Thread: A Health Care Scenario

Originally Posted by honedright

Irresponsible people like responsibility?

Uhm that's not what I wrote. Would you find the same construction but with different quality equally contradictory?

"people are stingy"
"people like others to be generous, just not themselves"

I didn't think my second statement was that confusing, rephrasing it would be 'many people like only others to be responsible, while they remain irresponsible themselves'.

To prove the alleged contradiction you will have to establish a relation between the two statements, for example that 'irresponsible people don't like anybody to be responsible, perhaps they are irresponsible just because they don't believe in responsibility as a principle'.
Otherwise these are two independent statements because they describe completely different things,
(1) one's preference how they act themselves (2) one's preference how others act.
And yes, my observations are that people are inconsistent, so (1) and (2) don't need to be correlated, or in other words 'do to others as you want them to do to you' is a matter of conscious choice and not a universal law, like gravity for example.

Originally Posted by commiecat

I guess we'll respectfully disagree on this. Options and competition, IMHO, will only help the patients/consumers. That's how capitalism works, and I'd compare it to how the USPS competes against UPS/FedEx. I'd be curious to see what UPS rates were if the USPS weren't around.
For your example to work, you would need someone between the providers of the service and the end user. If a third company were paying UPS, USPS, or FedEx on behalf of a group of end users. These third companies would only be able to negotiate good rates with the service providers if they had a great number of end users to funnel towards the mail companies. The middle man (insurance companies) are the wild card here that are changing the rules of free market economics in the healthcare. I totally agree that competition is good in the regular free market.

Regional monopolies aren't a good thing to me, especially regarding insurance. If you're a risk or have existing conditions, how is it good to have a single provider that is going to either charge you exorbitantly, or opt to not cover you at all?
It isn't clearly.

There are few companies that I'd place below the government in regards to who I'd rather deal with, but the insurance companies are one of them. It's not like your Congressman is going to be taking your temperature. The nurses, doctors, specialists and hospitals will remain the same, it's the payment/reimbursement process that is getting changed.
To be clear, I am not opposed to a public option per se, but it isn't the sole answer to the issue of cost.

The rest of the industrialized world has something similar. Currently American citizens pay the most for health care, yet have some of the worst statistics.
With out a doubt, we have a low value system.

How do we increase the value of healthcare in this country? That seems to be the question to me.

-Rob

Originally Posted by sicboater

How do we increase the value of healthcare in this country? That seems to be the question to me.

-Rob

It's my hope that this reform plan will do just that. The Heath Care Exchange will allow an individual to choose amongst all registered plans, and the public option will offer an inexpensive competitor.

If you're a customer or employer then you can choose the plan that's right for you and use the other plans as leverage. A big problem today is that some areas have either little or no competition so the private company has all the leverage. Like I've said upthread, there's nothing to really stop them from raising premiums or dropping coverage altogether on people who are a risk or have prior existing conditions.

As far as the public option goes, it will have low premiums. If the private companies want your business, they will either offer the same service at a lower cost, or increase their service/benefits to justify the price difference.

I think that both of those will give us more value for our health care dollars.

Originally Posted by sicboater

How do we increase the value of healthcare in this country? That seems to be the question to me.

-Rob

Giving control of health care to the same people that are running the United States Postal Service (guaranteed success)

Originally Posted by Navaja

Giving control of health care to the same people that are running the United States Postal Service (guaranteed success)

I'm not sure if you're making these sarcastic, flippant remarks just for giggles or if you're really that uninformed.

The government won't be controlling health care. Private insurance will still be owned privately and the current doctors and nurses will still be taking care of you. Why is this so hard to understand?

Originally Posted by commiecat

I'm not sure if you're making these sarcastic, flippant remarks just for giggles or if you're really that uninformed.

The government won't be controlling health care. Private insurance will still be owned privately and the current doctors and nurses will still be taking care of you.

Who's uninformed??

Originally Posted by honedright

Who's uninformed??

Private insurance will still be owned privately and the current doctors and nurses will still be taking care of you.

What's incorrect about that? Where does it say that government will control our health care? That's like saying that government has control of package delivery.

Offering one option in a sea of many is far from taking control as far as I'm concerned.

Originally Posted by commiecat

Private insurance will still be owned privately and the current doctors and nurses will still be taking care of you.

What's incorrect about that? Where does it say that government will control our health care? That's like saying that government has control of package delivery.

Offering one option in a sea of many is far from taking control as far as I'm concerned.

Unfortunately I don't have access to the Pelosi bill. My understanding is that there is a provision that penalizes doctors who order medical tests above a certain percentile (Physicians Argue Against Provision Penalizing for Excessive Testing in Healthcare Reform Bill | Business and Financial | News and Analysis)

Sounds like government control to me.

If your doctor is considering performing that one-more-diagnostic-test-just-to-be-sure, will the procedure be skipped because the doctor finally decides it's unnecessary? or due to a fear of being penalized? You'll never know.

The bill is over 1900 pages. In 1900 pages there can be many such provisions. A good way to hide problematic provisions is to bury them in a voluminous mountain of legalese. Since when does it require 1900 pages to define how a doctor gets paid?

Originally Posted by honedright

If your doctor . . . .

so, you have a doctor yay! yesterday one was out of your reach and today you have one.

There are a lot of what ifs and buts after that, I'm sure, but lets sort the basics shall we?

Originally Posted by gregs656

so, you have a doctor yay! yesterday one was out of your reach and today you have one.

There are a lot of what ifs and buts after that, I'm sure, but lets sort the basics shall we?

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