Why the health care debate is way off

Posted by cabinman (anonymous) on November 3, 2009 at 9:04 a.m. (Suggest removal)

How about the radical group freedom works. They refuse to say who their corporate backers are and they pay Dick Armey, former house majority leader, $550,000 a year. This man who is the leader of many "tea parties" and who is against a public option for health care did not mind using public ran health care for the 31 years he was in Washington. This brings up two very important questions. Do these people who are going nuts about losing freedoms to the government not care at all if they lose them (or already lost them,) to corporations? These corporations do EXACTLY what you SAY will happen with health care reform. They dictate what doctors you can see, where you can see them, what conditions are covered and what to do with end of life care (ie. Hospice). The other important question is why is a supposed "grass routes" movement organized by a man who is paid $550,00 year from a group that will not say where they get their money?

Posted by billm2257 (anonymous) on November 3, 2009 at 9:53 a.m. (Suggest removal)

You left-wing dingbats are all the same. Look at the systems that you claim are so glorious and that we should adopt. Are you a complete moron? Have you been to England or Canada and witnessed their horrific medical systems? This country is founded on individual rights and freedoms, not on Uncle Sam providing nationwide services for all citizens. And by the way, where do you think Uncle Sam gets his money? From you and me...the taxpayers. I don't like a lot of things our government wastes money on (both Dems and Repubs), so why should I want our govt to waste more money on a single-payer health care system? You claim it will save money. That's utterly ridiculous. Medicine and medical procedures in this country are better than anywhere else in the world. That's because we are a free-market system that allows and promotes advancement and profits. A single-payer system does not in any way allow for or promote advancement (in training, in technology, in medicine, in research, etc). It promotes reduction. Reduced cost? Ha!! Reduced services, reduced number of doctors, reduced ability/education of doctors, but there is not a single govt run program that has reduced costs of anything in this country.

Posted by Pittsburgh (anonymous) on November 3, 2009 at 10:31 a.m. (Suggest removal)

"A resident of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Hudon said the only procedure that may help in her fight was pioneered at the Hillman Cancer Center in Shadyside and is not offered in Canada"

http://www.thepittsburghchannel.com/heal...

Posted by foodandart (anonymous) on November 3, 2009 at 10:45 a.m. (Suggest removal)

Better yet.. why won't anyone talk about the income downshifting option as a political movement against mandated business requirements?

It's not like Americans are on solid financial footing anyhow, so what's the problem with simply letting go of upward mobility, and deciding to live on and with less.

Given the nature of the status and power-seeking people that infest Washington, it's not like they will even seeing it coming. What did Greenspan say when everything went titsup.. "I'm shocked.." (and he was supposed to be watching!)

If incomes are used to define where mandates begin and end, it's time to lose the incomes.

It's not easy, but it's simple.

Posted by TommyT (anonymous) on November 3, 2009 at 11:11 a.m. (Suggest removal)

It is obvious that billm2257 needs some cold hard facts about healthcare in other western nations whom he criticizes as not being free market countries like the good old US of A. Bill apparently is unaware that some of the largest pharmaceutical and medical equipment companies are headquartered in Germany, England, Switzerland and France where single payer healthcare systems cover all people based on their citizenship, not their employer. Socialist healthcare....brand it what you like, but the fact is that all OTHER industrialized nations have figured out ways to provide affordable healthcare to all citizens. The US had 700,000 medical bankruptcies last year, the EU countries, Japan and Australia had zero.

Posted by cabinman (anonymous) on November 3, 2009 at 11:26 a.m. (Suggest removal)

What is with the name calling bill? Why am I a ding bat? You actually trust big corporations who are solely out for profit and greed and criticize people for trusting the government. I just want to know why a corporation telling you that this is not covered or you can not have that treatment or hospice is turned down on your insurance is a good option.

Posted by cabinman (anonymous) on November 3, 2009 at 12:17 p.m. (Suggest removal)

I wanna know how this is a grass routes campaign that is financed by large corporations (and undoubtedly at least supported by the RNC and Fox News) and pays a guy $550,000.00 to speak at these "gatherings." How does he relate to the every day American? He is not even in the same book let alone the same page as far as facing everyday working class problems is concerned. He is making $264.42 an hour to control and misinform a group of people who are rightly concerned. This is very scary to me.

Posted by MissIndependent (anonymous) on November 3, 2009 at 1:28 p.m. (Suggest removal)

At the rate France is going, it will not be able to continue to provide the care that it is currently providing due to high cost. There was an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune about that several weeks back.

The government has done a good job with Medicare? Really? If that is the case, why do they contract with private insurers to manage their plans? Why can a private insurer offer seniors the same benefits as Medicare (Medicare Advantage) but WITH a Part D drug benefit and other benefits that Medicare alone doesn't cover?

Not saying the system needs to be fixed or updated (for lack of a better word). The people that need help in particular are those facing catestrophic illnesses. No one should have to go bankrupt to get care when you have cancer or AIDS, for example. But a public option costs money and you need to look no further than the deficit numbers to realize we can't afford it now.

Why can't we try making improvements to the current system versus re-inventing the wheel?

Posted by cabinman (anonymous) on November 3, 2009 at 3 p.m. (Suggest removal)

http://www.photius.com/rankings/healthra...

France #1, USA # 37 according to the World Health Organization.

-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_France

Posted by NoDFL (anonymous) on November 3, 2009 at 3:33 p.m. (Suggest removal)

cabinman,

Checked your source. It did not say what the survey was based on. Where they got their facts or how they crunched the numbers. All I am saying is you maybe right or you maybe wrong but without the information it is just a list on a website not even connected to the WHO.

Next Wikipedia is your other source. Really I will not let my kids use it as a primary sources nor does any college in Minnesota.

Look at the issue here. How can you add people without it costing more. What kind of system is this that violates the laws of economics. Here is the basic one. If price goes down Demand goes up (Law of Demand). However if price goes down so does Supply (Law of Supply). So if you increase demand and reduce supply the resulting effect will be a shortage. It could be doctors, treatment, hospital beds. It has to that is the way works.

One last thing if all of these Socialized medicane countries are so great why do we have more people coming here for treatment than all of those other nation? Explain why if their system was/is so good why are the world's sick coming here for treatment.

Please help me understand when did Congress repeal the laws of Economics?

Posted by cabinman (anonymous) on November 3, 2009 at 4:07 p.m. (Suggest removal)

Did you miss this at the top?

The World Health Organization's ranking
of the world's health systems.
Source: WHO World Health Report - See also Spreadsheet Details (731kb)

Posted by cabinman (anonymous) on November 3, 2009 at 4:07 p.m. (Suggest removal)

http://www.photius.com/rankings/who_worl...

Posted by cabinman (anonymous) on November 3, 2009 at 4:19 p.m. (Suggest removal)

I never said anything either way about France. I just posted some facts that the World Health Organization concluded. If you would do some research you would see that France has a different system then the other country's such as Canada. France combines our system of private health care with a country like Sweden where it is all a single payer. That just sounds better then socialized, but I know why you use that word.

Thanks for telling me what you let you kids do a research project with but my use of Wikipedia was just to give a general back ground of how France's system works.

Lastly, do you know a lot of people who come here from France to get treatments? Also, when did I ever say anything about the laws of economics? Is this your attempt at trying to make yourself look better then me or something? I am glad that you know everything about all of this though. Have you ever thought of running for public office?

Posted by leftys2221 (anonymous) on November 3, 2009 at 4:24 p.m. (Suggest removal)

cabinman, dfl is really good about not accepting facts when other people post them but when he posts his opinion it is 100% fact. Wait until he starts calling you names too. I am sure that is coming soon.

Posted by NoDFL (anonymous) on November 3, 2009 at 5:34 p.m. (Suggest removal)

The World Health Report says the main failings of many health systems are:

•Many health ministries focus on the public sector and often disregard the frequently much larger private sector health care.

•In many countries, some if not most physicians work simultaneously for the public sector and in private practice. This means the public sector ends up subsidizing unofficial private practice.

•Many governments fail to prevent a "black market" in health, where widespread corruption, bribery, "moonlighting" and other illegal practices flourish. The black markets, which themselves are caused by malfunctioning health systems, and low income of health workers, further undermine those systems.

•Many health ministries fail to enforce regulations that they themselves have created or are supposed to implement in the public interest.
http://www.photius.com/rankings/who_worl...

Responsiveness: The nations with the most responsive health systems are the United States, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Canada, Norway, Netherlands and Sweden. The reason these are all advanced industrial nations is that a number of the elements of responsiveness depend strongly on the availability of resources. In addition, many of these countries were the first to begin addressing the responsiveness of their health systems to people’s needs.
http://www.photius.com/rankings/who_worl...

So If I am reading your facts right what they said is socialized med creates a blackmarket in healthcare and this blackmarket leds to coruption yet the most responsive health care system is the capitalist system in the United States. A responsive system is one that responds to the health of it's people the quickest. That develops new treatments, new drugs, just better ways of doing things.

Why you may ask. Because people (all people) respond to incentives. Doctors know if they develope a new idea that it will pay off for them. We encourage them and reward them for doing this. Socialized medican removes the incentive thus the doctor has no reason to do it beter or save more because he is only paid enough to keep him/her in the system.

Lefty Why the hate???? Oh I know why because it is part of your play book. Attack the messanger. Deflect, dodge. I bet you were great at playing dodgeball. :) I see that the Sen has said this bill will not happen this year because too many Dems have issues with public option and the elections today have them spooked.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424...

Posted by NoDFL (anonymous) on November 3, 2009 at 5:36 p.m. (Suggest removal)

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has reportedly told fellow Democrats that she's prepared to lose seats in 2010 if that's what it takes to pass ObamaCare, and little wonder. The health bill she unwrapped last Thursday, which President Obama hailed as a "critical milestone," may well be the worst piece of post-New Deal legislation ever introduced.

In a rational political world, this 1,990-page runaway train would have been derailed months ago. With spending and debt already at record peacetime levels, the bill creates a new and probably unrepealable middle-class entitlement that is designed to expand over time. Taxes will need to rise precipitously, even as ObamaCare so dramatically expands government control of health care that eventually all medicine will be rationed via politics.

Yet at this point, Democrats have dumped any pretense of genuine bipartisan "reform" and moved into the realm of pure power politics as they race against the unpopularity of their own agenda. The goal is to ram through whatever income-redistribution scheme they can claim to be "universal coverage." The result will be destructive on every level—for the health-care system, for the country's fiscal condition, and ultimately for American freedom and prosperity.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424...

Posted by Culture_Warrior (anonymous) on November 3, 2009 at 5:38 p.m. (Suggest removal)

Mary. This is not about reforming healthcare. It never has been. This is the biggest power grab by our goverment over its citizens lives since the New Deal. It is about power. It is about control. Be very careful what you wish for Mary. Soon, you will be "spanked" by some bureaucrat in Washington if you eat the wrong thing, drive the wrong thing, smoke the wrong thing, live in the wrong neighborhood, yada, yada, yada. Wise up while you still have a little time and oppose this statist power grab.

Posted by NoDFL (anonymous) on November 3, 2009 at 5:40 p.m. (Suggest removal)

•The spending surge. The Congressional Budget Office figures the House program will cost $1.055 trillion over a decade, which while far above the $829 billion net cost that Mrs. Pelosi fed to credulous reporters is still a low-ball estimate. Most of the money goes into government-run "exchanges" where people earning between 150% and 400% of the poverty level—that is, up to about $96,000 for a family of four in 2016—could buy coverage at heavily subsidized rates, tied to income. The government would pay for 93% of insurance costs for a family making $42,000, 72% for another making $78,000, and so forth.

At least at first, these benefits would be offered only to those whose employers don't provide insurance or work for small businesses with 100 or fewer workers. The taxpayer costs would be far higher if not for this "firewall"—which is sure to cave in when people see the deal their neighbors are getting on "free" health care. Mrs. Pelosi knows this, like everyone else in Washington.

Even so, the House disguises hundreds of billions of dollars in additional costs with budget gimmicks. It "pays for" about six years of program with a decade of revenue, with the heaviest costs concentrated in the second five years. The House also pretends Medicare payments to doctors will be cut by 21.5% next year and deeper after that, "saving" about $250 billion. ObamaCare will be lucky to cost under $2 trillion over 10 years; it will grow more after that.

• Expanding Medicaid, gutting private Medicare. All this is particularly reckless given the unfunded liabilities of Medicare—now north of $37 trillion over 75 years. Mrs. Pelosi wants to steal $426 billion from future Medicare spending to "pay for" universal coverage. While Medicare's price controls on doctors and hospitals are certain to be tightened, the only cut that is a sure thing in practice is gutting Medicare Advantage to the tune of $170 billion. Democrats loathe this program because it gives one of out five seniors private insurance options.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424...

Posted by NoDFL (anonymous) on November 3, 2009 at 5:42 p.m. (Suggest removal)

As for Medicaid, the House will expand eligibility to everyone below 150% of the poverty level, meaning that some 15 million new people will be added to the rolls as private insurance gets crowded out at a cost of $425 billion. A decade from now more than a quarter of the population will be on a program originally intended for poor women, children and the disabled.

Even though the House will assume 91% of the "matching rate" for this joint state-federal program—up from today's 57%—governors would still be forced to take on $34 billion in new burdens when budgets from Albany to Sacramento are in fiscal collapse. Washington's budget will collapse too, if anything like the House bill passes.

• European levels of taxation. All told, the House favors $572 billion in new taxes, mostly by imposing a 5.4-percentage-point "surcharge" on joint filers earning over $1 million, $500,000 for singles. This tax will raise the top marginal rate to 45% in 2011 from 39.6% when the Bush tax cuts expire—not counting state income taxes and the phase-out of certain deductions and exemptions. The burden will mostly fall on the small businesses that have organized as Subchapter S or limited liability corporations, since the truly wealthy won't have any difficulty sheltering their incomes.

This surtax could hit ever more earners because, like the alternative minimum tax, it isn't indexed for inflation. Yet it still won't be nearly enough. Even if Congress had confiscated 100% of the taxable income of people earning over $500,000 in the boom year of 2006, it would have only raised $1.3 trillion. When Democrats end up soaking the middle class, perhaps via the European-style value-added tax that Mrs. Pelosi has endorsed, they'll claim the deficits that they created made them do it.

Under another new tax, businesses would have to surrender 8% of their payroll to government if they don't offer insurance or pay at least 72.5% of their workers' premiums, which eat into wages. Such "play or pay" taxes always become "pay or pay" and will rise over time, with severe consequences for hiring, job creation and ultimately growth. While the U.S. already has one of the highest corporate income tax rates in the world, Democrats are on the way to creating a high structural unemployment rate, much as Europe has done by expanding its welfare states.

Meanwhile, a tax equal to 2.5% of adjusted gross income will also be imposed on some 18 million people who CBO expects still won't buy insurance in 2019. Democrats could make this penalty even higher, but that is politically unacceptable, or they could make the subsidies even higher, but that would expose the (already ludicrous) illusion that ObamaCare will reduce the deficit.

Posted by NoDFL (anonymous) on November 3, 2009 at 5:45 p.m. (Suggest removal)

• The insurance takeover. A new "health choices commissioner" will decide what counts as "essential benefits," which all insurers will have to offer as first-dollar coverage. Private insurers will also be told how much they are allowed to charge even as they will have to offer coverage at virtually the same price to anyone who applies, regardless of health status or medical history.

The cost of insurance, naturally, will skyrocket. The insurer WellPoint estimates based on its own market data that some premiums in the individual market will triple under these new burdens. The same is likely to prove true for the employer-sponsored plans that provide private coverage to about 177 million people today. Over time, the new mandates will apply to all contracts, including for the large businesses currently given a safe harbor from bureaucratic tampering under a 1974 law called Erisa.

The political incentive will always be for government to expand benefits and reduce cost-sharing, trampling any chance of giving individuals financial incentives to economize on care. Essentially, all insurers will become government contractors, in the business of fulfilling political demands: There will be no such thing as "private" health insurance.

***
All of this is intentional, even if it isn't explicitly acknowledged. The overriding liberal ambition is to finish the work began decades ago as the Great Society of converting health care into a government responsibility. Mr. Obama's own Medicare actuaries estimate that the federal share of U.S. health dollars will quickly climb beyond 60% from 46% today. One reason Mrs. Pelosi has fought so ferociously against her own Blue Dog colleagues to include at least a scaled-back "public option" entitlement program is so that the architecture is in place for future Congresses to expand this share even further.

As Congress's balance sheet drowns in trillions of dollars in new obligations, the political system will have no choice but to start making cost-minded decisions about which treatments patients are allowed to receive. Democrats can't regulate their way out of the reality that we live in a world of finite resources and infinite wants. Once health care is nationalized, or mostly nationalized, medical rationing is inevitable—especially for the innovative high-cost technologies and drugs that are the future of medicine.

Mr. Obama rode into office on a wave of "change," but we doubt most voters realized that the change Democrats had in mind was making health care even more expensive and rigid than the status quo. Critics will say we are exaggerating, but we believe it is no stretch to say that Mrs. Pelosi's handiwork ranks with the Smoot-Hawley tariff and FDR's National Industrial Recovery Act as among the worst bills Congress has ever seriously contemplated.

Posted by cabinman (anonymous) on November 3, 2009 at 7:02 p.m. (Suggest removal)

warrior do you mind being under control from big business?

Posted by meeker (anonymous) on November 4, 2009 at 12:25 p.m. (Suggest removal)

Cabinman, are you serious? Big business cannot confiscate your wealth, they cannot compell you to do anything, they cannot throw you in jail. Only government can do those things. And you want to give more power to government? I can always say no to a big business, but cannot do so to government.

Posted by ErnieGann (anonymous) on November 5, 2009 at 4:22 p.m. (Suggest removal)

Liberals keep trotting out the old WHO study--a study so flawed that it hasn't been issued since the year 2000.

The Wall Street Journal did an expose of health care myths. Here's the link http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424...

Heres the WHO quote "the best interest of patients or society."

• The World Health Organization ranks the U.S. 37th In the world in quality. This is another frightening statistic. It is also not accurate. Yet the head of the National Committee for Quality Assurance, a powerful organization influencing both the government and private insurers in defining quality of care, has stated this as fact.

The World Health Organization ranks the U.S. No. 1 among all countries in "responsiveness." Responsiveness has two components: respect for persons (including dignity, confidentiality and autonomy of individuals and families to make decisions about their own care), and client orientation (including prompt attention, access to social support networks during care, quality of basic amenities and choice of provider). This is what Americans rightly understand as quality care and worry will be lost in the upheaval of reform. Our country's composite score fell to 37 primarily because we lack universal coverage and care is a financial burden for many citizens.

So--the WHO--the "One World Government"--ranks the U.S. down because...........wait for it...........wait............wait........WE DON'T HAVE UNIVERSAL COVERAGE! Never mind that we have excellent coverage, never mind that people come here from all over the world, never mind that the vast majority of people with coverage are HAPPY with their coverage--according to the bureaucrats at WHO, we CAN'T be any good because we don't adopt their failed system!

Anything coming from WHO should be immediately suspect. This is an arm of the UN--and like the parent organization, they have been big on talk but not actually accomplished anything. Read their list of accomplishments--the "study", they "encourage", they "monitor"--but they don't actually DO anything. These are the people that can't give away donated powdered milk!
"