There are death panels being held everyday in hospital corridors and living rooms across America. It's how we currently ration health care: by who can pay. Unfortunately, because we spend so much health care money on profits for the health care industry, costs are still skyrocketing so that we are going to have to "ration" even more.The Devil's greatest trick was not convincing mankind that he didn't exist, it was convincing middle-class America that a trillion-dollar industry built from the ground up on denying people health care are the good guys.
But since Good People, Real Americans, have health insurance, only bad people have to worry about this, which is how it should be. The problem is that if the government takes over they're going ration by taking away the Good People's health care and giving it to welfare queens and illegal immigrants who don't deserve it.
Once again, they're not just protesting against their own self-interest, they are literally protesting against their own self-preservation. How's that for a "death panel"? Thousands of Americans die each year because they can't afford heath care. These people want to keep in that way.
That's your damn death panel right there. They are deciding to keep up the killing. They have decided the poor need to die, and they're okay with that.
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No, We've decided the best way to serve the most people is through free market mechanism like in all other industries. Witness laser eye surgery. At first it was the province of only the rich. Now it's competitive with eye glasses.
I'll grant that our health care industry needs reform, but it's pro-capitalist reform not anti-capitalist reform we need.
You are trying to sell me a free lunch and I know, "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch".
Laser eye surgery is elective, not a life or death matter. And yes, as more doctors are trained on LASIK, the cost went down.
But nice try. Getting your insurance claim denied on laser eye surgery doesn't kill you and you damn well know it.
It's a service, like any other, which is best provided through a pricing structure.
What you're proposing is to do away with the price signals in the health care market which will completely mess up supply and demand.
The market is not some ideal to strive for. The laws of the market exist like the laws of physics exist. You can deny it, and try to jump off the cliff, but it will kill you.
Here's Cuba: http://www.therealcuba.com/Page10.htm
You're still as uninformed as ever. Both the House versions and Teddy Kennedy HELP bill establish that the public option has to compete under the same rules as the insurance companies.
For those Americans not already enjoying government health care (Medicare and Medicaid, which I add have NOT done away with insurance companies), the free markets already ration health care by your ability to pay for it, period.
Health insurance companies are for-profit companies. They are not in the business of saving lives. They are in the business of determining who lives and who dies and playing the odds of that happening, profiting from it. They are your death panels now.
Pay attention for God's sakes.
"under the same rules as the insurance companies."
That is a lie. A deception woven into the bill to fool the gullible.
First, By definition any government option operates under different rules by virtue of the government taxing powers to make up any short fall.
Secondly, ...
http://conservativethoughts.us/2009/07/26/5-freedoms-youd-lose-in-health-care-reform/
"The bill gives ERISA employers a five-year grace period when they can keep offering plans free from the restrictions of the “qualified” policies offered on the exchanges. But after five years, they would have to offer only approved plans, with the myriad rules we’ve already discussed. So for Americans in large corporations, “keeping your own plan” has a strict deadline. In five years, like it or not, you’ll get dumped into the exchange. As we’ll see, it could happen a lot earlier.
The outlook is worse for the second group. It encompasses employees who aren’t under ERISA but get actual insurance either on their own or through small businesses. After the legislation passes, all insurers that offer a wide range of plans to these employees will be forced to offer only “qualified” plans to new customers, via the exchanges.
The employees who got their coverage before the law goes into effect can keep their plans, but once again, there’s a catch. If the plan changes in any way — by altering co-pays, deductibles, or even switching coverage for this or that drug — the employee must drop out and shop through the exchange. Since these plans generally change their policies every year, it’s likely that millions of employees will lose their plans in 12 months."
I said, the industry needs reform, but it's pro-capitalist reform we need. http://mises.org/story/3613
We've already tried to defy the laws of the market and been bit. This so-called reform is just asking for more trouble.
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I'll grant that our health care industry needs reform, but it's pro-capitalist reform not anti-capitalist reform we need.
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Explain the overhead difference between CIgna (for example) and Medicare. Cigna's overhead is 20%, Medicare is 3%.
Also explain how while insurance rates have doubled inflation rates, they've kept down costs more than Medicare? Hint...they haven't.
Oh yeah, make sure to factor in that Medicare has to cover the old and sick, where as private insurance can strike them from their policies.
Also make sure to take into account that by law Medicare cannot use it's buying power to negotiate cheaper rates for drugs.
So now tell me exactly, what do free-market insurance companies contribute to the medical system? Aside from sucking money out to pay obscene profits and salary's for the executives?
You guys are promising everyone something for nothing. You're proposals will destroy the good that we have.
All I'm saying is we have to deal with reality as it is. Market forces as they exist.
Medicare threatens to bankrupt us already and you want to throw the rest of us in there.
Here's a real reform proposal. http://mises.org/story/3613
Oh, and on Medicare's costs. Private insurance buyers subsidize Medicare/Medicaid patients.
"In the case of hospitals, which cannot refuse to accept Medicaid patients when they appear in the emergency room, the result has been a correspondingly greater rise in the costs charged both to private medical insurance companies and to the federal government under the Medicare program. The process is known as cost shifting. That is, to the extent that the hospitals' costs are not reimbursed by the Medicaid program, they are shifted in the form of higher charges to patients covered by private insurance companies or the Medicare program. Private patients who are not insured are also confronted with higher charges on account of this shifting of costs. (The same kind of cost shifting occurs insofar as hospitals are legally compelled to accept other patients with no means of paying.)
Since the mid-1980s, when the Medicare program adopted the policy of payment according to "diagnostic related groups" (DRGs), cost shifting has intensified. Now Medicare payments also frequently turn out to be inadequate to cover the costs of treatment. This inadequacy is added to the insufficiency of Medicaid payments. The inadequacy is further compounded to the extent that private insurance companies have adopted the DRG standards of payment. The total, combined shortfall is then passed along to the remaining patients, above all, the uninsured."
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