[Opinion]US healthcare bill
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This discussion is so complicated on so many levels, if it was a black and white issue it would have happened years ago.
What we have here is a country run by big business, lobbyists controlling the capital.
You have a two party system where politics and re-elections are more important than the people they claim to represent (both parties are guilty of this).
You cannot get a simple bill through the senate/house without having to add pet projects/pork to sweeten it in order to get it through.Our system is broken...completely f*cked up.
I do not like the bill that was passed, but I like the status quo even less.
I commend Obama for taking this political risk in a time this country has the lowest opinion and trust for politicians, many say he has committed political suicide with this as well as dooming many Democrats facing elections later this year. Obama has done what FDR, JFK, Carter, Nixon, Reagan and Clinton all promised in pre elections and never able to make happen or too scared to actually try. So if he goes down because of it then so be it, history will be the judge.
Hell, Texas is talking of suing him already, the radio stations are talking succession from the union… so Texas, so fundamentally Texas.
In this country we are forced to have car insurance (thank you lobbyists) failing to do so will get you car towed away and you getting fined in Dallas. Now the same will happen with health insurance, this is the part I absolutely disagree with, I do not need to be forced to get something that’s not free. Make it free social health care then force me, but forcing Americans to pay through their noses for over inflated health insurance is just wrong.
Ideally we need a NHS system, we could refrain from starting wars for a few years in order to pay for it.
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@solo said:
Ideally we need a NHS system, we could refrain from starting wars for a few years in order to pay for it.
As a very brief aside, its so disheartening seeing all the money that is spent on keeping the military going. What a complete waste of resources (in an ideal world.)
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For what i heard about the plan from Obama, it was designed on the situation by us in the Netherlands.
In our country everyone has to pay for medical care, and we pay in 2 ways. 1 way is through your loan and the second way is by yourself for the standard costs. Everyone who wants more or better medical care like payment for a correction of there nose must get an extra insurance.For the people who have a minimum income whe have a fund from the government, and they get a refund for there medical costs. So in our system must the people with the most income pay for the people with less income. We call it social democratic solution, where people take care for each other
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@solo said:
In this country we are forced to have car insurance (thank you lobbyists) failing to do so will get you car towed away and you getting fined in Dallas. Now the same will happen with health insurance, this is the part I absolutely disagree with, I do not need to be forced to get something that’s not free. Make it free social health care then force me, but forcing Americans to pay through their noses for over inflated health insurance is just wrong.
I agree with your larger sentiment and I also agree with the phrase 'over inflated health insurance'. But I think the system will not work without the mandate.
I do some free lance work for a contracting outfit (3 guys with a pickup truck). They're all pretty far to the right politically and this is the one aspect of the health care bill they want to go to war over. They talk loudly (and sometimes drunkenly) about rights and freedom. But in conversation with them it becomes immediately apparent that not one of them is actually paying for health care now. They've all had reason to use health care in the past (one had an accident and another one became a father last year). And this is the problem. If we all could choose to buy our car insurance only when and if we had an accident, there wouldn't be enough money in the insurance pool to make the insurance work.
These 3 guys are in their late 30s and they're only now beginning to talk about getting health insurance because they have kids and they're getting older. For the system to work, they need to have been paying into it since they started work in their late teens or early twenties. There's no way these guys were going to voluntarily start paying into a system when they were in their early 20s and in good health. Same thing with Social Security. When you're 23 you never think you're going to be 70 and out of work. If you didn't have to pay it through the tax system from the time you started work it wouldn't be there when you need it.
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Note, most if not all states only require that you have liability car insurance. To protect the other guy. Not sure how this type of mandate to protect other persons and their property fits into the health insurance mandate.
And onto another note, insurance is a shared risk, a pool of people willing to pay to have coverage and share the risk. Mandatory and compulsory requirement to carry health insurance is a shared cost. Sharing the cost does not lower the cost, it just spreads it around.
No where in this plan is there any thing I can see that will help to lower the cost, it just spreads it to more people.
And the real irritating problem with this bill is it makes more classes of US citizens, special deals for select groups. People in some states get a break, unions get a break, the person who doesn't get a break is the young middle class working stiff, who will be paying for this years to come. What happened to everyone is equal and should be treated equal. I guess if you vote one way, you more than equal, vote another way you are less than equal.
I read the other day that SS has from 30 to 50 trillion dollar in uncovered mandated cost, and another 30 to 40 trillion in uncovered mandated cost in medicare. Folks we are broke and now we are broker.
The process was flawed. The people doing the process are flawed.
I have two main beliefs that will be battled out during the next couple of years. One that the further you are from a true free market system, the less efficient the process is going to be (read that as more expensive) and number two is since all energy comes from a sun, the further the energy you use is from the energy's origin, a sun, the less efficient the energy is, (read that as more pollutant).
OK, the end of my rant.
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I don't get the discussion around there. The opinion in the Netherlands is quite simple, and therefore we have a good quality off life, perhaps the best in Europe.
When youre young like a baby you need a lot of medical treatment, costs made by the insurance.
When youre like a working life, between 20 and 60 you have less costs normaly. But when you get old en perhaps very old you need more medical treatment. Normaly in the Netherlands you pay more when youre working. So you pay then for the older and young people. But when your old the young people who is working pay for you.
But at the end is the calculation so that you have paid for your own costs, but youre spread the bill over many years.
This is quite common in Europe, and the profit in this situation is that everyone deserves medical treatment and also on the same level. So when you earn les you get the same docter als Obama when he is ill
. No different kind off people, everyone is equal. -
It's not perfect (what is?), and won't please everyone, but I believe it is a step in the right direction, something to build on. A lot of Americans are complaining it's socialism; I don't know about that, but we already have such programs in this country in the form of Medicare, disaster relief, and public education. I don't hear the naysayers wanting to scrap any of those programs.
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It is not the US government's role to make sure that everyone has health insurance. As for comments I've heard about military costs, it may be high, but at least that is where the US gov't. should be spending it's resources.
Ben
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The negative and very slanderous / scare mongering campaign the Republicans and their military wing the 'Tea party' have amassed will dissipate in time and eventually they will come to adopt this bill.
I'd like to see the republicans try and over turn this one, LOL at the politician that can say in public that he/she agrees with the health insurance companies that people need to be refused for pre-existing conditions, or that the health insurance companies can deny services based on cost.
Anyone notice how these fracking health conglomerates got a boost in share price yesterday? What are they bitching about, they are going to make money hand over fist soon as this mandates that all Americans need to use their services...the thing is we can now shop them on price, so they need to get productive and streamline their prices and services to stay profitable.
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Mike 1158 -
My sympathies of course.
But the anecdotal horror stories that are told about various countries health care systems tend not to show up in the statistics. Most comparisons will show that form point of diagnosis to point of cure the actual numbers are quite similar country to country. England has no larger percentage of death by cancer or any other disease than other countries do - including the US.
The Republicans bandied stories like yours around as 'proof' of how much better off than we are. But no industrialized country has any intention of scrapping their public health care system and no politician could hope to get elected if they ran on such a platform. This is similar to the often repeated sound bite that the Canadian Prime Minister came to America to see a specialist. But he was a multimillionaire. Ask a self employed carpenter in Canada if they want to come to America and pay $16,000 a year for their family's health insurance. You'll get a very different answer.
This is an interesting health care graph - you might have to zoom out a bit to see the US position in the upper left hand corner.
http://blogs.ngm.com/.a/6a00e0098226918833012876a6070f970c-800wi -
I am a believer in the UK's National Health Service. It's just that at the moment it's going downhill fast. For example my father-in-law was sent to the local hospital to be checked over for a lung shadow.
We arrived and he was seen within 15 minutes and put in the assessment ward. Various checks were carried out speedily and he was transferred to ward "you'll need a biopsy on your lung".
Alas this is where things started on the downhill slope. He was put under a consultant who after a couple of days "went on holiday" without making any arrangement for the biopsy. Over the next couple of weeks his condition deteriorated. We asked what his treatment was and how he was progressing, but were told to speak to the doctor who was rarely around. I took an afternoon off work to ensure we saw the consultant on his afternoon round. We told the ward sister we wanted to speak with him and she assured us he had started his ward round and we could speak to him when he reached father-in-law. Time drifted on, but yes he knew we wanted to speak to him. Then the registrar came in, sorry the round was taking longer than usual but he would be round to see us. Finally a staff nurse came in to the six bed side ward and announced that the consultant had left and would finish the round the next morning! Oh, did you want to see him, could you come back in the morning. To this day I don't know how I didn't lapse into Anglo-Saxon.On another visit my wife heard a faint voice from the next bed. The poor old guy had been given his dinner but it had been left out of his reach. Also it was sausages but he wasn't strong enough to cut them up, so she did and moved it to where he could reach. He died a couple of days later.
Shortly after this father-in-law died, although the circumstances were not clear. My wife and son went to visit him and found him dead in his bed. Initially they weren't believed by the ward sister, but then doctors and nurses arrived from everywhere, but to no avail. As far as we were aware he never did have his biopsy. Our letter of complaint was replied to in a half hearted way.
These days I don't worry how the service is funded, only how well it is delivered. Too many institutions are like Fawlty Towers, the patients just get in the way of it's smooth running. Private medicine gives a direct link between the patient and the money, offer crap service and the patient goes elsewhere and there is no money. Public medicine doesn't have that link so those who give crap service get away with it. Nobody gets fired, they're just sent for "more training" which is a cop out. Perhaps that's why there are so many hospital bugs, lack of enforcement of standards.
Visit a NHS hospital and die! -
I concratulated Obama yesterday on http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact
Bep
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@ben ritter said:
It is not the US government's role to make sure that everyone has health insurance. As for comments I've heard about military costs, it may be high, but at least that is where the US gov't. should be spending it's resources.
Ben
Ben, Ben, Ben, .......... the US government already spends 49% of GDP on the Military Industrial Complex, each year. And your worried about a little bit ofSocial Democracy? Its laughable! You are no longer a nation of a few million people, where "Once upon a time" the the prevailing attitude may have been "F**K my Neighbor, I'm only here to look out for myself and my family". If you have not noticed, its that attitude that GW used to get the US into deep trouble with its War in Iraq. Squandering Trillions of your future tax dollars, for a war that has killed more than 1 million Iraqi's. Who happen to be human beings just like you and me. Where was the rage against the Iraq war? The rest of the world already has socialized medical care, and has had for decades. If its not the role for Governments to provide health insurance, then who's job is it to help you survive, when you get sick. Trust me we will all get sick, sometime in your lives.
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Tomot, every article I researched places the US Government's defense spending at below 10% of the GDP. Even the most militant patriot would balk at the percentage you listed. As for outrage over the Iraq war, there were/are plenty of Americans against it and who protested.
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Americans are free to choose a health system they want. The European model, whatever you want to call it, has main benefits over the traditional American system:
- it costs less. Americans spend a larger portion of their GNP on healthcare than Europeans do.
- it gives better results. Europeans are generally healthier. I don't know the real reason, maybe it depends on the relatively large proportion of Americans that are without healthcare.
The European system is not the same everywhere. There are national and regional differences, with the French being generally the most envied. Our Finnish system is rated somewhere in the middle caste, but I really cannot find fault with the care I and my family have received when in need of it.
Anssi
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I envy y'all system.
It's a shame that a country like ours cannot do the most fundamental of things, protect our health yet feel that protecting our lives from WMD's that do not exist is more important.
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@daniel said:
Tomot, every article I researched places the US Government's defense spending at below 10% of the GDP. Even the most militant patriot would balk at the percentage you listed. As for outrage over the Iraq war, there were/are plenty of Americans against it and who protested.
Thanks for calling that to my attention. I was taking that info from a pie chart, not unlike the attached one, which is not as severe. I suppose one can skew a pie chart to engage any intended group.
However comparing a pie chart to the us debt clock ........YIKES!
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Frankly, I'm glad to see it get to this point. There are still a number of problems, and those problems will need to be worked out, but it's doable... Perhaps we'll see some of the military budget being wasted in Irag transferred to this program (after our pull out) to help the citizens who generate the revenues that fuel the "war machine" in the first place...
I'm more chagrined about the GOP and their "we're not going to co-operate on further legislation this year" foolishness. We have a LOT of things that still need to be fixed in this country, like illegal immigration for example, and this kind of rhetoric is just plain stupid. Akin to "I'm taking my ball and going home" immaturity that I would expect from a spoiled child.
A prime example of how they (the GOP) consider the "party" more important than the populace.
Next November will be interesting...
Cheers.
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There are a couple things that truly torque me off about this health care bill.
the first, (and i'm not sure if this ahas changed..probably not) is that members of Congress were exempt from the actions of the bill.
the second... there is a reason not everyone has health insurance. an example.. my mother doesn't for the simple fact that she cannot afford it. Nor can her (now ex) husband, who runs his own successful cable contracting company. both of them need it because of their health, but there is nothing they can do to afford it. Forcing t down their throats, and expecting them to pay for it is a load of crap. There is a country (switzerland I believe, could be wrong) that makes it mandatory for everyone to have a certain level of health care, but they (the government) pay for it, and if people want a higher level, they can pay for it.Based on the way i've seen our (the US) government work, this system will fail, and fail hard. and the reasons all come down to one word: greed.
While I didn't vote for Obama, I did try to give him a chance. But one thing has become clear to me. This health care thing has nothing to do with improving the country, but with checking off something that was on his personal agenda.
I'm one of those that has lost all faith in our government accomplishing anything meaningful. When "Representing the People" becomse an entitlement career, where you are exempt from many of the laws you impose on others, pretty much don't have to worry about answering to your constituants, vote for your own pay raise, etc. its a sign that things need to change. On the same token, I do think the whole 'Tea-Party' movement is a Farce.In short, i think this Health care thing is a very bad idea, rushed through with little thought to the concequences, implimented by a government that is broken, and only concerned about themselves. Health care for eveyone is a good idea, but the plan that has been pushed through is not.
Thanks for giving me a place to rant on this
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Well said Mike, I agree 100%. Why half of the Americans here feel that it is a smart move to put health care in the hands of the federal government is beyond me.
If the government was reduced down to one man on a job interview and you reviewed his job history, his success or failure rates of other companies he's run, did a background check, checked with his creditors and called his references and found a history of bankruptcies, unpaid loans, extreme debts, accusations of war crimes & fraud and all his neighbors say he's an agressive bully.....would you then hire him to oversee the health and well being of your children?
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