To call it the American health care system is an oxymoron – there is no “system” to it as a whole. No wonder the House bill is 2,000 pages long. Such a multi-faceted issue is not as simple as whether or not to have a public option.
The shared goal of all our federal legislators for health care reform, as they would tell us, is greater accessibility at lower cost. (I won’t go so far as to say they all agree on “universal” access and affordability. That’s what you and I want, but we don’t get tax-free tips from the health care industry.)
So in those 2,000 pages we see odds and ends of “reform” for who pays, who provides, who insures, what is successful treatment, what’s a fair price, when do you get a subsidy, what does a given service cost, who gets taxed, who’s responsible for supervising, who negotiates, what’s covered, and on and on and on. Reminiscent of herding cats. Where to start?
Americans spend twice as much per capita on health care as the next most expensive country. But we don’t get anywhere near the best care, despite what we pay.
Have you checked the rate-per-hour of a surgeon lately? Thousands! Yet doctors of my acquaintance say they’re barely making it at today’s rates of reimbursement. The cost of their training takes years, decades perhaps, to pay back. Then there’s the cost of all the high tech equipment they need, the medical staff, the liability insurance, the bookkeeping staff. Indeed, some hospitals have pointed out that they have more billing staff per bed than they have nursing staff. Doctors and hospital administrators all live pretty well by my standards, but I will take their word that it’s not like it used to be.
In any case, they pass on to the “payer” the cost of all that. Ultimately, that’s you and me, not them.
No doubt the so-called system today encourages over-testing, over-treating. That’s certainly due in part to their legal liability. Tort reform is an element of reducing the CYA component of health care costs, but it’s not the only fix needed.
So what does either the Senate or House bill do to curtail the CYA practices, and impose industry standards, or “best practices”? Numbers show we over test, and that does NOT improve outcomes. “Evidence-based medicine” requires a payment structure that guides what is seen as potentially helpful and what isn’t. Medicare does it, and it works very well. The docs are relieved of some the legal liability if a government entity decrees a standard that is “evidence-based,” and they follow it. That doesn’t mean they fail to perform tests or treatments they deem necessary for a particular patient. It means they don’t take a shotgun approach when a sighted-rifle will do the job.
Hospitals used to be non-profit. Amazing how the costs of an aspirin and a bandaid provided during your hospital stay have skyrocketed out of control since they became for-profit care providers, isn’t it?
Pharmaceuticals show record profits, but government (Medicare) isn’t allowed to negotiate prices? They can sell their stuff in South America for a fraction of what they sell it to us? How do these bills address this ridiculous situation?
Then there’s the issue of anti-trust exemptions. Insurance companies are allowed to control a market in a specific state. But changing this won’t guarantee more competition; there are different regulations and secured funds requirements in each state; it’s expensive to set up shop in a new state. A few bad customers in a small state (think millions in medical bills for someone with several significant lifelong issues) can kill the profitability of a company with a small market share in that state. Perhaps if they were in every state they could spread the liability around, but surely we can all see that this won’t reduce premiums overnight.
And we come to profits for Insurance Companies. They claim their profits are only 2%. Seems pretty reasonable, doesn’t it? How can we expect them to decrease profits?
I submit that’s creative accounting. That’s what they report to the IRS, not what they report to their shareholders. Wouldn’t a large discrepancy like that raise a few eyebrows if it were offered by a person, not a corporation? Special tax rules for corporations with lots of cash to flash in Washington and throw at campaign offices across America?
And executive salaries are considered expenses, remember? No limits there, of course. That’s just overhead. 30%. Is there any real attempt to limit profits and overhead in the health insurance industry in either bill?
Fiscal conservatives, you should like the idea of letting Bean Counters make the decisions about appropriate care and legitimate overhead -- especially when it’s tax dollars that are paying, like in a “public option.” But that’s not what Blue Dogs and Republicans are jumping on. Truly cutting costs means suggesting that a patient can’t just get every drug and procedure and test they’ve seen on TV. That’s a hard sell to the American public who already have insurance that someone else pays for.
So since we all share the same goals of greater accessibility and lower costs, you might think the Blue Dogs and Republicans would support a plan that gives this highly controlled option not only to Medicaid recipients, but also those too cheap to buy insurance who mess things up for the rest of us. They should get “rationed care” as dictated by the Bean Counters. So that’s where the fiscal conservatives jump in, right? But no, they say forget the public option. Let’s stick with what we’ve got. Gotta save those tax dollars – right? Regardless of the people who pay for that attitude with their health, indeed their very lives. 40,000 die every year from lack of health care coverage and the outrageously high cost of care.
Hate to be a broken record, but the only way to even begin to fix ALL these things is a single-payer system. Truly, a system. Would it be perfect? Of course not. Ask people in countries that have one. But would it cost less? Ask those same people and they’ll give you a resounding “Yes.” Would it improve access to health care? Duh. See previous answer. Would it improve the health of the American people? Just check the statistics that show we rank 37th in the world, behind every country that has a universal single payer system.
But we can’t even consider such a thing. It’s socialism, remember? Best practice, when it comes to health care, is apparently not good business, it’s socialism, according to the Blue Dogs and Republicans. And you know what THAT would mean! Better, faster, cheaper. We can’t have that in America!
* * * * * * * *
Footnote: Then there’s our ol’ pal Joe Lieberman. What I want to know is, where are the protests from Connecticut? 64% of those folks, according to the polls, want at least a public option in the health care reform bill. 64% of the people he represents. And he won’t even let the Senate have an up or down vote on the subject? I should be able to hear the screaming all the way down here in South Carolina. He absolutely does not deserve to caucus with the Democrats, much less be chairman of the Homeland Security committee, or even keep his seat in the Senate. Can you impeach a senator, Connecticut?
JM
Showing posts with label single payer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label single payer. Show all posts
Friday, October 30, 2009
Friday, August 21, 2009
Selling out Grandma
Holy crap!
Can’t people understand that we are already paying more than we should be for health care? The proposed new All-American Plan – as envisioned by our President and many other concerned, caring Americans – isn’t going to cost us any more than we are now paying. It might even cost less. And we’ll get more freedom to choose. More freedom, more choice, more caring. Am I dreaming? Consider …
Cutting overhead from 30% to 3%
Getting it right the first time instead of testing over and over again.
Cutting out the middleman
Negotiating reasonable fees with providers and drug companies
The fundamental principle is keeping all of us healthy, making us well
This is the dream our President has for us. And we can achieve it.
Health care will never be cheap in America. We want the best, and we want access to it at OUR choosing. We want to be responsible for our own choices. But it doesn’t have to cost 16% of our gross domestic product!
Where will we find the money? In our pockets, the same place we do now. And we won’t need any more than we already spend. It will just flow in a different pattern, and encompass all of us.
Our current system amounts to what George Lakoff calls “Private Taxation.” How’s that?
“Insurance companies have the power to tax and they tax the public mightily. When 20 percent to 30 percent of payments do not go to health care, but to denying care and profiting from it, that constitutes a tax on the 96 percent of voters that have health care. But the tax does not go to benefit those who are taxed; it benefits managers and investors. And the people taxed have no representation. Insurance company health care is a huge example of taxation without representation. And you can't vote out the people who have taxed you. The American Plan offers an alternative to private taxation”.
Let’s face it. Everybody needs to access health care in this country. But we pay through the nose for it. Break down where the money comes from now:
1. Insured with individual policies – we pay high, high premiums with high deductibles
2. Insured through employers – back breaking premiums (especially small business), lower pay checks to pay for it
3. Medicare/Medicaid – taxpayers like us already pay
4. Uninsured – providers just hike costs on everyone else to make up for those who can’t pay, and often the patient waits too long because they know they can’t afford it, so they need way more services than if they’d gone to a doctor or clinic at the first sign of the problem, costing even more, which we pay through higher premiums on everyone else
5. Self-insured – pay cash, at much higher prices for services than the insurance companies negotiate (these patients also tend to wait too long to get help because of the cost)
6. Pension coverage – my car costs more so GM can pay benefits to workers who accepted lower wages for years to fund their pension plans and retirement benefits. Now that health care costs have escalated so much GM can’t pay it anymore, they went bankrupt, and my taxes and “cash for clunkers” had to bail them out (George Lakoff suggests we should have made the insurance industry fork over a big chunk of the bail out money since they had a lot of responsibility for it.)
Add up all this money and you’ll find plenty enough to pay for the American Plan of President Obama’s dream. We just have to collect it in one place and apply the principles outlined at the beginning of this article.
Are you worried that a single entity for billing and paying would mean a government takeover of health care? That some government bureaucrat will come between you and your doctor? Rubbish! The American Plan would mean LESS interference than we put up with now. Lakoff again:
“Insurance Companies Govern Your Lives. They have more power over you than even governments have. They make life and death decisions. And they are accountable only to profit, not to citizens.”
“Your pain, their gain” (quoting an anonymous blogger).
With the ideal new American Plan, with a single billing and paying agency, we could achieve all those savings we mentioned earlier, almost immediately. We’d end up paying less for more. Choices would increase dramatically, because no provider would be “out of network”. But even if we do this in baby steps, beginning with providing an American Plan to supplement the existing private plans, we’ll start seeing some savings right away.
Legislators who refuse to even consider trying to use ideas that have worked quite well in other countries just show they care more about their campaign contributors than the health of their constituents. They’re selling out Grandma.
JM
Can’t people understand that we are already paying more than we should be for health care? The proposed new All-American Plan – as envisioned by our President and many other concerned, caring Americans – isn’t going to cost us any more than we are now paying. It might even cost less. And we’ll get more freedom to choose. More freedom, more choice, more caring. Am I dreaming? Consider …
Cutting overhead from 30% to 3%
Getting it right the first time instead of testing over and over again.
Cutting out the middleman
Negotiating reasonable fees with providers and drug companies
The fundamental principle is keeping all of us healthy, making us well
This is the dream our President has for us. And we can achieve it.
Health care will never be cheap in America. We want the best, and we want access to it at OUR choosing. We want to be responsible for our own choices. But it doesn’t have to cost 16% of our gross domestic product!
Where will we find the money? In our pockets, the same place we do now. And we won’t need any more than we already spend. It will just flow in a different pattern, and encompass all of us.
Our current system amounts to what George Lakoff calls “Private Taxation.” How’s that?
“Insurance companies have the power to tax and they tax the public mightily. When 20 percent to 30 percent of payments do not go to health care, but to denying care and profiting from it, that constitutes a tax on the 96 percent of voters that have health care. But the tax does not go to benefit those who are taxed; it benefits managers and investors. And the people taxed have no representation. Insurance company health care is a huge example of taxation without representation. And you can't vote out the people who have taxed you. The American Plan offers an alternative to private taxation”.
Let’s face it. Everybody needs to access health care in this country. But we pay through the nose for it. Break down where the money comes from now:
1. Insured with individual policies – we pay high, high premiums with high deductibles
2. Insured through employers – back breaking premiums (especially small business), lower pay checks to pay for it
3. Medicare/Medicaid – taxpayers like us already pay
4. Uninsured – providers just hike costs on everyone else to make up for those who can’t pay, and often the patient waits too long because they know they can’t afford it, so they need way more services than if they’d gone to a doctor or clinic at the first sign of the problem, costing even more, which we pay through higher premiums on everyone else
5. Self-insured – pay cash, at much higher prices for services than the insurance companies negotiate (these patients also tend to wait too long to get help because of the cost)
6. Pension coverage – my car costs more so GM can pay benefits to workers who accepted lower wages for years to fund their pension plans and retirement benefits. Now that health care costs have escalated so much GM can’t pay it anymore, they went bankrupt, and my taxes and “cash for clunkers” had to bail them out (George Lakoff suggests we should have made the insurance industry fork over a big chunk of the bail out money since they had a lot of responsibility for it.)
Add up all this money and you’ll find plenty enough to pay for the American Plan of President Obama’s dream. We just have to collect it in one place and apply the principles outlined at the beginning of this article.
Are you worried that a single entity for billing and paying would mean a government takeover of health care? That some government bureaucrat will come between you and your doctor? Rubbish! The American Plan would mean LESS interference than we put up with now. Lakoff again:
“Insurance Companies Govern Your Lives. They have more power over you than even governments have. They make life and death decisions. And they are accountable only to profit, not to citizens.”
“Your pain, their gain” (quoting an anonymous blogger).
With the ideal new American Plan, with a single billing and paying agency, we could achieve all those savings we mentioned earlier, almost immediately. We’d end up paying less for more. Choices would increase dramatically, because no provider would be “out of network”. But even if we do this in baby steps, beginning with providing an American Plan to supplement the existing private plans, we’ll start seeing some savings right away.
Legislators who refuse to even consider trying to use ideas that have worked quite well in other countries just show they care more about their campaign contributors than the health of their constituents. They’re selling out Grandma.
JM
Friday, July 17, 2009
Health Care Reform?
2013. No significant cost containment. 10 million still uninsured after 10 years. Tax increase. Growing deficit. And that's not all.
As we've been trying to point out in previous posts, the piece meal approach to reforming Health Care in America may be doomed to failure. Not failure in Congress. Failure in the marketplace. Failure in providing affordable accessible high quality health care for all.
And even worse than the inadequacies of the legislation are the outrageous lies and fearmongering by the Republican opponents, funded and scripted, we suspect, by the health insurance industry.
Where do we start? How about inadequacies of the legislation.
The reform we're likely to see won't provide the public option coverage until 2013. It isn't going to help us, and others with pre-existing conditions and no employer-provided plan, for four years. Guess we'll just have to rely on prayer and luck. Various analysists tell me that's because of the way the Congressional Budget Office calculates things. Let me quote Ezra Klein of the Washington Post:
"The slow start is a way of holding down costs in the 10-year budget window. If the bill begins in 2010, but the subsidies don't kick in until 2013, then that's three years that are under the budget but aren't costing much money. That means the new health-care system can really cost an average of $140 billion each year, as opposed to $100 billion, and that means you can afford a better system. "
Does that make sense to you? All we get from that is this is another political machination with disregard to the impact it will have on the people. We'll pretend to be providing for the people for 10 years for $1trillion, but we'll only really provide it for 7 years for $1trillion, so the amount we can spend each year we actually DO this can go from the stated "average annual cost" of $100billion to $140billion and we can do more with it. Except for the three years we do nothing for people.
Mandated coverage. How can we be forced to get an insurance plan when there's nobody out there right now that will give us a plan we can afford, thanks to pre-existing conditions and age? The public option might help here, but it won't be available for four more years! And when it is, it will be subsidized on a sliding scale. Those of us with middle-class incomes will get screwed again.
Premium costs. Are we reading this correctly? Insurance companies have to take everyone who applies, but they can "adjust" their premiums. They can charge older people twice as much as younger people. If nothing is done to reduce the premiums currently charged, that could mean your adult offspring in their 30s pay $400 per month for insurance, and you in your 50s could pay $800 for the same monthly plan. How is this reform?
Can't these legislators see that all they have to do is take an eraser to the Medicare legislation and eliminate the 65 year age barrier -- make it accessible to everyone -- and we get the reform we need as soon as the President signs it . (OK, we'll give them a few months to hire more people - possibly the insurance company employees who would be out of work, and add more computers, so they can process the billing.)
A single-payer system would save billions of dollars without reducing the quality or accessibility of the care we receive -- arguably, those aspects would actually improve. That's money we, the people, won't have to spend on health care. Same providers, same services, just a different payment system.
What's so scary about this concept?
We'll look at the lies we're hearing in our next post on this. Here's a taste:
*The government will ration health care (like the insurance companies don't now?).
*We'll die standing in line waiting for health care just like in Canada (Are you kidding me? They actually SAY that!).
*Taxes will go up on everyone to pay for this (they may have something there if we don't do more to contain costs).
*Americans are getting cold feet about health care reform (that's completely dependent on who you ask, Dems or Repubs).
Jacque
As we've been trying to point out in previous posts, the piece meal approach to reforming Health Care in America may be doomed to failure. Not failure in Congress. Failure in the marketplace. Failure in providing affordable accessible high quality health care for all.
And even worse than the inadequacies of the legislation are the outrageous lies and fearmongering by the Republican opponents, funded and scripted, we suspect, by the health insurance industry.
Where do we start? How about inadequacies of the legislation.
The reform we're likely to see won't provide the public option coverage until 2013. It isn't going to help us, and others with pre-existing conditions and no employer-provided plan, for four years. Guess we'll just have to rely on prayer and luck. Various analysists tell me that's because of the way the Congressional Budget Office calculates things. Let me quote Ezra Klein of the Washington Post:
"The slow start is a way of holding down costs in the 10-year budget window. If the bill begins in 2010, but the subsidies don't kick in until 2013, then that's three years that are under the budget but aren't costing much money. That means the new health-care system can really cost an average of $140 billion each year, as opposed to $100 billion, and that means you can afford a better system. "
Does that make sense to you? All we get from that is this is another political machination with disregard to the impact it will have on the people. We'll pretend to be providing for the people for 10 years for $1trillion, but we'll only really provide it for 7 years for $1trillion, so the amount we can spend each year we actually DO this can go from the stated "average annual cost" of $100billion to $140billion and we can do more with it. Except for the three years we do nothing for people.
Mandated coverage. How can we be forced to get an insurance plan when there's nobody out there right now that will give us a plan we can afford, thanks to pre-existing conditions and age? The public option might help here, but it won't be available for four more years! And when it is, it will be subsidized on a sliding scale. Those of us with middle-class incomes will get screwed again.
Premium costs. Are we reading this correctly? Insurance companies have to take everyone who applies, but they can "adjust" their premiums. They can charge older people twice as much as younger people. If nothing is done to reduce the premiums currently charged, that could mean your adult offspring in their 30s pay $400 per month for insurance, and you in your 50s could pay $800 for the same monthly plan. How is this reform?
Can't these legislators see that all they have to do is take an eraser to the Medicare legislation and eliminate the 65 year age barrier -- make it accessible to everyone -- and we get the reform we need as soon as the President signs it . (OK, we'll give them a few months to hire more people - possibly the insurance company employees who would be out of work, and add more computers, so they can process the billing.)
A single-payer system would save billions of dollars without reducing the quality or accessibility of the care we receive -- arguably, those aspects would actually improve. That's money we, the people, won't have to spend on health care. Same providers, same services, just a different payment system.
What's so scary about this concept?
We'll look at the lies we're hearing in our next post on this. Here's a taste:
*The government will ration health care (like the insurance companies don't now?).
*We'll die standing in line waiting for health care just like in Canada (Are you kidding me? They actually SAY that!).
*Taxes will go up on everyone to pay for this (they may have something there if we don't do more to contain costs).
*Americans are getting cold feet about health care reform (that's completely dependent on who you ask, Dems or Repubs).
Jacque
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Part II – Socialized Medicine?
I can’t believe how weak the health care reform bill from the House appears to be. For starters, it leaves at least 10 million people uninsured. It has totally ignored the concept of cutting costs by cutting out the billions we spend on billing 1900 different insurance companies.
The well-funded special interests (“stakeholders” is the new politically correct euphemism!) who are working so hard to prevent a single-payer health program for America want you to believe a whole lot of lies and misinformation. “American’s want to preserve their freedom to choose their insurance company.” Ha! We want the freedom to choose our caregivers and treatment, as we discussed in the previous posting.
We want to choose to PREVENT disease, and get insurance coverage for the programs that will help us do so. Very few insurance companies make this a priority. We had to fight for years to get mammograms and colonoscopies covered. Birth control isn’t covered – but Viagra is!
With a single payer system, would you have to wait forever for appointments and elective surgery? If you check the COMPLETE statistics (not the cherry-picked isolated cases) from countries like Canada, Australia, France, Denmark, Germany and others, you’ll see: absolutely not. At least not more than you already do. Try to get an ablation on your atrial fibrillating heart right now – you’re looking at four to six months here in South Carolina. Need your knees replaced by the orthopedics specialist you believe to be the best? Plan on several months on the waiting list. Will that get better with a single-payer system? No guarantees, but it won’t get worse. And if you show up in an emergency room with severe stomach pain, you won’t be waiting in line behind all those uninsured folks who have only the emergency room to seek treatment for their kid’s ear ache (which is probably much worse than it would have been if they’d seen a family physician two weeks ago when it started, but they couldn’t because they couldn’t afford it!).
What would we give up with a single payer system? Lots of jobs in the insurance industry. Lots and lots. High paying jobs. Really high paying jobs for the executives. Nearly 2 Billion for one United Health Care CEO. We won’t have to pay for those industry bureaucrats anymore.
Lots of jobs in the lobbying industry. High paying jobs. People who put money in the campaign chests of our representatives. Millions and millions of dollars. We won’t have to pay for that anymore.
That might upset those Senators and Congresspersons who currently take millions and millions from those lobbyists. Please see the website cited in the last posting to see some of the Democrats who answer this description. (http://vote.wewantthepublicoption.com)
In a single payer system, all of our premiums will go to a system that is modeled after Medicare. It works. Medicare only uses 3% of its budget for administration. The typical health insurance company spends about 33% of your premium for administration. I’m sure your imagination will suggest some of the ways they waste that money on unnecessary expenses, like office space in high-priced neighborhoods, leather desk chairs, “customer service” representatives whose job it is to find a way to deny a claim, corporate jets for the CEOs, annual meetings in Cancun for the senior managers, etc., etc.
How would we pay for it? Opponents are telling you we can’t afford this “socialized medicine” – but WE ALREADY CAN’T AFFORD THE SYSTEM WE HAVE! In fact, with a single-payer system, we can identify millions – even billions - of dollars of savings over what Americans currently pay (about $500 Billion per year). And the single-payer route is the only version of health care reform that will certainly provide those enormous cost reductions. The money we DON’T pay to health insurance companies will allow us to pay for the public system and put the savings back in our pockets.
Oh, and another thing: the single-payer would be able to bargain for lower prescription drug prices, for everyone. They’d have high volume purchasing power. So your Aunt Hattie wouldn’t have to choose between her heart medicine and groceries.
Socialized medicine indeed. How about medicine whose priority is taking care of the members of our society, not putting money in the pockets of high society?
I’ll put my money into a single-payer system any day. Suppose half of the uninsured gave $1 each to help fund primary opponents of Democrats who backed away from securing good health care for all. $23 million could make a difference, I’m guessing.
Do you think they’d listen to $23 million? Disgusting, isn’t it?
Jacque
The well-funded special interests (“stakeholders” is the new politically correct euphemism!) who are working so hard to prevent a single-payer health program for America want you to believe a whole lot of lies and misinformation. “American’s want to preserve their freedom to choose their insurance company.” Ha! We want the freedom to choose our caregivers and treatment, as we discussed in the previous posting.
We want to choose to PREVENT disease, and get insurance coverage for the programs that will help us do so. Very few insurance companies make this a priority. We had to fight for years to get mammograms and colonoscopies covered. Birth control isn’t covered – but Viagra is!
With a single payer system, would you have to wait forever for appointments and elective surgery? If you check the COMPLETE statistics (not the cherry-picked isolated cases) from countries like Canada, Australia, France, Denmark, Germany and others, you’ll see: absolutely not. At least not more than you already do. Try to get an ablation on your atrial fibrillating heart right now – you’re looking at four to six months here in South Carolina. Need your knees replaced by the orthopedics specialist you believe to be the best? Plan on several months on the waiting list. Will that get better with a single-payer system? No guarantees, but it won’t get worse. And if you show up in an emergency room with severe stomach pain, you won’t be waiting in line behind all those uninsured folks who have only the emergency room to seek treatment for their kid’s ear ache (which is probably much worse than it would have been if they’d seen a family physician two weeks ago when it started, but they couldn’t because they couldn’t afford it!).
What would we give up with a single payer system? Lots of jobs in the insurance industry. Lots and lots. High paying jobs. Really high paying jobs for the executives. Nearly 2 Billion for one United Health Care CEO. We won’t have to pay for those industry bureaucrats anymore.
Lots of jobs in the lobbying industry. High paying jobs. People who put money in the campaign chests of our representatives. Millions and millions of dollars. We won’t have to pay for that anymore.
That might upset those Senators and Congresspersons who currently take millions and millions from those lobbyists. Please see the website cited in the last posting to see some of the Democrats who answer this description. (http://vote.wewantthepublicoption.com)
In a single payer system, all of our premiums will go to a system that is modeled after Medicare. It works. Medicare only uses 3% of its budget for administration. The typical health insurance company spends about 33% of your premium for administration. I’m sure your imagination will suggest some of the ways they waste that money on unnecessary expenses, like office space in high-priced neighborhoods, leather desk chairs, “customer service” representatives whose job it is to find a way to deny a claim, corporate jets for the CEOs, annual meetings in Cancun for the senior managers, etc., etc.
How would we pay for it? Opponents are telling you we can’t afford this “socialized medicine” – but WE ALREADY CAN’T AFFORD THE SYSTEM WE HAVE! In fact, with a single-payer system, we can identify millions – even billions - of dollars of savings over what Americans currently pay (about $500 Billion per year). And the single-payer route is the only version of health care reform that will certainly provide those enormous cost reductions. The money we DON’T pay to health insurance companies will allow us to pay for the public system and put the savings back in our pockets.
Oh, and another thing: the single-payer would be able to bargain for lower prescription drug prices, for everyone. They’d have high volume purchasing power. So your Aunt Hattie wouldn’t have to choose between her heart medicine and groceries.
Socialized medicine indeed. How about medicine whose priority is taking care of the members of our society, not putting money in the pockets of high society?
I’ll put my money into a single-payer system any day. Suppose half of the uninsured gave $1 each to help fund primary opponents of Democrats who backed away from securing good health care for all. $23 million could make a difference, I’m guessing.
Do you think they’d listen to $23 million? Disgusting, isn’t it?
Jacque
Monday, July 13, 2009
Socialized Medicine?
Part I - Socialized Medicine?
WE can’t overstate how tired we are of hearing complaints about health care reform that use the jingoistic phrase “socialized medicine” -- as if the changes we might see would amount to living in a totalitarian, communist state! So let’s start from this point: this is not a slippery slope to communism. The rest of the industrialized world’s democracies have already discovered that people have an absolutely essential need, and a right, to good health care, just like they need highways, fire departments, sewage systems, and public education.
In fact, the single-payer proposals floating around out there are so American. They all involve the patient freedoms so beloved by us. What we want is the freedom to choose our caregivers; what labs we go to for mammograms or blood work; whether we want to pay a little extra for a private room in the hospital; and where we’ll fill our prescriptions (as determined by our doctors, not our insurance companies!).
The health industry lobbies would have us believe that a single-payer system would put a “bureaucrat” between us and our doctors. That’s ridiculous! A single-payer system would actually LIBERATE many of us who are now tied to “networks” of “preferred providers.” Ask your friends how many of them have had to switch doctors because their health insurance carrier changed networks. You’ll also find many who ended up paying extra for lab work because some insurance company drone got between them and a lab that used to be IN NETWORK without bothering to adequately inform them of the change -- BEFORE they were sent for doctor ordered blood work!
Doctors won’t work for the government. They’ll be free to work for YOU! All that changes is how they get paid. Instead of having 10 billing clerks to figure out the complexities and dodges of 1900 different payers, they’ll need 1 to send the paperwork to a single payer.
Do you work for a company that provides health insurance? Lucky you. But what if you don’t get coverage for the treatments or procedures or prescriptions your doctor thinks you need? What choice do you have? Virtually none! You can opt out of the company plan, but you won’t get a raise with the company’s savings, to help you pay for a private plan. Besides which, a private plan with reasonable coverage would cost you big bucks, especially if you arrive with a pre-existing condition -- which they probably won’t cover.
A single-payer plan also won’t exclude coverage for mental health, dental or vision care.
The hospitals won’t be controlled by the government either. They, too, would experience tremendous savings in the outrageously high cost they now have in their billing departments. That money could be spent on more nurses and aides on inpatient floors; more outpatient care for follow up visits; or extending your stay enough to make sure your stitches are healing, your pacemaker is working, or your baby isn’t jaundiced.
There’s more to this story… the lies you’re being fed about waiting too long for treatment, the lies about how we’ll need a gigantic tax increase to pay for this… we’ll take on those issues in the next posting. For now, listen to what Congressman (and Majority Whip) Jim Clyburn has to say about the political realities of this urgent and necessary reform process (click the video below, then come back to our blog):
To help influence those reluctant Democrats, check out this website:
http://vote.wewantthepublicoption.com/
Jacque
WE can’t overstate how tired we are of hearing complaints about health care reform that use the jingoistic phrase “socialized medicine” -- as if the changes we might see would amount to living in a totalitarian, communist state! So let’s start from this point: this is not a slippery slope to communism. The rest of the industrialized world’s democracies have already discovered that people have an absolutely essential need, and a right, to good health care, just like they need highways, fire departments, sewage systems, and public education.
In fact, the single-payer proposals floating around out there are so American. They all involve the patient freedoms so beloved by us. What we want is the freedom to choose our caregivers; what labs we go to for mammograms or blood work; whether we want to pay a little extra for a private room in the hospital; and where we’ll fill our prescriptions (as determined by our doctors, not our insurance companies!).
The health industry lobbies would have us believe that a single-payer system would put a “bureaucrat” between us and our doctors. That’s ridiculous! A single-payer system would actually LIBERATE many of us who are now tied to “networks” of “preferred providers.” Ask your friends how many of them have had to switch doctors because their health insurance carrier changed networks. You’ll also find many who ended up paying extra for lab work because some insurance company drone got between them and a lab that used to be IN NETWORK without bothering to adequately inform them of the change -- BEFORE they were sent for doctor ordered blood work!
Doctors won’t work for the government. They’ll be free to work for YOU! All that changes is how they get paid. Instead of having 10 billing clerks to figure out the complexities and dodges of 1900 different payers, they’ll need 1 to send the paperwork to a single payer.
Do you work for a company that provides health insurance? Lucky you. But what if you don’t get coverage for the treatments or procedures or prescriptions your doctor thinks you need? What choice do you have? Virtually none! You can opt out of the company plan, but you won’t get a raise with the company’s savings, to help you pay for a private plan. Besides which, a private plan with reasonable coverage would cost you big bucks, especially if you arrive with a pre-existing condition -- which they probably won’t cover.
A single-payer plan also won’t exclude coverage for mental health, dental or vision care.
The hospitals won’t be controlled by the government either. They, too, would experience tremendous savings in the outrageously high cost they now have in their billing departments. That money could be spent on more nurses and aides on inpatient floors; more outpatient care for follow up visits; or extending your stay enough to make sure your stitches are healing, your pacemaker is working, or your baby isn’t jaundiced.
There’s more to this story… the lies you’re being fed about waiting too long for treatment, the lies about how we’ll need a gigantic tax increase to pay for this… we’ll take on those issues in the next posting. For now, listen to what Congressman (and Majority Whip) Jim Clyburn has to say about the political realities of this urgent and necessary reform process (click the video below, then come back to our blog):
To help influence those reluctant Democrats, check out this website:
http://vote.wewantthepublicoption.com/
Jacque
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