Posted on 07/02/2008 7:48:07 AM PDT by SmithL
One year ago today, San Francisco became the first city in the nation to attempt to provide universal health care to its residents. Twelve months later, some city residents wonder why the program is billed as universal when they're still getting turned away.
When the Healthy San Francisco program began at two Chinatown clinics July 2, 2007, public health officials said they would swing open the doors to all of the city's 73,000 uninsured residents on Jan. 1, 2008. They anticipated that people would enroll gradually at a pace of about 600 a week, and full coverage would be attained by the end of this year.
But Healthy San Francisco remains open only to individuals earning up to 300 percent of the federal poverty level, or roughly $31,000 a year, while the city awaits the outcome of a case regarding the legality of making employers contribute to the plan. The city lost the first round of the case, which now is before the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
The program isn't health insurance because it doesn't follow people outside the city limits. Instead, participants are assigned a primary care facility at one of 27 clinics where preventive care and early detection are stressed in the hopes of avoiding pricey emergency room visits.
Patients have access to urgent care, mental health care, substance abuse services, pharmaceuticals and other medical care in exchange for a quarterly fee and co-payments depending on their incomes.
City officials had no timeline for expanding the program until the San Francisco Organizing Project, a grassroots coalition of congregations and schools, began pressing for definitive answers.
"It's very frustrating and scary to have someone say, yeah, at some point you're going to get insurance, but we can't tell you when,
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Well if they can get Ray and Dave Davies back together, more power to them.
Kinky San Francisco still working out health.
So they are trying to get employers to pay for it. I wonder how many of the 600 Starbucks stores that are closing are in San Francisco? If I was an employer there, I would get out. The unhealthy sexual habits of some of the residents there is going to cost gazillions to treat. I wonder how much AZT costs.
Just another way for the left to transfer wealth from those who have to those who don’t have.
Well, see what happens. Here’s a lofty liberal goal, of providing health coverage to all. And they have found that there are “real world” problems in implementing their lofty goal. Have we heard this one before?
Socialism is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.
Socialized medicine has been an abject failure everywhere that it has been tried. Why do you think patients in socialist countries come to the US whenever they really need medical attention?
So they are trying to get employers to pay for it. I wonder how many of the 600 Starbucks stores that are closing are in San Francisco? If I was an employer there, I would get out. The unhealthy sexual habits of some of the residents there is going to cost gazillions to treat. I wonder how much AZT costs.
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My in-laws live in SF. My MIL used to go to a twelve-chair salon. Once SF required employers to offer health coverage, the owner couldn’t afford to have employees. He employed only himself, rented out one or two chairs to other hairdressers, and waited for the lease to run out. One thriving business, dead of AIDS-related costs.
Well, as Hillary once said, she can’t be responsible for every undercapitalized business in America.
What Hillary and others don’t realize is that these undercapitalized businesses can go out of business if pushed to the wall once too often by gov’t mandates.
The majority of all employees in this country are employed by small businesses. Small businesses can’t absorb the costs of gov’t mandates as easily as bigger companies. Even bigger companies aren’t immune if their products aren’t selling. (such as Ford and GM)
I think some bureaucrats and Democrats think that you can pass the cost of anything on to business and that they have unlimited ability to absorb the costs.
If thats the case then I'm afraid the best they'll be able to manage is working out the Kink.
I have a friend who thinks like that. He votes republican and has for years but has this idea that businesses have an unlimited amount of money to spend. He is an otherwise intelligent person who believes in all other things conservative but rails about corporations. I am afraid there are all to many who think like that.
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