Betting Liz has great insurance and has never been rejected for a pre-existing condition…

The only thing ironic is your denial about the foul practices engaged in by the HMO’s and drug companies. Their profits have increased 400% while citizens are bankrupted by their illness and drug/treatments requirements.  Your worry and concern for the insurance and drug giants can only be measured by  your obvious tone deafness and blindness.

United Healthcare has made billions at the expense of their insured. Drug prices are obscene, as is Medicare RX Plan D with its doughnut hole where by Sept. I will continue paying premiums to AARP and will get no coverage for the rest of the year. Unless of course, in the three subsequent months I become so unexpectedly ill that I can spend around $5000 to become elligible for RX claim coverage. But guess what? Even were that to happen, it’s er….December and a new year…er… starts January 1st when my premiums start all over again. 

So really Medicare RX Plan D is a hype and a gift to the Insurance & Drug Co’s.  But have hope  Liz, as I am sure republicans will figure out a way to obstruct anything positive in the way of reform as they act as   a subsidiary of the Insurance and Drug lobby and are paid handsomely to deny reform of any real sort. 

Where do you get your compassion for the insurance industry - have they ever dropped your coverage?  I’m sure not since they provide such a service to you.

Where did you get your compassion for the insurance industry? The Lewin Group? 

Teddy Kennedy wrote the laws that created HMO’s.  It was a collusion between massive insurance companies and politicians to line each others pockets. In the History of HMO’s article:

 The individual was first discouraged from buying insurance in 1942 when employee health premiums were made tax deductible to employers—not to individuals. Congress created Medicare in 1965, making individual insurance for those over 65 obsolete. Subsidized, unrestricted health care for seniors lead to an unprecedented frenzy of spending by patients and doctors.

"Costs went up, introducing an economic obstacle to individual health insurance. As costs rose, those on the New Left, including then freshman Sen. Ted Kennedy, argued that government ought to pay for everyone’s health care and promoted the idea of a health maintenance organization, a term coined by a left-wing college professor.

"President Nixon appeased the left and proposed the HMO Act, which Congress passed in 1973. The law created new, supposedly cheaper health coverage with millions of dollars to HMOs, which, until then, constituted a small portion of the market. Kaiser Permanente was the only major HMO in the country by 1969 and most of its members were compelled to join through unions.

"Combined with Medicare, the HMO Act eventually eliminated the market for affordable individual health insurance.

"The new managed care plans mushroomed with federal subsidies. Employers perceived managed care as less expensive than individual insurance and stopped offering a choice of plans, making insurance more expensive for the individual. The government had effectively instituted HMOs, at the insistence of the left and the capitulation of conservatives and pragmatic businessmen. "

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=2819 

"The most conspicuous avenue for political manipulation is the regulation of medical insurance. This takes the form of coverage mandates, requiring insurance for treatments and procedures not wanted by the purchaser and at a price beyond his means. Legislators place the interests of their clients ahead of the public. When insurance itself is mandated and everyone must buy it, an even more powerful magnet for special-interest coverage mandates is created.

"Consumers cannot escape from this burden when states forbid competition from insurers in other states. Each state’s insurance commissioner and attorney general agree on one thing—that consumers are unsafe in the hands of officials in all the other states.

"Medicare regulations are so lengthy and complex that no one can read them let alone understand them. No one can even lift them. Yet violations by a health care provider can result in criminal prosecution. That serves no purpose except to allow enforcers to arbitrarily and capriciously punish innocent victims as their whims dictate.

"A few trial lawyers destroy objective law, buy off legislators, place their partners as judges in the court system, and practice legalized extortion. That directly increases the cost of health care for everyone and indirectly wastes much more on the defensive medicine strategies that physicians and hospitals must practice to defend themselves in court.

"Medicare reimburses physicians and hospitals for less than the cost of their services. Costs are shifted to other payers, who are blamed for rising costs.

 

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=5617

 

 

"The end-game is very obvious. If you expand the bureaucratic class and you expand the dependent class, you can put together a permanent electoral majority. By “dependent”, I don’t mean merely welfare, although that’s a good illustration of the general principle. In political terms, a welfare check is a twofer: you’re assuring the votes both of the welfare recipient and of the vast bureaucracy required to process his welfare. But extend that principle further, to the point where government intrudes into everything: a vast population is receiving more from government (in the form of health care or education subventions) than it thinks it contributes, while another vast population is managing the ever expanding regulatory regime (a federal energy-efficiency code, a government health bureaucracy) and another vast population remains, nominally, in the private sector but, de facto, dependent on government patronage of one form or another – say, the privately owned franchisee of a government automobile company, or the designated “community assistance” organization for helping poor families understand what programs they’re eligible for.  Either way, what you get from government – whether in the form of a government paycheck, a government benefit or a government contract – is a central fact of your life."

http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/2341/26/ 

I usually stay pretty quiet on the health care issue these days. Mostly because i just can’t get my mind around it. I have no idea if what the administration is proposing is a horrid mess or a saving grace.

 As well I worked most of my adult life in government agencies. County Probation, State Parole and State Child Protective Services. They are wasteful horribly bogged down and not capable of performing the way they should perform because of it. The waste of money alone is amazing. They step over dollars to get to dimes every day. One of the big problems of course is that these agencies aren’t run by business or financial people they are run by ex probation/parole and social workers who worked their way up from line level jobs. people with degrees in psychology and social work. who take direction from politicians for crying out loud. So the thought of government run anything is hard for me to swallow.

I also don’t feel like every man woman and child has a "right" to health care. I’ll probably take a big hit for that on here. But where is personal responsibility in this stuff? It sucks to not have health care. But why is it the governments/tax payers job to provide it for people who don’t have it for themselves? I’m just not so sure about that. I’m not sure we shouldn’t… but i can’t convince myself we should either. I absolutely don’t think we should provide health care on the backs of a huge debt. Just like I don’t think people should buy houses they can’t afford.

and i’m a democrat, and i voted for obama, and if i’m not convinced i can absolutely see why this thing is having a tough time.

With that said… I know the system is broken. and i believe it needs fixed. I just can’t get my brain around how to do it.

I think, and know, that people who don’t pay for health care in this country still get health care when they get sick. They go to emergency rooms. Continously. How do I know? I audited hospitals for a number of  years. The people in this country are paying for uninsured people’s health care with their taxes, increased charges for the services they receive from health care providers, and of course, larger premiums. Emergency rooms can not turn away people without insurance or resources. If they do, they will not receive money they need from Medicare and, also, state and county funds. That alone should make people wonder if there isn’t another way to handle the uninsured problem in our country.

Those uninsured go to the emergency room for many things, but when they have a stroke, a heart attack or other major medical event, they get the same care as the insured. Of course, it should be said the care is better at some emergency rooms than at others. But I have done discharge planning when I worked as a nurse case manager for many uninsured CVA patients who were placed on the state insurance when they were admitted to the hospital. That happens….does anyone against a public health care plan really understand how the health care for all  in this country is given?

About HMO’s. They have not succeeded in my part of the country because the people do not like them. HMO’s are for health maintenance. To keep the client (whatever you want to call them, i.e. the insured) well and in good health is the objective. The doctors don’t like it because they don’t get reimbursed for services provided. If their patient load is older patients with medical problems that come with the aging process they will not make as much money. They are paid only so much a year for the number of patients on the HMO, not for services rendered. So, when a patient (like one of my family members) needed to go to a specialist, getting a referral was difficult. I often wondered (not really) if that was a way to get the insured patient dissatisfied with the HMO plan? Surely doctors wouldn’t do that, would they? I’ve had doctors tell me that they don’t know what insurance a patient has. If that is the case why did doctors complain of only having 15 minutes allotted with their HMO patients? That is what they and the insurance company  considered the amount of time they  could spend with their HMO patients to make it most effective for the office monetarily. (Amount of time is an example only; it could be more or less, depending on the diagnoses codes used for the visit)

Oh, well, there is so much one needs to know about insurance and then one needs to understand the health care bill proposed to really talk or write about it, IMHO.