Posted on 08/03/2009 1:58:55 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
If government is so efficient at dispensing health care why do they have to raise $1.6 trillion in new taxes to pay for it. Have the liberals been lying to us all this time? Seems to me they are always saying Canada only spends 10% of GDP on health care while we spend 17%. Then they should be refunding taxpayers $1 trillion to implement, not asking for it.
Previously, we had a government of limited and enumerated powers, with the rights retained by the people.
The New Deal is simple: you get to live at the expense of others if you will allow others to live at your expense. We are encouraged to allow this because we are lead to believe that we each get the better half of the bargain.
This of course is made possible by the violation of three of the Ten Commandments: lies, coveting and theft (under the color of law, but still theft).
The real problem with health care in this country is the cost of malpractice lawsuits, more than anything else. Thousands of lawyers have become wealthy looking for deep pockets to reach into, and hospitals and doctors are prime targets. There is so much variability in biology that anything that goes wrong can be said to result from negligence. Somebody has to pay the costs of the lawsuits, and that somebody is us. No wonder it is so expensive that many cannot afford it any more.
Socialism cannot function in a sustainable mode, ever. That is because it distorts the price and costs over everything. Central planners cannot know the true consequences of their actions and are constantly surprised at the changes in demand for a service when they fix the price. Even the current law under proposal seeks to control costs by reducing the amount that government reimburses both hospitals and doctors.
The statists’ response to seeing an increasing number of doctors who refuse to accept new Medicare patients? To make even more draconian the legal penalties for doing so.
Socialized health care is a path to economic and social hell paved with not-so-good intentions.
Didn’t we just trillion dollar bailout of a bunch of New York regulated, top flite, companies that they pay the ratings agencies to, ahem, rate them?
Yeah.
I don’t see why an adult in one state can not buy a product or service, or have delivery from another state.
It seems to me that insurance companies can not build up the bulk to afford sophisticated software, nor manage on a large scale. Further, what does it matter when if as in the case of AIG if the re-insurer goes out of business. Who regulates them.
Making a commercial enterprise replicate its self in every state is no different than requiring( which used to be the case) that each auto company build cars in each state to each state standard.
I don’t even see why I shouldn’t get insurance from outside the US.
All I see is local politicians protecting their hack retireg politician friends and local mercantilism enterprises.
If some wants to be insured by Maine State Podunk Hack Insurance, fine. I would prefer to be insured by Honda of Tokyo or something like that.
I have worked, on the physician side, as a coder/auditor of medical bills for over 15 years. I consider myself a professional. I can say, without hesitation, that the reason that Medicare has such a low overhead is because they leave the real work to every one else!
Every billing department that I have either worked with, or dealt with has 3 to 5 times the amount of workers dealing with Medicare and Medicaid regulations as it does for the rest of the insurances combined.
Medicare also contracts the administration and payment of the program to PRIVATE INSURANCE COMPANIES! For example NY Medicare is administered by Blue Cross/Blue Shield. Wisconsin, which I am most familiar with, uses WPS. So I am unsure if those companies administration costs are calculated into the 3% or not.
Medicare and Medicaid have so many regulations that must be followed that it takes the provider multiple workers just to work through them.
So in the end, if we went to a government run health insurance, I will bet my life that although the governments overhead would be less, the Dr's overhead would skyrocket.
I happen to think that things should be changed in the health insurance world. I just don't think anything, anyone has put forward so far is the answer. I don't have the answer either, but I do think more people going to truly catastrophic insurance may be closest to what is needed. After all if auto insurance had to pay for every oil change, no one would be able to afford it.
I want a comprehensive coverage policy for my car...it should pay for fixing door dings, any engine diagnostic tests I want performed, all maintenance (no matter how much I abuse the car), upholstry repairs, routine car washes, oil changes (heck, ALL fluid changes), paint fading, tire wear, towing...
That would be as affordable as my healthcare policy.
The private insurance pays healthcare providers more money than Medicare or Medicaid—they are what keeps doctors in business. If obamacare is, indeed, the same as Medicare/Medicaid, as claimed on Rush today, then healthcare providers will never be compensated sufficiently to stay in business.
And then there are all the state mandates on top of the federal. In New York, “catastrophic only” policies are illegal — so if I want to pay out of pocket for routine and relatively minor things, I can’t just buy a a policy to cover huge, totally unexpected things — I either have to have no insurance at all, or pay the inflated policy rates for coverage including routine/minor things. Several states are now mandating infertility coverage, even up through ages where infertility is basically normal and foreseeable.
Yep, that would return a significant chunk of the healthcare market to normal competitive forces, where the consumer is price-sensitive because the consumer is actually the one paying. This is why catastrophic-only policies are outlawed in some states -- the last thing the government wants is free-market healthcare re-emerging.
There is simply no way to control costs when the party receiving a product or service isn't the same party that pays for the product or service. This is simply the reality we face.
If some wants to be insured by Maine State Podunk Hack Insurance, fine. I would prefer to be insured by Honda of Tokyo or something like that.
What happens if Honda of Tokyo fails to pay a claim for you? Are you going to have legal recourse through the United Nations, or through the Federal government?
The biggest problem you'll find in the insurance industry is that the "least expensive" insurance plans will also be the least stable in terms of the financial stability of the companies involved. You can go to almost any state in the South and find plenty of horror stories from people who paid premiums on insurance policies for years, only to have the insurance carrier collapse in insolvency when they needed to file a claim.
Commie crap from the LA Slimes. Does anyone read that birdcage liner?
______________________________
Our Party made significant efforts to popularize the heroic struggle and the communist aims of this rising of the most oppressed masses in Nepal, led by the comrades of the CPN(M)
In a statement on 13 June it congratulates the people on their heroic struggle against the ... Organised by the Communist Party of Ireland as part of West Belfast Festival
A meeting of the Working Group of the communist and workers ... decided to convene a extraordinary meeting of communist and workers’ parties in solidarity with the heroic struggle of ...
... others fear—does this represent a setback and betrayal of the goals of the revolution and of the heroic struggle waged to achieve them, and a serious departure from the communist ...
This heroic struggle will not cease until the Chinese people have driven Japanese ... Some immature Communists think that our task is confined to the present democratic ...
Website of the Communist Party, USA. We fight for labor unity, peace, equality ... were eventually declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court after an heroic struggle by ...
A heroic struggle by South Korean car workers has been viciously attacked by armed police and ... founder member of Workers Power and the Movement for a Revolutionary Communist ...
The heroic struggle of the Filipino people, under the leadership of the Communist Party of Philippines, with the countless sacrifices has highlighted the path for national ...
Bears-repeating bump. At regular intervals.
It also needs to be repeated early, often, and especially loudly when liberals try to get people to glide past it, that Slick and Beast were the people who let the insurance companies into the practice of medicine.
It was they who tore down the "Chinese wall" separating payors from doctors. They did it on purpose, to bureaucratize and screw things up, to prepare the ground with bitter experiences for a second push for nationalization and Sovietization.
Just remember -- it was Bill and Hillary who brought them in. See my last.
He appears to be one of those, um, journopolemicists who has a lot to say about e.g. "McCarthyism", but as someone pointed out in a blog, gets all mushmouthed and reticent about the atrocities of the Left.
He writes quite often about Communist parties and regimes, East and West.
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