Healthcare Reform

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Corth
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Re: Healthcare Reform

Postby Corth » Wed Mar 24, 2010 4:46 am

Well that's kind of the problem Daz. You shift some cost here, a little there. Try and come up with some reasons to incentivize people to buy the healthcare. It's all very arbitrary. Sure you can fine tune it.. try and make it work. And to some extent it will work. But when you fuck with the market in this way, the unintended consequences will always bite you in the ass. You tax the rich too much to pay for the poor, the rich leave (and take jobs, assets, and capital away). You tax the middle class enough, you make everyone poor. You can't really tax the poor very much. Maybe you print money which is a hidden tax on people with savings. So maybe we end up having great healthcare, and everything else sucks.

I'll tell you what.. it seems obvious to me that something needed to be done with healthcare. The status quo definitely was not working. I just think perhaps the right thing to do would have been to deregulate the whole fucking thing and screw the lawyers with some real tort reform. Let the doctors get back to making medical decisions based on what is needed rather than what covers their ass. Let competition determine the number of healthcare providers and their suitable compensation. But I'm certainly in the minority on this one.

This is what I think will happen. The current system will be a failure. It is DESIGNED to be a failure. I think the democrats and the republicans BOTH want it to fail. Then the next step is how you react to the failure. Democrats will be saying it failed because they weren't able to create a universal single payer system which is what they wanted in the first place. Republicans will revert to their talking points on socialism and argue for dergegulation (not repeal, as once you have an entitlement like this in place, similar to social security, medicare etc, you CAN'T get rid of it). Somehow or other it will get dealt with.
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Re: Healthcare Reform

Postby Corth » Wed Mar 24, 2010 4:50 am

Nobody manipulating the system will get sympathy from you?

The system is not manipulatable. It is what it is. It's kind of like the difference between tax evasion and tax avoidance. Tax evasion means that in order to save money on tax you didn't follow the law, thus you goto jail. Tax avoidance means that in order to save money on taxes you made intelligent decisions in such a manner as to reduce your tax liability. You get a pat on the back.

Ok so some of the lower income people get a free ride. They can choose between paying 2% of their already low income as a tax (and buy insurance once they get sick), or buy health insurance and enjoy a tax credit paid for by the middle class. err 'rich'. The first way the insurance company gets fucked. The second way the 'rich' gets fucked. But how could we ask this low income person not to choose in his best interest? I respect people that follow the law and do what is right for themselves. Ultimately, our hypothetical low income guy will choose the option that costs him the least amount of money. Good for him.
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Re: Healthcare Reform

Postby Daz » Wed Mar 24, 2010 4:53 am

i do not believe it is going to be a failure, but i think rather that the health care provider industry may collapse as they attempt to fail in hopes of a bailout or some sympathy that they might dellusionally think is coming their way from the public sector.

as for taxing the rich too much....a .9 percent (less than ONE percent) increase is hardly a massive travesty of taxation. i can tell you that every middle class friend i have with a child, wife, job, and a home will tell you that he would GLADLY pay another one percent for the comfort of knowing that if something happens to him or his child that his life will not come to a financial end because the imaginary coverage he has decides that they are backing out when he gets sick.


find me a middle class american who doesn't think that the health of his child is worth less than a one percent increase in his taxes, and you'll get me willing to consider that this is a 'burden' on taxpayers.
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Re: Healthcare Reform

Postby Corth » Wed Mar 24, 2010 4:55 am

You are incredibly deluded if you think this is going to cost the middle class .9% of their income. Again - no free lunch. Someone is paying for this, and we can only begin to imagine the unintended consequences of that to all of us (including said middle class).
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Re: Healthcare Reform

Postby Daz » Wed Mar 24, 2010 4:58 am

Corth wrote:Nobody manipulating the system will get sympathy from you?

The system is not manipulatable. It is what it is. It's kind of like the difference between tax evasion and tax avoidance. Tax evasion means that in order to save money on tax you didn't follow the law, thus you goto jail. Tax avoidance means that in order to save money on taxes you made intelligent decisions in such a manner as to reduce your tax liability. You get a pat on the back.

Ok so some of the lower income people get a free ride. They can choose between paying 2% of their already low income as a tax (and buy insurance once they get sick), or buy health insurance and enjoy a tax credit paid for by the middle class. err 'rich'. The first way the insurance company gets fucked. The second way the 'rich' gets fucked. But how could we ask this low income person not to choose in his best interest? I respect people that follow the law and do what is right for themselves. Ultimately, our hypothetical low income guy will choose the option that costs him the least amount of money. Good for him.


i dont know if you answered my question in a way that i don't see, but i'll ask again, and i'm not trying to be a dick, but i really want to know - how are these lower income people not already accounted for in the form of either medicare or private credits if their employers can't provide for them?

and how do the 'rich' feel about having the burden of taking care of 40 million uninsured americans taken off their shoulders?

in every scenario i look at, the burden of cost falls onto the health care providers and it is their job to either find a way to reduce their overhead/wasteful spending/inflated costs or be replaced by a newer, working model.
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Re: Healthcare Reform

Postby Daz » Wed Mar 24, 2010 4:59 am

Corth wrote:You are incredibly deluded if you think this is going to cost the middle class .9% of their income. Again - no free lunch. Someone is paying for this, and we can only begin to imagine the unintended consequences of that to all of us (including said middle class).



i didnt say it would cost them - i said most of us would pay it, and consider it a fair deal - an increase of .9% in exchange for security that you would actually get the coverage you are paying for.
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Re: Healthcare Reform

Postby Corth » Wed Mar 24, 2010 5:01 am

Not being much of an expert on this issue, I would be interested in any theories on why healthcare only started to become a problem in the last 15-20 years or so. It seems like people used to have no problem with their healthcare costs. I think maybe people just have less money and more debt these days. Probably itself an unintended consequence of the government fucking with the free market too much. Looking at it that way, healthcare reform is almost like an overmedicated patient getting a new perscription.
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Re: Healthcare Reform

Postby Daz » Wed Mar 24, 2010 5:06 am

or maybe its because the people running health care coverage have gotten progressively greedier - dipping their fingers into the cookie jar more and more. i'd like to see a chart showing the frequency of coverage denial and claim rejections for that period. my suspicion is that the answer to your question would probably be found therein, i would also suspect that you'd have to break someone's leg to get those companies to put that data online.


edit: from what I can find, sometime in the 90's Health Advisory Panels brought it to the attention of the people running health care services that the most effective way to increase profit margins was to implement a denial-of-care agenda and they started to hire people for the specific purpose of going through accounts and claims for the sole purpose of denying that coverage, thus saving the providers large amounts of money by not paying out expensive claims. as they started to realize greater and greater profits from this tactic, they hired more and more people to dig deeper and find more exclusions. For some reason no one bothered to say 'I wonder how the public is going to react as more and more people are thrown under the bus to finance your private jets and island vacations?'

There is actually a rather tragic publication online that talks about how to determine the most efficient way to measure denial of care strategies and formulate the maximum profit. It seems to be based on denial rate versus recovery rate. Each hospital has a ranking assigned to it by health care providers based on how much money they actually 'recover' for patients.

So if one hospital is denying 20% of all claims, and allowing only 9% recovery - that hospital's 'value' is measured at 11% of the value of all claims. Another hospital may only deny 15% of claims, and would at first look seem like the more upstanding provider, but if they only have a 3% recovery score than their final value to the health care industry would be 12%, a better deal - in addition to the fact that they get to brag that there is a 5% denial rate difference for their location.
Last edited by Daz on Wed Mar 24, 2010 5:18 am, edited 1 time in total.
Corth
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Re: Healthcare Reform

Postby Corth » Wed Mar 24, 2010 5:08 am

I really don't know. The way I hear the old time doctors describe it, back in the day you came in for your appointment, and you brought cash. But really I don't know. I'm sure there was insurance too. The whole industry kind of changed early in the Clinton presidency in anticipation of healthcare reform that never happened.
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Re: Healthcare Reform

Postby Corth » Wed Mar 24, 2010 5:09 am

Hey, this thread would be an excellent opportunity for Cyric to break his self-imposed exile! Would love to see some docs express their opinion. I think there are a couple of others as well.
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Re: Healthcare Reform

Postby Daz » Wed Mar 24, 2010 5:28 am

you've heard the audio tapes from the presidential meetings leading up to the public announcement of the private health care industry right?

i hate using michael moore's information, but you can hear for yourself here.

basically from the very beginning the health care industry was created on the principle that the best way to maintain profitability was to rely on a denial of care strategy, the reason it has become more noticeable to you in the last 15-20 years would probably be a combination of a - increased greed and shareholder demand for higher profits, and b - with the growth of the internet as way to distribute information its much harder to bury that coverage when its on a google RSS news feed.
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Re: Healthcare Reform

Postby Corth » Wed Mar 24, 2010 5:38 am

Denial of claims from an existing policy wasn't the big issue as far as I can tell. The bigger concern is that people don't have policies at all.
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Re: Healthcare Reform

Postby Daz » Wed Mar 24, 2010 6:02 am

i think denial of claims plus lack of coverage combined to create the very hostile public sentiment in regards to their industry as a whole
teflor the ranger
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Re: Healthcare Reform

Postby teflor the ranger » Wed Mar 24, 2010 2:00 pm

Corth wrote:Not being much of an expert on this issue, I would be interested in any theories on why healthcare only started to become a problem in the last 15-20 years or so. It seems like people used to have no problem with their healthcare costs. I think maybe people just have less money and more debt these days. Probably itself an unintended consequence of the government fucking with the free market too much. Looking at it that way, healthcare reform is almost like an overmedicated patient getting a new perscription.


The Rising Cost of Healthcare:

Detection and Treatment Methods of the 1900's:

Turn and Cough
Antibiotic!
Gun.

Detection and Treatment Methods of the 1960's:

Touch the Tumor, Feel the Tumor, You probably have cancer, no there's nothing that can be done.
Cut'em open and take it out?
Antibiotic(s)!
X-rays
Gun.

Detection and Treatment Methods of Today:

5 minute chemical tests and protein detection kits: $2,000
Digitized medical records: $400 per person
MRI, CT, Ultrasound, PET, Thermal Mapping, SPECT: A$tronomical
Antibiotics, antivirals, beta-blockers, calcium channel blockers, angiosin II receptor blockers, artificial insulin replacement, Ritalin, SSRIs, your mom: $Platinum card members only please.
Gun: now used to hold to the heads of another family struggling to feed mouths and pay the bills to pay for your treatment.
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Re: Healthcare Reform

Postby Sarvis » Wed Mar 24, 2010 2:12 pm

Corth wrote:Not being much of an expert on this issue, I would be interested in any theories on why healthcare only started to become a problem in the last 15-20 years or so. It seems like people used to have no problem with their healthcare costs. I think maybe people just have less money and more debt these days. Probably itself an unintended consequence of the government fucking with the free market too much. Looking at it that way, healthcare reform is almost like an overmedicated patient getting a new perscription.


Is it possible companies offered better benefits, and more people had jobs that gave benefits? You didn't have companies like WalMart not allowing employees to work full time so that they could avoid paying benefits, for instance.

Not to mention that Greed drives everything in this country, and if you're a medical provider or insurance company you know that NO ONE is going to choose death when the options are: Pay X for treatment or you're going to die.

Once you have that realization, you can increase X every chance you get... especially if people can put the bill on a credit card and be in debt (but alive) for the rest of their lives.
Last edited by Sarvis on Wed Mar 24, 2010 2:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.
teflor the ranger
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Re: Healthcare Reform

Postby teflor the ranger » Wed Mar 24, 2010 2:16 pm

That's patently untrue. Every single day there are real Americans giving their lives to ensure that the rest of us live with liberty. You think people are so selfish that they wouldn't opt to take their chances without placing an undue burden on their families or society?
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Re: Healthcare Reform

Postby Yayaril » Wed Mar 24, 2010 5:02 pm

It's kind of dumb that anyone would have to choose between dying and placing their family in financial burden.
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Re: Healthcare Reform

Postby Daz » Wed Mar 24, 2010 5:03 pm

Yayaril wrote:It's kind of dumb that anyone would have to choose between dying and placing their family in financial burden.


how sad is it that i'm not 100% certain if this statement means that you oppose or support the reform bill.
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Re: Healthcare Reform

Postby kiryan » Wed Mar 24, 2010 9:07 pm

kiryan wrote: If one guy in a 25 man firm has a wife with cancer, you're rates are going through the roof.


daz wrote:if one guy in a 25 man firm has a wife with cancer nothing will happen because effective 2011 providers are barred from basing price of coverage on your current health. yes, i know your argument that the fat guy at mcdonalds should pay more than the vegan nutritionist. doesn't it suck when you can't decide who should be treated equally and when?


In point 4, I said small benefit will benefit because of this dynamic is the current. It is improved under the healthcare reform bill. I think we agree here... although I generally disagree with the disconnect between price of coverage and your current health. When risk vs reward are decoupled you end up with imbalances such as the financial crash of 2008.

kiryan wrote:5. Socalized medicine is on the way...Give it 10 years and recommendations not to do breast cancer screenings will actually become law.

daz wrote:the bill specifically encourages and incentivizes people to get yearly exams of all kinds and focuses on getting doctors to solve problems with minimal recurrent visits - solve the problems instead of telling them to constantly come back just so you can get a quick cash fix from their provider.


Today it does. You are completely ignoring all the special commissions and expert panels as well as the BROAD policy powers given to the secretary of HHS. No matter how you argue it, there is a problem here. There was a recent report put out by government experts that said we over do breast cancer screenings. So either this law fails to reign in costs of unnecessary tests or it increases unnecessary tests. The truth is today it may guarantee it, but over the next 10 years the new commissions are going to start writing policy that change your benefits without a vote from the legislature...
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Re: Healthcare Reform

Postby Todrael » Wed Mar 24, 2010 9:24 pm

What are you going to do about it? Write a letter? Vote Republican? hahaha
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Re: Healthcare Reform

Postby Botef » Wed Mar 24, 2010 9:27 pm

Corth wrote:Not being much of an expert on this issue, I would be interested in any theories on why healthcare only started to become a problem in the last 15-20 years or so. It seems like people used to have no problem with their healthcare costs. I think maybe people just have less money and more debt these days. Probably itself an unintended consequence of the government fucking with the free market too much. Looking at it that way, healthcare reform is almost like an overmedicated patient getting a new perscription.


I think a big part of the problem is the belief that health insurance = health care. From my own perspective over the last two decades people have started to treat health insurance as a means of staying healthy instead of as an insurance towards the unforeseeable. People don't save for their medical needs anymore and seem to believe that insurance companies are some kind of piggy bank. The philosophy seems to be along the lines of if I give $X amount of money to the insurance company every month, I'm going to do everything in my power to get $X amount of health care back. In that sense I see all sorts of wasteful spending on doctor visits for a simple cough, or something that if you were spending your own money on you'd think twice about. I can't blame people for wanting to get the most for their money, especially when its hundreds of dollars every month, but thats not how insurance works. In that sense I don't place much blame on insurance companies for rising costs.

The malpractice end of the spectrum which you've touched on also takes its roll in contributing to wasteful spending on things to protect doctors from liability. I think on the whole people have stopped thinking about what their medical needs really cost until something really expensive slaps them in the face. That is one reason I'm a huge fan of HSA accounts. I've only had one for a year, but it has already accumulated a few thousand dollars. Its nice to be able to goto a doctor any time I need to without hesitating, but I also have incentive not to blow it all because it builds up over time and assures my future medical needs are also taken care of independent of what an insurance company thinks. My insurance is cheaper too because I only need it to cover things that exceed what I can handle with my savings.

One thing that frustrates me about this whole health care debate is that we continue to feed into the belief that health insurance is health care, and that you need it to be healthy. In that sense this health care bill boggles my mind. We want everyone to have access to health care, but continue to remain dependent on a third party to provide it, a party that really never should have assumed this role to begin with. People should be in control of their own health care needs, and insurance should just be a safety net for the things beyond your means. Why we continue to think that a third party is better equipped to handle this, be it an insurance company or the government, is something I really don't understand.
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Re: Healthcare Reform

Postby kiryan » Wed Mar 24, 2010 10:05 pm

have you even looked at the bill itself? where are you getting your information kiryan?

*****
Insured through work:
-no premium increase.
== seriously, how the hell is this possibly guaranteed within the bill. and even if it is, someone will pay for it somewhere
-no change of coverage, unless you want it.
== plans are goign to change to meet the new minimum requirements. plans are going to change to avoid the cadillac tax. I as an individual am going to see changes in my coverage whether I want to or not.


Small Business Owner:
==no comment, basically there are a lot of positive about how healthcare reform will affect small business. Assuming stealth taxes don't actually kill them.

Medicare:
-No benefits will be cut.
==bullshit.
-preventitive services such as cancer screening will be provided at no cost.
==what happens when you lower the price of something, you consume more of it. Great plan for reducing healthcare costs.
-Prescription prices go down.
==lol the so called donut hole fix. you realize this is a sham. its predicated on the idea that to fill in the donut hole drug companies are going to offer prescriptions for lower prices for the customer while in the donut hole, however the government will give them full credit on the retail price (not their discounted rate) towards filling the donut hole. So they move from low cost to moderate cost (in the hole) then back to low costs. The donut hole was designed to discourage prescription use by making people pay a lot for slightly overusing prescriptions, but cap it if they were really sick and needed expensive prescriptions for a long period of time.
-Quality of care will increase due to drastic improvements in the process by which information is shared and provided to medical professionals.
==ahahhahahahhahahahahhahahah bullshit. I am director of information services at a mental / behavioral health facility with an extensive community based services as well. Quality of care will not go up, cost of care will. I don't think you have any idea how expensive these electronic systems are to buy, to license yearly and to maintain. Medicare/medicaid billing is so complicated so impossible to manage that most people pay clearing houses to do this for them. And you think the electornic medical record provisions are going to make this better? LOL

Uninsured:
-The ability to shop from all eligible providers.
-The ability to purchase out of state health coverage.
-Increased financial assistance to those who can not afford coverage, and an expanded definition of those eligible.

Self-Insured:
-If you purchase your own health coverage your premiums will decrease from 14-20 percent.
==wow that's in there? The law actually says they insurers will reduce premiums? bullshit, this is their estimate and its not going to hold true. Probably not in the short term and definitely not in the long term unless they do something about the #1 cost in healthcare... wages.
-Purchasing your own coverage makes you eligible for tax credits worth up to 60% of what you pay in premiums.
==great more money for more people, who is going to be paying for all this?
-No changes/increases to co-pays and deductibles for private insurance.
==sure... show me where you find this in the law that just passed? You claim I haven't read the bill, I highly doubt this guarantee is in there anywhere.
-If your provider spends too much of your payments towards salaries and overhead, they have to provide you a rebate.
==yea thats going to work. you have no idea how many people it takes to run an insurance company. At the relatively small insurance company I have experience with we had probably 30 people who wrote reports regularly out of 120 ish people and at least 10 of those were full time report writers. We had 8 people who just made the system run... and this was a market leading insurance application. Think about it, every time the medicare/medicaid changes something... everytime a contract with a hospital changes... everytime the feds pass a new law... there are changes to how they do business. Those changes then beget other changes that beget reporting changes. My current company serves 120 kids residential and another 400 community based. I have 1 staff dedicated to writing reports just for the financial team, another who just works with finance on how charges are entered, billed and adjusted and 1 FTE who makes the system run and works on patches and upgrades. Thats in addition to the 50k a year I pay for the privilege to use the system.

General:
-all records will be kept electronically in a manner to quickly and efficiently exchange information between medical service providers for improved and expedited patient care while lowering the overhead of 'paper records'.
==bullshit see above complaints about "electronic" systems making things better. electronic systems do not make clinical staff more efficient, they decrease mistakes and facilitate reporting. Direct care staff, doctors and nurses become less efficient (in terms of number of patients seen) when they adopt electronic systems.
-streamlining and simplifying the paperwork process for filing claims and applications.
== bullshit, see my gripes about medicare / medicaid.
-coverage can no longer be rescinded AFTER diagnosis of a new medical condition
== the legal basis for rescinding coverage has always been based on fraud. im sure there are cases where insurers rescinded coverage primarily because peopel were diagnosed with a new expensive condition, but the actual recission was obstensibly based on fraudulent answers to the questionairres used to establish the RISK you pose and thereby the premium you msut pay.
-cost of coverage can no longer be influenced by pre-existing conditions
==yea sounds great until you start thinkign about how you are paying for other people's irresponsible decisions like ordering 2 buckets of chicken at KFC for a night of sitting on the couch alone watching grey's anatomy.
-lifetime 'limits' on coverage are no longer allowed
==great, insurers have unlimited liabilty which means as an individual you can't tailor your premium costs by accepting greater risks.
-creates a public 'exchange' of providers so that individuals and business can choose the coverage they want, including out of state options to increase and encourage competitive pricing
==I'm all for this.
-LIMITS on how much private health care providers can charge individuals for coverage.
==huh? I didn't realize there were any provider controls. If you are talking providers, clinics and hospitals then great, maybe we can invite Hugo Chavez up to be president in 2012. You're probably referrign to the protections for say charging women more than men (since they consume like 70% more healthcare statistically) ect... either way, you are fuking with the pricing of risk. You know just like failure to price risk correctly destroyed the economy over the last 2 years?

How is it paid for?
-a .9% (not 9, look close - its a decimal) increase to the medical payroll tax of individual earners of over 200,000 per year (250k married) - and this is the one that really upsets the wealthy i think, because capital gains and interest dividends are considered taxable for this purpose.
== yea great... medicare taxes being used to fund other initiatives. Maybe we can tack on another percentage to pay for haiti relief and the war in afghanistan. bad idea. in the recent words of a house rep, if you don't tie our hands well continue to steal.
-A tax on high-cost medical plans (as defined by cost in comparison to services provided in regards to the industry means).
==lobbyist's wet dream. unions already got their exclusion lets see who else has enough money to buy their exemption to this tax. Or maybe we can use Greece's list which includes coal miners, bomb disposers and media broadcasters (because there could be germs on the mic). FYI, one of the most dangerous professions in the USA is nursing.
-A small tax for those who CHOOSE to remain uninsured while within their means to accept coverage.
== yea a great loophole for people like me who will figure out whether its cheaper to buy insurance or pay the tax. I suspect it'll be cheaper to buy the insurance with all the subsidies since I have 7 dependents, but if it wasn't I'd just pay the penalty.
-A tax on business OVER 50 employees who CHOOSE to not provide the option of coverage to their employees.
==again, something businesses will min max to get the best deal for them.
-New taxes on the health care industry, pharmaceuticals and medical device manufacturers (not for individual use, such as hearing aids, eyeglasses, insulin, etc).
==right, who pays these taxes? the consumer. Maybe we need that 85% provision to apply to these guys too, or maybe we should just price control it like venuzela.
-Increase taxes on those who take non-health related withdrawals from health savings accounts.
==great, more bureacracy, more laws and regulations, more exceptions to wade through. why isn't your money just your f*king money?
-Penalties on health care providers who use a disproportionate amount of revenue for overhead costs.
==again, government is deciding whats appropriate. Its price controls. given that they can't even fund their own responsibilities (Native American healthcare) and that medicare/medicaid run a 30% fraud rate... why do you think they should be in charge of determining how much resoruces should be dedicated to what a private company? Maybe we can mandate drug makers spend 50% of their revenue on research and no more than 15% on marketing? Also, explain to me how if currently overhead is 25% that you are going to implement all the above changes (and the future ones) with less man power? You HIRE people during implementations and to maintain them afterwards because it takes so much time and effort.

****
i could get into how this is personal for me, with my father losing his home, his savings and his retirement when he was dropped from his coverage because of a 'filing inaccuracy' after he had a heart attack and his kidney failed. (salt in the wound, you would think 25+ years in the IUOE would mean someone would have his back, true colors i guess).

==sounds sad, but in most situations people's sob stories don't represent the truth.

I could talk about how upsetting this issue is to a close friend of mine who lost his mother to HIV contracted through a routine medical procedure and watched her lose everything she had while she spent her dying months in a constant battle to get coverage from a plan that would no longer protect her, when all she wanted was to be able to leave something behind after passing away for her children before the medical expenses decimated her savings and spirits.

==sounds sad, if she contracted HIV through a medical procedure then the hospital should be liable for her healthcare. If she wanted to leave something behind for her kids, she should've just gone someplace remote and died instead of continuously going back to the hospital and pharmacy rackign up thousands of dollars in service. I'll kill myself before I get to the point of losing 30 years of wealth accumulation for an extra year of life. I will give it to my kids and wife.

But I instead went out and scavenged through the garbage online to find actual facts about this bill. I will agree that this bill is not perfect, and even those who passed it admit that it will be in a constantly dynamic state for decades if not longer, but its a start.

==its a giant load of crap. they couldn't compromise enough to get any kind of bipartsian support. They passed it in an outright despicable manner buying off senators left and right. The passed a bill that before it was passed they already had written a bill to fix it. WTF. you just pass somethign you know is fatally flawed just to say you passed it? and you call that good and responsible? Its despicable and evil and now its a full out war.

those are not talking points, those are points taken from the bill itself. so tell me, when all is said and done - show me the evil.

==the evil is that it simply won't work as expected. It will not reduce healthcare costs. It will not reduce the deficit. It will give government extensive authority in the healthcare space which currently comprises 16% of our economy. the US model is suppsoed to be small federal government, respect for states rights. with 1 clause of the constitution, the federal government has over the course of 200 years turned everything upside down eliminating virtually all restraing on power. this is outright evil.
kiryan
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Re: Healthcare Reform

Postby kiryan » Wed Mar 24, 2010 10:41 pm

Daz wrote:in every scenario i look at, the burden of cost falls onto the health care providers and it is their job to either find a way to reduce their overhead/wasteful spending/inflated costs or be replaced by a newer, working model.


damnit lost my f*king post. how the hell do you think that insuring more people will make healthcare costs go down? The lower the price of something, the more people will consume. 30 million more insured means 30 million more people demanding services out of the same limited number of providers. in what universe does an increasing demand and lower or same supply result in lower costs?

Not only that, now that its heading towards federal regulation, we can guarantee more burecracy (cost) and we can guarantee that they'll keep throwing more money and taxes at it because who wants to run on pulling the plug on granny? She's costing you a 3 million a year on life support, but we won't pull that plug.

--

simple supply and demand explains most of the rise in teh cost of healthcare. We don't make enough doctors and nurses and haven't for 20 years. The baby boomers got older and as they enter the most healthcare intensive portion of their lives, there are fewer people to serve those needs. Extensive certification procseses for medical professionals further contributes to this supply problem. crappy medicare/medicaid reimbursement rates have lead to higher rates for private pays as well as an exodus of medical professionals.

end of life care is I think 50% of medicare/medicaid spending? The last year of life costs a ton and the last 2 months a small fortune. In the old days, kids used to take care of their parents, but now they ship them off to nursing homes and hospices courtesy of government programs (because the american family was destroyed by liberals) and the advent of the dual income family (thank you feminism).

health insurance became a healthcare subscription. at the same time people were insulated from the costs of their healthcare causing them to consume more.

pharmacy and over diagnosis. 75% of the women in my life are on thyroid medication, 50% are on anxiety or depression medication. I didn't even know what a thyroid was 25 years ago and depression was treated with a healthy does of wtf is your problem, get off your ass or I will whip the living shit out of you. I got an adhd kid, you think he gets any prescriptions? fuk no, he's got to learn how to overcome his biological tendencies and whenever he needs help with that, my belt is ready.
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Re: Healthcare Reform

Postby Todrael » Thu Mar 25, 2010 2:21 am

kiryan wrote:this is outright evil.

No, this is evil.
Daz
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Re: Healthcare Reform

Postby Daz » Thu Mar 25, 2010 7:24 am

kiryan you ask a lot of reasonable questions that i agree should be clearly answered and are not, but i also think that you make a lot of assumptions that i really just can't find a basis on beyond the widely shared pessimistic view that everyone is out to screw everyone.

the one thing that stood out in your reply was your commentary that the democrats made no effort to work in a bipartisan effort to get support from both sides of the aisle. maybe i have been misled by a leftist agenda, but from where i sit it sure looked to me like the republicans would have said no to anything short of 'how about you do it your way and we agree unilaterally to give you everything you want'.

regardless of the details of this bill i think most americans wanted something to change about health care and good or bad, we have our change. i personally am going to hope for the best, and do the only thing i can do - vote for what i believe is right, and try to provide the facts to people i know who don't look for information but wait until it is given them and hope they are able to make an honestly informed opinion for themselves.

i have no problem with people who disagree with elements of this bill, my problem lies in people who disagree with things that are not in this bill and people who extend details unto their own definitions in an attempt to spread dissent without accurately portraying the existing circumstance.

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