“We have the best government money can buy”

Unfortunately for the us, when he came up with this truism it was aimed a rich individuals. We now live in the age of the mega-corporations. Big businesses now make up nearly 1/2 of the largest financial entities in the world. Many are much larger than most countries. Against that background humans can no longer compete. Face it America, we really do have the best government money can buy, it is just that WE have been outbid.

pharmacy…

pharm…

I forgot to include children, since they’re mostly covered under CHIP, but you point on the statistics is a valid one. But that’s not the true point. The problem is a distorted number is being used to sway a problem to a government solution. If they said 15 million would people have a different perspective on the problem?

Everything in your 50K scenarios lack one thing. Responsibility for your own actions and choices you make. “Maybe exorbitant credit card bills after your provider randomly jacked up your interest rate for no reason”, there’s a funny one. Again an irresponsible choice to attain too much debt. And it’s not random; many factors affect that rate. Don’t like the rate, choose a different credit company.

“Often it can be difficult to take the time to research when you are working several jobs doing all you can to maintain basic survival.” Yet another pathetic excuse. I’m sure they know who won on American Idol.

I hate to be hard on the “have-nots”, but I feel it’s the best way to push people as it did me. Just in the same way we want to give everything to our children but take a tough heartbreaking decision to resist see them break through the challenges in life.

The problem I’ve learned is making decisions purely from the heart tends to make you blind to understanding the long term costs. One can see the external and social costs to a welfare system. The trick is providing the right assistance at the right time. As long as politics are intertwined with the government, it will be impossible to achieve in the public sector.

FYI, “Or they had coverage and were dropped once they manifested a sickness dire enough”, is an illegal action, unless you chose to drop coverage. This is where I believe we need to get insurance out of employer’s hands. The law to protect the insured is pointless if the person chooses to change jobs, thus has to re-join another insurance company skirting this protection.

“It really ought to be a moral outrage that a country as rich as the United States does not provide all of its citizens minimal basic health care.” Then go help someone your self. I do. I work with the American Cancer Society. Just don’t be stealing money out of my pocket with no control to whom I think should get the health care. That’s my moral outrage. I’m happy to help, just let me choose where I feel it will best help. It is my money after all.

I’d rather have several “rich insurance giants” with incentive to be efficient, profitable, and competitive (and employs millions; and pays billions in taxes) than one “behemoth barely-accountable government”.

“What can’t work is a system governed and ruled by for profit…” , you’re essentially stating capitalism does not work?

I’ll rephrase that last statement….If we allow the government to run health care, we’re going to be screwed and we’ll all end up hanging our heads in shame.

We need instead, is private care reform.

I wonder how it is that you add 8, 11, and 13 and subtract from 43-46 and get 5-10???

Really I’ve seen this kind of numerical breakdown before in the press and on right wing blogs and it’s a terribly distorted piece of propaganda even when the numbers do kinda sorta look like they add up.

The most obvious reason why it’s a distortion is that not all of the categories listed are never mutually exclusive. Nor are they presented as such in the reports used to source them. It’s ENTIRELY possible for a non-citizen to be making more than 50K a year for example. So it’s a misuse of statistics right there. If you were trying to be minimally honest, just based on the numbers you’ve given, you should have said “more than 11-14 million” not 5-10.

Speaking of distortions. It’s also important to note that a non-citizen is NOT the same thing as an illegal immigrant no matter how often right wing pundits want to equate the two terms. There are many people residing in the United States who are here temporarily or are working toward citizenship and are here perfectly legally.

Even if your basic arithmetic and definitions were correct, “true need of care” is obviously something you are defining in your own arbitrary way. IMO a deathly sick 2 year old whose parents carried them over the border as a baby and is thus technically an “illegal immigrant” but who doesn’t have health care absolutely IS in “true need” of care. As are other sick non-citizens be they illegal or not.

Of course we’re not even talking about care here at all, but insurance. My understanding of insurance is that it is most effective the more people are in the system. This is especially true of health insurance where diseases and conditions treated as early as possible are far cheaper for the system as a whole and prevention is the best and cheapest option of all. The emergency room is the LAST place we want to be treating people regardless of their insurance status.

Non-citizens, people who spend their money poorly, and lazy people all still DO get sick and they DO get care. It’s just that if and when they can’t afford to pay for it, they just get it at OUR (tax-payer) expense. And when they aren’t insured, they usually hold off until the last and worst possible moment when it costs us the most.

What would you do about the non-citizens rather than insuring them I wonder? Ship all 8 million of them back to their countries of origin? That’s actually pretty damned expensive you know especially since you basically have to go home by home to find these reluctant deportees. You probably would have to remove a number of them by force. And good luck keeping the general populace under control if the government tries that.

Or maybe you just think we should deny them treatment if they are not citizens and just let them stay sick and the worst of them just die on the street? I admit that *would* highly discourage illegal immigration (or ANY immigration) but it would just result in making the United States have not just one of the most costly and ineffectual medical systems in the industrialized world but also probably one of THE most *inhumane* systems. I for one think such a system would be a moral atrocity. Far wiser and more humane to spend more up front to extend universal coverage to everyone so that whenever anyone is treated, it is *paid* for.

The 50K income thing is also rather arbitrary. I realize the census statistics use that number as a categorical cut off but it’s still an arbitrary number. There’s hardly a guarantee that because you happen to make 50K that you should always be able to afford health insurance or health care. If you are trying to support 4 kids and were tricked into buying an overly expensive mortgage by greedy bankers that you are about to be foreclosed on, then maybe it’s not so easy to afford insurance eh? In fact maybe you also have educational loans to pay for for yourself and your kids, maybe paying for pre-school for your youngest kids, maybe child support payments for your illegitimate kids, maybe car loans, maybe exorbitant credit card bills after your provider randomly jacked up your interest rate for no reason, maybe aging parents or grandparents you are taking care of, maybe EXISTING expensive medical bills from before you had insurance, maybe an expensive drug habit, maybe you just paid for a wedding, etc. etc. etc.

Now if you were saying 50 Million a year maybe I’d say you have a point. Everyone with a salary over that really SHOULD be able to afford insurance. But just because you make over 50K doesn’t mean you can’t have a hard life.

Remember costs of livings are different around the country too. In some places surviving on 50K would be easy in other places it’s nearly impossible.

It’s also entirely possible that you just GOT that job that pays over 50K. Statistically you look the same as someone who has been working at that salary for 30 years. If you’ve only just started is it so unreasonable to think that given all your other expenses health insurance might be low on your agenda? And if you don’t know if or how long you’re going to be able to keep that job, maybe you make a judgment call to save your money rather than waste it on expensive premiums. Can you really blame someone for making a decision like that without knowing anything about their life or their situation?

All that’s ASSUMING if you make >50K you can even find someone who can cover you if you wanted to. That’s hardly a sure thing. Many of those making over 50K would love to have insurance but can’t get covered because of pre-existing conditions. Or they had coverage and were dropped once they manifested a sickness dire enough that they might actually NEED their insurance. A lot of insurance companies do that.

Lastly the “too lazy” category seems like a rather arrogant characterization. I mean, to put all the blame on the people who aren’t in government funded programs when they could be seems like a really bad way of looking at it. It’s not necessarily their FAULT they didn’t know. Often it can be difficult to take the time to research when you are working several jobs doing all you can to maintain basic survival. A large chunk of the population in the United States doesn’t even have access to the internet at home let alone broadband or cable television for that matter. Why should they know? Should the knowledge of such programs have magically floated into their heads?

Anyway, the fact that there are millions of people who qualify for coverage but AREN’T being covered is not IMO an argument against reforming the health insurance system. It’s an argument FOR reforming the system. Seriously, that’s a travesty in and of itself. It tells me we need MORE money for outreach to these people, or some other mechanism like an individual mandate so that we can be assured that they will be covered by whatever systems they qualify for.

And none of this even touches on the very large barely reported numbers of individuals and families in the United States who are UNDER INSURED. People who technically fall into the census bureaus insured numbers. People who are just a single accident away from lost insurance and then financial ruin. People who purposefully go without needed treatment because of the extreme costs to them they can’t afford EVEN THOUGH they have insurance. And people who only have health insurance for part of the year. There are millions of such people.

It’s absurd to try to downplay the problems in our medical system in attempt to discourage a public option. Anyone with any real experience dealing with any of these problems knows the system here is atrocious and desperately in need of reform. You need to only go to some of the poorest neighborhoods in the country to see people as desperately in need of care as people from some of the poorest third world countries. It’s insulting to suggest that these people are too lazy or dumb to get their proper insurance or just don’t deserve it because they’re “evil” illegals.

It really ought to be a moral outrage that a country as rich as the United States does not provide all of its citizens minimal basic health care. And it’s horrifying to hear people speak as if that’s okay or as if keeping a few rich insurance giants in business were somehow more important than the health and well being of millions of uninsured children.

I don’t personally really care how we reform health care. A public option system could work if we do it right. A heavily regulated private system could work. An individual mandate system could work. A single payer system could work (and is in my opinion probably the most likely to work).

What can’t work is a system governed and ruled by for profit insurance companies who purposefully look for ways to exclude in order to increase their profit margins. We’ve tried that. It’s an abject failure.

The fact is if we don’t come up with a MUCH better system soon, we’re going to be screwed and we’ll all end up hanging our heads in shame.

What should be looked at is mortality rates for just those with ailments like cancer. You’ll start to see US on top of several charts. There are other unmeasurable items like suffering and indirect mortality of waiting. Here’s a good article on the waits in Canada. http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2007/10/15/waittimes-fraser.html

So instead of talking about what all does not work or work well, including current system, how about what does work. How about eliminating 3rd party company insurance? Remove tax deductions from companies and provide them to individuals. Loosen up strict state package requirements and provide more ala carte packages available US wide. And promote more charities to cover the gaps allowing the people to choose who most needs the assistance.

Also, prices of medical care have grown the slowest (and sometimes dropped) where only out-of-pocket services are done. Take a look at Lasik prices over the years.

I can understand basic core emergency care fitting the model, but since the uninsured already get this for free, as hospitals are required to provide the service, it’s hardly rationing. And for people to demand free universal health care is the purest sense of greed.

And another thing, I get tired of the “46 million” or in this case “43 million”. One can look at http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/hlthins/hlthins.html
and see 8 million as non-citizen (aka illegal immigrants), 11 million making over 50K, thus choosing not to have coverage, instead a new car. 13 million already qualifying for government insurance but too lazy to do it. It leaves about 5-10 million with true need of care, which is where the focus should be. And where may charities already focus on.

Yes, those Veteran’s hospitals have been passing sanitary needs quite well. http://www.everydayhealth.com/blog/zimney-health-and-medical-news-you-can-use/va-hospital-problems/

With the exception of vaccinations and diseases, private care does well on the others; it’s just that people tend to ignore the healthy lifestyle. A choice they make. I don’t think the government will change that unless they take that choice, aka freedom, from them.

I’m game to try it out though.
Predictions:
Stage 1: universal care
Stage 2: over budgeted, overuse of services
Stage 3: cut back of payment of services
Stage 4: Reduction of doctors and nurses
Stage 5: Rationing of care, long waits, out lash from citizens
Stage 6: Cut back of available services, supplemental private insurance
Stage 7: virtual bankruptcy of universal care
Stage 8: Me saying “I told you so”
Stage 9: Back to where we are are now.