Come election time nobody is going to care how the healthcare bill is passed. All that will matter is if a bill passes at all and if it works.
Thumbs, I tend to agree with rj. You posted some good points, but when confronted with questions and answers regarding the "horsemen," you just gave up on the conversation. Debate, the process of compromising to find common ground, requires a back and forth that doesn't have to be "bickering." There are legitimate differences, questions, and concerns that we should talk about. It can't be "if these four things aren't addressed the way I want them addressed, then whatever happens will be bad," which is how you came across.
I failed to explain I have been corresponding non-stop on health care reform with my tea party group and here (to a much smaller degree) and I am burned out. Sometimes I lose track of what forum I'm in, so, if my response seemed petty, I tender my regret. However, I am going to take a time-out to see what Obama says tonight. BTW, I cannot cite specific examples of medical bankruptcy without getting the permission of those involved. Regardless of my many shortcomings, betraying a confidence has never been one of them.
Fair enough and I apologize if I sounded like I was calling you out. Get refreshed and come back. I understand and won't ask you to betray a confidence but am genuinely curious about if people are having their homes seized to go into Medicaid.
If you go into a nursing home and have Medicaid pay for it, they are allowed to recoup some of the costs from your estate. There are some easy ways to avoid it as long as you plan in advance. http://www.360financialliteracy.org...ance/Medicaid+and+the+principal+residence.htm
Trying not to start yet another healthcare thread, so I thought I'd stick this in here since it's a policy discussion. For public-option progressives: what is the rationale for being against a trigger mechanism for a public option? It seems to be the perfect solution for everyone. If the goal is to cut costs, and the private sector proves it can do it, who cares?
Except that it did. Malpractice insurance costs are down. Mal insurance profits are up. More doctors are coming into Texas due to the lower insurance costs. You can argue whether the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. But health care costs haven't been slowed one bit. This is the same in the other states that have tort reform. There's no connection from tort reform to health care costs.
I hope all this information will be shared with the tea party folks. MAJOR STUDY OF MALPRACTICE INSURANCE INDUSTRY FINDS NO BASIS TO FURTHER LIMIT LIABILITY OF UNSAFE HEALTH CARE PROVIDERS http://insurance-reform.org/pr/090722.html NEW YORK – A major new study released today by Americans for Insurance Reform finds that premiums and claims for doctors both have dropped significantly in recent years while the medical malpractice insurance industry is enjoying remarkable profits in light of the global economic collapse. It concludes that further limiting the liability of negligent doctors and unsafe hospitals is not only unjustified, but also would have almost no impact lowering this country’s overall health care expenditures. AIR’s report, True Risk: Medical Liability, Malpractice Insurance and Health Care, is by Gillian Cassell-Stiga and Joanne Doroshow of the Center for Justice & Democracy, and actuary J. Robert Hunter, who is Director of Insurance for the Consumer Federation of America (CFA), former Commissioner of Insurance for the State of Texas, and former Federal Insurance Administrator under Presidents Carter and Ford. In describing the study’s findings, Hunter said, “Thirty years of inflation-adjusted data show that medical malpractice premiums are the lowest they have been in this entire period. This is in no small part due to the fact that claims have fallen like a rock, down 45 percent since 2000. The periodic premium spikes we see in the data are not related to claims but to the economic cycle of insurers and to drops in investment income. Since prices have not declined as much as claims have, medical malpractice insurer profits are higher than the rest of the property casualty industry, which has been remarkably profitable over the last five years. “Our study also shows that states that have passed severe medical malpractice tort restrictions on victims of medical error have rate changes similar to those states that haven't adopted these harsh measures. Finally, our research makes clear that medical malpractice claims and premiums have almost no impact on the cost of health care. Medical malpractice premiums are less than one-half of one percent of overall health care costs, and medical malpractice claims are a mere one-fifth of one percent of health care costs. If Congress completely eliminated every single medical malpractice lawsuit, including all legitimate cases, as part of health care reform, overall health care costs would hardly change, but the costs of medical error and hospital-induced injury would remain and someone else would have to pay.” Joanne Doroshow, Executive Director of the Center for Justice & Democracy, said, “Where’s the crisis? Medical malpractice claims are down. Premiums are down. Meanwhile, insurers are raking in money and belittling the fact that hundreds of thousands of patients are killed or injured due to medical negligence each year. Many states have already afforded health care providers extensive legal protections for reckless or unsafe medical care. Proposals in any national health care bill that will take even more money out of the hands of injured patients and into the pockets of insurers are utterly indefensible.” The full study can be found at: http://insurance-reform.org/TrueRiskF.pdf. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Texas is good example. After a hard fought legislative and initiative battle requiring an amendment to the state constitution, Texas enacted severe “tort reform” in 2003. The impact was made clear in a June 1, 2009, New Yorker magazine article about why the town of McAllen, Texas, “was the country’s most expensive place for health care.”3 The following exchange took place with a group of doctors and the article’s author: “It’s malpractice,” a family physician who had practiced here for thirty-three years said.“McAllen is legal hell,” the cardiologist agreed. Doctors order unnecessary tests just to protect themselves, he said. Everyone thought the lawyers here were worse than elsewhere. That explanation puzzled me. Several years ago, Texas passed a tough malpractice law that capped pain-and-suffering awards at two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Didn’t lawsuits go down? “Practically to zero,” the cardiologist admitted. “Come on,” the general surgeon finally said. “We all know these arguments are bull****. There is overutilization here, pure and simple.” Doctors, he said, were racking up charges with extra tests, services, and procedures. What’s more, despite getting about everything they wanted legislatively, Texas insurers initially requested rate hikes. They lowered rates only after being forced to do so. Moreover, doctors never returned to rural areas they had abandoned supposedly due to the cost of insurance, an issue that “tort reform” campaigners exploited and blamed on lawsuits. In 2007, the Texas Observer found: “The campaign’s promise, that tort reform would cause doctors to begin returning to the state’s sparsely populated regions, has now been tested for four years. It has not proven to be true. … Those doctors are following the Willie Sutton model: They’re going, understandably, where the better-paying jobs and career opportunities are, to the wealthy suburbs of Dallas and Houston, to growing places with larger, better-equipped hospitals and burgeoning medical communities. So while Texas patients lost significant legal rights and many unsafe health care providers are now unaccountable, rural communities that were exploited during the “tort reform” campaign have seen no improvement in access to physicians. And as this report shows, medical malpractice insurers are charging doctors at rates that are not much different than any other state in the country, irrespective of their “tort” laws. Rates would have eventually dropped in Texas no matter what the legislature did.
