It isn't Free.....The Democrats Lied

Dude! No offense, but that statement is almost laughable. People are not widgets that can be more efficiently produced via mass production and automation. Health care is a person-by-person, case-by-case transaction. Each person has to be tended to "by hand" individually.

 

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Most of the people who are unisured can not afford and do not have Iphones or new SUVs. Not having an xbox might pay for 2 office visits to a doctor but it won't pay for insurance. Perhaps your employer is paying for most of your insurance and you have no idea what the true cost of insurance is.

I would not mind a more free market approach if it had a little socialism for the poor like insurance vouchers to buy subsidized insurance but otherwise was a pure free market approach that removed all barriers to competition and included government funded prosecution of fraudulent practices by the insurance industry.

Also a government funded version of something like Yelp for the insurance Industry that paid people a bit of money to get everybody to write reviews of their insurance and healthcare providers would be needed. The people need to be informed if market based Healthcare is going to work.

Antitrust would have to be vigorously enforced. The big insurers and big hospital chains would have to be broken up. The states would have to get out of insurance regulation because the state insurance regulators create barriers to competition.

People would have to be allowed to see unlicensed medical providers because not everybody can afford overtrained doctors. People would need to be allowed to prescribe their own medications. The war on drugs does not work anyway and there is not a whole lot of point to the USA worrying about preserving the effectiveness of antibiotics by using them correctly when the meat industry and most of the third world use antibiotics in an unregulated and incorrect way.

If "proper" medical care is unaffordable to many then you should not make improper medical care illegal.

Who is to say that a self-trained quack with a good reputation functioning as a GP and spending an hour per patient including research time can't outperform a doctor who paid a fortune for a long education but is only willing to spend 5 minutes per patient including research time and form filling time?

 

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thank you for proving my point. that your ideology doesn't have a clue whats involved in this and how it effects the cost.

 

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That actual care isn't the isse. What makes it cheaper is the number of people paying into the system.

 

Dude, loaded statement.

One can care for his country AND advocate for the poor without advocating for massive, bank-busting entitlement programs. As much as you guys try to blur that line, caring for others and massive government spending programs do not necessarily go hand-in-hand.

 

I believe you meant "affects" the cost.

 

whatever but you still don't understand it

 

What if it saves the American people money? What if it relieves the working man and woman of one of the biggest worries and expenses they have? Why it is that convervatives only object to spending when it's on people and not when it's on weapons for war or tax cuts for the rich? If you cared about the people you would at least support legislation that limits health insurance companies from screwing you, which they do every day. The sad fact is Republicans are tools of corporate interests, their profit is their only concern.

 

What is the basis for this claim or is this just pulling stuff out of the aether?

Now how is this consistent with the preceeding paragraph where you claim the new heatlhcare law will be more expensive than the current healthcare system?

Large employers are for a more efficient and lower costs healthcare because costs are rising and making the US more uncompetitive. The current healthcare system is just not sustainable...growing twice the national income and already at 17 percent of GDP.

Government will have in a few years insurance pricing oversight authority. And heatlhcare buyers will be able to view and evaluate all healthcare insurance products. So unless there is deliberate price collusion, the heatlhcare insurance markets should be a hell of a lot more competitive than they are today.

If you are saying that the heatlhcare reform law was not as effective as it could have been, I will agree with you. The single payer system, as insituted in other industrial countries, is a better more cost competitve system with a proven track record of success.

 

What if it save money? a government run system....:roflmao:

The CBO is already upping the estimates for the cost of obama care.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/37081.html

And from the liberals favorite:

http://www.factcheck.org/2009/07/obamas-health-care-news-conference/

Summary
President Obama tried to sell his health care overhaul in prime time, mangling some facts in the process. He also strained to make the job sound easier to pay for than experts predict.

■Obama promised once again that a health care overhaul “will be paid for.” But congressional budget experts say the bills they’ve seen so far would add hundreds of billions of dollars to the deficit over the next decade.
■He said the plan "that I put forward" would cover at least 97 percent of all Americans. Actually, the plan he campaigned on would cover far less than that, and only one of the bills now being considered in Congress would do that.
■He said the "average American family is paying thousands" as part of their premiums to cover uncompensated care for the uninsured, implying that expanded coverage will slash insurance costs. But the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation puts the cost per family figure at $200.
■Obama claimed his budget "reduced federal spending over the next 10 years by $2.2 trillion" compared with where it was headed before. Not true. Even figures from his own budget experts don’t support that. The Congressional Budget Office projects a $2.7 trillion increase, not a $2.2 trillion cut.
■The president said that the United States spends $6,000 more on average than other countries on health care. Actually, U.S. per capita spending is about $2,500 more than the next highest-spending country. Obama’s figure was a White House-calculated per-family estimate.

The House bill doesn’t pay for itself, adding a net $239 billion over 10 years to the federal deficit, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation.

As the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a bipartisan group, said in a report released this month, it’s tough to save money while greatly expanding health care coverage at the same time:

CBO’s analysis of the House bill does recognize specific savings that the legislation will reap from changes to Medicare, but also highlights some increases the bill would make in Medicare spending as well. Overall, that bill and the Senate’s don’t control the rising costs of federal health programs, according to CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf, who told the Senate Budget Committee last week that the bills didn’t have “the sort of fundamental changes” that would change the cost curve. On the contrary, he said: “The curve is being raised.”

 

I'm speaking in more general terms, the bill that was passed isn't perfect, but even if it costs more, at least more people will be covered. It certainly costs less to the individual than bankruptcy due to hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical bills. Healthier people will create a better quality of life and the economy will improve. Increased tax revenue would cover the costs. It's not a matter of if we have to increase health insurance coverage, but how. I should point out that your boy took us into war off budget that cost way more than the figures you mentioned. Also, you already made up your mind about it, so why bother to talk about it?

 

That was the opinion I formed after a lot of reading and an attempt to figure out the implications and how things would play out a year ago.

We will know in about three years whether or not I was correct or whether you were correct to think I was wrong. During the last 6 months I have lost most of the details upon which I formed my opinion. A lot of my opinion was based on looking at what actually happened in Massachusetts which is the most similar system to this new Democratic Party healthcare plan. In my posts from six months to a year ago i linked to and quoted from many of the sources that influenced me. The bottom line is that mathematically you can't give people who can't afford insurance insurance that they can afford without somebody paying for it.

But large employers only care about them having better prices. Having competing smaller employers pay higher prices would actually benefit large employers. If large employers stop paying for the uninsured by the insured subsidizing the uninsured at hospitals then large employers win. If large employers could kick their less well payed subsidy eligible employees out of their insurance plans without those employees getting upset by losing their insurance the large employer would win. Perhaps the employers could pay for their employees portion of their subsidized insurance while the employee still gets the subsidy. The key to large employers coming out ahead will be to stay separate from the insurance plans that have to allow the currently uninsurable people to join the plans.

I don't know how this Democratic Health care plan actually turned out for the large employers because i could not find any fact based writers writing about that.

Yes, and that is a huge burden on the USA but based on Massachusetts this situation will only get worse with the new healthcare plan.

I don't trust government to be on the side of the people rather than on the side of the employers. State regulators have seemed to be mostly on the side of the insurers; why should I expect the federal government to be better than the states?

Healthcare buyers can evaluate insurance pricing now but even with the internet doing so is very hard. Unless I missed something this plan still leaves the "every state has different plans" aspect of insurance in place which makes it harder for internet communities to help people figure out the realities of the insurance being offered. Insurance policies are confusing and I don't think that will change.

Where do you see an increase in competition coming from? We are still divided into states and there is no public option.

This we agree on.

We will see in a few years who's projection of what this plan will do is more accurate. I don't claim to really know what this plan will do and I don't think the congressmen, insurance experts and the Insurance industry really know what this plan will do either.

Hopefully in a few years you and I will be able to agree as to what the plan did in hindsight. Based on the disputes as to what the truth is about what the Massachusetts plan did there probably will be massive disagreement in the future as to what this plan has done.

 

Up to your old bag of tricks I see mr. buffalo roam. CBO is upping estimates if Congress makes changes in the law. There is no evidence that Congress is going to make those changes. Two, the Obama adminstration has said the following in regards to any potential changes:

"The Affordable Care Act will reduce the deficit by more than $100 billion in the first decade, and that will not change unless Congress acts to change it," said Kenneth Baer, an OMB spokesman. "If these authorizations are funded, they must be offset somewhere else in the discretionary budget. The president has called for a non-security discretionary spending freeze, and he will enforce that with his veto pen." - Your Politico reference

How could you over look this paragraph mr. buffalo roam?

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Your Fact Check article is dated July 2009. That was before the August recesse and the legislation discussed in the article is not the healthcare legislation that was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama.

So what does that mean buffalo roam. It means your claims are yet again false. You should be ashamed of yourself, pointing to early dialogue on the bill and representing it as the bill that was signed into law by the POTUS.

The bill signed into law by President Obama is projected to save over a 100 billion in the first 10 years and a trillion in the second 10 years...one of them pesky little details. And all you can do is say, well if they do this and then to that it will cost X and mislead people by representing earlier discussions as the final bill.

The process went something like this mr. buffalo roam. Congress created the bill and sent it to the CBO for scoring. If the bill was not deficit neutral as demanded by President Obama (which the early version was not) then it went back to Congress to crank out another version which was deficit neutral. And that is what happened mr. buffalo roam.

Those peskly little facts just keep getting in your way.

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People will be covered? People will be covered? if they can't afford health care now, and it is more expensive under Obama Care and the cost continue to rise, just how in the sam hell are they going to be covered? you still have to buy a policy either from the Government or the Insurance Industry.

It isn't going to be free, and the cost are already rising and it isn't even in effect yet.

 

Based on Massachusetts, one of the things that happens when the uninsured become insured is they go and see doctors. The cost savings from doctors preventing worsening of illness is not nearly large enough to offset the cost of patients who previously did not partake of the healthcare system suddenly becoming healthcare users. Some of the cost savings from preventing illness from becoming worse might take place decades later and therefore is not yet in the Massachusetts numbers.

Conventional thinking is that smokers cost more in terms of healthcare. They certainly cost the private insurers money by getting sick at younger ages but they save Medicare money buy dying young. "About 27% of Medicare's annual budget goes to care for patients in their final year of life." Seniors cost more even when relatively healthy than younger people do. The last ten years of life even for younger people are on average more expensive years than normal.

Smokers may very well reduce health care costs by not being seniors for very long. They definitely save Medicare money.


The point is that the truth and what everybody including the intelligent authorities are saying are often not the same.

 

Agreed, the truth will be in the pudding as grandma used to say. I think many of the holes in the Massachusetts system have been plugged in version that was signed into law. Massachusetts had a lot of trouble as did Hawaii with people gaming the system. Their laws were not well written or well implemented. It remains to be seen how this law will be implemented.

I would expect (hope) that the healthcare law signed into law is a starting point. It is definately not a stopping point. One of the benefits of this law is the creation of a system of metrics - something the industry has long opposed. In any other industry metrics are common and mandatory but not in the healthcare industry...until the passage of the healthcare reform law.

The healthcare industry is one,if not the most, powerful lobby in Washington. And they have no interest in a competitive healthcare market.

 

Here's what happens based on your logic. The people who can't afford Healthcare, you tell them tough luck. So what do they do? They show up to the Emergency room where the inflated costs are passed to you and me. Thanks alot.

 

I think it's worth it, even if we just establish a single system that covers everyone based on a progressive tax. Health isn't something to neglect as a society, we don't want to make it class-based.

 

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http://thesocietypages.org/economicsociology/2008/10/30/15/

Ahh, the good old days. Also see fire insurance marks.

 

Surprise, this is the future conservatives want for you. The future is now.

A Crash. A Call for Help. Then, a Bill.