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You've proven that you're very good at cut and paste as shown by your fine job of lashing out against Fox News, but how many of your thoughts are actually your own and not those you've regurgitated from pMSNBC?
The Federal Government can barely run Medicare, Medicaid, the VA or any of its other programs and you honestly expect that it can run the entire health care industry. If you believe that, then seriously you have issues that nobody on this board can help you with.
Everybody will admit that there are flaws with the current system and it needs some work, but throwing the whole system out and replacing it with this Obamanation is a joke! Tort reform and allowing interstate competition is the place to start, not one of these 2000 page bills that the Dems are trying to ram down out throats.
the flaws in the current system are much larger. 80+% of people are satisfied with medicare and their VA benefits. The highest satisfaction in healthcare. They use 3% overhead to run, private insurance uses about 30. If you can't see companies making 100's of billions of dollars annually while they deny coverage as a problem than you have the issues not me.
I don't even watch MSNBC or any other cable news networks, thanks.
Interstate huh? great idea. too bad it basically already exists since large insurance companies own the majority of the "smaller" ones and put a different name on it.
As long as it is a business for profit the bottom line will always be money and not the health of america. Like Reziac likes to say Follow the money. its about profit not healthcare.
I keep track of all my expenses and break out what part of it is tax. If everyone kept track of exactly what they pay in taxes, they may be as upset as I am.
as i said before than you are getting tax deductions on them. Also 425,000 a yr doesn't really put you with the average joe. Your sales tax could largely come from luxury purchases and fuel taxes pave the roads you drive on
You are one of the many Obamabots infiltrating the message boards and blogs with your regurgitation prepared by the DNC. If you had to come up with your arguments on your own, you may do enough research to realize you are wrong. Obama is losing his mojo as evidenced by the governor races yesterday. Take away his teleprompter and his is a babbling fool.
someone who supported bush is gonna have the gall to call anyone a babbling fool I also dont ever recall saying i supported obama?? dont make assumptions. i did not assume you are a racist red-neck
Also please, please, please show me what I am wrong about. Prove something I said was a lie. Please
These are the boards Organick posts on. It appears he/she lives in North Carolina and posts to numerous boards in the east coast as well as Montana mostly taking liberal viewpoints.
someone who supported bush is gonna have the gall to call anyone a babbling fool I also dont ever recall saying i supported obama?? dont make assumptions. i did not assume you are a racist red-neck
Assumption? You assume I supported Bush? How do you assume that?
As long as it is a business for profit the bottom line will always be money and not the health of america. Like Reziac likes to say Follow the money. its about profit not healthcare.
Insurance is a relatively low-profit industry, at a max of about 4%. Also, their own regulations require that if their profits exceed a certain point, they must be returned to the customers.
The money flow indicates that the real problem is lawyers, and that tort reform would do more for reducing healthcare costs than anything else. However:
There are interesting charts which juxtapose health care costs with gov't intervention. Turns out that before Medicare/Medicaid, health care costs only kept pace with inflation. After Medicare/Medicaid, health care costs have risen at 2 to 3 times the rate of inflation.
Now, who runs Medicare/Medicaid, hmmmm??
Medicaid is the United States health program for eligible individuals and families with low incomes and resources. It is a means-tested program that is jointly funded by the states and federal government, and is managed by the states.
Medicare is a social insurance program administered by the United States government
Tell that to my friend's mom, who died of bone cancer while waiting for the Canadian system to even ADMIT she was sick, let alone treat her. She was about 65 when she died, and had been getting the runaround from the Canadian healthcare system for FIVE YEARS. Why? she was "too old".
oh give me a break my cousin married a canadian he had a heart problem when he was 35 living in the us with no health insurance, could not even get on a donor list. They moved back to canada and within 4 months he had a new heart.
Please tell me you have some relevant data than that to back your argument.
Barzelai says physicians in Canada earn a good living and aren't faced with the same administrative hassles that American doctors gripe about. "Medical costs here are half of what medical costs in the States are," he says. "At the same time, our infant mortality is lower, our life expectancy is longer, our rates of obesity are a lot less. So there's got to be some positive aspects of living in Canada and with the Canadian medical system."
The Commonwealth Fund, a respected and nonpartisan U.S. health research organization, looked at deaths that could have been prevented with access to quality medical care in the leading 19 industrialized countries. In the latest survey, the United States ranked last and Canada came in sixth.
Professor Bob Evans, one of the grandfathers of the health economics field, has been studying the Canadian and U.S. systems since they were founded around the same time in the mid-1960s. He says that what many Americans hear about Canada — rationed care, long wait lists and a government bureaucrat who gets in between a patient and doctor — is "absolute nonsense."
"Are there cases of people who wind up not getting the care they need at appropriate times? Yes, of course there are," says Evans, who is with the Centre for Health Policy Research at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. "This is a huge system and it's a very complicated one and things do go wrong. But as a general rule, what happens here is that when you need the care, you get it." But that wasn't always the case.
Myth: Taxes in Canada are extremely high, mostly because of national health care.
In actuality, taxes are nearly equal on both sides of the border. Overall, Canada's taxes are slightly higher than those in the U.S. However, Canadians are afforded many benefits for their tax dollars, even beyond health care (e.g., tax credits, family allowance, cheaper higher education), so the end result is a wash. At the end of the day, the average after-tax income of Canadian workers is equal to about 82 percent of their gross pay. In the U.S., that average is 81.9 percent. Myth: Canada's health care system is a cumbersome bureaucracy.
The U.S. has the most bureaucratic health care system in the world. More than 31 percent of every dollar spent on health care in the U.S. goes to paperwork, overhead, CEO salaries, profits, etc. The provincial single-payer system in Canada operates with just a 1 percent overhead. Think about it. It is not necessary to spend a huge amount of money to decide who gets care and who doesn't when everybody is covered. Myth: The Canadian system is significantly more expensive than that of the U.S.Ten percent of Canada's GDP is spent on health care for 100 percent of the population. The U.S. spends 17 percent of its GDP but 15 percent of its population has no coverage whatsoever and millions of others have inadequate coverage. In essence, the U.S. system is considerably more expensive than Canada's. Part of the reason for this is uninsured and underinsured people in the U.S. still get sick and eventually seek care. People who cannot afford care wait until advanced stages of an illness to see a doctor and then do so through emergency rooms, which cost considerably more than primary care services.
What the American taxpayer may not realize is that such care costs about $45 billion per year, and someone has to pay it. This is why insurance premiums increase every year for insured patients while co-pays and deductibles also rise rapidly. Myth: Canada's government decides who gets health care and when they get it.While HMOs and other private medical insurers in the U.S. do indeed make such decisions, the only people in Canada to do so are physicians. In Canada, the government has absolutely no say in who gets care or how they get it. Medical decisions are left entirely up to doctors, as they should be.
There are no requirements for pre-authorization whatsoever. If your family doctor says you need an MRI, you get one. In the U.S., if an insurance administrator says you are not getting an MRI, you don't get one no matter what your doctor thinks — unless, of course, you have the money to cover the cost. Myth: There are long waits for care, which compromise access to care.There are no waits for urgent or primary care in Canada. There are reasonable waits for most specialists' care, and much longer waits for elective surgery. Yes, there are those instances where a patient can wait up to a month for radiation therapy for breast cancer or prostate cancer, for example. However, the wait has nothing to do with money per se, but everything to do with the lack of radiation therapists. Despite such waits, however, it is noteworthy that Canada boasts lower incident and mortality rates than the U.S. for all cancers combined, according to the U.S. Cancer Statistics Working Group and the Canadian Cancer Society. Moreover, fewer Canadians (11.3 percent) than Americans (14.4 percent) admit unmet health care needs. Myth: Canadians are paying out of pocket to come to the U.S. for medical care.Most patients who come from Canada to the U.S. for health care are those whose costs are covered by the Canadian governments. If a Canadian goes outside of the country to get services that are deemed medically necessary, not experimental, and are not available at home for whatever reason (e.g., shortage or absence of high tech medical equipment; a longer wait for service than is medically prudent; or lack of physician expertise), the provincial government where you live fully funds your care. Those patients who do come to the U.S. for care and pay out of pocket are those who perceive their care to be more urgent than it likely is. Myth: Canada is a socialized health care system in which the government runs hospitals and where doctors work for the government.Princeton University health economist Uwe Reinhardt says single-payer systems are not "socialized medicine" but "social insurance" systems because doctors work in the private sector while their pay comes from a public source. Most physicians in Canada are self-employed. They are not employees of the government nor are they accountable to the government. Doctors are accountable to their patients only. More than 90 percent of physicians in Canada are paid on a fee-for-service basis. Claims are submitted to a single provincial health care plan for reimbursement, whereas in the U.S., claims are submitted to a multitude of insurance providers. Moreover, Canadian hospitals are controlled by private boards and/or regional health authorities rather than being part of or run by the government. Myth: There aren't enough doctors in Canada.
From a purely statistical standpoint, there are enough physicians in Canada to meet the health care needs of its people. But most doctors practice in large urban areas, leaving rural areas with bona fide shortages. This situation is no different than that being experienced in the U.S. Simply training and employing more doctors is not likely to have any significant impact on this specific problem. Whatever issues there are with having an adequate number of doctors in any one geographical area, they have nothing to do with the single-payer system.
And these are just some of the myths about the Canadian health care system. While emulating the Canadian system will likely not fix U.S. health care, it probably isn't the big bad "socialist" bogeyman it has been made out to be.
It is not a perfect system, but it has its merits. For people like my 55-year-old Aunt Betty, who has been waiting for 14 months for knee-replacement surgery due to a long history of arthritis, it is the superior system. Her $35,000-plus surgery is finally scheduled for next month. She has been in pain, and her quality of life has been compromised. However, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Aunt Betty — who lives on a fixed income and could never afford private health insurance, much less the cost of the surgery and requisite follow-up care — will soon sport a new, high-tech knee. Waiting 14 months for the procedure is easy when the alternative is living in pain for the rest of your life.
Assumption? You assume I supported Bush? How do you assume that?
your right I assumed. Because you are on here in support of a republican stance with the tea party. I apologize if you did not support bush. I will say its odd to find many harvard lawyers who are babbling idiots.
These are the boards Organick posts on. It appears he/she lives in North Carolina and posts to numerous boards in the east coast as well as Montana mostly taking liberal viewpoints.
Aww thanks for having that much interest in me I am flattered
Insurance is a relatively low-profit industry, at a max of about 4%. Also, their own regulations require that if their profits exceed a certain point, they must be returned to the customers.
The money flow indicates that the real problem is lawyers, and that tort reform would do more for reducing healthcare costs than anything else. However:
There are interesting charts which juxtapose health care costs with gov't intervention. Turns out that before Medicare/Medicaid, health care costs only kept pace with inflation. After Medicare/Medicaid, health care costs have risen at 2 to 3 times the rate of inflation.
Now, who runs Medicare/Medicaid, hmmmm??
Medicaid is the United States health program for eligible individuals and families with low incomes and resources. It is a means-tested program that is jointly funded by the states and federal government, and is managed by the states.
Medicare is a social insurance program administered by the United States government
Profits at 10 of the country’s largest publicly traded health insurance companies rose 428 percent from 2000 to 2007.
Health care costs are not determined by either of those programs they are determined by private insurance and providers apples and oranges my friend. Also medicaid reimbursement rates have consistently dropped over the past 5+ years.
For the quarter, UnitedHealth earned $859 million.
Humana reported third quarter revenues of $7.44 billion, an 8 percent increase from the $6.99 billion it earned for the same period in 2008. More significantly, it had a net income of $301.51 million for the quarter, a 65 percent increase from the $183 million it brought in for the same period last year.Humana reported spending 81.9 percent of premiums on care, down from 84.1 percent during the same period in 2008.
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I also dont ever recall saying i supported obama?? dont make assumptions. i did not assume you are a racist red-neck
