"Nice to know
that I'll be well taken care of.
Thank you
Tom, for your
interest in my
physical welfare.
It is refreshing to know some
one cares about
something besides
making money.
God Bless you
and yours."
Leo Bors-
Phoenix, AZ

Health Care Reform

Health Care Reform Official government web site. Check to see what is happening with health care reform in your state.

Bargain like a Democrat One cartoonist's view of how the party in power managed to give it all away instead of getting a comprehensive health care reform bill passed. By making it look like the Republicans were trying to stop everything, the Democratic Party managed to give another bail out for the rich while utterly failing to do anything to reform our health care system.

Single Payer Option-Not So Good
HR 676 plays into and is supported by a very popularly held but incorrect notion that the problem with health care is how we pay for it. Half of the people that are currently uninsured could be and could afford to be but they see no value paying into our sickness industries so they don't participate. Many people that are forced to seek care there also see little value in our for profit AMA allopathic driven sickness culture but feel trapped into doing so, not finding meaningful alternatives. Congress showing a complete disconnect from reality and unwillingness to take on the complex of problems that make health care so expensive, like our agriculture policy of subsidizing food like substances but never providing for healthy food, can't come up with anything more complex than bashing the easy targets like insurance companies but, as usual, doing a completely incompetent job of doing that. After all, health insurance is the most heavily regulated industry in the country and it has always done what has been asked of it. So how is a creature created by the balkanized state regulation now solely responsible for the health care crisis to the point of being called dishonest by the President? Who is being dishonest here?

Trying to fix "health care" with "insurance reform" is like trying to change the kind of cars the automobile industry manufactures by changing the banking and finance laws. There is no connection. If you want safer cars and better mileage then you have to legislate those standards. If our health care industry was as prescient as our automobile industry then we wouldn't be paying a trillion dollars a year more for health care than we should be. Unfortunately, our for profit health care system, not insurance, doesn't even run as well as our bankrupt automobile industry except that doctors have been far more adept at bilking rate and tax payers out of their money than Chrysler or GM. That is in part because, as hard as it is to tell the price you will pay for a vehicle on a dealer's lot, it is far easier to tell what those charges are going to be with a car dealer than they would be for any doctor.

HR 676 doesn’t create a better health care system. It simply shifts responsibility for payment into the public sector. The public plan we have now is as well known for the amount of money it loses to fraud as it is for the services it provides people that are disabled or over age 65. People that want “Medicare for All” have no experience dealing with Medicare and don’t realize that Medicare is far more brutal about denying claims and that in fact all claims procedures followed by private insurers is based on Medicare rules. We need insurance reform, national standards, the ability to buy plans wherever you want, etc. More important, however, would be to have a national standard model of care that includes knowing what the price of a service is before you receive it and the ability to shop and compare the quality of care that is received from different doctors and hospitals. Ultimately, if health care reform is successful, then the need for insurance will cease to be as big a part of the way our system works.

It will never cease to puzzle me how frequently health care gets confused with insurance, even though there is no proven relationship between how much you pay for care and the efficacy of the care or the quality of the outcome. HR 676 played more into the hands of corporate healthcare and against the interest of progressives and everyone else than any other option proposed. It did not create a national (or improve our) health care system, simply extend government insurance plans. If the goal is to get rid of insurance then why embed insurance into our government in such a way that it would take another 300 years to rid ourselves of it? We need the government to start playing a leadership role by providing the infrastructure for a health care system, not create an even bigger and more complicated insurance problem. Labor unions proposed this idea originally, in order to cover unfunded health care liabilities. HR 676 would have directly gifted billions of dollars to trade unions by relieving those underfunded obligations. This legislation was a trick and a lot of otherwise very smart people fell for it.

[Home] [Up] [Site Map] [Resources] [Privacy] [Contact Us]

Proud member of the:
 

You can call us at (800) 547-1567 or send mail to web@seniormarketservices.com with questions or comments about this web site. Copyright © 2010 Senior Market Services LLC