Actually You maybe right HOWEVER the problem is that we ACCEPT the Government's inadquacies we do not DEMAND better from the government we just make the joke reality that the government will never do anything efficiently Rocket River Revamp the way Government does business
On some levels it appears that Healthcare is free... This is just from observations that I have been informed from my girlfriend who works at an out-patient clininc. She tells me of several people who are not even US citizens that come into their place of business and these people have government health care coverage. Believe me she calls in to verify the insurances all the time and these are legitimate coverages that their clinic is compensated for. I don't know the whole logisitcs, but it is either medicare or medicaid (I personally get them confused), but my girlfriend can spit out most of the insurance jargon with the best of them. Can someone explain this to me? Her biggest complaint is that these people that have no residence or citizenship in the US have this free health coverage, while working class people, that she sees come in to the clinic have to try and work out payment plans because it is apparent that health care for them is not financially feasible. I honestly do not now if these individuals had to lie in some respect to obtain their coverage, or if there is some true coverage that our tax dollars pay for that allow non-US individuals to obtain some level of health care. All I can say is that if there is some coverage that our government offers to non-citizens, then why do they not f-ing offer some to the people of our country that can barely afford to pay their bills to stay above water with their low paying wages. I will step down from my soap box... ... sorry for the rant
I think this is the path to take. Health care should be affordable and not free. As I mentioned earlier, I don't think anyone should get anything for free just by existing.
Affordable is the way to go. If that was an option for health care that is the route I would take 111chase111. In my above rant I was not trying to imply that heatlh care be free, only that it is appalling(sp?) if there are those who appear to have found a loop-hole of some sort. pirc1 made a good point that many people would abuse free health care. It reminded me of another point my gf informed me about. She has also told me of several instances of people who are on medicare/medicaid (I am sorry that I am not sure which of the two i was originally told about), that pull up to the clinic she works at, and these people are driving mercedes (nice/expensive cars) and she tells me they are wearing lavish jewelry, but they are demanding that their perscription of Robutussin be filled. I honestly was dumbfounded that if you receive medicare/medicaid, that as long as the doctor writes the perscription, then it does not have to be paid for out of pocket. I was under the assumption that OTC medication wouldn't be covered and that OTC medication was something that had to be paid out of pocket. **shrug**
The OTC stuff can be covered if there is a perscritption for it. In the case of diabetes supplies the OTC test strips are more expensive than the actual medicine. They add up to cost in the thousands in the course of a year. It is much better to be able to get perscription for those and have them paid for. The problem with illegal immigrants using clinics and emergency rooms for free, is that their options are often limited. It is a huge problem when a child that isn't having an emergency is brought to the emergency room because the parents can't afford to take it anywhere else, it takes time, and costs money to everyone else who has to pay for it. I would rather it all be free or very minimal costs, because that way they would be able to go to regular medical facilities and the emergency room would be for emergencies. Everyone should be cared for in the best possible way.
A couple of things about the articles. The wall street journal one, is particularly strange because it is like a hybrid, since he was a foreigner using the UK system. For the citizens of the nation, the health care wouldn't have even cost the 25k it talks about costing him. But I disagree with him talking about the author talking about lack of inventive health care solutions and the incentive being gone in Britain. The most promising healthcare advance in fighting breast cancer has come from there, and deals with ways to weaken the cancer cells while not harming healthy cells as well. The process is one that doesn't give the cells chances to develop immunities to any medications either. It is new and not 100% certain that it will always help, but it is an innovation that the Brits had with their nationalized healthcare that no other nation had. The other article talks about a few nightmare scenarios, and those can be found in any system, and are found in all of them. Neither complete privatization, nor complete nationalization of healthcare will get rid of those. I would say that before we institute a nationalized health care plan we should look very carefully at how it should be instituted. We could take the best ideas from nations already doing it, and try to mesh them together in a way that would best serve our own people.
heatlthcare should be absolutely free, effective, and cutting edge. FOR EVERYONE. we are the freakin' united states of america, the greatest nation on earth, right? we should take care of our own. in addition, higher education should be free. it's the civilized thing to do.
Higher education will not just cost more, I expect many state institutions to become private in the future. The univeristy I am working at is already over 55% funded by tuition and when ten years ago it was funded like 65% by state. Tuition will keep on going up I expect, out of state students now pay about 20k for tuition.
They tried it in Washington state right after Hilary Clinton started tossing the idea around. They discontinued it a year later for two reasons: 1. Doctors fled the state in droves because they could not earn a living enough to purchase a home in Seattle and pay their student loans. 2. They found that costs were out of control because people were going to the doctor every time they sniffled. It becomes easier to justify when there is no cost to you involved.
1. I think it depends on what model we use, but I understand that doctors there would leave, because they can make more money elsewhere and with only state resources to draw on they wouldn't be able to pay them a truly appropriate wage. Just look at the wage teachers get. But with Federal funding I think it could be remedied. 2. Yes that can happen. I believe that it happens a lot the beginning of programs but then it tapers off. I heard that on some debate about the subject in college, and that was many years ago, so there might be new studies. I can only speak personally that I don't enjoy going to the doctor. I have to miss work or something fun, and the doctor's office is never fun. Unless I have to do I would never go, even if I was the one being paid . But I would still rather people go too much than have people, especially children who know there is are treatments out there that can help them with whatever conditions they have, but can't get adequate treatment. I've been in that situation before, and with insurance changes I had to go from a treatment that was working, to one that wasn't for some years, and I know the damage done over that time, but I won't know the extent of any permanent damage until the future. The whole time I knew there was a treatment out there that worked, but just couldn't get afford it, because it was too expensive.
Pardon me for pointing out the obvious but if we are entitled to life then technically the government should provide health care to all whether they can pay for it or not. For instance if someone was bleeding to death a doctor is bound by the Hippocratic Oath to save them but the Hippocratic Oath isn't in the Constitution neither is there an enumerated right to life in Constitution.
No, let's face that some government-paid healthcare is actually kick ass, not subpar. I work at the VA Medical Center in San Francisco, and it is the 2nd best hospital in the bay area. In fact, some of the best docs in the area are gravitating toward the VA because it is single payer and they do not have spend 400% of their time dealing with BS billing regulations from Blue Cross or Healthnet or whatever. I am so tired of the blanket take 'all public-run facilities are terrible.' That is such incorrect garbage - no public program has eever worked, no non-profit facility does what it is supposed to. Yes, some suck. Some suck hard, I have worked at those too, it is not pretty. But saying that profit-driven, rather than value-driven community services are the only way to get anything accomplished is pretty damn cynical, not to mention totally incorrect. Some single payer stuff works. I think we should face that. As AggieRocket's that it is not cost-effective to provide health care for those who live in among us - thanks for that. It is also not cost effective to provide rural electrification, space exploration, the FDIC, the NIH, food stamps, social security, public broadcasting, state parks, farm subsidies, any health and human service, or even civil rights. I hope that hundreds of years down the road, people look at our society and say "They did what was cost effective." And by the way, it is actually cost effective to provide quality health care rich and poor.
That's not true. Entitlement to life just means you have the right to live. No person can take your life away from you. Of course circumstances may occur in which your life is put in peril and you may die from disease or wounds. You are not guaranteed the right to "all methods possible" to save your life. Same thing with the right to pursue happniess. Perhaps happiness to you is to lie around doing nothing. Unfortunately, circumstances (in this case the need for money to pay for food and rent) prevent you from doing so. The government is not obligated to 'give' you life, liberty, and the ability to pursue happiness. The government is just obligated to prevent others from withholding you those right. The Hippocratic Oath is merely an ancient relic of tradition. Plus, it only deals with doctors, not the country as a whole.
Yes and no. Many rights have been interpretted to government actively working to preserve those rights. For instance government has on occasion acted to preserve a diverse and free press through developing media and openning access to them. If there is a right to life then it wouldn't mean much if government didn't act to preserve it in some way, that would mean providing health care. As for things like the right to the pursuit of happiness. It says pursuit so the government is under no obligation to provide happiness. If happiness to me is to lie around all day I'm free to pursue it, I may not get it but the government gives me the right to pursue it. If it said "the right to happiness" then there's an argument that they government would have to provide for the other stuff so I could have my happiness. Finally for the Hippocratic Oath that was my point. Its not in the Constitution same as a specifically enumerated right to life. A strict Constitutionalist would say that those three rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence have no legal barring once we gained our independence. My only point was that 111Chase said those were the only three rights he recognized as government's obligation if so then I would say under the right to life government is obliged to provide health care to preserve life. One last note on the Hippocratic Oath I think its more than just an ancient relic but under I think all state and federal law does compel medical personnel to provide emergency aid whether the patient can pay or not. So technically the government does provide free (or at least compel medical personnel) health care.
There is no free health care anywhere in the world. Somebody pays for it. The question should be phrased- should those who work and pay taxes pay more taxes so that the government can pay for the cost of healthcare? Makes me no difference- I don't see our nation avoiding the economic distaster already coming because of the size of our government debt.
June 13, 2005 One Nation, Uninsured By PAUL KRUGMAN Harry Truman tried to create a national health insurance system. Public opinion was initially on his side: Jill Quadagno's book "One Nation, Uninsured" tells us that in 1945, 75 percent of Americans favored national health insurance. If Truman had succeeded, universal coverage for everyone, not just the elderly, would today be an accepted part of the social contract. But Truman failed. Special interests, especially the American Medical Association and Southern politicians who feared that national insurance would lead to racially integrated hospitals, triumphed. Sixty years later, the patchwork system that evolved in the absence of national health insurance is unraveling. The cost of health care is exploding, the number of uninsured is growing, and corporations that still provide employee coverage are groaning under the strain. So the time will soon be ripe for another try at universal coverage. Public opinion is already favorable: a 2003 Pew poll found that 72 percent of Americans favored government-guaranteed health insurance for all. But special interests will, once again, stand in the way. And the big debate among would-be reformers is how to deal with those interests, especially the insurance companies. These companies played a secondary role in Truman's failure but have since become a seemingly invincible lobby. Let's ignore those who believe that private medical accounts - basically tax shelters for the healthy and wealthy - can solve our health care problems through the magic of the marketplace. The intellectually serious debate is between those who believe that the government should simply provide basic health insurance for everyone and those proposing a more complex, indirect approach that preserves a central role for private health insurance companies. A system in which the government provides universal health insurance is often referred to as "single payer," but I like Ted Kennedy's slogan "Medicare for all." It reminds voters that America already has a highly successful, popular single-payer program, albeit only for the elderly. It shows that we're talking about government insurance, not government-provided health care. And it makes it clear that like Medicare (but unlike Canada's system), a U.S. national health insurance system would allow individuals with the means and inclination to buy their own medical care. The great advantage of universal, government-provided health insurance is lower costs. Canada's government-run insurance system has much less bureaucracy and much lower administrative costs than our largely private system. Medicare has much lower administrative costs than private insurance. The reason is that single-payer systems don't devote large resources to screening out high-risk clients or charging them higher fees. The savings from a single-payer system would probably exceed $200 billion a year, far more than the cost of covering all of those now uninsured. Nonetheless, most reform proposals out there - even proposals from liberal groups like the Century Foundation and the Center for American Progress - reject a simple single-payer approach. Instead, they call for some combination of mandates and subsidies to help everyone buy insurance from private insurers. Some people, not all of them right-wingers, fear that a single-payer system would hurt innovation. But the main reason these proposals give private insurers a big role is the belief that the insurers must be appeased. That belief is rooted in recent history. Bill Clinton's health care plan failed in large part because of a dishonest but devastating lobbying and advertising campaign financed by the health insurance industry - remember Harry and Louise? And the lesson many people took from that defeat is that any future health care proposal must buy off the insurance lobby. But I think that's the wrong lesson. The Clinton plan actually preserved a big role for private insurers; the industry attacked it all the same. And the plan's complexity, which was largely a result of attempts to placate interest groups, made it hard to sell to the public. So I would argue that good economics is also good politics: reformers will do best with a straightforward single-payer plan, which offers maximum savings and, unlike the Clinton plan, can easily be explained. We need to do this one right. If reform fails again, we'll be on the way to a radically unequal society, in which all but the most affluent Americans face the constant risk of financial ruin and even premature death because they can't pay their medical bills. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/13/opinion/13krugman.html?pagewanted=print
I, like Krugman, prefer the term "single payer" to "universal health care." If the government had a single payer system, the pressure would be on the private insurers to improve their service, drop their prices, or go away. A friend of mine had to have an emergency appendectomy a few years ago and his bill (he was uninsured) was astronomical. He talked to the hospital and told them that he would not pay a penny over what insurance companies paid and his bill dropped to half of the original. When he had a lawyer send a letter saying basically the same thing (at a whopping cost of $100), the cost dropped by half again to a grand total of 25% of the original. With a single payer system, we could get those kinds of rates on all medical procedures and treatment as the system would keep the pressure on the providers to keep their costs low. We once had the best health care in the world, but those days are long past. We could have the best in the world again, but that will not happen so long as health care costs continue to rise while our salaries and benefits continue to fall.
I seem to recall this statistic posted somewhere on the BBS but under our system don't we both pay more per capita for health care even though we have far more people than most industrialized country without insurance while at the same time are performing lower on several health indicators?
