Reply With Quote
There is no free market in health care.
I don't mind a sick care bill for people that want it and need it, especially the poor and elderly, but it's wrong to force it on people. People should be able to sign up for it if they want it, as well as not sign up if they don't want it. My main issue is the mandate (forcing even people who don't believe in that kind of healthcare, why should they be forced to care for their own health the way the govt deems necessary?) and this is helping the insurance companies. My healthcare is my diet and nutrition. More people should be taught or more info should be commonly spread about preventative care thru diet and nutrition, instead of suppressed the way they do (because sick care is a big business). If that were seriously taught in med school and elsewhere, millions wouldn't need sick care as much. GMO's, processed foods, pesticides, dangerous FDA approved drugs that dont heal and only mask problems..those are some of the many reasons why people are really sick. Most people don't even think of this when debating sick care..but it's important and should be part of it. Problem solved for many people if attention was given to holistic, alternative and preventative care. Then also offer a plan that people can choose if they wish.
This crap right here is bogus. Mandates that condition the American people to accept more stupid mandates in the future, like rfid chips and all kinds of crap. Civil liberties down the drain, more and more tbh.
There is no free market in health care.
Not a bad post until you went conspiracy theory...the mandate only applies to people who can afford to pay some insurance but refuse to do so or no private insurance is available through their job...I'm for single payer, but I also pay thousands in taxes to the county....i want to know that everybody has some skin in both the costs and the responsibility of their own healthMandates that condition the American people to accept more stupid mandates in the future, like rfid chips
My post was all good..not conspiracy theory. It's true. Mandates like that which shouldnt exist make it easier for more in the future to be accepted. But back to mandating...it shouldnt be forced on someone just bc they can afford it. Some people don't treat their sicknesses in that manner and are successful at being healthy with their natural approach (which should be more commonly accepted for people to practice)..therefore they shouldn't be forced to buy insurance they dont use, want or need. Who does the government think they are to tell me I have to take care of my health the way THEY say?? That's ridiculous, and its not Freedom.
Accidents happen...and then I and all Texas homeowners have to foot the bill..how is that fair? Why do I get to pay for someone else irresponsibility? Especially when they can afford to foot some of the bill themselves...Some people don't treat their sicknesses in that manner and are successful at being healthy with their natural approach (which should be more commonly accepted for people to practice)..therefore they shouldn't be forced to buy insurance they dont use, want or need.
Accidents happen, that's life. Doesn't mean every living American should be required to buy insurance (if they arent covered some other way). Even Obama was against mandates, he campaigned on it in 08. Why don't we just stop funding wars with billions and billions of dollars and make some REAL defense cuts and just use that money for healthcare instead actually making everyone sign up for sick coverage they really dont need or want? I'd be more in favor of that.
And back to preventative care..we are wasting and will be wasting billions when millions of people can prevent being sick to begin with through some of the education and methods that I mentioned earlier. A lot of sickness is actually completely unnecessary. This whole healthcare debate as we commonly know it is 100% completely ass backwards when it comes to a persons real healthcare. What we are talking about is Sick care, they just call it healthcare. Millions and millions of people can be less sick. But big pharma, FDA, insurance companies, cancer business, sick business dollars would plummet. We are not looking at "Healthcare" the right way. And noone in govt has the balls to bring this to light. And too many Americans are brainwashed into thinking they are tylenol deficient rather than vitamin and nutrient deficient, etc. Just give people their nyquil, tylenol, antibiotics, vaccines, etc and not even teach them why they really got sick to begin with. Amazing. That is the biggest problem with healthcare, period, And nobody is talking about it.
it's Obama who compared it to Amazon.com, Kayak.com and the Iphone
Last edited by cheguevara; 10-23-2013 at 03:55 AM.
Bottom line is they have had three years to get ready for this and have failed miserably.
Funny, IMHO even their basic premise of using a website as the only portal of entry is flawed.
One of my customers recently mandated that all people that worked there had to go through security background checks. They chose a third party internet based vendor to do the background checks. Because of privacy issues they have to communicate directly with my employees. The problem? Literally 50% of my technicians not only weren't computer literate, they didn't even have e-mail accounts. These are smart guys making 50K+ a year...I had to make dummy email accounts for them to get them signed up. How are people like this going to navigate a buggy, bersome ACA website?
"using a website as the only portal of entry is flawed."
for the computer illiterate/unconnected or frustrated/desperate, there are alternate paths of telephone to govt/exchange people or you can shop directly online or by phone at the insurers.
The states that run their own exchanges are doing pretty damn well, as are the GOVERNMENT Medicaid-expansion signups.
healthcare.gov was partly, perhaps mainly, sabotaged by the Repug states refusing to run set up their own exchanges, dumping Ms of people onto healthcare.gov. (I'm not excusing healthcare.gov) Of course, VRWC JINO SCOTUS enabled that disaster by letting the states opt out.
None of you Repugs ed about the huge startup problems of the Repug-corporate-welfare programs of Medicare Advantage and Medicare Part D (doughnut hole!).
That's because you don't get fined for not signing up for those on a website that doesn't work
I didn't know webmasters we're the ones handling all of this healthcare stuff wow! I thought they just build websites. Do they have seats?So we're just automatically going to trust the same people who can't come out with a simple website that allows people to log in, displays the proper data, has a working calculator, and records users' information correctly to handle the rest of this healthcare program? The same people who have kept other simple tasks like paying taxes or doing basically anything at the DMV as archaic and inefficient as possible?
Not to mention, step 1 was having a proper website in place - if they're going to fine people for not having government healthcare, the least they could do is get step 1 right first....
But that makes no sense. A lot of people aren't going to want to sign up/pay for healthcare. Guess what? When they get seriously injured or incredibly sick, and can't afford to pay for it, and go to the ER, YOU STILL GET STUCK WITH THE BILL.
What is so damn hard to understand about that? Every other technologically advanced country in the WORLD has figured this out, and they have lower health care costs than we do.
Educate yourself.
Accidents shouldn't require me to purchase healthcare as the govt sees fit. You wanna stop waste and burdens, stop the wars and invading countries and throw that money toward healthcare. Many countries have figured that out.
Educate yourself, tbh.
EMTALA's effect
Improved health services for uninsured
The most significant effect is that, regardless of insurance status, participating hospitals cannot deny urgent medical assistance. Currently EMTALA only requires that hospitals stabilize the emergency. According to some analyses of the U.S. health care safety net, EMTALA is an incomplete and strained program.[10][11]
Cost pressures on hospitals
According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, 55% of U.S. emergency care now goes uncompensated.[12] When medical bills go unpaid, health care providers must either shift the costs onto those who can pay or go uncompensated. In the first decade of EMTALA, such cost-shifting amounted to a hidden tax levied by providers.[13] For example, it has been estimated that this cost shifting amounted to $455 per individual or $1,186 per family in California each year.[13]
However, because of the recent influence of managed care and other cost control initiatives by insurance companies, hospitals are less able to shift costs, and end up writing off more in uncompensated care. The amount of uncompensated care delivered by nonfederal community hospitals grew from $6.1 billion in 1983 to $40.7 billion in 2004, according to a 2004 report from the
Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured,[12] but it is unclear what percentage of this was emergency care and therefore attributable to EMTALA.
Financial pressures on hospitals in the 20 years since EMTALA's passage have caused them to consolidate and close facilities, contributing to emergency room overcrowding.[citation needed]
According to the Ins ute of Medicine, between 1993 and 2003, emergency room visits in the U.S. grew by 26 percent, while in the same period, the number of emergency departments declined by 425.[14] Ambulances are frequently diverted from overcrowded emergency departments to other hospitals that may be farther away. In 2003, ambulances were diverted over a half a million times, not necessarily due to patients' inability to pay.[14]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergen...tive_Labor_Act
=====================
old, but without doubt much yearly and by now:
The Uninsured: Access to Medical Care
Q. Who are America's uninsured?
A. Nearly 46 million Americans are uninsured in the United States. More than 8.3 million of the uninsured are children. More than 8 out of 10 uninsured persons are in working families that cannot afford health insurance, and most are not eligible for public programs.
- 83 percent of the uninsured are in working families
- 62.1 percent live in households with a full-time worker and 21.3 percent with a part-time worker
- 17.8 percent of non-elderly Americans are uninsured
- 21.2 percent of African-Americans are uninsured
- 34.3 percent of Hispanics are uninsured
Q. What are the costs of providing health care to the uninsured?
A.A. Hospitals and physicians shoulder the financial burden for the uninsured by incurring billions of dollars in bad debt or "uncompensated care" each year. Fifty-five percent of emergency care goes uncompensated, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services The amount of uncompensated care delivered by nonfederal community hospitals grew from 6.1 billion in 1983 to 40.7 billion in 2004, according to a 2004 report from the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured.
In the past, hospitals shifted uncompensated care costs to insured patients to make up the difference. However, cost shifting no longer is a viable option because managed care and other health plans have ins uted strict price controls, leaving little margin to shift costs. More than one-third of emergency physicians lose an average of $138,300 each year from EMTALA-related bad debt, according to a May 2003 American Medical Association study. Emergency physicians and other specialists combined lost $4.2 billion in revenue in 2001 providing care mandated by EMTALA.
With projections that health care costs will double and the number of uninsured will increase to 53 million by the year 2007, the nation is faced with how it will continue to provide care for all Americans, not just the disadvantaged. Emergency departments provide an essential community service, similar to fire departments, police departments, and public utilities. The nation cannot afford to allow the emergency care system to collapse because of a lack of funding. It is too high a price to pay in terms of public health effects and human suffering.
http://web.archive.org/web/20090116041157/http://www.acep.org/patients.aspx?id=25932
Relevance?
Those problems won't ever get fixed in this country. Americans are too stupid. There are too many knuckle-draggers that start screaming "socialism" and "death panels" when real healthcare debate happens.
good point. Many countries in the world provide full coverage for accidents to EVERYONE including visi'tors. The US health system is so ed up, they can't even afford to do that. I still hope they can somehow fix Obamacare and have it functioning to help people but I have my doubts and would not bet $5 on it.
this is bull . The whole idea of the "healthcare marketplace" was for individuals to shop/compare/browse for their best priced health plan. How in the world can that be possible over the phone? There would have to be some kind of army "health insurance agents" created that would answer the phones and do this for you. As far as I know, no such individuals exist. Even if these "health care agents" existed, THEY STILL NEED A FUNCTIONING WEBSITE OR SYSTEM TO LOOK FOR PLANS AND SIGN THEIR CUSTOMERS TO THEM!
as someone else said, they made this "online marketplace" one of the cornerstones of Obamacare. Once they did this, a failure on that, and the entire system is failed. I still hope somehow they can fix it.
You completely miss the point. Not shocking.
First of all, of course our military spending needs to come down. That goes without saying. But why do you think just throwing MORE money at a broken system will help ANYTHING? We already spend more than any other nation on healthcare, and the US CLEARLY gets less out of the money we spend. So what, exactly, would throwing another trillion dollars at the problem change? Serious question, and I'd like you to answer it.You wanna stop waste and burdens, stop the wars and invading countries and throw that money toward healthcare. Many countries have figured that out.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions