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November 19, 2013 at 10:43 pm #800067
skeeterParticipantI’m sure you are right about the fast food workers, JoB, but I think it’ll be bigger than that. Store clerks, movie theater employees, security guards, etc etc. Pretty much every employer that is paying around $8 to $13 per hour is not going to want to pay for medical coverage. I hope I am wrong.
November 20, 2013 at 12:54 am #800068
KevinParticipant@HMC Rich,
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If something bad is happening to me or my wife, and we call the police – they come.
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If our house catches fire, the firefighters come and put out the fire.
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If I have a serious medical issue, and need to be transported immediately, Medic One will drive me to the hospital (no extra charge for the flashing lights.) Did you know that private ambulance companies like AMR actually charge EXTRA for the flashing lights and sirens?
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The interesting thing Rich, is that in all three examples above – I NEVER RECEIVED A BILL!
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All paid for by taxes. Perhaps I’m dense Rich, but what part of this equation don’t I get?
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Health care delivery should be just the same.
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And one last thought… WHY is fire insurance so reasonably priced when compared to health insurance? Seems to be a huge disconnect here.
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And just for fun, what WOULD the actual retail cost of putting out a typical residential house fire run ??
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Likely FAR less than a typical 3 or 4 day hospital stay. Would you agree?
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November 20, 2013 at 2:54 am #800069
JanSParticipantspeaking of low paying jobs:
http://business.time.com/2013/11/18/walmart-seeks-food-donations-to-help-needy-employees/
November 20, 2013 at 6:33 am #800070
dobroParticipant“We claim to hate the ACA, but we never had a sincere/realistic proposal of our own to deal with our country’s healthcare mess.”
How many times must it be reiterated that the ACA IS A REPUBLICAN IDEA!! It’s the same thing as Romneycare (with a few tweaks)and was proposed by Obama with the hope that Repubs would support it because IT WAS THEIR OWN PLAN! The only reason the Repubs hate it is because anything Obama supports, they must oppose. Truly a pathetically sad state of affairs.
November 20, 2013 at 5:33 pm #800071
skeeterParticipant@Kevin I’m not sure where you are going. Fire insurance is not provided by the government. Yes, our tax dollars put the fire out. But rebuilding the property and repairing the damage is through private insurance companies.
As for ambulance rides, I’m pretty sure the government does not pay for ambulance rides. The individual’s medical policy is billed for this. So I guess you could say that taxes pay for ambulance rides for poor people and people on medicare but for the rest of us our own insurance pays.
November 20, 2013 at 6:48 pm #800072
KevinParticipant@skeeter – I’m quite aware that fire insurance is not paid for by taxes. My point is that you will never get a “bill” from the FD for their services.
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As for ambulance rides, I’m fairly certain that if Medic One decides to transport you, it is a free ride. That decision is their call, based on the urgency of your situation. Otherwise, they will call a private ambulance service such as AMR, end then yes you are correct that your insurance will be billed.
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Perhaps I should have just said two words in my previous post – “single payer.”
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Fire and police services are just two of many examples of how we already have single payer systems that seem to work just fine. Healthcare should be one too.
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Below is a link to an interesting list of how other countries are dealing with healthcare.
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November 20, 2013 at 7:18 pm #800073
skeeterParticipantMany would agree that single-payer is the way to go. Heck I might be one of them. But just because police and fire work well as taxpayer-funded doesn’t mean everything would be better off as taxpayer-funded. For example, life insurance is not taxpayer-funded. People go out and buy it on their own. System seems to work well. Same for automobile insurance. People don’t get it from the government. They go buy it themselves. Also seems to work well.
Another concern is quality. Let’s look at grade schools. Taxpayers pay for public school. If a parent thinks the taxpayer funded school is adequate, she sends her children there. If she believes the public school to be inadequate, she sends her children to a private school if she can afford it.
My concern is if we have a single-payer healthcare system, the wealthy will find the system inadequate. They will then pay for medical care out of pocket. And then we’ve got a big problem. The poor don’t get the quality care that the rich get.
I don’t have the answer. But I’m not convinced single-payer is the perfect solution.
November 21, 2013 at 1:01 am #800074
elikapekaParticipantAll we need to do is gradually lower the Medicare eligibility age until we have Medicare for all. Figure out the pace at which it can be done efficiently, and get started. Medicare is proven to work. It’s already in place, it would just need to be expanded. I don’t know of anybody who hates being on Medicare. So next year we lower the eligibility to 60, then 55, and so on. Done.
November 21, 2013 at 7:31 am #800075
dhgParticipantHealthcare cannot be compared to life insurance or car insurance. The moment you catch an expensive disease, health insurance companies treat you like a leper. And this can happen to anyone at any time. The countries that have single payer systems look at us and think we are idiots.
A typical comment exchange on reddit.com is really telling. A person posts a photo of a badly infected digit and person A says: dude, why didn’t you take that to a doctor? Person B says, “he’s probably in America. No one goes to doctors there because they can’t afford it.”
Elsewhere in the world we are looking stupid.
November 21, 2013 at 6:36 pm #800076
skeeterParticipant“The moment you catch an expensive disease, health insurance companies treat you like a leper.”
I don’t understand this comment. Do they pay any expenses they are legally obligated to pay under the terms of the policy?
November 21, 2013 at 7:24 pm #800077
LindseyParticipantIt’s called recission, and thanks to the ACA, it’s illegal now. In 2012, it was revealed that Wellpoint specifically targeted women with breast cancer for aggressive investigation with the intent to cancel their policies. Assurant specifically targeted people with recent HIV diagnosis. These are the type of cancellations where people’s policies would be dropped because of minor or inconsequential errors in paperwork, medical histories, etc.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/07/AR2009090702455_pf.html
Like mentioned in the article, Healthnet admitted that they offered bonuses to employees who found ways to drop people’s policies.
November 21, 2013 at 7:39 pm #800078
dhgParticipantSorry, Skeeter, not everyone gets my sense of humor. Allow me to reword it clearly:
The moment you catch an expensive disease, health insurance companies distance themselves, are slow to approve medically necessary procedures and will claim some procedures “experimental” and thus not a valid claim. They find that delaying tactics work well as patients will sometimes kindly die while waiting and the expenses for that are much lower.
November 21, 2013 at 10:49 pm #800079
skeeterParticipantOkay… but even single-payer doesn’t mean there are unlimited funds for medical care. The government would also have to be selective in which costly procedures are approved.
November 22, 2013 at 12:04 am #800080
dobroParticipant“…but even single-payer doesn’t mean there are unlimited funds for medical care. The government would also have to be selective in which costly procedures are approved.”
Surely you realize that insurance companies do not have unlimited funds and are selective in which costly procedures they will approve. No one has said or suggested that there are unlimited funds and, of course, there aren’t. The entire discussion is about how we use the funds we DO have-for medical care or to create profits for the insurance companies. Single-payer puts the emphasis on medical care. That’s why it’s better.
November 22, 2013 at 12:34 am #800081
wakefloodParticipantCorrect, Dobro, and we’re not talking a few percent better. Most estimates put the difference at between 25% and 30% better.
It’s easy to wrap your brain around. Just visualize every single dollar spent on health care in this country. Now take a quarter of those dollars and give it to an Insurance Company Executive who’s busily attempting to close on another vacation home in Antigua whilst berating his underlings to drop more policies and deny more claims. See? How hard is that?
November 22, 2013 at 3:12 pm #800082
JoBParticipantskeeter..
insurance companies might not have had unlimited funds to pay medical claims.. but until the ACA they did have unlimited profits…
November 22, 2013 at 5:05 pm #800083
skeeterParticipantI think it’s safe to say this; It’s unlikely that I’ll convince you that the private sector is more efficient than the government for medical service payment and delivery. It’s unlikely that you’ll convince me that the government is more efficient than the private sector for medical service payment and delivery.
Why does the U.S. spend so much more money that other countries and get no better overall medical care? I don’t know. I have my doubts that single-payer would both improve medical care and deliver cost savings. But I could be wrong. You guys might be right.
November 22, 2013 at 8:48 pm #800084
wakefloodParticipantSkeets, WE are only asking you to recognize facts. If that requires us to construct an argument that you accept as a precursor to accepting a universally recognized fact, then all is lost, my friend.
As stated above, I’ll repeat again:
The accepted overhead cost of delivering a dollar’s worth of gov’t administered health care is approximately 3% – or three cents. This simply means that 97 cents of every dollar goes toward delivering health care. (This is due to things like the ability to bargain for volume discounts on drugs and limits what providers get paid for a given procedure, AND the fact that there’s centralized administration of the programs – Medicare, Medicaid, Vets.)
The accepted cost of overhead for a privately-administered health care dollar is between 25% and 35% – or 25 to 35 cents. That’s only 65-75 cents of every dollar actually going toward delivering health care.
That difference (20+ cents on the dollar!!) is attributable to several things – but a significant chunk of it is pure profit to the Insurance Company. They are simply an intermediary skimming the cream and working hard to keep THEIR costs as low as they can by delaying/denying/dropping their customers.
If you truly want the market to work, all you have to do is look to any of the many things where unnecessary “cream skimmers” have been disintermediated from the system. Amazon ring a bell?
If you’re a fan of Adam Smith and the invisible hand – and I KNOW you are – you should look at this system as completely inefficient and in desperate need of disintermediation.
Your gut is right on this one. :-)
November 22, 2013 at 9:06 pm #800085
skeeterParticipantWakeflood, what are your thoughts on this article:
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/331704/medicare-s-efficiency-robert-moffit
November 22, 2013 at 9:25 pm #800086
JanSParticipantNovember 22, 2013 at 9:30 pm #800087
wakefloodParticipantWell Skeets, I don’t have the time to re-read that article – read it back upon release. Will get back to it sometime soon.
Here’s my basic thoughts.
Moffit is a Sr. Fellow at the Heritage Foundation. That is a privately funded “think” tank of the Right Wing. The National Review – which published this article is a mouthpiece for the right – Ted Cruz is right on the front page of their website. Predisposition much?
Like the echo-chamber of climate change denying and “research” that comes from Heritage – I’m skeptical of Mr. Moffit’s analysis. If you could guarantee me that Mr. Moffit had no preconceived notion of what his “analysis” would yield, I’d be less skeptical. But I clearly am. Not guilty until proven innocent skeptical but given that the GAO and other apolitical analyses of this issue disagree with him vehemently, let’s just say I have a healthy skepticism of this article. Very healthy.
Your thoughts?
November 22, 2013 at 9:32 pm #800088
JanSParticipantPrivatized healthcare. Well, as a recent patient in a non-profit dialysis center (Northwest Kidney Center), I learned a bit about this. I had the choice of NKC, or I had the choice of going to a for profit, private company (DaVita – the one at Westwood Village). DaVita has been investigated a few times for different infractions. The one that stands out is how the defrauded Medicare, etc., by shorting the patients the amount of a certain medication to counteract anemia, and throwing out the balance, but billing for the whole amount. And therein lies the problem. The privatized companies are FOR PROFIT. They are about making money. That comes first, the patients come second. Remember that.
(And I had excellent care at NKC)
November 22, 2013 at 10:33 pm #800089
wakefloodParticipantZactly.
Here’s one simple chart that tells you that what we’ve been doing for Health Care is quite simply the worst of any developed country…BY FAR. We’re the outlier. And all one needs to do is realize that what we’ve been doing is the least effective possible solution that anybody actually is trying. Then you can quickly see that there are much MUCH better ways – and MOST countries utilize them.
Or maybe you like over-over-overpaying for indifferent outcomes?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/22/american-health-care-terrible_n_4324967.html
November 22, 2013 at 11:35 pm #800090
skeeterParticipantPrivate insurance companies, whether profit or non-profit, have a motivation to identify fraudulent charges and not pay them. The motivation for a for-profit company is the desire to maximize profits. The motivation for a non-profit is to keep rates affordable.
Medicare also certainly has a motivation to not pay fraudulent charges. This article concludes that private insurance companies (again, some are for profit and others are non-profit) do a better job than medicare of not paying fraudulent claims.
I suppose it’s a matter of priorities and limited resources. The more time you spend trying to identify fraudulent claims, the more you’ll save money in not paying them. However, the more time you spend trying to identify fraudulent claims, the less money you’ll have to actually pay for medical care as opposed to overhead.
I think you guys are correct and I’m wrong, though. My guess is we will have a single-payer system within 20 years. Maybe sooner.
November 22, 2013 at 11:41 pm #800091
skeeterParticipantWe should get together for a beer sometime. I wanna meet all you guys.
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