We have it now ...in a very ineffecient system. You have money taken out of your paycheck. You go to the Dr. and based on your insurance provider, they increase the fee depending on how much the insurance company cuts it. Furthermore, anybody can get free healthcare by simply going to the emergency room. Then the hospitals charge more for any care they dispense including visits you may incure which gets charged to insurance companies anyway who thusly take it out of your paycheck. Don't forget we already have Medicare which is a very poor attempt at socialized insurance already ...that ALSO comes out of your paycheck. And the kicker here, is you pay into it but the only people that use it are really old and therefore are heavy burdens. Unlike a healthy insurance program where the beneficiaries are a cross section of the public where most people don't the insurance. See how that works? All costs come out of your paycheck directly or indirectly. So why are we paying profit seeking insurance companies to broker this whole thing for us?
Which I can opt out of, or modify, pick any plan I choose. Unless you opt out of health plan entirely. Or have the cheapest HMO and are healthy. Isn't medicare the reason to NOT let the .gov screw this one up? because the fed .gov has proved when we give them money they cannot handle it.
The rates are still set by the insurance companies ...who still have to cover rising costs by hospitals ...who are covering uninsured patients. You can opt out ...but then you'll inevitably turn into one of the uninsured people in the emergency room ...which you'll most likely be there because you didn't have much cheaper preventative care. Didn't read? Medicare is insurance for people who use it at probably an >80%. As opposed to standard insurance policies who also cover young healthy people that use it MUCH less frequently. ...have the insurance companies done any better given our spiralling health care costs. I don't feel as though they've done us any favors either. SS has been a GREAT plan ...until politicians decide the borrow from the system. Al Gore proposed that we dedicate the SS $ in a "lock box" ...and Gore became the butt of all the jokes. Nobody is laughing anymore about it.
no offense was taken. invisible fan is probably right, type II is probably becoming prevalent because of our diet as well as genetics. which goes back to the corn lobby, which has led to all this processed food we eat now. my brother who never weighed more than 185 and is about the same height found out he had it ten years ago, he's 11 years older than me. my maternal uncle found out he had at about age 75. my fraternal grandmother found out she had it about 20 years ago at age 75, and my fraternal aunt found out she had it about 5 years ago. All type II I believe. Type I is cause by obesity and you can actually cure it by losing weight. not to go off on a tangent
The biggest benefit of having universally available healthcare is preventative care. Right now one of the biggest problems we have with healthcare is that due to its cost many people don't go and see a doctor until a lingering problem gets severe. That means that the problem is only treated at its most expensive point.
Preventative care is being cut out of healthcare systems all over Europe. In France now, 70+% of the population has a supplemental healthcare policy, generally to cover preventative care. Before HMOs (which are a Nixon-era government creation), the United States had the best healthcare system in the world, by far. One of the key characteristics of that system was that people payed out of their pocket for routine medical expenses, they were affordable, and people generally had a great relationship with their doctor.
^ I don't know about Europe but in Asia there is a big focus on preventive care and it is one of the things that many Asian countries are looking at to keep healthcare costs low.
The point of the thread is we can't afford to borrow any more money. Any more govt. spending will necessitate borrowing money. Every campaign promise at this point if kept will take another slash into our standard of living. In other words the economy is only going to get worse after the election. (and president Obama will have the previous admin to blame- instead of the FED and its cheap credit debacle) We are pretty well going to spend ourselves into ruin based upon the democratic and republican policies. If you are in debt and you keep borrowing you don't get out of debt.
http://perotcharts.com http://perotcharts.com/challenges/ take 10 minutes out of your day and please educate yourself if you haven't already. the site does an excellent job of clearly explaining the massive problem at hand. there are even videos and narrated slideshows for the people who don't want to read.
The only real solution our problems is drastically change healthcare. The only solution is to kill big pharm and the AMA. That won't be easy to do. Really there is not another good solution.
The point of this thread is that the American people need to wake up and kick out any poltician who won't drastically reduce federal spending.
I agree 100% But I think everyone is pretty much taking sleeping pills at this point- the media, politicians, educators etc.
It's unlikely we can make healthcare a moral imperative as long as the healthcare industry is unrestricted for profit. So who gets to hold that 99.2 trillion? Is it some abstract sword of death, or do some filthy rich people get to use it?
Otherwise the nation is bankrupt, not that it isn't already. However most every other country does limit the healthcare industry. When hospitals charging 5 bucks for a pill what chance do we have having affordable healthcare even with universal health coverage.
but it won't happen because very few have taken the time to realize the gravity of the situation. further this isn't just federal spending as a whole it is the mandatory (obligated by law) spending that will kill us. there is no easy way out of this problem. it is basically either massively increase tax revenues (i think by like 80%), growing our way out of it (double digit GDP growth for the next few decades), or by massive cuts to the entitlements. it's all in that perot slideshow.
it's the amount of money we will need to pay for the entitlements. did you read the speech or look at the perot slideshow?
Yes...I'm assuming the healthcare industry becomes filthy rich by this since the elderly and disabled need a lot of medical attention? What could trickle back, so to speak? The debt could also be in a form of interest to be paid over time. I want to know what we'd scrap if we had no other choice and what we'd be burdened with through forced obligations.
they will only get rich if we find a way to pay for this stuff. we don't have a way to pay for what we are legally promising so they won't get filthy rich. could you explain that a little more? we already have a back breaking amount of debt. we would end up being forced to scrap healthcare.
I'm thinking of the interest on our outstanding debt exploded into $99.2 trillion. We currently pay off 400 billion in interest alone. The danger is that our debt commitments are slowly being held by non-domestic players. http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/ir/ir_expense.htm How much would would the government still remain in debt? Would profligate government spending be curtailed or encouraged because of our culture of running up debt "as the grease of the economy". I know this is the endgame many libertarian and Conservatives in libertarian clothing want, but offloading that commitment to individuals will bankrupt enough to send the public back howling to their Congressmen for protection.
