Obama has lowest spending record of any recent president

That is a fucking stupid ass way to conduct business. Yes, one can not predict health crisis...which is EXACTLY why the plans shouldn't be based on what you need. How the fuck is anyone suppose to know what they need at any given time?

And trust me...if and when you ever get into a car accident?
You will pay. Usually a pretty high deductible before your precious premiums kick in to pay for the rest. Not to mention that the insurance company can dictate what types of parts to use and the total cost of service even if you came in with top 'o the line parts and shit.
THAT is not a move to save YOU money. That's a move to save THEM money on the profits they make off of your premiums.

 

This isn't a question of morality. No party wants people to be sick and suffering from illnesses...that's ridiculous! But we don't live in some utopia. It costs MONEY to keep people healthy.

People only complain when they don't need something. Trust me, I wouldn't care how much a heart monitor test costs if it can save my life. I wouldn't care how much radiation costs if its to treat my child with cancer. I would go bankrupt any day of the week to save the life of my kids.

And you seem to be mad at the same thing everyone else is...the cost of healthcare. That is a completely separate discussion from health insurance. Two ways I see people reducing healthcare costs are employers offering wellness benefits to employees who live a healthy lifestyle. And more phone checkups by nurses and physicians to patients who can hopefully do more preventative care before an issue becomes a big problem.

 

Damn I have to agree with this.

 

A stupid way to conduct business? It's the only way to conduct business. Health insurance companies would go bankrupt in two weeks if they did what you're asking. The average cost per bed at a hospital stay in 2011 was $1400. This is why you have to pay a premium. Insurance companies don't know how many times you're going to use them and to what extent of procedures you will need, so they have to have enough cash on hand to handle all claims as required by the government.

And how are you supposed to know what you need at any given time? You don't...that's why you're paying for insurance!! That's why Chris Rock calls it "in case shit" because you only need in case shit happens.

 

Actually there are fam

 

HMOs and hospitals are running a scam on both ends.
Have you seen the cost doctors and hospitals bill for some of the most frivolous crap? Also notice how much certain costs vary from state to state and hospital to hospital.

For those on prescription meds, notice the cost you're being charged before your copay and then search for an online pharmacy and see how much they charge for the same meds.
Then tell me our healthcare system isn't a con game.

$1400 a day to lay in a hospital bed??? WTF?? Maybe a nurse checks on your ass once every hour or two.

Why??

The American people are getting hustled.
Shit is rigged and IMO it's time to blow it up and start over.

It's B.S. to imply healthcare is going to be more expensive in a publicly run system than it would be in the current private system.

If 100 million people are in a public option, guess who sets the price?? It's the consumers and what they're willing to pay, not what the market will bear.

THe pricing in the current U.S. healthcare system is upside down.

 

The consumers will not set the price even in a public option. The government will not be able to keep prices low when the cost of the doctors, tests, and medications are the same. This isn't like buying a T-shirt and there is a price most people are willing to pay. People place value differently when it comes to health.

The public option is even worse because when the government regulates private industry and can lower their prices, the public option will also collapse the private industry leaving tens of thousands out of work.

 

Just so we are all clear, the law does not include the public option, a government-run insurance plan that would have competed with private insurers. The government's expanded role in health falls far short of being a government takeover, analogies about strict government regulation provide some helpful illustrations. The Federal Aviation Administration imposes detailed rules on airlines. State laws require drivers to have car insurance. Regulators tell electric utilities what they can charge. Yet that heavy regulation is not described as a government takeover.

 

LOL. when they have a job then its GOPish...when you lose your job for whatever reason then they are liberals. death panle arguement hell thats been going on for years in the healthcare industry ..its called excluded coverages..

 

I know the law doesn't include the public option yet. I'm discussing why the public option won't provide any benefit to consumers because healthcare costs remain the same. Healthcare is expensive and quite frankly I don't feel doctors are overpaid for what they do.

Most surgeons work 50-60 hours weekly, including on-call time, administrative duties, and other responsibilities. Usually surgeons will have about 3 days blocked off for surgery and 2 days devoted to office hours for follow-up appointments or pre-operative consultations.

The case load can vary, based on the type and complexity of surgeries performed, and can be anywhere from 150 per year up to 500 or more. The average is about 300-400 surgeries annually.

 

THe compensation paid to surgeons is not what's driving up healthcare costs.
Many doctors feels that their fees are suppressed by the insurance companies through which they are contracted.

The only way to beng down the cost curve in healthcare is through preventive medicine, a more efficient implementation of medicare and reducing medical fraud from the system through overbilling that's responsible for billions of dollars in illegal payments every year, compensating doctors for treating chronic conditions and drastically reducing the role of HMOs in our healthcare system.

The single greatest factor responsible for the skyrocketing cost of medical care is our aging population AND out of control health insurance premiums.

The only people who should be making significant money in American healthcare are doctors, nurses, hospitals to a lesser extent, medical supply companies and to a lesser degree pharmaceutical manufacturers.

That's it.

It's counter-intuitive that we need or require a private, non-medical service industry to manage our healthcare system.

If you aren't a doctor or treating and caring for patients directly, you shouldn't be able to make coin off sick people.

A single payer system is a far superior model for healthcare than the system we have now.

We are the richest nation in the world, spend the most per citizen on healthcare and we have one of the worst long term healthcare outcomes for sick people.

When you're spending more and getting less in return, the system is broken.

Status quo isn't a 'fix'.

 

Where did you go to undergrad and have you considered law school?

 

My point about doctor compensation was showing their value and that they deserve the pay for the work they do, it was not a comment about them being the most significant reason for our healthcare costs.

I agree that we have an aging population, but the problem is the way most Americans live their lives. The majority of Americans do not lead healthy and active lifestyles and those habits are passed along to our children. Also, in a previous post I stated that Canada has only 3% Hispanics and African Americans while the US has roughly 29%. African Americans and Hispanics have higher cases of obesity, diabetes, prostate cancer, liver disease, etc. So preventative care is the long term solution but that involves changing people's mindset about the way they approach their health. Employers are doing a better job of promoting wellness programs to keep their workforce healthy and effectively reduce the number of medical claims they have to match.

What kind of a single payer system are you proposing? A single payer system at the state level poses significant problems. 60 Minutes had a special a few days ago showing how many doctors today are waiting on their checks from the state. Many doctors being owed $200,000 or more from the state. There are 41 out of 50 states nearing bankruptcy. I don't trust state officials to manage the money properly and if you've ever dealt with state run agencies don't expect anything to be quick. When it comes to my HEALTH I want a private company who can respond in a timely fashion. A state run agency will not get back to me in 60 days because they have thousands of cases and 6 workers because of cutbacks.

Also, the US has good long term care outcomes and services provided to the elderly. We offer home care, skilled nursing facilities, and nursing homes. A study done by the University of Texas Health Center show our patients surviving an average of 76 days longer.

So I respectfully disagree. We spend more and get more in return

 

Chew on this, James.:smt109

The model for a managed care single-payer system is, get ready for it, the Veteran's Hospital system. Socialized medicine that is providing superior care with better outcomes than its private competitors.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1376238,00.html

From the article;

The VA runs the largest integrated health-care system in the country, with more than 1,400 hospitals, clinics and nursing homes employing 14,800 doctors and 61,000 nurses. And by a number of measures, this government-managed health-care program--socialized medicine on a small scale--is beating the marketplace.


For the sixth year in a row, VA hospitals last year scored higher than private facilities on the University of Michigan's American Customer Satisfaction Index, based on patient surveys on the quality of care received. The VA scored 83 out of 100; private institutions, 71.
Males 65 years and older receiving VA care had about a 40% lower risk of death than those enrolled in Medicare Advantage, whose care is provided through private health plans or HMOs, according to a study published in the April edition of Medical Care. Harvard University just gave the VA its Innovations in American Government Award for the agency's work in computerizing patient records.


And all that was achieved at a relatively low cost. In the past 10 years, the number of veterans receiving treatment from the VA has more than doubled, from 2.5 million to 5.3 million, but the agency has cared for them with 10,000 fewer employees. The VA's cost per patient has remained steady during the past 10 years. The cost of private care has jumped about 40% in that same period.


The roots of the VA's reformation go back to 1994, when Bill Clinton appointed Kenneth Kizer, a hard-charging doctor and former Navy diver, as the VA's under secretary for health.

Kizer decentralized the VA's cumbersome health bureaucracy and held regional managers more accountable. Patient records were transferred to a system-wide computer network, which has made its way into only 3% of private hospitals. When a veteran is treated, the doctor has the vet's complete medical history on a laptop. In the private sector, 20% of all lab tests are needlessly repeated because the doctor doesn't have handy the results of the same test performed earlier, according to a 2004 report by the President's information technology advisory committee.


.......conservatives fear such an arrangement would be a Trojan horse, setting up an even larger national health-care program and taking more business from the private sector. Congress has no plans to enlarge the scope of veterans' health care--much less consider it a model for, say, a government-run system serving nonvets. But it's becoming more and more "ideologically inconvenient for some to have such a stellar health-delivery system being run by the government," says Margaret O'Kane, president of the National Committee for Quality Assurance, which rates health plans for businesses and individuals. If VA health care continues to be the industry leader, it may become more difficult to argue that the market can do better.


:smt072

 

I think you're smart enough to know that since the VA is treating a small subset of the population, they are treating a smaller set of diseases than in a general population of 300+ million. And I can show studies where patient satisfaction is incredibly low for the VA

Greater government involvement is not the solution. The difference in health care costs between the US and other government run institutions like Canada is partially explained by the differences in their demographics. Police-reported drug abuse and violence are more common in the United States than in Canada; both place a burden on the health care system. Illegal immigrants, more prevalent in the U.S. than in Canada, also add a burden to the health care system, as many of them do not carry health insurance and rely on emergency rooms — which are legally required to treat them — as a principal source of care. Simply put...Americans don't lead healthy lives

Two areas that are not directly linked to our poor lifestyles are name brand pharmaceutical drug costs and the number of technical devices in hospitals. Those are areas we can improve.

 

So the reason private healthcare costs are skyrocketing out of control with worse longterm outcomes compared to other wealthy industrialized nations is because; Americans are fat and lazy, too many illegals, drugs and alcohol abuse, poor Blacks and hispanics.

LMFAO.

The VA system is more efficient not because of the size of the patient population they're treating. The VA has become totally automated and has the most advanced record keeping system for any hospitals in the country.

Most private hospitals and HMOs are loathe to go all digital because...IT'S TOO EXPENSIVE in the short term.

The only real complaint most vets have about the VA is that it's too small to treat the number of vets who need care, they don't have a problem with the quality of healthcare they actually receive.

There are 7 main drivers in healthcare costs. Unit cost for medical services and goods. In hospital stays from 2009-10 stayed the same, yet the cost nationwide went up 10 percent.

Unnecessary services,(frequency, defensive medicine, unnecessary use of high cost services).

Administrative waste,(redundant costs of administrating different plans, unproductive documentation).

Inefficiency in delivered services.

Too high prices,(prices higher than competitive levels, excessive variation in service prices).

Fraud.

Missed prevention opportunities.

The Institute of Medicine calculated in 2009 alone we wasted more than a third of the $2.5 trillion(!!) dollars spent on healthcare.

$765 billion dollars.

Be careful about recycling conservative talking points about healthcare reform being some kind of mortal sin against democracy and the free market.

It's the very same private healthcare insurance corporations who are spending millions of dollars to turn the public AGAINST basic healthcare reform.

 

Our outcomes are not worse, research has shown that we have better outcomes. We are able to detect and treat almost every medical condition faster and better than any country in the world. But having that ability means that our healthcare spending is much higher than other developed nations.

And yes...Americans are fat and lazy, illegals do drive up medical costs because they have to be treated and have no insurance, we have much higher drug and alcohol abuse, and blacks and hispanics (of all economic classes, not just the poor) have higher rates of certain diseases than do Whites. It's not a racial attack...it is simply the facts. We suffer from diabetes, prostate cancer, and are at a higher risk of heart attack due to high cholesterol.

But I also listed that brand name pharmaceutical drugs and the amount of medical technology we invest in skyrockets the prices as well. The main difference is that patented drug prices in Canada average between 35% and 45% lower than in the United States, though generic drug prices are higher in Canada. And the reason we carry more technology like MRI machines is that it reduces the wait time. An emergency patient who needs an MRI can have it done within 24 hours here in the US. In the two largest provinces in Canada, an urgent patient must wait between 3-19 weeks to get an MRI.

So their prices are lower, but who exactly benefits when your life is on the line? I don't care if it costs a bunch of money because my life and my kids lives come first. But I guess you wouldn't mind hopping a flight to Mexico to save a couple hundred bucks on a surgery.

 

We've gone from discussing facts to regurgitating conservative talking points. An urgent care/medical emergency patient in Canada does not have to wait 3-19 weeks for an MRI.
But there is on average a 4 week wait for a private insurer to authorize an MRI for a non-emergency patient in the U.S.
Also in Canada if you're willing to come out of pocket, you can get a non emergency MRI immediately.

For deaths that could have been prevented by timely healthcare, the U.S. ranks near the bottom or at bottom for 19 industrialized nations, annually.

Tell me in even one healthcare outcome where the U.S. ranks number 1??

Poor people go to the hospital less often and receive less care. Most do not have a primary care giver and the majority die from chronic illnesses at a much higher rate than their non-poor, White counterparts.

The fact is poor Blacks and hispanics don't see doctors often enough or live that long to be a 'strain' on our healthcare system.

To ONLY cite the cost of brand name pharmaceuticals and innovations in medical technology and research as the primary drivers of healthcare costs is a deflection and denial about why U.S. healthcare costs are the highest in the world by several multiples and increasing every year, outpacing inflation and the cost of living expenses for most Americans.

 

Boba is airing this Wilson cat out. Please Boba no more its painful to watch lol.

 

These are not conservative talking points, these are just facts about the healthcare industry.

Again, you keep going back to economic status. My argument is that Americans, in general, don't live healthy lifestyles. It is a fact that our population has high crime & drug use, more illegal aliens, and higher percentages of minorities which have historically high number of medical issues. It is ridiculous to say blacks don't visit the hospital because they die early. Healthcare costs are a reflection of the society, just look at the number of medical visits we have in a year. The Center for Disease Control has some great stats- 82% of adults visited a doctor in the past year and 92% of kids visited a doctor in the past year. Plus, there were 1.2 billion ambulatory care visits. Because we have so many visits, this forces us to have more healthcare professionals on staff, more technology, more prescriptions, etc. So this isn't some talking point, it's reality.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/docvisit.htm

Here is a site which shows world health rankings with lists of the leading causes of death. You will not see the US towards the top of these lists. We do a very good job of keep our people healthy. We give our kids vaccines and do regular checkups. Other countries don't do this.
http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/world-health-rankings

So if doctors salaries, pharmaceuticals, and medical technology are not the causes of healthcare costs rising, please tell me what you think it is? And you're sadly mistaken if you think having a government run agency will all of sudden eradicate the issues I mentioned above. You want cheaper healthcare...LIVE BETTER. I promise you that the things you're complaining about wouldn't be an issue if you were lying on a hospital bed for a serious medical issue. You're going to be thankful for all of the medical advancements we have.