If anyone ever bothered to read our Anti Trust Laws, I have, they would soon see that they are basically a description of how our Entire Medical Profession operates, they ALL BELONG IN PRISON!!!
P4L
The last bill had 50 Billion dollars paid directly to insurers. . This one has 70 BILLION DOLLARS PAID TO INSURERS. What?? #noinsurancebailout
70 billion?? #notjustno
Why you, Wolfie?
I thought you had been standing up for a libertarian position on the usage of medications. Now are you turning from principle?
I still think that could work, but the land needs to reconnect with God. God is like oxygen to suffocating people.
When the so called debate on “healthcare” was going on, I believe the Dems got together with the repukes and said “We know you’ll get voted out of office if you vote with us and we want you in office because you want the same things we do, so you may appear to be defiant. And since you agree to run a bunch of idiots for president, we all know Hillary will follow Obama so we’ll never have to discuss it after 2016.”. The repukes have been pretenders for way too long.
Which is almost always the result of a CHOICE made by the addict. Nobody held them down and forced a needle into their arms! Why should my share of the billions go to "treat" or "fight" the results of their bad choices?
While I do not disagree with all Mr Denninger has to say, he is not perfect, that is his understanding of facts is not perfect.
He makes the claim that the stated amount Medicare says it will cover is always at or above the providers cost. Anecdotally it may be above cost some percentage of the time, but there are sufficient numbers of cases where it is not above cost; so much so that any number of doctors in each of the states choose to not provide services if Medicare is the only “insurance”. (yes, by law providers can choose to not accept Medicare if it is the only insurance someone has, just as they can choose to not accept Medicaid either).
Also he assumes it is feasible to report to patients in each and every health care facility, up front upon entry to the facility, a one-price-fits-all price list for all services performed there. That is not technically feasible. Why? Every patient is different. Every health care requirement that individuals enter the facility to get treatment for can require a combination of things to be done, for that individual’s case, that is not the same for every other individual, even though their cases may appear to be exact/similar on first glance.
That is not the same as might be said for some very specific items (a dose of medicine X, daily bed rate for a semi-private bed, a single and singularly focused x-ray, ect., ect.). But EXACTLY what combination of things will actually need to be applied in each case is not known ahead of time.
I think if Mr Denninger admitted his own understanding of what insurance can and cannot be - which he does in other posts - his recommendations would be less focused on the “insurance benefit” side of what insurers could provide, and his prescription for solutions would require plans that begin with extremely robust health savings accounts, from which many things would get paid directly by the consumer, from that account, with additional “insurance” for benefit coverage for accidents, and a “comprehensive/catastrophic” benefit for major hospital treatments (major surgeries [heart], cancer treatments, kidney failure, colostomy, child-birth delivery, ect., etc.).
His treatise is lengthy and though I read much of it, including some of the text in links to additional work he has done on this topic, my comments here are only on the items I saw first.