same sort of issue: we end up paying for "uninsured breathers" one way or another.

I'd agree that on principle that people who have anything nornmally pay *something* for many sorts of halth care - even if its only the cost of a carton of ciggies.

But we also have to realize that in the case of *some* sorts of care we can't avoid the cots of their unwise behavior any more than (realistically) we can avoid the possibility of being rear-ended by an uninsured motorist - the question is: what is the cost effective level of protection?