[starfish923]

Thanks for the information. I MISSED this but humbly apologize for my error...and to the Sacbee. Though they somehow missed telling the facts that even they would know. Oh well, I don't blame them for the chance at making Mayor Know-Nothing Newsome look stupid, again.

Every San Franciscan without health insurance could see a regular doctor, get prescription drugs and have advanced medical procedures under a skeleton plan unveiled by Mayor Gavin Newsom on Tuesday.
The universal health care access plan is not traditional health insurance, but would allow some 85,000 to 150,000 uninsured city residents to receive a defined set of routine health care benefits through an as-yet-undetermined fee paid for by the patient, employers and the city government.

The "universal" wouldn't be, of course, UNIVERSAL, since it wouldn't include me, or the OTHER 700,000 citizens who DO have health care.

It wouldn't be UNIVERSAL, either, for those who already have the UNIVERSAL health care that welfare provides: ALL medical (even infertility problems), ALL prescriptions, ALL psychiatric (and that's a biggie), ALL dental, ALL emergencies (done at very posh hospitals, in fact, not merely at the S. F. General Hospital, which, btw, leads the country in many aspects of health care...you guessed it, HIV/AIDS treatment) and ALL short-long-medium care problems.

The question is for our moron mayor -- Who needs universal health coverage besides the drunks and drug addicts who WON'T use the health coverage unless they PASS OUT on the street? His numbers are totally wrong. Even the nonprofits and homeless advocates cite smaller numbers. Wow, he's jackin' the stats. What a SHOCK.
Hmmmm.

But the Sacbee was correct, "universal" health coverage WAS proposed.
What a moron is our mayor. He KNOWS the facts, he's just jacking up the VOTER-stupids in the city who don't know the facts.

[edcoil]

"85,000 to 150,000" X $75 a patient per month.

Most gov numbers are rounded low, we know over time they tend to be only 10% of the actual costs.

Even with the numbers they at 150,000 x 75 = 11,250,000 x 12 months is over a Billion dollars a year so a small group on a cities budget.

[Arizona Carolyn]

If the people of SF are poor, homeless, etc., they already qualify for Medi-Cal. The elderly receive Medicare and if they are elderly and poor they are Medi-Medi's and they receive the Medicare Prescription Drug Plan free of charge if they make under $20K a year because Medi-Cal which used to cover prescriptions for the medi-medi's now picks up the deductible for the medi's...

It's the middle class that gets squeezed by rising cost of health care, but a lot of that is due to the high cost of insurance doctors have to deal with and the high number of illegals who run up the hospital costs causing hospitals to raise their fees to cover overhead.