Posted on 07/27/2009 10:03:42 PM PDT by JLS
Health care is a game-changer. The permanent game-changer. The pendulum will swing, and one day, despite their best efforts, the Republicans will return to power, and, in the right circumstances, the bailouts and cap-&-trade and Government Motors and much of the rest can be reversed. But the government annexation of health care will prove impossible to roll back. It alters the relationship between the citizen and the state and, once that transformation is effected, you can click your ruby slippers all you want but you’ll never get back to Kansas.
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
This man says more on 1 sentence than I can say in a chapter.
later
So I take it if I live in Kansas to begin with I won't be in Kansas when the Obomacare where will I be?
BTTT
A state controlled medical establishment can peddle all the BS they want but it doesn't matter anymore. We can discover quite readily when they are lieing to us and then seek satisfaction however we wish.
Obamacare will only work if the people are deprived of scientific knowledge and the internet.
Odds are good there'll be a rollback of the state controlled medical establishment in European countries.
(I fear Canadians are too stodgy to figure this out though).
Very interesting counter opinion, I wonder what Steyn would say to that? I cetainly don’t speak for him, but he might say that a generation down the road the people will just be accepting that government should decide when they are worthy of treatment?
Steyn’s been reading my posts, methinks.
Or, great minds think alike.
I’d say more, but modesty prevents me.
;)
(I’m just kidding, relax.)
If this passes, I can’t wait until they try to give my mother “end of life counseling”. She will tear them a new one. I will be on standby.
I had the exact same thought about my mom!
I work for the state, my health insurance costs me almost 600.00 a month. I have a 3,000 medical deductable on top of that. My share of a Cat scan is 500.00.
Recently I was diagnosed with Behcet’s a rare auto-ammune disease. I have a team of specialists that are supposedly working together to come up with a treatment plan.
When I discovered that they were all running the same blood work because one had not forwarded it to the other, I decided to take an active role in providing each specialist with a copy of the test results.
Each time I go to one of them I ask them for the latest copy of any test results. These go into a binder, when I go to the next specialist and he orders blood work, I look through the results and inform them which ones have already been done.
Two of the specialists are part owners of the big medical building which have their own laboratory. Now I do know that repeating tests maybe necessary, but at least I have called their attention to it and made them explain to me why they feel it should be repeated.
I think that if the specialists had to disclose to the patient the percentage of ownership they had in any equipment or laboratory and the patient was responsible for making sure the physician did not duplicate tests, or routinely order tests in which he is part owner of the equipment it might clean things up a bit.
1. Young healthy people with good jobs may only want to invest in catastrophic insurance. The kind that kicks in when they have a skiing accident. They could put their deductable into a medical savings plan and invest it in CDS.
2. Those with chronic illnesses should not assume that the healthy individuals should subsidize their care. You should have a cafeteria plan in which you choose the coverage and deductable based on need. Older people don’t need pregnancy coverage. Younger people don’t need home health care. Deductables should be required to be placed in medical savings plans.
3. Physicians should have to disclose any medication samples they have received money for using, ownership of equipment, surgery centers, laboratories to the patient so the patient can require them to use a facility in which they own no more than 10%.
.
4. Tort reform is a must and should accompany any health care reform. Why shouldn’t physicians require more tests than necessary if it means that it will keep their insurance low.
5. The insurance companies like car insurance companies should have a pool in which they have to insure high risk people with pre-existing illnesses without huge premiums.
6. The small business owners should not be forced to cancel group insurance when one of their workers makes the rates go sky high because a child is born prematurely or someone gets cancer.
7. Small business owners should be given payroll tax credits for insuring themselves and their employees. For far too long, we have assumed that the business owner is responsible for our healthcare. This started when Jimmy Carter put price and wage freezes on. The only way the employer had of giving them a raise is to pay for their health insurance.
8. The premiums for health insurance for those workers that the small business owner has had to lay off should continue to go into the unemployment insurance fund and the worker should have the same deductable and monthly payment deducted from their unemployment. Again, the small business owner should be able to charge the worker monthly for this cost along with their insurance while they are employed.
9. Medicaid should not have better coverage than those working at low wages have. They have no deductable, 2.00 copay for medicine, and a 5.00 copay for the doctor. The parents should be covered with a catastrophic health care plan and the children should be given preventative care. Each time you make health care “free” it is abused. The working poor whose taxes go to pay for the medicaid, may have insurance but rarely use it because they can’t afford the deductables and the copays after they get through paying for those who aren’t working through higher taxes and for their own coverage.
10. Medical costs for those who choose not to have coverage should not be allowed to go into bankruptcy. The government might give them a loan, much like a student loan but they should be required to pay all of it off. They took the risk, they should not be rewarded.
A lot of Hollywood celebrities would be “allowed” to die under Obamacare.
http://spectator.org/blog/2009/07/28/who-will-tell-michael-j-fox-he
While it might take decades to undo Obamacare it can be stripped of a lot of its most odious provisions quite quickly. Start with repealing the provisions that create a national health care rationing authority.
Next, your thoughts.
US OUT OF MY UTERUS!
What explains the yawning chasm of these gaping six-month variations? Lack of funding? The United Kingdom spends three times as much money on “health” as Poland and their cancer survival rates are more or less identical. Okay, forget the cash and consider the treatment: Even within the United States, even within the Medicare system, there are regions that offer twice as much “health care” per patient – twice as many check-ups, pills, tests, operations – for no discernible variation in outcome. To one degree or another, any health care “system” is a giant placebo. Right now, in a fit of mass hypochondria, large numbers of Americans have convinced themselves that they – or, at any rate, their uninsured neighbors – urgently need the magic Euro-cure-all. If they get it, it will improve their health not a whit.
Great stuff from Stein in this much longer article. Definitely worthy of a read.
Why put the government in charge of that which ultimately isn't affected much by whomever is in charge, and why put it in charge of that which generations have proven more than capable of being in charge of.
But they still have to ration treatment. Patricia Hewitt, the former Health Secretary, says there’s nothing wrong with the state forbidding treatment on the basis of “lifestyle choices”. And apparently the “pro-choice” types who jump up and down in the street demanding that you keep your rosaries off their ovaries are entirely relaxed about the government getting its bureaucratics all over your lymphatics.
Even the Bhutanese yak farmer wants no part of socialized medicine.
Business shouldn't be paying for health insurance any more than it should pay for my car insurance. There is no reason for it other than a business owner believing it will attract better workers and help him keep those better workers.
The italicized line above suggests that a business owner has some kind of obligation to pay for a worker's health insurance. That simply isn't so. If the person is no longer working for them, then there is no longer any reason to extend any "benefits" to the worker.
Also, the "benefits" are extended to keep the productivity of good workers. It's not paid because they are really, really nice guys. Productivity enables a business to make more money. If the worker is no longer present for duty being productive, then they are no longer making that money for the business. If they're not making that money, then the business can't very well pay it.
This whole conversation is full of assumptions that somehow workers are entitled to health benefits from their employers. We'd be a lot better off if businesses had simply paid more salary and stayed out of the benefits business altogether.
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