Posted on 09/15/2009 11:16:47 PM PDT by SideoutFred
Worth watching
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
We need politician insurance.
I been saying this for a long time...
Any time you have someone else paying the bill for you, its gonna cost MORE!
Stossel did a good series some years ago opposing government-run healthcare. It was longer, but it made all the same points. I can’t wait for him to start with Fox.
thank you
Obama’s Hidden Agenda:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mi7CsxuOlGQ&feature=related
He puts together Obama’s hidden agenda extremely well.
Is he still employed by ABC?
Great - thanks.
My father was one of the smartest people I have ever known. First, I will relate that after watching Ronald Reagan give his speech after the TV program sponsored by GE, my Dad commented: “Why can’t somebody like that be President?” The year was 1959! I remember it well. It made a big impression on me.
After spending 10 years selling insurance and real estate, my father stated that the medical system was broken. He pointed out that a system where one party pays a second party to provide services to a third party does not have proper “feedback”. This observation was sometime in the late 1970’s.
Since I am heaping praise on my father for being prescient, I should also point out that one of his favorite desserts was homemade yogurt on top of fruit, like peaches. He developed a taste for this in 1960! If only we had made a business of it! :)
He’s a racist!!
Stossel did a good series some years ago opposing government-run healthcare. It was longer, but it made all the same points. I can’t wait for him to start with Fox.
***
Has he already signed ???
Nope...he’s with FNC now...thank goodness.
Everyone can thank Teddy Kennedy for HMOs, that replaced good, affordable insurance.
Just one more step in the direction he wanted to go...which is universal coverage.
Ditto. I have long felt we are over-insured. I’m not saying that is bad for those who are receiving that generous benefit. I’m saying, this makes the system unsustainable.
The less insurance, the more people control the costs of their procedures and medications. This contains costs. When insurance is paying, people don’t give a damn what the cost is.
We are over-insured, not under-insured. Catastrophic insurance is vitals so you are not bankrupted or have all of your equity depleted in one unfortunate stroke. But any system that claims to be able to provide you with anything for a measly $5 co-payment is doomed to fail.
We are over-insured, not under-insured.
Did your father have any ideas/theories about a medical insurance system with "proper feedback"?
This is something I have been saying all along. If a part of the market is artificially high, one must find out what is keeping it high and remove that thing, allowing the rules of supply and demand to resume.
I would submit that private insurance and gubmint insurance are the primary reasons why the health industry is so expensive (though other forces apply, law suits, over-regulation as examples)
WHY would one create a monopoly in favor of the very forces causing the high costs, and allow government to operate it?
I also resent doctor's offices booking up the schedule back to back starting at 8:00 a.m., full well knowing that doctor is NOT going to show up until at the earliest 9:00 a.m. Nothing like sitting in a doctor's office waiting room with 10 - 15 sick people exposing each other. There is really no way to budget for medical expenses other than the first purchase of some type of health insurance. Then one need be prepared to pay that deductible before the insurance starts to pay for any medical care. After that one can never leave the doctor's office knowing with any kind of surety of what exactly the amount is going to be owed after the insurance company does its review. And then it can be weeks before that bill shows up on the mail.
Priority number one every time I have gone to the doctor is not what my medical problem is, it is met with that first face demanding to know my economic status. And that is the last face I face when I leave the place.
I hold the government do gooders accountable for setting up their future lobbying groups to keep themselves on the take election after election for the state of health care becoming a long ever evolving system of socialistic medicine.
And government giving tax incentives for employers to provide health insurance to employees instead of employees purchasing their own is the source of much of this. It has disconnected many of the consumers of health care from the actual costs.
Something you are forgetting is that even with a “5 minute” visit there is much more time spent to document your case, process your insurance claim and the doctor has ongoing liability if you choose to sue him later. They can’t legally charge cash costumers less either thanks to government...
Lawyers demand detailed paper trails of everything. All that costs time and money. If something is missing, the doctor gets to pay dearly for it.
If you want to lower the cost of health care both government and lawyers need to be removed from the process. Bypassing insurance companies would further improve costs - and results.
Yes, I realize 'time' is required to document the visit. What I am hearing is the medical community is moving to 'software' products to chart medical history. And so it actually takes more time than before to chart because the physician is actually the one who has to enter the information.
The software and training, upkeep, and software updates, does not come cheap. I realize costs of doing business is factored in that $155.00 cost. But there are legions that are attached to the health care system that have nothing to do with what care I personally receive, mostly dictated by government as some level.
I thought I did say specifically that I ultimately hold government system creators accountable for the evolution of our health care system.
He’s moving to Fox
Be a capitalist pig:
(1) Get a different doctor.
(2) Negotiate the price.
(3) Start you own clinic, in many states you’ll have to partner up with State Certified Medical Providers, but that’s not a high barrier.
(3) Start you own insurance company
STOP WHINING!
When our measure of "affordability" is whether or not we got more than we paid for, of course the cost go up.
Ask yourself how you keep your auto insurance premiums low? Odds are, you take a high deductible, you don't make claims for routine maintenance or minor dings, and you only make bigger claims knowing that if you do, you're rates are likely to go up next year.
So, why are we surprised to see our health insurance premiums go up year-over-year when we expect unlimited office visits every time we get the sniffles?
We need to reconsider what insurance should be...protection in the event that we have chronic issues or catastrophic health problems. We ought to be paying out of pocket for routine visits and for maintenance care.
My wife had a gastric banding procedure that our health insurance did not cover. With a cash deal the cost was probably $5,000-$7,000 less than what would have been charged to our insurance company. We figured that our share of what we would have paid in deductables and co-insurance would almost have equaled the cost of paying for it ourselves.
WHINING? I have not objected to paying for my health care in a capitalist system. My objection, NOT whining is how much socialism has already crept into the SYSTEM!!! IF I got what I wanted for $155.00 for a 5 minute visit then I would be participating in a capitalist system.
You did say that. I just expanding on it...
The government wants electronic medical records so they are portable - and therefore easily available to government...
Paper records are for the most part out of their reach.
So while I’m all for modernizing, in this case I believe there’s a more sinister underlying reason for it...
Yes, he has signed a contract, according to this report:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,548989,00.html
Absolutely agree.
It looks like my grammar fell apart too...
Time to go to bed...
The cost of medical increased when Medicare was passed. We had private insurance and $7.00 a day hospital rooms before that.
Indeed, it is obscene. Once, one of my children fractured a bone, and a specialist looked at him for five minutes, said there was nothing that could be done, "just buy a sling and put his arm in it." His bill was $700. Insane.
When I was a young adult, I was uninsured from time to time, and once, after I was married, an insurance company wouldn't cover a preexisting condition (pregnancy). Here's what I found out during those periods without insurance:
#1 - Although some doctors will refuse to take you, others are willing and will charge a reasonable cost if you have no insurance.
#2 - Students at dental schools are always willing to practice on you. ;-)
#3 - When I was paying out of pocket, doctors wouldn't send me for lab tests I didn't need. Because I hated wasting my time with unnecessary tests and appointments, I told some doctors I had no insurance and paid out of pocket even after I became fully insured. The doctors would give me a deal. I never had to depend on gov't help. But, I applied for help for the pregnancy, thinking, "Well, I've been paying taxes, and I've never asked for anything before," but the gov't refused to help. A pro-life organization referred me to a low cost midwife program, and I saved $1,000 doing without anesthesia. I'm so glad the gov't refused because I continued to use midwives and do without anesthesia even when we were insured.
We've been fully insured for many years now. Once, when I brought one of my children to an eye doctor, as his secretary was completing my paperwork, the doctor quipped, "You know, the funny thing is, if you'd walked in here off the street without insurance, I would've charged you $15." It dawned on me later that he was hinting that he was willing to do without the insurance payment if it meant his secretary wouldn't be so inconvenienced. (I'm typing $15, but I remember him saying $5. My memory must be mistaken, though he only looked at my child for five minutes.)
Of course, there are times when insurance is necessary - emergencies, serious illnesses, etc. But, the fact that insurance is paying for every little doctor visit is what has driven the cost upward.
At the time he suggested that the only form of insurance should be catastrophic coverage. Without a change he believed that medical practices would be swamped.
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