This absurdity — nay, this calumny! — from the guy who’s supposedly going to transform Christy Mihos from 2006’s comic relief to next year’s Charlie-slayer.
Question for Christy Mihos: do you agree with “Dick” Morris that President Obama’s health plan is going to kill people?
Please share widely!
that access to critical services are delayed, then this isn’t necessarily a cheap shot. “Purchasing” health care isn’t like waiting for the right advertising flier or sale to arrive in the Globe to pick up a new sofa, car or laptop. This coming from someone whose wife had a great endocrinologist who overstepped the primary care doctor in detecting a malignant thyroid tumor (the former primary care doctor said “you’re imaging things”; the endo said not so fast, and the biopsies proved out. Thank the world for MGH). Believe me, a delay of a few months would have made a world of difference in the outcome. If you’ve been there, you’ll understand why delays in seeing specialists isn’t a trivial matter.
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p>There is a third dimension with health care when it’s serious: time. How much do you value your or a loved one’s life?
…under Obama’s plan, but it’s not delayed in today’s world of for-profit health care? Why would your wife’s endocrinologist not be able to make a timely medical decision if the insurance coverage was provided by the government? My mother has Medicare – when she needs treatment, she gets treatment, and when she needs a specialist, she sees one. She’ll be 88 in September, and she loves the care she gets from “socialized medicine”.
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p>I wasn’t able to attend Netroots Nation this year, so I donated my ticket to another blogger who has diabetes. Because she didn’t have health insurance, her diabetes worsened to the point that her kidneys shut down, she’s now on dialysis – now that she needs dialysis, she’s finally been given Medicaid. This is a product of our current system, if she had had coverage in the first place, she would have been better able to manage her diabetes and may have avoided renal failure and the expense of dialysis. I gave her my ticket so that the politicians who attend can see first-hand the sub-par results our current system provides.
It has done well by me. However, the prescriptions are a bitch. I have been dead twice. Great emergency room care brought me back. I don’t want a government hack making any possible decision on my well-being. If I want to live, that’s my decision, or my proxies’. They know my wishes. If I want to die, same thing.
You say you don’t want a “government hack” making any possible decision on your well-being. At the moment, you have insurance company hacks doing exactly that. Care providers have strong incentives to provide any and every remotely defensible procedure. Insurance companies have equally strong incentives to find any and every creative way possible to deny payment for those procedures. The patient ends up holding the bag.
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p>A physician’s claim is rejected by the insurance company. Who gets the bill? The patient. The insurance company says the physician filed with the wrong information. Who gets the bill? The patient. The physician “misplaces” the insurance information for a patient. Who gets the bill? The patient. State law regulates how much a provider can be reimbursed for a given procedure. When any of the above bills reach the patient, what is the amount shown on the bill? Two and three times that amount.
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p>In the current system, who has incentives to actually pay reasonable charges in a reasonable time? Nobody. Who has incentives to make sure that physician claim submission procedures work in the most effective way possible? Nobody.
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p>The current health care system is a disaster and getting worse by the year.
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p>The proposed plan will improve, not harm, emergency room care. Even the proposed plan (like its Massachusetts prototype) falls far short of what’s really needed, because it keeps the insurance companies squarely in the middle of the health care delivery system. The insurance companies — not the providers and not the government — are the problem. A single-payer system is the solution.
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p>We need a national, federally-sponsored, single-payer health care system where the sole role of insurance companies (if they have a role at all) is to expedite payment from the government to providers, and where they are measured by how much they move how quickly.
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p>Medical care is not like shopping around for a brake job after your mechanic says “your rotors are shot”.
I use to think of him as a middle-of-the-road freelancer willing to work for either side, but in recent years he’s been a rightwing mouthfrother. What happened? Is it because he’s on Fox’s payroll? Is he still miffed at Bill Clinton for cutting him lose after being discovered with a prostitute (including, as I recall, divulging campaign secrets to her)? He was always borderline sleaze in my mind, but there was a time when I thought some of what he had to say was worth at least hearing out.
…pushed him over the edge. He’s gone the full monty into crazyland!
clinical opinion has tipped the scales in favor of permanent brain damage due to excessive fetishistic toe sucking. Collapsed vessels or an air bubble or something. Pretty complicated stuff. đŸ˜‰
The fact that faux news or any other news station is even talking about a single payer health plan just goes to show they are passing along bad information again.
Single payer heath care isn’t even on the table anymore.
Which I think is a good thing. Having the government run
a healthcare plan that covers the entire population of the United States is a disaster waiting to happen.
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p>AN INSURANCE EXCHANGE WITH A PUBLIC OPTION CHOICE is the best way to go. With regulations in place that coverage can’t be denied to people with preexisting conditions.
This way, the government can keep corporate insurers in check by providing a great plan at low cost so the corporate insurers must change to compete. Also, the government will be kept in check by corporate insurers because they will always have to provide better service in order to create incentive to enroll in the public option.
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p>I’m sure there will be problems with an exchange too. And there is always the risk that those pesky contributions to elected officials will sway decision making for an exchange as well.
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p>But of all the proposals:
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p>1~single payer
2~exchange with regulations
3~exchange with regulations and public plan option
4~do nothing (otherwise known as the ten year trigger)
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p>number three has the greatest potential to provide better services to our citizens, while allowing the freedom of choice so many people are concerned about.
Or is that 4?
…just like everything else about his candidacy!
Taxing employer paid health benefits! Which would be a blatant middle class tax hike, and a hefty one too.
I too thought it sucked, given that the reality in MA is that family coverage is about $18k a year through your employer overall, v. national average of $10k. But you’d better start getting concerned with any of these schemes because what we pay in this state for regular coverage is considered “Cadillac” coverage in the rest of the country on a cost basis.
As it should. We need to ditch the employer provided health plan system, not continue to subsidize it. It is unfair and inefficient.
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p>But with Obama, we won’t get a refundable tax credit to buy our plans (that’d be a major tax cut for me and other self-insured people, in fact I’d make money), and we won’t be able to choose from plans available in red states to avoid blue state mandates like IVF, abortion, and prescription drugs.
If you’ve only been buying amoxicillin you might not be concerned. There are other drugs that cost hundreds of dollars per month. Wait 20 years. You’ll change your mind.
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p>I am not happy about taxing employer paid health benefits.
I’ve heard that the Democratic plan would only affect the value of benefits over 12-15,000 dollars or so (not 100% sure, no link). So his plan would at least leave out the type of benefits an average middle class family might receive. Still worried about that though.
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p>I’m not convinced being able to buy plans across state lines will change anything. Remember, these companies are driven by greed. They want record breaking profits. They will probably charge Mass residents just as much as we pay now. Why wouldn’t they?
because the state makes us pay that much, the state wants to subsidize the pharmaceutical industry and genetic research in general. We gave them $1Billion in bonds and we give them billions more in insurance premiums. 90% of the price they charge is to subsidize the industry, and the state is happy to give them as much as they want. But if we only had ten bucks to give them, they’d only charge us ten bucks. Ethically, they should give drugs away (or at least at cost) to people that need them, it is downright evil that they withhold drugs from people that can save their lives. These aren’t recreational drugs we are talking about.
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p>Yes, the current Dem proposal is to tax “cadillac plans”. And some sort of progressive tax rate makes sense, but it all should be counted as income and taxed. It is income. 100% of it should be taxed. Group plans get enough unfair advantages as it is.
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p>There would be “red state plans” available from red states that don’t mandate that everyone subsidize drug research, infertility treatments, abortions, and organ transplants. Those plans would cost half of what Massachusetts mandates we pay for.
Because it’s worked out so badly for all those countries that tried it, or because we’re so very, very special?
Currently, my health care funding is provided at the sufferance of my employer and administered by a corporation that has no accountability to me at all, and which operates under strong disincentives to pay for any of my care. Single payer would end those onerous conditions.
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p>Even if you are one of those convinced that government can do no right, it has to at least pretend to serve the people, and is – to whatever extent the popular vote has meaning – accountable.
I hate it too. I am fully in support of a government run public option. I would probably choose the government run program if I needed to buy a plan.
But monopolies are monopolies, and a country covered by one government controlled single payer health plan would be one huge monopoly. I am against one entity running such an important aspect of our lives.
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p>My health insurance is fair. We often do have to fight back and forth to get things covered. Our children do not have well child visits covered after the age of 6, so we have to pay out of pocket for physicals. (they aren’t cheap either) We have high co-pays and deductibles. I am so ready for that to end.
So let’s have a wonderful public plan that corporate has to compete with. I would be absolutely ready to give the public option a try, and maybe that would change my mind about supporting a single payer system in the future.
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p>Who knows, maybe the public program will be such an improvement over market place plans, so many people will enroll that we will essentially have single payer health care. It could happen.
I mean in context of poor-fair-good, not fair as in reasonable for the cost.
your insurance, as described, is not fair in either sense. We are all paying far too much and receiving much too little in return.
Just look at the records of other countries. Overall they do a better job than we do hands down.
Max Baucas and Olympia Snow have been meeting to come up with a proposal that blue dawg dems can support, it does not contain a govt option. The CBO also is revising costs of the Baucas and Snow plan and it is said to be cost neutral. The current govt option has considerable costs especially over the next 10 years.