Posted on 10/11/2013 12:20:46 PM PDT by xzins
We are being told that the affordable care act fixes great injustices of insurance by allowing those with pre-existing conditions and those with catastrophic illness to have coverage. In the past, they say, insurance companies would only provide such coverage at great expense or not at all.
Not so. When we finally read the law that "no one knew until we passed it" we found out about IPAB, the Independent Payment and Advisory Board.
Howard Dean, no friend of conservatives opposing the ACA recently was quoted about the IPAB:
"One major problem is the so-called Independent Payment Advisory Board. The IPAB is essentially a health-care rationing body. By setting doctor reimbursement rates for Medicare and determining which procedures and drugs will be covered and at what price, the IPAB will be able to stop certain treatments its members do not favor by simply setting rates to levels where no doctor or hospital will perform them."
Here is the bottom line: Expensive patients, whether with pre-existing conditions or with frighteningly expensive illnesses will be "cost controlled" by bureaucrats. They will determine that expensive patients will have access to treatments A,B, and C, but not to treatments D, E, and F. ABC will be cheaper and probably involve pain control as one enters the afterlife. DEF will be far more expensive and will not be considered a covered treatment (except for the connected and well-heeled).
So, "death panels", my friend. Pre-existing condition? IPAB will fix you right up. Cancer? IPAB has a pain pill with your name on it. The one consolation, of course, is that you will receive "death counseling" every few years. I'm sure that will take the edge off.
If hit with the pre-existing and catastrophic cost argument, I've no doubt the Momma Grizzly, Sarah Palin, would have been right there with the correct answer about the IPAB death panels. Sarah would probably have said something like, "Dead isn't much of a solution, is it?"
***Dr. Donald Berwick, who headed the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, admitted as much when he opined: “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care — the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”
Berwick also said: “We can make a sensible social decision and say, ‘Well, at this point, to have access to a particular additional benefit (new drug or medical intervention) is so expensive that our taxpayers have better use for those funds.’”*** (investors business daily)
Our taxpayers have better use for their funds than to throw them into the Federal Government black hole, but they don't get to make the decision.
We could have dealt with those issues (people with pre-existing conditions and those about to be bankrupted by the cost of their care) for a small fraction of what Obamacare costs. And without disrupting anyone else’s lives.
What’s your vision for how we could do this? I’m not sure I see a way to handle it. Especially since more and more people have pre-existing conditions as they age.
I like the Amish approach. They eschew all public assistance. If one has a hospitalization and one can’t pay the entire bill, the church picks up the remainder of the bill. They have special funds dedicated to that purpose. The community contributes.
Those with pre-existing conditions and catastrophic illnesses are supposed help keep the system solvent by dying sooner.
This is how the system was designed to help them.
Ain’t Liberalism grand? < / sarcasm >
Actually death is a great solution.
Cut even one year off the life expectancy and see what a plus it is for the SocSec and Medicare budget projections.
When the kiddos complain about granny getting off’d, the regime will offer up some student loan forgiveness coupons.
So won't it be better to have doctors that don't accept the insurance?
I'm pretty sure a death panel isn't the way I prefer to handle it.
The insurance companies used higher premiums and higher maximums....in other words, far more costly policies.
Compared with a death panel, though, that's a pretty good solution. However, a mid-level policy still covered a pretty high annual maximum expense on catastrophic illness.
There was no way to escape a pre-existing condition that I recall other than a very costly policy....same as a wreckless driver car insurance policy. The company goes into it knowing that they're putting out big cost.
don’t forget that junior said grandma can maybe just take a pill....
bet it’s Zyklon B.
Those are excellent!
A lot of people are generous. If their church had a fund to support members with catastrophic medical bills, people would contribute. I recall a few years ago, my parish donated over $20,000 in one weekend for the family of a woman who had died from complications of Lyme Disease.
And if they had to send less to the government, they’d have more to pay their own medical bills AND help others.
I thought the Amish approach was to let the gubmint handle it...Oh, you mean those Amish.
In a random group of people that would work. In an invited group, it would attract those with illnesses and lose the advantage of randomness
The government could have funded something for un-insurables and had everyone else buy a major medical policy if they really needed to mandate something. What they have done is bring ruin on the whole country. I’ve not met a lib yet that realizes what they have done. This next year, 2 on the outside will be very interesting in a bad way.
The first thing I thought of was malingerers.
Eggzactly!
0care is a poison pill we’re being forced to swallow. The entire law is a death panel for this country.
Seems like a nutcase post to me.
No relevance whatsoever for ordinary patients who might have GERD, say, or a history of tension headaches, or ordinary diabetes.
I’m not denying the real possibility that death panels and rejected treatments might emerge, but the relevance to say, my wife, who requires a $4 Metformin Rx seems pretty slight.
I agree.
I also doubt seriously that people get rejected by insurance companies for reflux or a $4 medicine.
Most certainly people are rejected from policies for Type II diabetes as well as GERD, which can lead to Barrett’s Esophagus.
Nope. You could always get a group plan. And it was illegal to discriminate against small groups.
Obviously death panels aren't the way to handle this. But a lot of people with serious pre-existing conditions arent going to be able to afford the enormous Obamacare deductibles so we'll just die anyway.
I agree with the “saving up your money in advance” idea with one caveat. They did try to put people in pools and create a profit from the pooled money. That, in my mind anyway, is “insurance”.
Also, each state, iirc, did run high risk pools far before the advent of ObamaCare.
I’m on record elsewhere saying there was nothing so bad about our old health insurance model that ObamaCare comes even close to being a better choice. We had the best health system in the world, and people from around the world came here for care.
We are now going to eventually get single payer, and you can bet your granny that cost/benefit analysis is how it will operate. I spent to many years in Germany watching their government system work. Had a foreign exchange student from Germany 3 years ago whose grandfather died while she was here due to the government refusing full treatment after a fall broke a shoulder.
My English aunt was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. They rushed her in for an operation, six months later.
My friend had a Polish nanny, back before the Wall fell. She spent her first summer visiting the dentist. My friend asked her why she was making so many trips to the dentist.
She said in broken English, "It's great here. You have novacaine."
I guess anesthesia was considered a luxury.
LOL! Reminds me of a trip to the dentist in about 73 near Ansbach, Germany. I was a GI, and the Army had contracted with some local dentist to provide some of the care. As luck would have it, I drew him. In his thick German accent he told me I needed a cavity filled. Then he made light of novacaine. "Der ist no need." Then he pushed his thick glasses that grossly magnified his eyes back up on his nose.
Dumb and young, I was thinking of visits to Dr Kip, my neighborhood dentist when I was growing up. The needle. No need for the needle.
I agreed.
It was the worst 15 minutes of hell in my life.
I saw that dentist not many years later after I'd returned home. I was watching "The Marathon Man", and the Joseph Mengele type character with German accent began drilling on Dustin Hoffman.
Dead Ringer. I swear it. True story. I didn't know Mengele personally, but his spiritual clone had me in a dentist's chair in Bavaria. LOL.
As a matter of fact the health system Obamacare is about to replace DID take care of those with pre-existing conditions.
If they couldn’t get insurance, that didn’t mean they were left lying in a gutter somewhere without treatment. Did you ever see that?
As a matter of fact, every State and county in the country has some mechanism for taking care of people without insurance. We pay taxes to take care of them.
There are county health clinics and plans, doctors who donate time and services, and hospitals run by all sorts of religious denominations and counties who take indigent patients. Most of them are charged according to their ability to pay.
It sounds paranoid, but I believe they wish to control the population by determining who lives and who dies. People with DM II develop heart dz, renal dz, visual problems etc. (My husband is diabetic. I don’t think they would deny him metformin, but they might deny him coronary bypass surgery.)
And esophageal CA, which involves ugly procedures and variable outcomes.
My "now" dentist gives me nitrous oxide before injected local anesthetic. Are we blessed or what? :)
You are one tough cookie, Gypsy.
Salute!
Not really. My idols are the veterans who were killed and damaged in our wars, and those who returned home. Those are the tough ones. (P.S. The highest accolades anyone could bestow during my childhood were, “He/She studies hard,” and “He/She’s tough.”
Pi ng
Pi ng
Pi ng
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