Bob55

Health Care Bill: Prescription for Disaster

In agreement. Profit and the well-being of health care consumers should not be mutually exclusive in an ideal world. Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world. Not that we can't push ourselves closer to one.

Health Care Bill: Prescription for Disaster

Today, the public plan is put back on the table. Good news indeed.

Health Care Bill: Prescription for Disaster

Why is it when the well-to-do feel like something is being taken from them that they equate it to socialism? Talk to the regular Joe on the street who are barely making ends meet working two jobs or the family who just lost their house to foreclosure or the person who have just been laid off because their company have a need to "cut expenses" then this legislation is a godsend.

I do agree with you on the corrupting influences of lobbyists. Hearing today the public option for health care have been taken off the table altogether by Congress was disappointing to say the least.

Health Care Bill: Prescription for Disaster

Arguments have been presented for and against universal health care. So many of the points you have brought up are similar to the arguments of rationing and lower quality of care that was brought up the last time a health care reform bill was introduced so many years ago and which is making its rounds this time also.

Among the more interesting motivations FOR a plan and this has support among many health care providers and pharmaceutical companies is, quite simply, there will be so many new patients should the presently-uninsured finally have coverage. There is no doubt a plan of some kind has to be pushed through to cover the uninsured in our country who are ever-growing given these dark times, but how we do it is debatable. Congress is working through so many variations as we speak. What is not debatable is that cost has to come down. Will we see more concessions by health care providers and the drug companies to lower costs? I think we will but they know they will more than make up for it by seeing its patient base grow substantially with the "newly-insured".

Will private insurance companies fall on the wayside competing against a national plan? I don't think so neither, but they will have to change the ways they do things, and in the end, it will be better for everybody.

What the government has to do to prepare for the huge influx of the "newly-insured" regardless of whether a national plan covers them or private insurers cover them is that the number of doctors have to be increased drastically. Any rationing or cut in services will not be acceptable to the American people. Having enough physicians to serve them and allowing for choice of health plans will minimize that from happening. Competition, whether or not it's against a national plan, will force change, change against health care costs going higher and higher to astronomical amounts where Americans can no longer afford it anymore and continues to be a bigger and bigger expense to so many American companies. Doing nothing is something we cannot afford to do right now.

Health Care Bill: Prescription for Disaster

With layoffs possibly continuing into 2011, and so many Americans losing access to health care because of it, what solutions do you propose? Keeping the status quo and doing nothing is not exactly realistic, not if you care at all about your fellow Americans.

As for walking down the road to serfdom, perhaps we should look at some of the countries who currently have universal health care:

the U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, the Netherlands, and Germany

Not exactly a bunch of backwards-looking countries.


On Jul 22 11:51 AM John Galt wrote:

> " Start with a basic premise: All citizens of a civilized country
> must have equal access to quality health care, regardless of race,
> creed or economic status."
>
>
> Who doesn't have equal access to health services?
> What level of quality are people entitled to in your world?
>
> Does some bodies right to free stuff trumph my right to my property?
> The founders of this country highly disagree with you there, in fact
> they declared it, then fought and won a war against the greatest
> army on earth and wrote the constitution ensure future generations
> cliams to freedom to life, liberty and property. Maybe you could
> start with your basic premise somewhere else, but that's not what
> Americans believe... or once believed.
>
> It looks like you don't like people being discriminated against based
> on race, creed or economic status... So you must be against the minority
> of people with higher incomes being discriminated with higher taxes
> " just because of their economic status"?
>
> The difficult thing to grasp is why people want to walk down the
> road to serfdom.

Health Care Bill: Prescription for Disaster

Regarding your comments for end of life care, you have a point. However, for the vast majority of Americans however who are currently healthy, prevention and screening should go a long way in lowering health care costs over the long run. For example, what is the cost of a mammogram compared for what it takes to treat a woman for breast cancer? I suppose the difference between treating someone in early-stage cancer compared to late-stage cancer may not be substantial, but you can believe catching any illness at its early stages will substantially improve life-expectancy. Isn't that what those in the medical profession should be looking at - improving life expectancy?

In the end, it's human life we should be looking at instead of merely the numbers. Will more lives be improved or damaged by health care reform going forward? Let the public be the judge and not only the health care companies and the politicians. Let Main Street have as much say as Wall Street on matters of health care. You may find the opinions of the common citizen may differ greatly when you're not looking at it from a cost- and profit-driven perspective and more on how it affects your family, your friends, and your community.

On Jul 20 10:50 PM Jason S. wrote:

> I am a physician who spends 100% of my time in the hospital. To
> enlighten many of you, the people in the hospital for the most part
> are not there because of a failure to PREVENT acute illness or catastrophe.
> Instead they are people are near the end of their life because they
> are either unlucky to have had bad disease that can't be treated,
> they sabotage their health, or they are old. Medicine may have a
> lot of sexy technology but in the end humans cannot control nature.
> Until society gets some realistic expectations about what the health
> system can (and can't) do for them, we will continue to flush money
> away with end of life care.
>
> Furthermore, all this talk of prevention is likely not going to yield
> much in savings -- instead it will just pick up the people in an
> earlier state of dying and start their medical dollar spending earlier
> -- therefore costing more money.
>
> I too agree with other commentors --- the administration's disregard
> for medical tort reform shows how out of touch they are -- and how
> little they actually want to fix the system.
>
> For a rational approach, try Clayton Christensen's "The Innovator's
> Prescription" -- I wish Obama had read this.

Health Care Bill: Prescription for Disaster

One of the most important outcomes we can hope to see should health care reform pass is that we see a shift from health care being primarily being about treating illness to one being about prevention. Prevention will be one of the keys to cost-containment. Testing for and addressing illness at its earliest stages and taking a very proactive approach towards educating everyone about "healthful living" will have a big payoff over the long term.

Just as employers now have a say in changing "lifestyle choices" of its employees like smoking and obesity, should National Health Care be given the same latitude over those it covers? Most definitely. It should be a condition of accepting coverage. So, yes, the cost of "helping" people in these two areas alone in the early years may be rather high, but year after year of educating America on health issues will finally pay off in the not-too-distant future. So many illnesses can be eradicated by addressing these two issues alone and I don't see this happening other than having a National Health Plan. Especially among the uninsured, you can't "force" people to change their lifestyles for the better unless you provide the means and the incentive.