What is the best way to fix once-and-for-all our national health care system?

And that is the darned problem.

Healthcare should never have been about "profit".

Healthcare shouldn't BE a "business". It should be a service, like the MILITARY. Socialist, yes... but in a good/proper way.

The GREED in this nation over healthcare (profits), is inspiring sickness and death.

 

The "greed" for providing a service to you, i.e. "health insurance" is about 3.7%. Get rid of the insurance companies and you have two things left, pay for your own services or have government run health care insurance with all of it's bureaucratic inefficiency and no incentive for efficiency, which costs, and have some faceless bureaucrat decide what is good for you.

We all know that most of you think that health care should be free and wouldn't think of paying for it yourselves or be responsible for yourselves, but nothing is free. You either pay for it yourself, or pay a company to handle it, like Obamacare wants to, or you create even more government to do something less efficiently and with less care for customer service than any business ever would.

 

Regardless... that present commercial system we use, is NOT better than what is in more socialized nations. We need what Canada and much of Europe now has. That time has come.

No, not "free"... SOCIALIZED. That is, every darned person that can PAY something, gets into the pool... so that it is stable and robust enough to provide the widest and most consistent coverage.

As things are now (and I have some of the best healthcare insurance)... my doctors don't even get paid in a uniform fashion by those companies. The complexities of dealing with insurance companies, illustrates how convoluted and inefficient the money I'm spending on it really is.

You are assuming what is not true. Come on... stop blaming individuals here, and see the freaking problem. Healthcare FOR PROFIT, is a HORRIBLE MODEL.

When people get sick enough (which millions do), they need help. That is obvious and VERY true; I do not need to prove that further in this thread. Most people who are sick/dying... are only going to "die"... not pay. That is reality.

The Affordable Healthcare Act was only a stepping stone to what we actually need, as far as I'm concerned. Considering what President Obama and the Democrats faced in Congress... things turned out as well as they could have.

Single Payer, is what I will always advocate for.

Consider what other nations have... we should move away (somewhat) from the commercially dominated model (and soon).

You surely haven't proven that here. And considering what I've read and discussed with many from nations with overall BETTER healthcare than America... I'd say you're leaning toward being wrong. We'll see.

 

They simply don't beleive it. They really think the US Government is capable of building a health care apparatus that is more efficient and capable and will still offer the same unlimited care where you can go into a doctor and demand any kind of service you wish regardless of cost.

They think that a rationing panel would be more popular to the people than being rationed out of the market by worth to society as expressed through wage.

 

And considering the effects of our commercially based system over the years... people shouldn't simply "believe it".

Something is wrong with this system of healthcare. We know that. The specific fixes remain to be seen; but we know that more of the same, is NOT the answer.

 

Ah yes, the socialized system is so good that wait times are on the national agenda and the cost is the number one budget item anymore and of course, it worked so well for Natasha Richardson. After all, if government does not give you the money for equipment, you are just out of luck if ill.

 

In my opinion, we may be better off with a federal research hospital system with a campus in every State of the Union and the federal districts, with its own supercomputing array and dedicated fiber optic network; established to discover more perfect knowledge of forms of dis-ease, to lower those costs to the private sector.

 

I think a lot more thinking and planning will be done, before we reach the best solutions to our healthcare issues.

 

I will agree that an area that government could be involved in that would more fit federal duty is the creation of a system to share data for research, but we already have that, it is call the internet where anything like this can be done already and is.

 

Everybody drop their third party payer, and watch healthcare prices fall.

 

In my opinion, we could be solving several problems and eventually lowering our tax burden through more cost effective cures, with a federal research hospital system that could be more complimentary with any means tested welfare public policy scheme.

Adding more campuses for public education could be another benefit.

 

Yes, and innovation, not socialization. Socializing medicine does not reduce the actual cost of health care.

 

I will ask again....

Your child is extremely ill. On the verge of death. you take her to the hospital ER. The ER nurse says...

"Yes, we can treat her. That will be 3 million dollars. In advance."

That, is "supply and demand" and is what you are pushing.

If your house is burning do you want to negotiate the fee with the fire department? Paid in advance so they don't have to do billing.

Health care is a public service that must be provided by and paid for by the public through taxes.

 

Our Space Race was not achieved by the private sector on a for profit basis, but by central forms of planning and public sector intervention in private sector markets.

 

You have it exactly backwards.

RoBomNey Care is a thoroughly Republican plan that pushed by Republicans like Gingrich and implemented by a Republican named Romney.

Like the drive to privatize Social Security it has nothing to do with providing services and EVERYTHING to do with the financial services industry (insurance) getting their hands on billions in revenues they now do not control.

 

___Amen!!___

 

That is untrue.

Overhead and profit in the health insurance industry exceeds 20% across the industry. Not one cent of that goes toward patent care. Medicare overhead, on the other hand, is less than 4%.

Part of RoBomNey Care requires insurance companies to spend 80% of their revenues on actual health care. The companies faced with the prospect of either increasing services or lowering rates have decided try to get the rule exempted at the state level and, barring that, to lower rates rather than actually provide needed services.

http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2011/December/23/Texas-Insurers-Rebates.aspx?p=1

 

The reason medicare overhead is low is because they rely on the insurance industry to do most of the work.

Romneycare is a state run issue, not a federal issue. States should be free to run their own state. The federal government has no business in insurance and as a legality, cannot anyway unless they present it in court as a tax and spend issue as the legality of government run insurance was already determined illegal before social security was sold to the public as insurance but argued in court as a tax and spend issue.

 

It's a problem with the system. The people using the insurance are not buying it or paying the cost of using the most expensive versions of care, so they aren't even worried about how much the care costs. The people buying the insurance don't care about the health care part because they don't use it. If I wanted a system that would give the worst possible outcomes on all levels, that would be it.

Simple solution would be to get the employers out of the health care insurance system altogether and hopefully have private citizens buy their own insurance much like we do with home insurance or car insurance. That should stop most of the abuses on both sides because now the people using the insurance would be concerned about what the care will do to their rates, and they would demand more efficient care at lower costs rather than top-of-line care. The other thing that would happen is that people would not go to the doctor for minor issues that would most likely clear up on their own. It's a bigger problem in the cost of care esp. at the Primary Doctor level because as more people go to their doctor for ever more mild complaints, he has less time for serious issues, or must refer things that in the past would have never required a specialist to specialists simply because he doesn't have time to deal with it. (it's also why Dr.s can't spend more than 1/2 hour with a patient -- too many complaints, not enough hours in the day)

That's my solution.

 

OK. Let's implement it your way.

Group plans are cheaper because of two reasons. The insurer and spread risk and the group is responsible for selling and service.

Now let's say you're a 62 year old man with a history of high blood pressure and about 20 pounds overweight working at a company that employs about 1,000 people. We have two problems:

First on the risk side: statistically, you are a walking heart attack. I as an insurance company cannot charge enough to cover the risk of insuring you and you probably cannot pay the premiums.

Second on the management side: Everyone in a group plan gets the same coverage and is managed the same way. I reduce costs by streamlining management. With 1,000 individual policies with differing coverages I lose whatever efficiencies the group plans provided.

Necessarily, the average cost of the individual health care plans will increase.
Perhaps significantly since since younger workers with no dependents will often choose to do without insurance thus making the pool shallower, and sicker, and increasing risk to the insurer.

My employer pays about 75% of my health insurance. A benefit that is worth about $10 to me. I can see where the employer saves money by not paying for my benefit but where is the part that he passes that saving on to me so I can buy it on the "open market?"

So here's what we have under your plan.

My insurance will cost me more but cover less and I will have to pay all of the cost out of my current income.

AND

You will add millions to the group that does not now pay for insurance but still receives care at the ER.

I would look top negotiate health insurance as an employee benefit and my employer would look to get a better deal on that insurance by agreeing to buy group policies from the insurance companies.....

In other words, your plan would lead us right back to where we are today.

 

Elect government free from special interest which is:

 

When you hear the term "profit", just know that it is not about your own well-being. The profit motive sucks, because it caters to greed... and not actual service.

 

And it has been killed by those same interests and planning...

 

This is precious. No money changes hands for this? Anywhere?

 

Of course not, it's FREEEEEEEE!