The Glade 4.0

I think the best solution is universal healthcare for all, either via Medicare or a VA like program. It will cost us the least in the long run, will ensure a better quality of care for all citizens, and will bring us in line with basically every single other industrialized nation on the planet.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

Really? Private insurance rations care? Funny. I never seem to have problems getting treated with private insurance.
Really? That's news to me and everyone else. The Senate Bill is projected to reduce the Definition by a grand total of $217 billion dollars over 10 years. The CBO contends that deficits will still exceed a trillion dollars a year under Obama's standing budgets as a best case scenario with White House claims of reductions.
No, it's not. The bureaucracy you're arguing should manage everyone's healthcare is failing to deliver vaccines to the States. The CDC and White House are using the situation as a political tool. It's not a red-herring at all.
Really? The surrounding science supports delaying mammograms until 51? Funny, because, you know, you're wrong. And I didn't say they were law, I said they were provisions in the House Bill (which passed) and the Democrat's Senate Bill. Never mind the hard fact that the highest risk years for developing Breast Cancer are between 41 and 50. Of course, I didn't make an appeal to emotion. I asked exactly how does this work out to the benefit you keep touting. At what point does changing care standards against empirical fact improve the quality of health care?
You really have no idea what you're talking about now.
1. Bush's Tax Cuts didn't cost me or you any money. They had a negligible impact on Federal Government revenues, too; after all, investments and capital gains taxation increased; actual business taxes paid increases; and more money was capitalized for gain under Bush's presidency than would have otherwise been.
2. We won't save any money through this plan: both plans include increased taxation, including surtaxes on private insurance. So, not only will I have to pay more for your coverage, because you feel entitled to it, I will have to pay a tax on my own health insurance which serves me just fine. That's not saving money, Montegue.
3. Universal Health Care Coverage will do what, except drive up the cost of Health Care and drive down the availability of providers? How do you escape the Law of Supply and Demand?
That's all fine and good; except, under your idea of a right, there will be no one to provide care. The best part about the House and Senate reforms will be the number of doctors who quit their practices and the number of doctors and nurses that never get trained. When you remove the incentive for someone to do a job, they quit doing they job unless forced.

So, who's going to treat you when the best and brightest and most inclined seek other vocations because medicine doesn't pay the bills?

Amusingly, everyone already has access to health insurance. 80% of the uninsured choose to be uninsured by the measures used by the Obama Administration. I know, I'm in that 80%. I have a Catastrophic Illness and Injury policy, an HSA, and the ability to pay out of pocket for office visits and preventative care. And, ironically, even with my health issues, I pay less a year than the average Single Person covered by employer provided group plans. Funny how that works out ... individual responsibility and intelligent behavior trumps your reform that will tax my policy and consider me uninsured.

Xequecal:

What problems? The Blacklisting is a myth and fabrication on the private insurance side. If you develop one of those problems, Federal law already prevents your existing insurance company from dropping you or pricing you out of coverage. And if you don't have coverage or can't afford it, your big problem is that Medicare doesn't cover most of them itself. But, you never hear that ...

The real problems with American Health Care is a long history of retarded government intrusion and price fixing. Yet, neither you nor Montegue will address the fact that outside of ridiculous anti-medicine tort law, Medicare is the single largest contributor to the increase of health care costs in the United States.

Stop reading DailyKOS and the Huffington post for Insurance News. The Liberal Web Media has their heads up their asses on this issue and ignores the very real facts of our system.

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I know I keep harping on this, but this is just fine from a liberal perspective. You have money, so you should be happy to pay extra for the betterment of the "less fortunate." If you are not, you are an immoral degenerate who doesn't deserve his wealth anyway, and we're totally morally vindicated in "stealing" it from you. This IS the attitude of most liberals and is why public health care is so popular. I don't get why everyone on both sides insists on dancing around this point. It's blatantly obvious that this concept is what public health care is based on.



I know that. But when your current contract term expires, they won't renew you. My personal insurance has to be renewed each year and I hear some insurance companies force you to renew your contract every six months. So if you develop one of these conditions you're gonna be SOL pretty fast.



I'm not a fan of Medicare. And I'm not pulling this off DailyKOS. I had this discussion with the guy who sold me my insurance policy, since I assume he actually knows the business. I asked him straight up, "How does someone with HIV, cancer, autism, or Crohn's disease get private insurance?" His answer was, "You don't, unless you're under an employer's group plan and he doesn't find a reason to fire you."

You bet they do. I have watched the process cross my desk.



And if you keep reading, they estimate another 650 billion in savings in the ten years following that. That's damn close to a trillion dollars in *savings*.
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Tell me, when the VA system is properly funded, is it a giant colossal failure?




Really.



Yes it does, and no, I am not wrong. The board that made this reccomendation did so because of the amount of false positives, the problems those false positives cause, and because of the low amount of actual positives you find between the age of 40 and 50.



Show me. Pretty sure you're wrong here.



Actually, no.



You have your facts wrong.



Save your personal attacks, Khross. I know exactly what I am talking about.



They cost the government 2 *trillion* dollars. That's a hard fact, if you will. Two trillion dollars in revenue *lost*. And did it produce a massive spike in jobs, or growth? No. In fact, our economy got worse and worse under Bush, despite his tax cuts.



Except for the trillion dollars the CBO sees. IF we spend X amount on health care now, and after this time frame we spend X minus 2 trillion, we have saved money.





*eyeroll*. Yet another dire horrifying warning of how doctors will stop working when 30 million more people have health insurance.

Wait, that's 30 million more people getting treated. That's thirty million more people to bill.

Doctors aren't going anywhere.



Dr. John Galt, then? You might have a point if there weren't lots and lots of brilliant doctors that work in countries that have universal health care coverage.



That's just a lot of hogwash. Everyone does *not* have access to health insurance. Many who *do* qualify for medicaid don't use it, and should, but your paragraph here is unsupported and simply not accurate.


Blacklisting is *not* a myth. Recission is not a myth. I have watched people with serious illnesses get dropped from their insurance on technicalities. I have watched what happens when employers find out someone has a serious condition and that their rates will be going up. I've watched as a health insurance company retroactively denied claims on a cancer patient because of an unrelated illness she never reported (because she never knew she had to).

The profit motive fails when it comes to health care. Health insurance companies kill.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

Xeq if we destroy the cost multipliers average cost decreases tremendously. If we stop a lot of the mandatory cost shifting things will balance out and costs drop for almost everyone. This will free up money for charity to better handle cases such as this. Remember for every 10% in income charitable giving goes up by 3% (go high enough and the charitable rate starts to increase itself). Since charitable organizations spend money more efficiently than social mandates net services and quality increase. We increase competition in insurance companies by opening up state laws and engage in tort reform.

There is no solution that will work perfectly but this will allow most benefit for least effort.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

That depends entirely on how you define "most benefit." Both you and Khross are arguing that a private system based off personal responsibility is cheaper. I definitely agree with that, but you keep overlooking that the average person totally **** fails at personal responsibility. The only way such a system can work is if you lay out severe consequences for failure. If you could tell the 400-pound guy that because he chain smoked and subsisted for the last 10 years on the Krispy Kreme diet, we no longer give a **** about his health care and he can go die somewhere, of course costs will come down. But virtually no one is willing to do this.

Private health care can ONLY work if you are willing to accept that a large number of people will go without health care. It's the same as private education, or private anything. Most Americans see at least basic health care as a right, not a privilege, and private health care can never fulfill that expectation.

There's some truth to the underlined portion, but you're exaggerating significantly.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Xeq and how are people supposed to be motivated to take responsibility? By being rewarded when they do not and punished when they do - or the converse?

No it doesn't only work that way Xeq unless you believe that the average person is not charitable.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

The question you really need to be asking is, "how do I convince the masses to accept that health care is a privilege, not a right." Because until you do you will have this problem.

The lack of honesty when it comes to health care is astounding. While liberals are under some kind of weird delusion that public care will cost less and be more efficient, conservatives seem to somehow believe that if you deregulate a private system enough, somehow everyone will get health care. Both of these points are total bullshit and it makes arguing based on facts impossible.

We can't even get the masses to realize that driving, and cable TV are privileges.

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

Montegue:

Bush's tax cuts didn't cost the Federal Government any revenue. You keep persisting with this myth, when, in point of fact, Federal Revenues continued to rise and exceeded the growth points under Bill Clinton's presidency.

Regular mammograms should start at 40, end of story. Whatever bullshit Pelosi and Reid are feeding your blogsites is exactly that: bullshit. But, this is a good issue in and of itself: you're already arguing for the rationing of healthcare to defend bad legislation. I guess it's not legislation if it gets your pet bill passed.

Blacklisting and vacating policies are already illegal under current federal law. What will you say when its Medicaid/Medicare doing the same thing?

Yes, the VA is a massive failure at the moment. The shift to Tri-Care decreased the quality of care for veterans and active duty military, because they lost certain private sector physician protections and payments. Of course, a little less than 8% of the population qualifies as it is and has to deal with care rationing and limits. You want to expand the government purview to include more?

Xequecal:

The surtaxes will affect the family plans for everyone at my university with a spouse and 1 dependent. The tax is based on total cost, not individual contribution. It will also affect everyone on the personal plan (covering only themselves). Basically, they want to tax private health care out of existence.

As for the liberals thinking its ok to steal my money, that's their problem. When there is no one left to pay the bills for them, they'll just resort to violence. There are 330 million people in this nation in the 4th or 5th largest geographical area on the planet. We have more ethnic diversity than every country on the planet with a socialized medical system. All sorts of reasons why their plan will fail miserably.

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Those masses don't need public health care, they need to be Darwin Award recipients!!

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"Said I never had much use for one, never said I didn't know how to use one!"~ Matthew Quigley

"nothing like a little meow in bed at night" ~ Bruskey

"I gotta float my stick same as you" Hondo Lane

"Fill your hand you son of a *****!"

Montegue:

Unless you have worked in or been a patient in a VA hospital you don't know squat about what goes on there, so don't even think about spouting your liberal nonsense about VA hospitals and their financing!!

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"Said I never had much use for one, never said I didn't know how to use one!"~ Matthew Quigley

"nothing like a little meow in bed at night" ~ Bruskey

"I gotta float my stick same as you" Hondo Lane

"Fill your hand you son of a *****!"

Yes, this is pretty much the plan. If you tell today's liberal that someone should have a higher life expectancy because they are wealthier, they will call you an inhuman monster. The liberal philosophy is that everyone should get the same health care regardless of wealth, and the only way to ensure that is to force everyone onto the same public system. I have been told by a few far-left liberals that not only should we do a public option, but any private spending on health care outside that public option should be illegal, to totally enforce the "fairness."

Yes the ideal liberal equality brings the equality of the grave.

Galt was so right when he was in the torture machine.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Just a serious question here, not trying to imply anything:

Why can't someone with a pre-existing condition get insurance that covers them for everything except their pre-existing condition? For example, why can't someone with cancer get insurance coverage that would pay their medical bills if they got into a car accident and had to be hospitalized, but wouldn't cover them for anything cancer related?

To me, the rule to ignore the pre existing condition, would be like demanding car insurance cover the chronic drunk driver. I know it is a poor example, as cancer happens and drunk driving is a choice. But essentially you are telling a buisness to make unprofitable decisions. Next would be a demand on banks to ignore the credit history of an applicant before making a home loan.

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"Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

So who gets to be the Barney Frank of the insurance industry since your example happened?

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

Next? I thought that's why the bubble burst.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

I should have put the "next" in quotation so show I was joking as to the effect of government interference in the business world.

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"Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

Oooh lets mandate life insurance of at least 500,000. that way for everyone who dies the government can tag half that policy as well!

I can solve the budget in a generation!

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

Monte: This post is directed at you.



A few things about this report:

1) If the report didn't "conclude" something that our administration liked, it never would have been released, much less publicized. That's how pseudo-news modern politics works.

2) The two countries where this "science" came from have a breast cancer survival rate of less than 80%. Here in America, our survival rate is above 90%.

3) The efficency study they conducted is cost centric. It concluded that the reduction in costs and net savings, could be applied and still retain an 81% effectiveness. Which of course means 19% ineffectiveness. Which means alot of dead women and motherless children.

The fall-out will be, that women who self test won't have their mamorgams covered by their insurance. Young women won't have their mamograms covered, and when dealing with an aggressive cancer like breast cancer, two year periods between mamograms will render many women untreatable by the time the government allows them to detect their cancer.

This really doesn't seem to jive with the notion that a woman should have control over her own body.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20