Posted on 04/30/2009 7:07:18 AM PDT by wingsof liberty
Ironically, we will also see a huge growth in overseas care. Massive, gleeming medical facilities are already all over Asia. Just about anything over $10K in the US, and you save money, even flying two people over with pre and post care hotel stays at 4 star properties, all transport, etc.
Americans are on the road to serfdom, and are choosing it for themselves and their children.
I live in MD, near Baltimore, the center of the medical universe. We have the best here. But we have the worst politicians, of course - bunch of liberal commies who pay lip service to the great medical care. Then call them greedy money-grubbing bastards to the nation.
They’re like yours - useless pustules. I’m in liberal-land of the affluent kind, so I too am stuck with all liberals; not 1 conservative represents me.
Our problem is our family is well-off, so we are not sympathetic for any “stories”. But my point would be with these communist measures, a) we’ll all be poor and b) our medical resources will be poor - in finance and in quality. It won’t matter if you’re rich because you’ll have no choice but garbage.
This is key, why would we want to go where it was tried and FAILED. If people can be education to see that, there is hope.
That is the REAL scary thing. I saw on another post the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Obama wants Universal Healthcare, Socialism, a pre-9/11 mindset, the policies of the Carter administration, etc. all of which have and will fail. By this definition The One has lost his marbles.
I’m also a legal immigrant from Canada and I have experienced the health care system in Canada if you want to call it that. At the present time a person in Ontario has an average wait time of 73 days before they can begin to start chemo. I had a precancerous condition diagnosed in Sept of 1987 and was finally treated in Nov of 1989. I arrived in the U.S. in July of 2002 and was just recently diagnosed with invasive breast cancer. When I went in for the consult appointments my mouth dropped as I watched arrangements being made for surgery etc, after having dealt with the “system” for so many years in Canada and I was scheduled for surgery on April 14th. The bubble burst for me on April 18th when I was contacted by an extremely rude bureaucrat in Boise advising me that I was being denied access to medicaid (my husband is a senior who will be 75 in June). Needless to say the April 14th surgery was cancelled and we have been in a fight with Health and Welfare bureaucrats since then trying to find a doctor who will operate along the lines of Jr’s HOPE. The bureaucrats have proposed that I find a surgeon who will operate in the HOPE that when I submit the paperwork after the fact that it will be accepted (it may not be) and he will be paid, BUT only the surgery may be covered, no follow up treatment would be offered. At this point in time I am beginning to think I am actually back in Canada experiencing the universial system they have there instead of the excellent system I know the U.S. does have. Many people in the U.S. are also under the mistaken impression that health care in Canada is free when in actuality it isn’t. Canadians pay amongst the highest taxes in the world for their wait times for medical treatment and they also pay more for medical premiums on a sliding scale according to their income, the more they earn the more they pay for their health premiums but it doesn’t earn them any less of a wait when they need to see a doctor or specialist. Where I used to live there was actually a sign posted under the sign in window saying “If you have not been called within 20 minutes, please see the check-in clerk again”, it wasn’t unusual to go see that clerk five times before being taken back to one of the exam rooms before sitting in one of those rooms for at least an hour!Welcome to universial health care and be afraid, be very afraid!
You can buy all the cigarettes you want on an Indian reservation — it’s bringing them back to non-Indian land that triggers a problem. No way to tax people for bringing themselves back from an Indian reservation (you could have been doing anything there, and the casino operators and their federal and state government cronies wouldn’t tolerate it).
Plus if some Indian tribe started this project in earnest, and the feds or states tried to intervene, the Indians could have a field day playing the race card. They’d be howling about how the evil white man only lets the Indians do things like casinos and tobacco sales, that are harmful to Indian society, but won’t them go into to beneficial industries. And the loony leftists who populate our universities would be severely disoriented, when their dream of forcing everyone into a one-size-fits-all single-payer national health care plan clashes with their conviction that poor, dark-skinned people can do no wrong and are constantly being oppressed by rich white people.
The reason such an underground network hasn’t already developed is that the minute somebody isn’t fully satisfied with the results they got, they hire a lawyer to file a malpractice suit, and the people who provided the care are destroyed by the legal system for practicing medicine without a license or for violating any of a zillion other regulatory requirements that have been forced on all medical care in this country.
You got a point there. That’s 50% of the problem
We have more money and more people than the USSR ever did.
And we’ll be even more bankrupt than they were at the end...
Very interesting idea about the Indian reservation.
Problem is that the government insurance plan will be able to beat any benefit from such an arrangement. Initially.
Once a tax-subsidized government plan has achieved critical mass, they will be able to tighten the screws. If we the people reject this stuff, we might stand a chance. But, everyone is selfish, so I don’t see it happening.
Here’s what I’m doing.
I’m a physician (interventional pain) and I’m alerting my patients of pending legislation. Specifically, I have been alerting my patients of an AP article indicating that doctors may be punished for ordering too many advanced inmaging tests (MRI scans?).
I also believe that even if we have Orwellian style coverage restrictions, a free market will emerge whereby patients can receive the care that they want. Let’s hope that the free market will not be a black market.
It’s possible as the heathcare rationing comes to light there will be a rush of Medicare and Medicaid patients to schedule their procedures before strict rationing come to pass. Hmm sound a little like stocking up on ammo.
That’s not a bad idea. Really practical, I don’t know, but worth thinking about.
If the facilities on the reservations catered to the wealthy, who simply won’t tolerate the third world care that is already the norm in many US hospitals, and will spread further under a nationalized health care system, the politicians would be hard pressed to move to shut them down, since most of their significant donors would have strong and very personal objections. And if the wealthy have to be allowed to have access, then what politician would dare try to implement obstacles that would block the unwealthy.
The reservation facilities would need to start by focusing on high ticket services to those who can afford to pay out of pocket even after they’ve been taxed to support a national health care system, and then quickly invest the profits to move down into lower ticket services that more people can afford, with an emphasis on services that the national system is delivering particularly slowly or poorly (big political donors first, then net taxpaying voters — keep it profitable by excluding all the non-paying illegal aliens, “frequent flyers”, gangbangers, etc, few of whom vote and virtually none of whom donate to poltical campaigns).
The goal would not be to eventually transfer most medical care to the reservations, but to set up some real competition that operates outside the suffocating legal and regulatory structure that plagues even our current health care system. That would produce political pressure to start removing the suffocating net from facilities and providers outside the reservations.
Obama owns the courts, too. Before too long, he will have at least one, probably two, appointments to the Supreme Court.
We went over all this ad nauseum before the election, yet there were still people who said they didn’t care, they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for McCain as a way to try to stop the Rats from getting power in the WH, Congress and the courts.
My point exactly. Thank you.
And the larger the economy that is socialized, the worse the fallout from doing such an economically unnatural act.
Oops, #75 was meant for GovernmentShrinker!
Yep.
I am have been speaking to one of my gnomes...
They tell me the backlash to the Obaminator has begun. The numbers are being rolled out (in terms of a flat fee) to what the Feds will pay/services under their Socialized Medicine Scheme. Specialist that are charging 3X this for their highly needed (and highly specialized) services that voted for the Bamster are not starting to wake up. Sort of; I went to school to work for this with Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars of Student Loans to pay? I won't say the number, but they would do better as a plumber.....
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