With the BK judge ONLY?
Cheers!
Posted on 02/24/2009 12:28:43 PM PST by arichtaxpayer
NEW YORK (AP) — A bankruptcy judge says Delphi can stop paying for health care and insurance benefits for its retired salaried workers. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Drain on Tuesday provisionally approved the auto supplier's request to cut off the benefits effective April 1. But he says the 15,000 affected retirees can form a committee to investigate if they have the right to negotiate with the company. The committee will present its findings at a March 11 hearing. Troy, Mich.-based Delphi Corp. has been operating under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection since 2005. It says it needs to cut off the benefits as part of its restructuring. But attorneys for the retirees say the company is obligated to negotiate with the retirees before it cuts off their benefits. More than 1,600 retirees sent letters to the judge begging him to deny Delphi's motion.
(Excerpt) Read more at google.com ...
Right. Their moral obligation should have been to set up an outside fund. Although, the one silver lining is that more and more young people see through this and either are independent contractors with their own funds or don’t work for companies that make unfunded promises.
The politicians beds are well feathered.
Actually, the solution is to free the market for health care. Walmart tried to set up medical clinics to handle minor stuff and were blocked. Most states have laws about prescriptions from doctors outside the state. They also block doctors from foreign countries from practicing here. If they dropped the enforced slavery of doctors through emergency room laws, etc.
You’d see medical prices plummet. If they allowed nurses or even technicians to set up limited practices you’d still have a referral service to experts and doctors, but not the incredible expense for simple procedures.
Government has created the health care crisis.
That’s not going to help for chronic illnesses like kidney failure, or for major medical like breast, prostate, lung or other cancers. Or are you proposing that any “doctor” or nurse be able to hang up a shingle unregulated? Back-alley cheap dialysis parlors? $1500 “cancer surgeries” performed in motel rooms?
I thought that the argument was that the Marcus Welbys of the country were driven out of business by the high cost of medical malpractice insurance. Are you proposing that medical malpractice cases be forbidden? How “market-driven” and unregulated do you want medicine to be - unfettered and Ayn-Randian?
Thanks grellis.
Cletus: Stay on your feet, it's too early to be falling down (at least out here).
I don’t have a solution.
I have MS. If we didn’t have group, I’d probably get a private insurance policy to cover other things, but they sure wouldn’t cover anything to do with the MS.
How would that change my life? I wouldn’t take the “disease modifying med” I now take (too expensive), I’d refuse tests that are routine now but probably not affordable w/out insurance, however, I would continue to take the meds for symptom relief, I’d make a way to pay for those because they are what enhances my quality of life.
Here’s the problem with private insurance and a chronic illness...the insurance tries to blame everything on the chronic illness so they won’t have to cover the problem.
Everybody can feel safe saying people should “pay their own way”, as long as you are winning the health lottery. But we truly have little control over our own health when it comes to many diseases, so nobody should get too smug and believe “that won’t happen to me, I’ll never be in that situation.”
But I still believe you play the cards you’re dealt and if you can’t afford a treatment, well you can’t afford a treatment. If the means are there to finance it, fine, or if a drug company is willing to give you a break on a med, okay, other than that I have no answers.
Guess the jokes on them. I'm glad I didn't take that job oh them so many years ago.......
Medical boards keep bad doctors in place. My wife worked for one and she would bring home horror stories, but clearly medical malpractice lawsuits need to be better managed. “Loser pays” laws would alleviate a lot of that. If states with bad juries were to lose doctors and pay the price it would influence bad decisions.
Probably the best fix for poor jury pools would be to pay jurors their current wages. In Illinois you get $17.50 plus bus fare & day care. Unless you are unemployed or on welfare you lose money. This disincentive creates poor jury pools which lead to bad decisions.
I understand your concern about the free market. The media, government schools and most pundits (creatures of the previous two) point out only the flaws in the market, but rarely the negative effects of government policy.
Economy means household management. So when you fear the free market you are really saying you fear your own decision making abilities. Mavens, people who work hard to know a certain subject, generally correct for fraud/poor service/errors in the market place. This is proved and easier than ever with the Internet. Book, restaurant and seller reviews prove this. It would work the same with medical practitioners, no?
Imagine further what you describe as back alley cancer surgeries or “unregulated” medicine. Would you use those? Few people ever know where their doctor graduated from or how he did relative to his peers. They don't investigate their doctors background at all. When was the last time you asked for your doctor to produce his license?
The difference would be choice. Consumer choice is the best cure for bad practices and high prices. It has also been shown that as the simpler issues in services/products have their prices reduced - in this example say getting your flu diagnosed at Walmart as opposed to making a Drs. appt. or being able to make your own prescription and freely buy and sell prescription medicine - you would lower your cost of services. This translates to lower product/service costs across all medical procedures.
Eliminating regulation means trusting people. It mostly works and when it doesn't you have the courts and public opinion as your redress.
As you can see in the current economic downturn, regulation did not prevent fraud or bad business practices. Your belief in regulation as a protection likely hurts you more than you realize.
Delphi screwed the workers in my area big time a few years ago. Went bankrupt, dumped pensions on the taxpayers, and split millions among those who penned the deal.
Another chink in the middle class warfare. Take away all
supports and people will have to make some serious choices.
Survival of the fittest in the devolving society.
ESCQLJ
As the waters rise, Government Island looks better and better. Build enough fear and the people will swallow anything.
They’ve got the whole economy held hostage. We are tax slaves already. Their policies directly resulted in our current crisis.
Health will be the last stretch of our Republic into their hands.
They’ve got our property and now they want our bodies.
Delphi to Slash 775 Jobs at Steering Parts Plant [Michigan]
(Obama’s Fault)
Bloomberg via The New York Times | February 17, 2009
Posted on 02/17/2009 7:11:33 AM PST by an amused spectator
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2187446/posts
With the BK judge ONLY?
Cheers!
i guess i indirectly contributed quite as bit to it then in the 80's and happily so as the company i worked for bought DYS-50's by the dozen hooked to everything from PDP-11/70's to Mini-VAX's to VAX-Clusters.
“What is the Conservative solution to this situation? I gather from discussion in other thread’s it’s to accept that no one else should have to pay for your misfortunes, and that the American system is the best in the world. So is the solution for all the sick Americans who can’t pay for their treatment to die?”
Well, that is indeed the “worst-case scenario”. And yes, I think some Conservatives would say just die. Can’t pay, just die. What gets us a bad reputation. This is also what is going to allow a nationalized health care plan to get passed, with the backing of most Americans. I think what Conservatives forget is that healthcare is not just another commodity, like a new car, or a bag of groceries. No, it involves human beings that are mortal, and anyone, when presented with a chronic illness, or an accident, or any other dread disease wants to live and not be considered just another object to be purchased or sold or be left to die if you don’t have the moolah.
I’ll give an example. A relative of mine and his wife had a restaurant that went bankrupt. They worked hard to start up a new restaurant that has recently opened and is doing quite well. But now the economy is tanking, so they count every shekel, as what little they had left went towards the start-up costs of their new restaurant (a much better location). They didn’t have the money for health insurance right away and just today he had a mild heart attack. Now they will be back in the hole due to the hospital expenses and stent surgery, and all their hard work will have been for nought. They will owe their soul (or his heart in this case) to the company store (the hospital).
Plus, the odds are he will now not be able to get private health insurance because of his new preexisting condition. Hope they can work something out, a payment plan, with the hospital. Even though these are two Republicans, they will now be more than supportive of Obama’s national healthcare plans, as he is about 9 years away from Medicare, with no good insurance options and his wife has no insurance either. So here is an example of a business owner, not a union or gov’t employee, who is in trouble, like many other small business owners. P.S., they looked for cheaper health insurance and there isn’t any. It would have cost them $500 plus per month, and that was for only one of them (due to their age primarily, he is in his later 50’s, she in her early 60’s).
There are lots of people out there, many being retirees on fixed incomes, for whom sky high healthcare costs are beyond their means or wiping them out, and not all are some kind of deadbeats or ner-do-wells. Many have lost jobs, been laid off, have had their pension or retirement funds decimated via the rotten stock market situation, or have run into a catastrophic illness or accident. They aren’t going to understand people who say they don’t have the right to live or be healed because they don’t have the dollars for whatever reason.
Many conservatives have not wanted to deal with healthcare while the costs of it have spiraled out of control for years now. We will pay the price for not having a well thought out plan to deal with it, and that price will now be Obama’s federalized healthcare plan getting passed, whatever it turns out to be. so we lost the issue by having no plan. You can’t dink with people’s very life by not covering them in some fashion. No one wants to die or be in a state of chronic sickness with no option for care. Too bad conservatives couldn’t have come up with a plan to stay in the healthcare game instead of totally losing the issue to the Dems.
Your screen name invokes images of Barack 0bama showing up at your door step, grabbing you by the ankles, and shaking you upside down to get every last dime out of your pockets. Then going to your sofa and searching under the cushions. Sort of like screaming “I’m a target”. I’m not being mean, just making an observation.
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