One VERY important note:
This debate is just about to start. The fight isn’t over as the Gitmo situation illustrated. They WERE going to bring those terrorists here until polls came out. When you spoke up and 75% said “no way”, the government backed down and quickly.
The same applies here. Learn the lesson. Make the Congresspeople afraid of you in 2010 and watch what happens.
We CAN stop this if you act now! Fax and call the congress. Flood their emails. DON’T twiddle your thumbs because in a very short period of time the debate will ensue on this.
OK – to the health care and the truth.
There are several plans being bandied about at this time – and not a single one of them is good for this country.
One of the points I might offer is the fact that I have been attended by government VA hospitals and would rather pay to not use one again is a very important thing for most people to understand.
Talk to people who have worked in a VA hospital and left quickly. I met a nurse who worked there 2 weeks before leaving stating that she couldn’t deal with having to treat people in that system.
What we are talking about, in plain talk, is the fact that the government will, in it’s ineffectual way, try to run 17% of our economy efficiently, thus accomplishing something it has never done before.
Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Welfare, Military Procurement, Amtrak, etc.
Need I say more?
How about this – 119 million people are insured. There isn’t really a crisis of uninsured.
47 million are uninsured, but the average time they stay that way is 4 months.
38% are voluntarily uninsured for higher pay – the youth who don’t WANT insurance. Obama, of course, finds this unacceptable and wants MANDATORY insurance for all.
25% could be on medicare at this time and don’t apply for it voluntarily.
That is 63% – almost 2/3 aren’t involuntarily uninsured.
The crisis – there are truly about 8-9 million who are uninsured for reasons that keep them fairly permanently on those rolls. And we agree that help could be provided for them – but certainly not mandatorily by government insurance.
The hospitals actually will see someone without insurance now – as the hospital in my area will tell you. The costs that keep going up are a good deal because the hospitals DO see the uninsured.
One little thing being batted around by Congress right now is the possibility of people who maintain their private insurance being taxed as if the value of that insurance was additional income. So – if you earn 50k per year plus have insurance valued at 15k, guess what? You get taxed on income at 65k per year.
What do you think this is going to do? Drive people to government insurance (and power) and put hundreds of thousands out of work.
Ok – let’s talk different plans and their points:
Single payer – basically medicare for all. Go to your local clinic and ask a doctor what they think about government health care for 100% of the people in the nation.
According to the Heritage Foundation:
The key issue in the emerging national health care debate is the role of the federal government. While some Members of Congress favor a “single-payer” national health insurance system—”Medicare for all”—others, including President Obama, propose a new public plan, modeled after Medicare, to compete with private health plans in a national health insurance exchange.[1]
Many independent experts expect a “crowd out” of existing private options and a rapid evolution toward a single payer system of national health insurance.[2] In either case, the federal government would amass greater power over the financing and delivery of medical services; it would also determine the benefits and medical procedures that Americans would get and the prices providers are paid for them. This concentration of government power over health care would have a profound impact on all Americans, especially members of the medical profession.
Such government control would:
- Result in substantially lower payments to physicians and other health care providers compared to a multiple-payer system;
- Reduce the quality of care by limiting the ability of physicians to invest in advanced medical equipment that takes advantage of new technology;
- Limit access to care in the near term, as current physicians and other professionals retire earlier or otherwise leave the profession;
Limit access to care even more substantially in the long term, as the prospect of lower lifetime earnings reduces the incentive for talented people to choose careers in health care; and
Reduce the rate of medical progress, because fewer talented people receiving medical training decreases the supply of talented medical researchers.
Read a lot more about single payer systems here:
http://www.heritage.org/research/healthcare/wm2381.cfm
Another system that is being considered is the plan that has been in place since 2006 in Massachusetts.
In it’s conception, this plan was supposed to cost the state $120 million a year, but has rapidly ballooned to 10 times that amount at $1.1 billion a year.
Boston has the LONGEST waiting times in the NATION according to recent studies.
This plan isn’t free to everyone. This is a sliding subsidized scale that runs between 0-330 dollars a month for single people and 0 – 792 dollars a month for families. This is based on income, as are the copays.
There are still deductibles. 2000.00 for singles and 4000.00 for families with a cap of out of pocket of 5000.00 and 10000.00 respectively.
Also – in Massachusetts, it is mandatory with limited exceptions. People WITHOUT COVERAGE FACE PENALTIES UP TO 912.00 per year. You have NO CHOICE.
I have better insurance from my company for 50 dollars a month for my wife and myself – what would I want this for? Most people who have insurance rate it as good to great. I wonder if the UAW wants to surrender their insurance for this? Does Congress and the SEIU have to participate? If not – you know it is a failure and YOU don’t want it EITHER!
Another plan being discussed is the Baucus plan which:
Temporarily expands eligibility of Medicare to Americans aged 55 to 64.
Eliminates two-year waiting period for Medicare coverage for individuals with disabilities.
Requires states to use CHIP to cover all children at or below 250 percent of the poverty level. Eliminates 5 year waiting period for legal immigrant access to Medicaid and CHIP.
Enrollment of every individual in some form of health care plan, private or public.
Individuals required to have a certificate of coverage from their insurer.
Once again – NO CHOICE.
Also, there will be a fee assessed everyone with private insurance to help fund the new system which they haven’t been able to put a cost to yet.
If you want to see information on 16 different plans being offered, check out this link to a great organization, CPRights:
If you want information from CPRights – contact them at info@cprights.org
You definitely want to visit their site and look at the no national health care solution they offer.
Check out their commercials too as well as their infomercials that you can see the schedule of on their site.
I can’t stress this enough – with national health care, time that you wait to see a doctor will go up, the care will go down because the rewards of being a doctor will decrease dramatically.
Drugs and treatments that are being worked on today for hopes of a financial profit down the road will mostly cease to exist as the government is so bad about funding research, especially without killing most of the grant recipients with paperwork (my wife was financial adviser at a charity non profit that received government money).
Visit the CPRights site and see the video where they talk to patients and doctors from the systems that the socialists are trying to emulate here.
Please – do something to fight this right now. We can fix what we have through reforms of insurance, health care, less regulation by the government, more competition and tort reform to stop the huge lawsuit costs from piling on costs to every level of costs that eventually get passed to the consumer.
Help spread the word – Health care isn’t a crisis – that is just the Dems word to get everyone to panic and change when most people don’t want change.
But government knows best….. right? (/sarcasm)
Make the call before you forget it! Contact info can be found at the link below:
http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml
Filed under: Campaign promises, Crackdown on civil rights, Current, Economics, Health Care, Honesty in politics?, Lying Liberal Media, Obamanews, stupid liberal programs, stupid socialist programs, stupidity, Taxation | Tagged: America, American, freedom, left wing, liberal, Obama, political, political debate, political discussion, politics, progressive, right wing, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, socialism, stupidity, Taxation, taxes, truth |
DirtyRottenScoundrels 
Good info.
[…] 7, 2009 · No Comments The Truth About Health Care Posted on 06/05/2009 by […]
We really need a public healthcare solution that lets us get away from those insurance companies who currently have a stranglehold on the healthcare dollar. We also need to address the plight of the millions of Americans who have no healthcare. It’s time to put the old politics aside and do the right thing for all Americans.
John, there are not “millions of Americans who have no healthcare.” There ARE millions of Americans who have no health INSURANCE and that is quite a separate matter. In fact, the one thing that those uninsured American’s do have is Choice: Choice of doctor, choice of hospital, choice of treatment. That choice is something that NONE of the millions of Americans using Medicare and Medicaid have. The American Seniors on Medicare have no choice on their health care delivery. What is even more offensive is that Medicare recipients are not ALLOWED to open a Health Savings Account – which would be more cost effective than enrolling in a Medigap plan.
But back to the issue of the uninsured, when was the last time you heard of a hospital turning away someone was uninsured? Or a doctor turning them away? Yes- put old politics aside, but not with the goal of pursuing the same old, tired appeal for socialist medicine.
As a physician, I can tell you that I do the happy dance when a patient comes in as a self pay patient (no insurance, limited coverage or insured but does not want services to be claimed on their insurance). My office discounts our fees (that we submit to insurers)by 50% for cash or credit card in hand and come out smelling like a rose. We also work hard to be sure that we only do the absolutely necessary services and let them decide if further care is appropriate for them. The insurance plans reimburse for services so poorly that I would prefer that all patients be self pay. My fees would dramatically go down and my income would increase if I could charge something less than the inflated fees (UCR) that are charged insurance companies and then slashed per contracted reimbursements. Today, I am lucky to recoup 25-30 cents on the dollar from ANY insurer and Medicare and Medicaid reimburse much less than that, so you can see that if I could get 50 cents on the dollar for services to a self pay patient, how my financials would improve greatly.
If everybody could have health savings accounts where they are responsible for their own payments and choices of services, patients would be much more careful regarding how their money is spent. That expensive CT scan or MRI would not be done as a knee jerk “cover the waterfront” testing from internists and all physicians would need to use our brains again!!
Any time, dear Doctor, that you would like to write a blog article on what you go through with insurance or medicare/aid, let me know. I would also love to hear the nightmares about YOUR insurance, as most people don’t realize how much doctors pay both themselves and often in practices too.
Thanks for the great comment and info!