Very illuminating story on Politico.com about health care reform proposals in Congress. This story shows how non-radical the legislation really is, despite opponents doomsday rhetoric.
Seems like we're trying to put band aids on gaping wounds. Why doesn't the United States join the rest of the developed world and have a single payer, government run system — basically Medicare for all. Sure it would be imperfect, but it can't be more imperfect than thousands of people dying because they lack insurance and families and business going under because they can't afford private coverage.
Health is not a commodity that should be subject to the laws of supply and demand. Some worry about freedom being taking away by more government involvement in health insurance. Imagine the "freedom" from fear about rising costs and lack of coverage a single payer system could unleash.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
I'm all for universal health care, but I can't for the life of me see where the mandatory $3,000 per year is going to come from for the single mothers who work at McDonalds. Part time workers, farm hands, etc.
Palin talks about death councils, how about this one?:
I had a good friend that had debilitating cancer who had insurance and had been in the policy for about 10 years, paid for by her employer. Because she got sick, she wasn't able to work, but she had COBRA and tried to keep the insurance paid. The insurance company re-rated her and raised the premiums as soon as she quit working (she was in the hospital). She sold her house and belongings, her parents mortgaged their house and even still couldn't continue to make the payments on her policy. She and her family ran out of money after paying these ba$^ards tens of thousands while unemployed and hospitalized. The insurance company cut her off. She was dead within 2 months after care was denied. I miss her. I think of her every time I hear one of these people standing in the way of very necessary healthcare reform.
It is time for healthcare change.
Thousands of people with excellent healthcare insurance die every year as well. Socialism is not the answer.
Headline :
Big Liberal thinks MORE Big Government THE ANSWER.
Big Surprise - NOT !
We need to open up inter state competition so we have more choices than just Coventry & BCBS here in Kansas.
O's stimulus package is claiming job increases in districts that don't exist.
Sixty Minutes showed the fraud rampant in Medicare.
from John Stossel's blog
http://stossel.blogs.foxbusiness.com/2009/11/20/the-true-cost-of-the-health-care-bills/
THE TRUE COST OF THE HEALTH CARE BILLS
The House did Thursday what the Senate didn’t do last month: It passed a bill to cancel a scheduled 21 percent pay cut for doctors who treat Medicare patients.
That's from an NPR report this morning about the "doc fix". (We listen, so you don’t have to.) Current law requires cuts in Medicare payments to doctors, but since 2003, Congress has suspended those cuts year by year. However, both Senate and House Health Care bills rely on these Medicare cuts so they can deceitfully flaunt them as "deficit reducing" bills. If this "doc fix" bill passed in the House becomes law, the Health Care bills will actually cost over a Trillion dollars and add billions more to the deficit -- two things President Obama pledged his health "reforms" would not do.
Want to guess whether NPR finds this relevant? Something that would perhaps be important to its listeners? Don't bother. They didn't. Not a single word explaining the connection.
Megan McArdle at The Atlantic explains why the "doc fix" needs to be included in any discussion about the true cost of the health care bills in Congress:
It would be one thing if they'd found some alternative financing mechanism to pay for the physician fix. But as I see it, they're passing a bill that increases the deficit by $200 billion in order to pass another bill that hopefully reduces it, but by substantially less than $200 billion. That means that passage of this bill is going to increase the deficit.
Exactly. Rep. Paul Ryan asked the Congressional Budget Office to incorporate the "doc fix" into the Health Care bill and tell him whether it was still "deficit neutral". It wasn't. Few besides McArdle, Reason's Peter Suderman, and Bloomberg.com have reported on that.
Post a Comment