debate on universal access to health care

Here is another one, reminded of this as I read the news this morning.

Government provided unemployment check. Socialism/irresponsibility at work. What is happening:

1) You are rewarded for not saving money, putting money away for a rainy day.

2) You are rewarded for as long as you do not get another job.

3) You are rewarded for scamming the system, work under the table and collect unemployment.

4) You are rewarded for not keeping a steady job, just go out on unemployment every few years.

Nice huh.

Deron.
 
julesa said:
You are so trolling. Welcome to the ignore list.
Click to expand...

What is trolling?

Your ignore list or is there some kind of function in this forum that allows that?

I guess that happens when someone gum's up this socialist dream with a dose of reality.

Deron.
 
I'm with Jules here; you've been served with numerous facts and reasoned thoughts, and you return with lazy, inflammatory nonsense, and call it a 'dose of reality.'

I call it a waste of time. I'll be happy to continue to discuss with folks with a differing point of view, but this shit-eating-grin nonsense is growing tiresome.
 
It is possible to be so completely impervious to logic and reason that your arguments are indistinguishable from someone who is simply pretending they can't learn anything, in a juvenile ploy to get a rise out of people. Of course, it's a waste of time to have a discussion with either type of person, but he's trolling. He overplayed his hand a bit with those last few posts.
 
OUR PRESIDENT IS LISTENING!!! He has written a letter to Ted Kennedy and Max Baucus (Dem), who along with Chuck Grassley (Rep), are the two guys charged with coming up with a bipartisan solution before congress takes their august break. The president now publicly supports the idea that there should be a single payer system available to everyone who does not have private insurance, and that the single payer system would compete with private insurance to "keep the insurance companies honest".

The plans you are discussing embody my core belief that Americans should have better choices for health insurance, building on the principle that if they like the coverage they have now, they can keep it, while seeing their costs lowered as our reforms take hold. But for those who don't have such options, I agree that we should create a health insurance exchange -- a market where Americans can one-stop shop for a health care plan, compare benefits and prices, and choose the plan that's best for them, in the same way that Members of Congress and their families can. None of these plans should deny coverage on the basis of a preexisting condition, and all of these plans should include an affordable basic benefit package that includes prevention, and protection against catastrophic costs. I strongly believe that Americans should have the choice of a public health insurance option operating alongside private plans. This will give them a better range of choices, make the health care market more competitive, and keep insurance companies honest.

Read the full letter from the President . . . http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/obamaforamerica/gGGGpK




I know it was not only in response to my letters that he has returned to the ideas he espoused when we elected him, but they didn't hurt. I can now go forward and support the president's efforts completely, and i urge every american to do the same. 60% of personal bankruptcies in the us are now caused by medical bills, and if we expect 100 senators with the best health plan in the world and pockets continually stuffed with contributions from the drug and insurance companies (who want no change at all) to pass anything on access to affordable care for the rest of us, we had better get off our collective ass and MAKE them do it. We will never have a better chance to pass universal health care.

It is very easy to say "i am healthy, i don't need insurance" or "I am tough, i will take care of myself" but believe me things change if you get into a position like i did where i was $70k in debt and could not work, even after giving my insurance company my life savings they dropped me the moment i could no longer pay, and i went for YEARS with no affordable care at all. Medicare is not the greatest system, but it works. If everyone who does not get adequate coverage through other means had access to medicare, the volume would mean the system could be even better. The private insurers will scream that it is unfair competition, so let's promise that we will open the books to scrutiny if they will show us theirs.

The current business model of insurers in the US is:

1) deny coverage to anyone who might be a liability; exclude pre-existing conditions.
2) deny coverage to insured if there is any way to squirm out of it. if you cannot avoid paying, stall and maybe they will go away and/or die.
3)raise rates if anybody gets sick and kick them off the insurance rolls asap.
4) buy as many politicians as it takes to insure continuation of 1-3 and to insure highest possible profits.
5) poor people should just go away and die, but if they do get sick and manage to crawl into the system; do the minimum to avoid getting sued and then kick them out and hope they die asap.

Does anybody think this is a reasonable business model, and that a public system would not be better?
 
THE HEALTHCARE EXCHANGE
(1 function)
a guy is quoted $7000 for an operation locally.
he posts his needs on the site.
competitive bids come in!
he pays much less for the same thing!
.
I LIKE IT!
 
Cackalacka said:
I'm with Jules here; you've been served with numerous facts and reasoned thoughts, and you return with lazy, inflammatory nonsense, and call it a 'dose of reality.'

I call it a waste of time. I'll be happy to continue to discuss with folks with a differing point of view, but this shit-eating-grin nonsense is growing tiresome.
Click to expand...

Awe, you guys just live in your little fantasy socialist land and do not want it upset by someone pointing out the holes in that type of system. I know guys, it sucks when someone pops your balloon, but face it, the only type of system that works is, when the person that uses it, is directly in charge of as many aspects of it as possible.

You are your own/families best advocate, you will spend your money more wisely, take better care of yourself, find the best doctor, shop for better care, do follow up... then some bureaucrat that would be in charge of your health care in some socialist system.

Deron.
 
.... but face it, the only type of system that works is, when the person that uses it, is directly in charge of as many aspects of it as possible.

You are your own/families best advocate, you will spend your money more wisely, take better care of yourself, find the best doctor, shop for better care, do follow up... then some bureaucrat that would be in charge of your health care in some socialist system.

Deron.[/quote]
I agree with Deron.
 
Cackalacka said:
Ahh, the Goodle Days Chestnut. You know, back in the Goodle Days, we didn't have a health care system that would help cure your kid's cancer. Nope, we sure didn't. No WHO, NIH, or FDA either. Life expectancy was 35; if you got the flu you'd probably die, but we sure didn't have to worry about paying for one of "those people's" boob-job.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

I wouldn't trust the WHO, FDA or any of those bodies of control. The FDA is the same organization that is allowing aspartame in your foods. The WHO is involved in pushing Codex Alimentarius. Google it. Thailand is already banning Ginger and Tumeric with pressure from the WHO.

Also, I credit medical science to longer lifespan, NOT those governing bodies. How else do you think Monsanto gets aways with selling you rBGH milk?

wiki Monsanto

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto

Now scroll to Corporate governance or read to your heart's content if you wish.
 
Hi,

You can sign a petition here:
http://pol.moveon.org/popetition/?rc=homepage

Sign the Petition
Full petition text:
"I strongly believe that Americans should have the choice of a public health insurance option operating alongside private plans. This will give them a better range of choices, make the health care market more competitive, and keep insurance companies honest."

Your message to your Senators and Representative: (optional)

After you click the button below, we'll send your name, address, and comment to your Senators and Representative.
Click to expand...

Stand with Obama: Support a Public Health Insurance Option

On Wednesday, President Obama reaffirmed his support for a public health insurance option--the key piece of health care reform that will provide coverage for all Americans and help bring costs down.

But as the fight for real reform heats up, right-wing lobbyists and conservatives in Congress are working hard to kill the public health insurance option.

We need to show Congress just how many Americans support Obama on health care reform. Can you sign the petition to stand with Obama?

A compiled petition with your individual comment will be presented to your Senators and Representative.
Click to expand...
 
Hi,

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/6/5/headlines#9

Bankruptcy Filings Projected to Reach 1.5M
New figures show consumer and commercial bankruptcies are on pace to reach more than 1.5 million this year. The figure is the highest since Congress passed legislation making it harder to file for bankruptcy in 2005.

Study: Medical Bills Account for Over 60% of US Bankruptcies
A new study, meanwhile, says ballooning medical bills are now responsible for more than 60 percent of bankruptcies in the United States. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation says the percentage of bankruptcies linked to medical bills increased by 50 percent from 2001 to 2007, the last year for which data is available. More than 75 percent of bankrupt families had health insurance but were still crippled by medical debts.
Click to expand...
 
set said:
I wouldn't trust the WHO, FDA or any of those bodies of control. The FDA is the same organization that is allowing aspartame in your foods. The WHO is involved in pushing Codex Alimentarius. Google it. Thailand is already banning Ginger and Tumeric with pressure from the WHO.
Click to expand...

Why would the World Health Organization have anything to do with providing access to affordable health care to americans? This is a classic "straw man" argument, as are the following claims that the WHO is pushing drugs and pressuring the Thai government. This has nothing at all to do with affordable health care for americans. nothing.

The FDA is not the main culprit when it comes to creating a market for the products of the huge international drug companies while denying us natural alternatives. The drug companies are doing just fine at it themselves. The problem is that the drug companies control the FDA, not the other way around. Look at how the strange and sudden illness of a group of people that has been clearly tied to a mysterious and unbelievable failure to clean filters when switching from making fire retardant to processing the amino acid supplement L-tryptophan just coincidentally happened at the same time Prozac came out. Occam's razor says this was a deliberate act and not an accident.

The story of L-Tryptophan illustrates a sad perverse picture of the politics and priorities of public health in America: A safe, dietary-supplement serotonin producer is publicly unavailable to people, while daily fed to animals by corporate agribusiness. A patent is approved to use L-Tryptophan to cure the very condition the FDA claims it caused. And, while publicly exclaiming that L-Tryptophan is a dangerous and untested drug, the FDA more quietly, allows human-use L-Tryptophan to be imported, and then marketed and sold by the pharmaceutical industry. quoted from http://www.lef.org/fda/fdaban95.html

The drug companies are running the FDA and the insurance companies are running the health care industry. Less government is not the answer. We need a government "of the people, by the people, for the people", and it HAS "perished from this earth". (Lincoln, Gettysburg,1863). What we have is a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich. The drug companies and health insurers get richer and more powerful every day, while we get sicker. The middle class is quickly fading out of existence through medical bankruptcy and the value of our currency is being destroyed while the cost of energy is driven sky-high by a bunch of parasites trading in the dark money of unregulated options markets. Less control over unbridled greed is not the way to fix this. The only way we can fix our broken health care system is by providing a public option for people who are not getting what they need from their private insurance or who cannot afford it. Now that we have a leader willing to take them on, we are throwing away the chance of a lifetime if we do not jump on the chance for real change.
 
according to a show on PBS, ancient Greek people had the lowest health care costs!
They would throw the sick and useless over a cliff!
.
so, while our system has numerous flaws, it is better than that!
 
"The drug companies are running the FDA and the insurance companies are running the health care industry. Less government is not the answer. We need a government "of the people, by the people, for the people", and it HAS "perished from this earth". (Lincoln, Gettysburg,1863). What we have is a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich. The drug companies and health insurers get richer and more powerful every day, while we get sicker. The middle class is quickly fading out of existence through medical bankruptcy and the value of our currency is being destroyed while the cost of energy is driven sky-high by a bunch of parasites trading in the dark money of unregulated options markets. Less control over unbridled greed is not the way to fix this. The only way we can fix our broken health care system is by providing a public option for people who are not getting what they need from their private insurance or who cannot afford it. Now that we have a leader willing to take them on, we are throwing away the chance of a lifetime if we do not jump on the chance for real change."

Well you pointed out a problem with our current system and that is what I have been trying to get across to everyone. Which is turning more and more control over to other people. As long as we turn the control over more and more of our dollars to other people, weather it be the government, insurance companies... the more they end up with "The Power".

Whoever has control of your money, has control of your life.

Deron.
 
deronmoped said:
Well you pointed out a problem with our current system and that is what I have been trying to get across to everyone. Which is turning more and more control over to other people. As long as we turn the control over more and more of our dollars to other people, weather it be the government, insurance companies... the more they end up with "The Power".
Click to expand...

It is easy to say "there is a problem". It is more difficult to propose a solution. Anyone who believes that people in the US today will suddenly become self-reliant in terms of taking care of their health care needs is smoking something better than i am.

We must take a pragmatic approach if we are to live in a civilized society. Most of us are not willing to watch our fellow citizens die in the gutter or push them over a cliff. Neither, though, are most of us willing to pay for free heart transplants for 85 year old smokers. Once we agree on those two points we can work to find something in between that will work.

People are turning over management of their health care system to the insurance companies, drug companies, and medical care provider organizations. These are for-profit companies, and many answer only to insatiable stockholders whose only concern is the bottom line. This is how we arrived where we are now, and it is not working. Health care costs are strangling our economy and destroying the middle class. The ruling oligarchy is perfectly happy with this, since once the middle class is eliminated they can get back to their public demonstrations of opulence without consequence.

We may not get another chance at this. Even the most apathetic citizen will wake up when their inability to afford health care costs them the life of a child or spouse, or when insurance they thought was protecting them from catastrophic illness refuses to pay for treatment that has been demonstrated to work. Somebody IS going to continue to ration health care. That somebody should not be a for-profit business with the model of denying care to anyone with a pre-existing condition and refusing care to its customers or stalling in the hope the customer dies or at least goes broke and can no longer pay.

Something has to change. Right now is the best chance we have ever had for real reform. We may not get another chance. I am personally not going to let my senators leave on their summer vacation without some real action, even if it means i lay down in front of the senate doors and make them watch the spectacle on the tube.

I was saddened yesterday when none of the people who had registered managed to find me at my card table set up on the edge of the farmer's market. I hope they just did not find me and not that they just didn't follow through. I am grateful to Mitch for his links, so i don't feel the need to add any more links to this post, but i do want everyone to know that there will be a national health care service day on June 27, organized by people like myself and those of you willing to get involved. I have no idea what i will do yet, so i am seeking guidance from Organizing for America and from my neighbors. We elected the president by talking neighbor to neighbor and the organization growing out of that. We can change the health care system the same way. They said we could not elect him. We did. I think he is doing a great job so far when you look at the mess he inherited.

I saw the Newt on the sunday news shows warning that "what they're after is single payer, they want the government to control YOUR health care, and ration it, they want to do away with YOUR private insurance and some bureaucrat will decide who gets treatment". What he does not mention is that "some bureaucrat" is better than the employee of a for-profit insurance company whose main job it is to deny you care.
deronmoped said:
Whoever has control of your money, has control of your life.

Deron.
Click to expand...

i am willing to pay for police to at least TRY to keep violent people from hurting me. i am willing to pay for fire protection. i am willing to pay the government to keep kim jong il from nuking the world. why would i not think that was the best organization to trust with my health care? Is it better to trust a for-profit company that has already demonstrated they will do anything for a buck? The only reason we cannot trust the government can be dealt with through campaign finance reform, but I cannot think of any way we could ever trust the insurance companies and drug companies to look out for our best interests when it is my life on the line.

and yes actually i AM nuts. many of you already know this. I share company with people like Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, Jimi Hendrix, Ludwig von Beethoven, Charlie Pride,Tom Waits, Neal Cassady, Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe, Abbie Hoffman, Brian Wilson, Sting (Gordon Sumner),Tim Burton,Francis Ford Coppola, and my personal mentor Jonathan Winters. We are all bipolar, and would you want us any other way?
 
bob, I was responding to cackalacka because he credited the WHO, FDA, etc on our increased life expectancy. Yes, it have nothing to do with American health care system. Nothing. Neither does his statement of increased life expectancy due to these governing bodies. I was merely countering his point.

My point is that increasing the size of government will not help. I will agree with you that drug companies and insurance companies run the health care industry. You must also understand that they also run the government. How do you think the government deregulated medicine and allow these drug companies to charge big bucks for cheap pills? It's has something to do with lobbying. These companies spend lots of money lobbying bills and laws to favor them.

Your solution to our health care problem is ironic. It's like a disease. Our health care problem is the disease and your solution aims to "treat" the symptom. That's the problem with our health care and that's the problem with your solution. Instead of treating the disease, maybe we should focus on the cause. A sick person gets sick because he ingested sick foods. He develops stomach ulcers. He goes to the doctors. Gets treated for the ulcers. He continues to eat sick foods. Rinse and repeat. The cycle continues. He develops more problems. If he simply avoided sick foods, he wouldn't be in this mess!

Most of our health problems are due to our diets and lifestyle. We need to step back and look at the bigger picture. We need to ask ourselves, "hey, why are so many people getting sick? Why are so many people fat? Why do so many people has asthma?" The answer is our environment. We get sick because we are reacting to our environment. Lack of exercise. Chemicals in our foods and water. Smog and dirty air that we breath. Too many people overlook prevention in this health care debate. Fixing our problems now require lots of hard work. I've always lived by the mantra of, "Do it right the first time." If we did things right the first time, we wouldn't be in this mess. I'm not saying people wouldn't get sick but it wouldn't be an issue if we could afford to take care of our sick. We would just do it.
 
set said:
bob, I was responding to cackalacka because he credited the WHO, FDA, etc on our increased life expectancy. Yes, it have nothing to do with American health care system. Nothing. Neither does his statement of increased life expectancy due to these governing bodies. I was merely countering his point.
Click to expand...


you seem to have missed the second part of my proposed solution = campaign finance reform. once we get the insurance companies out of the health care business there will be less reason for them to continue to line the pockets of our politicians, and we will work to enact legislation that puts our representatives back to work passing laws for us instead of spending all their time trying to collect money to get re-elected. Just like when i have a broken leg and a pumping artery in my arm, i fix the arm first. then i use it to fix the leg.

set said:
Your solution to our health care problem is ironic. It's like a disease. Our health care problem is the disease and your solution aims to "treat" the symptom. That's the problem with our health care and that's the problem with your solution. Instead of treating the disease, maybe we should focus on the cause.
Click to expand...

when you have a fever of 105 you treat the fever first because it will kill you. then you go after the cause. the fever is the broken health care system, the cause is influence peddling. first we take steps to keep the fever from killing us then we use the antibiotics of campaign finance reform to root out the festering disease at the root of the problem by taking away the power of the oligarchy to buy our elected officials by limiting all campaign contributions to $10 a person and eliminating all the other shameful waste and abuse we can all see, just like sometimes we have to lance a boil. it hurts but it is the only way to bring the germs out into the light where we can deal with them.

many would say true campaign finance reform is impossible to achieve. i submit that it will be easier than trying to find a way for publicly traded insurance companies to manage the health care system in our best interest.
 
set said:
My point is that increasing the size of government will not help.
Click to expand...

Size of government is sometimes measured by budget. Higher taxes, higher spending = bigger government.
30% of the money we spend on health care right now is spent on paperwork handling the red tape of hundreds of different insurance companies. Other inefficiencies come from underinsured people waiting until they have an emergency to get care, etc.

Switching to a single payer system could actually reduce the size of the US government from what it is today, at least in terms of health care taxes and spending, through increased efficiency. In 2006 the US government paid more than $3000 usd per capita on health care (Medicare, etc). The Canadian government paid about $2500 usd per capita on health care in 2006, but their system is so much more efficent than ours, that $2500 paid for basic care for every Canadian citizen. I already linked to the data source for info in a post above. Bob isn't proposing increasing the size of government. He's proposing a more efficient system.
 
Interesting debates you guys have here. Been following this for a while and i noticed this article today. As usual journalist and internet articles aren't concrete fact sometimes but makes for a good read.

http://www.gizmag.com/over-60-of-all-us-bankruptcies-attributable-to-medical-problems/11895/
 
bobmcree said:
deronmoped said:
Well you pointed out a problem with our current system and that is what I have been trying to get across to everyone. Which is turning more and more control over to other people. As long as we turn the control over more and more of our dollars to other people, weather it be the government, insurance companies... the more they end up with "The Power".
Click to expand...

It is easy to say "there is a problem". It is more difficult to propose a solution. Anyone who believes that people in the US today will suddenly become self-reliant in terms of taking care of their health care needs is smoking something better than i am.

We must take a pragmatic approach if we are to live in a civilized society. Most of us are not willing to watch our fellow citizens die in the gutter or push them over a cliff. Neither, though, are most of us willing to pay for free heart transplants for 85 year old smokers. Once we agree on those two points we can work to find something in between that will work.

People are turning over management of their health care system to the insurance companies, drug companies, and medical care provider organizations. These are for-profit companies, and many answer only to insatiable stockholders whose only concern is the bottom line. This is how we arrived where we are now, and it is not working. Health care costs are strangling our economy and destroying the middle class. The ruling oligarchy is perfectly happy with this, since once the middle class is eliminated they can get back to their public demonstrations of opulence without consequence.

We may not get another chance at this. Even the most apathetic citizen will wake up when their inability to afford health care costs them the life of a child or spouse, or when insurance they thought was protecting them from catastrophic illness refuses to pay for treatment that has been demonstrated to work. Somebody IS going to continue to ration health care. That somebody should not be a for-profit business with the model of denying care to anyone with a pre-existing condition and refusing care to its customers or stalling in the hope the customer dies or at least goes broke and can no longer pay.

Something has to change. Right now is the best chance we have ever had for real reform. We may not get another chance. I am personally not going to let my senators leave on their summer vacation without some real action, even if it means i lay down in front of the senate doors and make them watch the spectacle on the tube.

I was saddened yesterday when none of the people who had registered managed to find me at my card table set up on the edge of the farmer's market. I hope they just did not find me and not that they just didn't follow through. I am grateful to Mitch for his links, so i don't feel the need to add any more links to this post, but i do want everyone to know that there will be a national health care service day on June 27, organized by people like myself and those of you willing to get involved. I have no idea what i will do yet, so i am seeking guidance from Organizing for America and from my neighbors. We elected the president by talking neighbor to neighbor and the organization growing out of that. We can change the health care system the same way. They said we could not elect him. We did. I think he is doing a great job so far when you look at the mess he inherited.

I saw the Newt on the sunday news shows warning that "what they're after is single payer, they want the government to control YOUR health care, and ration it, they want to do away with YOUR private insurance and some bureaucrat will decide who gets treatment". What he does not mention is that "some bureaucrat" is better than the employee of a for-profit insurance company whose main job it is to deny you care.
deronmoped said:
Whoever has control of your money, has control of your life.

Deron.
Click to expand...

i am willing to pay for police to at least TRY to keep violent people from hurting me. i am willing to pay for fire protection. i am willing to pay the government to keep kim jong il from nuking the world. why would i not think that was the best organization to trust with my health care? Is it better to trust a for-profit company that has already demonstrated they will do anything for a buck? The only reason we cannot trust the government can be dealt with through campaign finance reform, but I cannot think of any way we could ever trust the insurance companies and drug companies to look out for our best interests when it is my life on the line.

and yes actually i AM nuts. many of you already know this. I share company with people like Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, Jimi Hendrix, Ludwig von Beethoven, Charlie Pride,Tom Waits, Neal Cassady, Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe, Abbie Hoffman, Brian Wilson, Sting (Gordon Sumner),Tim Burton,Francis Ford Coppola, and my personal mentor Jonathan Winters. We are all bipolar, and would you want us any other way?
Click to expand...

I have been screaming about the solution the whole time. That is everybody being responsible for themselves. We feed, cloth ourselves, put a roof over our heads, provide transportation, entertainment, raise our families... With running every aspect of our own lives day in and day out, all of a sudden, we decide that someone else is going to run our health? The best thing we could do for ourselves is put as much interest into our health care as we do on what TV show we will watch that night. Take the power to decide away from some third party. Put our health care dollars back in our pockets. Get rid of the insurance companies, government... that "say" they will take care of you, better then you could do the job. Yeah right!

And sure you can point to some government services that can plug some holes in the system, but that is not the whole story. Take fire protection. It's a huge expense for the service they provide. We may have a thousand fire stations in San Diego, yet they may put out a thousand fires in a year. What about police protection, what police protection? The police department is a huge revenue source for the city, with protection being less and less of what they are there for. And I can point to how the city can not take care of the simplest of things. The sewers leak, the water lines explode, the streets are turning to dust, the city is trying to avoid bankruptcy, it's just a huge mess. And you want to use the government as a example of what type of health care we would have?

Deron.
 
Take the 30% the paperwork costs.
How much can be cut out?
It all can't be cut out.(unless we pay our own bills maybe)
Maybe HALF?
That's 15%.
How fast are costs going up?
This feat, saving 15%, while impressive, would help lots, but only for a year or 2. Then we are back to the same game.
We need savings that compound,....
 
Matt Gruber said:
Take the 30% the paperwork costs.
How much can be cut out?
It all can't be cut out.(unless we pay our own bills maybe)
Maybe HALF?
That's 15%.
How fast are costs going up?
This feat, saving 15%, while impressive, would help lots, but only for a year or 2. Then we are back to the same game. We need savings that compound,....
Click to expand...

That's just one of the inefficiencies I mentioned. I think people using emergency care facilities as free general practice clinics (and waiting until their minor problems become real emergencies) is a much bigger source of waste. Our system is really, seriously broken compared to any other industrialized nation. Are we really that much sicker than any other country in the world? Or do the other countries just go to the doctor less? Neither is true... so where are all those taxes the US govt is spending going? Why do we get so little for such a big investment of tax dollars? Private insurance and private health care is available in most of these other countries, but their citizens apparently don't feel the need to spend a lot of money on it. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the U.S. is projected to spend over $2.5 trillion on health care in 2009, or $8,160 per U.S. resident. Health spending in 2009 is projected to account for 17.6% of GDP. Why? Insurance company profiteering at the expense of overall system efficiency. We are already spending more tax money on health care than many of the countries below, many of which have universal health care.

Health care spending in USD per capita in 2006
|-Public (tax money)-||-Private (out-of-pocket)-|

|--------------------------||-------------------------------| United States
|--------------------------------------------||---| Luxembourg
|----------------------||----------------| Switzerland
|-------------------------------||------| Norway
|--------------------------||----| Iceland
|--------------------||--------| Canada
|-----------------------||-----| France
|--------------------||--------| Austria
|--------------------||-------| Belgium
|------------------||---------| Netherlands
|----------------------||----| Germany
|----------------------||--| Denmark
|-----------------||-------| Australia
|----------------------||--| Sweden
|-------------------||---| Ireland
|----------------||-----| Average health spending per capita among OECD countries.

The UK, Italy, Japan, Finland, Greece, Spain, and New Zealand are among those OECD countries spending less than the average. The amount of federal money (tax money) the US already spends on health care every year is more than these countries spend in total, public spending and private spending together. We are already paying enough in taxes to cover universal health care. We're just not getting it.

http://www.kff.org/insurance/snapshot/chcm010307oth.cfm

None of the other countries with single payer systems prevent you from buying additional coverage out of pocket if you want it. I think some even let you opt out of paying into the public system if you have private insurance. I'm not saying a single payer system will not have problems of its own. Of course it will. But it would be a damn sight better than what we have now.
 
deronmoped said:
I have been screaming about the solution the whole time. That is everybody being responsible for themselves. We feed, cloth ourselves, put a roof over our heads, provide transportation, entertainment, raise our families... With running every aspect of our own lives day in and day out, all of a sudden, we decide that someone else is going to run our health? The best thing we could do for ourselves is put as much interest into our health care as we do on what TV show we will watch that night. Take the power to decide away from some third party. Put our health care dollars back in our pockets. Get rid of the insurance companies, government... that "say" they will take care of you, better then you could do the job. Yeah right!
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first i apologize for attributing material you quoted improperly to you. it happened only because i was sloppy with the cutting and pasting. i totally agree in a utopian world everyone would take care of themselves, and if their barn burned down their neighbors would help them build a new one with trees from their own farms, and we would educate each others' children etc. I wish we could move to that world this nanosecond, but we didn't; i was watching.

MRI machines were developed buy a bunch of guys in University laboratories, financed by drug companies who wanted to make a profit for their stockholders. I know, i was one of the guys who built the first machines at UCSF and Pfizer financed us at first, then sold us to a smaller company when they decided they could not make enough money on imaging. This part of the system works fine and is capitalism at its best. The problem occurs when we need access to these million dollar machines. The current system lets a for-profit business with stockholders who care about nothing but profit manage our access to these machines. Of course these companies do everything they can to keep us away from these expensive machines even though they know they are the best way to diagnose our problems. Development of new drugs and new ways of caring for disease should be for profit, but we do not need a for-profit business between us and these products.

Change takes time, and our existing health care system has at its core a lot of people making obscene profits by managing delivery of health care to the rest of us. We do not need them. In a government of, by, and for the people we could have our elected representatives in place of these profiteers, and if we do not like the job they are doing we can tell them how to change it or vote them out. This once again assumes we follow health care reform with campaign finance reform. Many people will die waiting for care if we have to do it the other way around, but we will do it one way or the other.

I do not speak for Organizing for America other than to be a volunteer working with them to achieve a bipartisan solution that provides access to affordable health care for every american. In that area i am on board 1000%

A government health plan operating alongside existing private insurance is the only possible way we might get the private insurers to operate in our best interest. The private insurers have a business model based on cherry-picking the healthiest customers and denying the rest, then squirming to find any possible way to keep from paying the people the DID agree to insure should they be so unfortunate as to actually get sick. They then routinely stall and delay care in the hope that these people who have given them their life savings to continue coverage until the savings run out DIE, and they are no longer responsible. Anyone who denies this is happening can email me personally and i will provide examples.

I reiterate my proposal; we have a broken leg that is keeping us from going forward, but we have an artery in our arm that is spurting out our blood and will kill us soon. The artery is the broken health care system, and the broken leg is the broken system that forces our elected representatives to expend more time and energy courting the special interests who finance their re-election campaigns than they do passing the legislation we elected them to do.

You patch the artery first so you do not die. You patch the health care system today so that not another american dies waiting for the insurance company to approve benefits that could have saved them.

After patching the artery you can go back later and refine the repair. At least nobody died waiting to see the doctor. Then you go after the broken leg that caused the injury that is spurting out our life blood - influence peddling. We MUST get the money out of politics by limiting campaign contributions so that the fat cats who run our system now can no longer buy the representatives who claim to be working for us. We cannot make things fair by just taking their money and giving it to someone else, but we can at least make it worthless when it comes to buying the votes of our senators and representatives.

deronmoped said:
And sure you can point to some government services that can plug some holes in the system, but that is not the whole story. Take fire protection. It's a huge expense for the service they provide. We may have a thousand fire stations in San Diego, yet they may put out a thousand fires in a year. What about police protection, what police protection? The police department is a huge revenue source for the city, with protection being less and less of what they are there for. And I can point to how the city can not take care of the simplest of things. The sewers leak, the water lines explode, the streets are turning to dust, the city is trying to avoid bankruptcy, it's just a huge mess. And you want to use the government as a example of what type of health care we would have?
Deron.
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you point to a lot of problems, but no solutions. do you think you would be better off hiring blackwater to do your police protection? i propose a real solution:

1) provide access to basic health care to every american, so we do not die while seeking reform.
2) get the money out of politics through campaign finance reform.
3) get involved in the new representative democracy, and reform every other aspect of government by making the system work for us.

if your solution is do nothing and let lazy people die, how do you propose we deal with their rotting corpses? then how to provide health care to the guys picking up the bodies? what about the plague and other epidemics caused by them when their bodies rot in our drinking water supply? if your solution there is to go live in a cabin in montana with solar cells, what are you going to do when kim jong il sends a nuke your way?

if you have better answers my mind is open.
 
Bob
Sign me up for the obscene profits!
Let's say i'm an investor in Blackrock Muni-bond funds paying 7.2% .
I'd like to make the obscene profits you speak of.
The muni fund is well diversified with over 50 bonds in 20 states. Any one could default without being noticed.
Now, get me a list of a dozen or two public companies, or a even a single health care fund where the DIVIDEND is OBSCENE compared to 7.2%.
Then i will buy, and use the obscene profits to PAY MY HEALTH CARE.
I say you don't know what you are talking about. Prove me wrong. Heck, you won't be able to find a SINGLE public company.
 
Matt,
Why call the extra money profits when the execs can instead fund extravagant "business expenses," and the investors will be happy with 10% returns? Of course that's a small problem compared to the simple waste and inefficiency in our system.

Or do you think our healthcare is twice as good as any other country's? 'Cause we're paying twice as much...
 
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