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Is everything that Republicans fear about health care happening right now?

This is an attempt at reasoned discussion, please don't answer until you've read everything and then please respond point-by-point. Thanks! ================================== Paying for other people's care: Insurance rates are based on how many people in the whole plan get sick...if you take care of yourself and never get sick, 100% of your money will go to funding care for strangers who possibly don't take care of their health. I have also heard the argument that people should just go the emergency room, but the people who do this are generally not concerned with their credit score and are not going to ever pay for the thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in care for a serious illness. ER care is the most expensive form of care available and you are currently bearing this cost through taxes. Rationed care: Again, if you have private insurance you are already in a pool with other people who are insured by an organization with a fixed amount of money to spend on everyone's care. There are two important differences, however; a private insurer has a profit motive to find ways to deny coverage while the government does not. In fact the elected officials who are behind the system know that they can always be voted out of office, so they have a motive to make sure people are getting what they need. Do you really think all those other industrialized Western countries with full universal coverage routinely deny care to all elderly people, and everyone just accepts it because they're wacky foreigners who don't have any feelings?? Death Panels: This seems to refer to one of two things, either a panel to determine whether someone is worthy of living or a consultation with a doctor to discuss a dying family member's care. In the first case, see above. In the second case, this is what normal people already do regardless of where the doctor's money is coming from. In the proposed legislation, such a consultation is OPTIONAL. In any case if you are worried about people dying, then why aren't you worried about the estimated tens of thousands of people who die every single year due to preventable illness and lack of coverage? http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=1RJ&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&ei=Rs2TS8KNBcGUtgft4KzUCg&sa=X&oi=spellfullpage&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=2&ved=0CAYQvwUoAQ&&q=die+every+year+lack+coverage&spell=1 Adding to the budget: The United States currently spends significantly more on health care as a percentage of GDP than almost any of the industrialized nations with universal health care. http://www.rwjf.org/pr/product.jsp?id=45110. The total cost of implementation is projected to be between $850-$950 billion, but this will pay for itself many times over in the long run. Keep in mind the projected total cost of the war against a country that never attacked us, had no ties to al qaeda, and no WMD's, is THREE TRILLION dollars and we will never get this money back. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=M7d&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=projected+total+cost+iraq+war&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq= Changing the "best system in the world": I have yet to be told what this is based on, other than anecdotes about foreigners coming to the U.S. for surgery. However, quality and access are two completely different things. It's true that the best doctors in the world come here, but that does little for the people who have no health coverage whatsoever. Yes people can go to the ER, but then we're back to Point #1. The fact is that the U.S. has a lower life expectancy than the Western industrialized nations with full universal coverage, and although this is not 100% due to the health care systems it certainly damages the argument that universal coverage kills people. Keep in mind that universal coverage is not even being remotely contemplated here. I have heard arguments about "back-door universal coverage" by preventing people from ever getting private insurance again once they go onto the public option, but this is quite confusing considering that a public option is not even in the legislation currently being blocked from even coming to a vote. Maybe someone can explain this too. Thank you for making it this far, I look forward to intelligent responses. =================================== "bmovies6" The government has a motive to be fiscally responsible, not to MAKE A MAXIMUM PROFIT. Link for your Medicare claim? And when market forces cause all the private insurers have roughly the same rates of denial, where are you going to go? =================================== =================================== "Pelosi's Water Boy" I didn't realize Cuba was a Western industrialized nation.... "GoGo Girls" I actually agree with you on everything about immigration...too bad this question was about health care. =================================== ===================================== "CaptainO" It's been awhile since I've heard the "public option will be so cheap and such great service that it will put the private companies out of business" argument. Silly goose, don't you remember that the public option will be awful because the government can't run anything right? MAKE UP YOUR MIND ===================================

Public Comments

1. "however; a private insurer has a profit motive to find ways to deny coverage while the government does not" False. The government does have to find ways to deny coverage in order to save money. In fact, the denial rate in medicare/medicaid is way higher than private insurers. A too high denial rate for private insurers can hurt their profit margins because if word spreads that x health insurance company denies its customers too many times, people will stop doing business with them and turn toward their competitors. Government has no competitors, so if it turns you down (and it will), where are you going to go? "Do you really think all those other industrialized Western countries with full universal coverage routinely deny care to all elderly people, and everyone just accepts it" Yes I really do think that because that really does happen. some people accept it, others dont, but theres little to nothing they can do about it. "A U.K. grandmother has been waiting 13 years for a hip replacement" http://www.thisissouthwales.co.uk/displayNode.jsp?nodeId=161366&command=displayContent&sourceNode=161855&contentPK=14055165&folderPk=88503 a 4-year-old girl with several absessed teeth has been waiting in agony over a month for "urgent" dental care: http://www.leedstoday.net/ViewArticle2.aspx?SectionID=39&ArticleID=1349493 10-month wait for cancer treatment http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/675968.stm Cancer patients 'wait too long' http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/uk_news/scotland/4377583.stm Kidney cancer patients denied life-saving drugs by NHS rationing http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1174592/Kidney-cancer-patients-denied-life-saving-drugs-NHS-rationing-body-NICE.html "Adding to the budget: The United States currently spends significantly more on health care as a percentage of GDP than almost any of the industrialized nations with universal health care. http://www.rwjf.org/pr/product.jsp?id=45110" True. And as a result, we get more health care and better quality of it. What do you expect to get if we pay less? "The total cost of implementation is projected to be between $850-$950 billion, but this will pay for itself many times over in the long run" False. The key word there is "projected". How many government programs have actually come in on what was projected? Chances are that it will cost 10,20, 50, even 100 times more. "Keep in mind the projected total cost of the war against a country that never attacked us, had no ties to al qaeda, and no WMD's, is THREE TRILLION dollars and we will never get this money back" False. The war against Iraq did NOT cost us 3 trillion dollars. Not even close. http://costofwar.com/ It did have WMDs (Kurds were exterminated by them), and it did have ties to Al Qaeda as captured documents later proved. " The fact is that the U.S. has a lower life expectancy than the Western industrialized nations with full universal coverage, and although this is not 100% due to the health care systems it certainly damages the argument that universal coverage kills people." False. It in no way damages arguments that universal health care kills people. Labour hid ugly truth about National Health Service (NHS) "DAMNING reports on the state of the National Health Service, suppressed by the government, reveal how patients’ needs have been neglected. They diagnose a blind pursuit of political and managerial targets as the root cause of a string of hospital scandals that have cost thousands of lives. " http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/article7052606.ece "The government has a motive to be fiscally responsible, not to MAKE A MAXIMUM PROFIT." Ha! Making a maximum profit IS being fiscally responsible! And the government has a motive to be fiscally responsible???? Where on earth do you get that? When in the past 200 years has government EVER been fiscally responsible??? What motive? "Link for your Medicare claim?" My claim comes from a report from the AMA!: According to the American Medical Association’s National Health Insurer Report Card for 2008, the government’s health plan, Medicare, denied medical claims at nearly double the average for private insurers: Medicare denied 6.85% of claims. The highest private insurance denier was Aetna @ 6.8%, followed by Anthem Blue Cross @ 3.44, with an average denial rate of medical claims by private insurers of 3.88% In its 2009 National Health Insurer Report Card, the AMA reports that Medicare denied only 4% of claims—a big improvement, but outpaced better still by the private insurers. The prior year’s high private denier, Aetna, reduced denials to 1.81%—an astounding 75% improvement—with similar declines by all other private insurers, to average only 2.79%. http://sayanythingblog.com/entry/shocker_medicare_has_a_higher_claim_denial_rate_than_private_sector_employe/ "And when market forces cause all the private insurers have roughly the same rates of denial, where are you going to go?" When market forces causes all the private insurers to have roughly the same rates of denial, I'll still go to another insurance company because if my insurance company denies me for my claim, chances are that another one wont, even if it has the same rates of denial. Just makes denials regarding a different affliction.
2. They don't fear health care,,,,everyone gets health care. However conservative republicans do not care for gov takeover of health care.
3. Have you personally ever been into a hospital or seen a physician outside of our great country? By the way Socialistic Medicine in Cuba is really "great", ask Micheal Moore
4. USA is awesome
5. Gee, it would be nice if we were responding to an intelligent person. But let me address your eh...opinions. There are those who can pay, those that will pay, and those that won't pay, no matter what program we have. Illegals flood the ER's not because they can't pay, but because they won't pay. How is my destroying the care I have now going to fix this? Give them amnesty? Not on your life. Rationed care- the profit motive may in some cases deny charges, but in many more times they weed out the fraudulent. You are not listening to both sides. Death Panels. - You obviously do not understand this issue. This is all about the care one will get based on their value to society. Do you give the bypass to the 80 years old or not? Since the majority of our health care costs are in the last few months of life, this would be determined by the "panel" as to whether this person would have their life extended or just made comfortable in favor of the bottom line budget. Where are you getting your numbers? They are a crock. This health care plan they are pushing is more like 2.5 Trillion to implement and moving upwards to 6 Trillion. You need to do some reevaluation of your numbers or wake up to a dose of reality. CBO has stated that there is nothing in these bills that will reduce our health care costs. We could also save a ton of money by getting rid of the illegals, reversing obamas order to open our borders to those with HIV, and tightening our requirements on immigrants on the whole.
6. I'm not going to waste time telling you how great our health insurance or health care system is. It is far from perfect. There is much within it that could use improvement. But, you don’t fix an overflowing toilet or even a cracked foundation in your home with gasoline and a match. Make no mistake, Obamacare will torch our current system of health care and health insurance. This is no modest reform. Contrary to President Obama’s repeated attempts to assure those of us pleased with our current health insurance arrangement that “you will keep your plan,” this is simply not the case. the Public option sounds nice and market-based until you realize that the public option is going to be subsidized with your tax dollars. It will “compete” only in the sense that it will always be cheaper than what you can obtain on the private market. Because private health insurers are bound by the market constraints of profit-making, cost containment, supply and demand, etc. The federal government knows no such bounds. The Obamacare plan will not “save” money as the Administration claims. This is a pretty big whopper that the President keeps on telling. The latest Congressional Budget Office estimates put the price tag at over $1 Trillion even without the costs of the “public option” or all the Medicaid expansions the Democrats want.You cannot take 83.4 million people who were previously privately insured plus 32.6 million people who were not buying insurance before and SAVE money. You have to work inside the D.C. Beltway to miss that fundamental fact. There is a limit to what we can, as taxpayers, afford to spend on health care, especially when you consider the crushing debt we are already incurring as a result of our entitlement spending, bank bailouts, auto bailouts, etc. With Obamacare, we will see those limits in the doctor’s office, the hospital room, or the ER. Choices will be circumscribed in the name of efficiency and cost control. To be sure, insurance carriers have been engaging in these sorts of cost controlling methods for years. You probably know someone who became so upset with the charges that an insurance carrier was willing to pay for and not pay for, that they changed their insurance coverage. I know plenty of people like that. But, once the government that is making those decisions for you, where are you going to go? So, taken all together, we have devastation of the private insurance market, a brand new government entitlement for 129.6 million people, and government oversight over patient/physician decisions about care.
7. Paying for other people's care: Even if you NEVER get sick, you still go for physicals, if you're a woman, you get a pap smear every year and birth control. That's paying for your own care. If you have a baby, you go to the hospital- even if you're not sick. Insurance companies DO cover ER visits. What about people who pay out of pocket (and can afford to do so), that don't WANT to pay a premium to an insurance company? Why should the government FORCE them to pay for a policy they don't even want or need? Rationed Care: If an insurance company denies payment for a service I need, I can dump them, pay for it myself, or find a high risk pool that WILL pay for it. The government is NOT going to give me that option. Plus, if they take from Medicare/Medicaid and screw over doctors by not paying them for services, that's rationing care to the elderly, while ensuring that they cannot get onto a private insurer thru Medicare Advantage. Death Panels: Do you REALLY want some government bureaucrat making those decisions? Rather than the patient and the doctor? Denying compensation to doctors limits the care they can give, that's just reality. "Here's 800mg of Ibuprofen for your brain tumor, go home and die"- what is that? Obama's brainchild harshly limits care to those who need it most. Adding to the budget: It's more like 5-6 Trillion over 10 years, and will NOT pay for itself. How can a plan with NO public option be this expensive? All it does is create government bureaucracies, and force people to buy their own insurance. Keep in mind that WMD's WERE found (chemical and biological weapons) and Saddam moved his nukes into Syria, as anyone who can remember what happened yesterday already knows. If Clinton hadn't stripped the military to the bone, it wouldn't have been this expensive, Saddam's violation of UN Resolutions would NOT have been tolerated, and Osama bin Laden would not have been ignored. Changing the best system: We have the best quality of care in the world, we don't have waiting lists for MRI's and heart surgeries. The "UN Report Card" doesn't account for the fact that infant mortality rates are counted differently. It doesn't prove that UHC is better than what we have here.