Posted on 03/17/2014 4:56:50 AM PDT by Kaslin
Republicans have voted more than 50 times to repeal or alter Obamacare as the popularity of the legislation continues to be nearly non-existent. In the process, Republicans have been criticized for failing to present an alternative piece of legislation to replace Obamacare. More than a dozen alternative plans have been crafted on the Hill, but Republicans haven't been able to rally around a single plan. Now, that's changing as Republican prepare to present Americans with an official alternative to the Affordable Care Act:
The plan includes an expansion of high-risk insurance pools, promotion of health savings accounts and inducements for small businesses to purchase coverage together. The tenets of the plan — which could expand to include the ability to buy insurance across state lines, guaranteed renewability of policies and changes to medical-malpractice regulations — are ideas that various conservatives have for a long time backed as part of broader bills.
But this is the first time this year that House leaders will put their full force behind a single set of principles from those bills and present it as their vision. This month, House leaders will begin to share a memo with lawmakers outlining the plan, called “A Stronger Health Care System: The GOP Plan for Freedom, Flexibility, & Peace of Mind,” with suggestions on how Republicans should talk about it to their constituents.
The timing for this legislation is great for Republicans who just came off of a special election win in Florida where Democrat Alex Sink lost by running on a fix, don't repeal platform. Not only can Republicans running for election in the fall run against Obamacare, a law that will only continue to make the lives of Americans worse and more expensive, they can run on a new alternative.
No.
No.
No.
Repeal it.
Period.
Sounds good. Another thing they should be considering is offering a solution to help those people who have already suffered the terrible consequences of “Obamacare” in the form of lost insurance, lost benefits, etc. It will take a while for the reforms they are suggesting to enter into effect, and in the meantime, there are people who need to have this thing fixed right away.
I wonder if it would be possible to repeal it and restore the policies that people had had the year prior to Barry’s destruction of the US medical system. I suspect this would probably require some kind of payment to the insurance companies, unfortunately, but it might be necessary just to give the system a stable jumping-off point for the changes the GOP is suggesting.
Yes, the alternative to zer0 care is LET THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MODEL TAKE CARE OF IT.
“The Business of America is Business”
Calvin Coolidge
They want to repeal it. But what’s going to happen then?
The old system, in both what was good and what was bad about it, no longer exists.
So what now? Just tell the people who have been devastated by Obamacare that it’s their tough luck?
And make mandates of any kind illegal.
Here’s my solution. Make it voluntary. Sounds too simple doesn’t it.
Electing Liberals (from either party) has consequences.
Some of those are devastating.
The longer we wait the more painful the recovery will be.
(We could always try blaming the people who did this for a change.)
It should have been voluntary from the beginning and never shoved down our throats
Return to the days when I was growing up when there was no such thing as health insurance.
Medical care was reasonable and good.
Pay your own way in this world or croak!
The country does need medical reform, but not Obungacare.
The size of obungacare indicates to me that it is about power and not about health care. Likewise Mark Steyn notes that the job of director or head of public health has become the biggest govt. job in European countries which have public health care i.e. it would be a step upwards from PM or President or King or Grand Duke or anything else to head of health care. In other words, European health care is ultimate bureaucracy. If I had the power to I would institute a sort of a basic health care reform which would be overwhelmingly simple and which would resemble the thing we're reading about in no way, shape, or manner. Key points would be:
1. Elimination of lawsuits against doctors and other medical providers. There would be a general fund to compensate victims of malpractice for actual damage and a non-inbred system for weeding out those guilty of malpractice. The non-inbred system would be a tribunal composed not just of oher doctors, but of plumbers, electricians, engineers, and everybody else as well.
2. Elimination of the artificial exclusivity of the medical system. In other words our medical schools could easily produce two or three times the number of doctors they do with no noticeable drop off in quality.
3. Elimination of the factors which drive the cost of medicines towards unaffordability. That would include both lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies and government agencies which force costs into the billions to develop any new drug. There should be no suing a pharmaceutical for any drug which has passed FDA approval and somewhere between thalidamide and what we have now, there should be a happy medium.
4. Elimination of the outmoded WW-II notion of triage in favor of a system which took some rational account of who pays for the system and who doesn't. The horror stories I keep reading about the middle-class guy with an injured child having to fill out forms for three hours while an endless procession of illegal immigrants just walks in and are seen, would end, as would any possibility of that child waiting three hours for treatment while people were being seen for heroin overdoses or other lifestyle issues.
All of those things would fall under the heading of what TR called "trust busting". There would also be some system for caring the truly indigent, but the need and cost would be far less than at present.
By far the biggest item is that first one. I don't know the exact numbers but if you add every cost involved in our present out-of-control lawyering, it has to be a major fraction if not more than half of our medical costs. The trial lawyers' guild being one of the two major pillars of financial support for the democrat party is the basic reason nobody is saying anything about that part of the problem.
Other than that, you almost have to have seen some of the problems close up to have any sort of a feel for them.
Item 2, this is what I saw in grad school some time ago, although I do not have any reason to think much has changed. In the school I attended, there appeared to be sixty or seventy first year med students walking around and all but one or two of them would have made perfectly good doctors, they were all very bright and highly motivated. The only way the school should have lost any of those kids was either they discovered they couldn't deal with the sight of blood in real life or six months later they changed their minds and went off to Hollywood to become actors or actresses; the school should never have lost more than ten percent of them. But they knew from day one that they were keeping 35% of that class.
That system says that you know several things about the guy working on your body: You know he's a survivor, and that's highly unlikely to be from being better qualified than 65% of the other students; You know he hasn't had enough sleep (he's doing his work and the work of that missing 65%); You know he's probably doing some sort of drugs to deal with the lack of sleep... One of my first steps as "health Tsar" or whatever would be to tell the medical schools that henceforth if they ever drop more than15% of an incoming class, they'll lose their accreditation.
Item 3. My father walks into a pharmacy in Switzerland with a bottle of pills he normally pays $50 for in Fla. and asks the pharmacist if he can fill it. "Why certainly sir!", fills the bottle of pills and says "That will be $3.50." Seeing that my father was standing there in a state of shock, the man says "Gee, I'm sorry, Mr. V., you see, we have socialized medicine in Switzerland and if you were a Swiss citizen and paid into the systemn, why I could sell you this bottle of pills for $1.50 but, since you're foreign and do not pay into the system I have to charge you the full price, certainly you can appreciate that."
The guy thought my father was in shock because he was charging him too MUCH... Clearly whatever needs to be done with drugs amounts to trust busting, and not extracting more money from the American people.
Item 4. A caller to the Chris Plant show (D.C./WMAL) the other morning, an ER nurse, noted that much of the costs which her hospital had to absorb, as do most hospitals, was the problem of people with no resources using the ER as their first and only point of contact to the medical profession. She said that there were gang members who were constantly coming in for repairs from bullet holes and knife damage and drug problems, that they could not legally turn any of those people away, and that there was zero possibility of ever collecting any money from any of them, and that the costs of that were gigantic.
Clearly throwing money at that problems is not going to help anything either. Again if I'm the "Medicine Tsar", those guys would be cared for, but not at the ER or at least not the part of the ER where normal people go, and they would not be first in line. Mostly they'd be dealing with medical students who needed the practice patching up knife and bullet damage.
Their version raises my taxes so no thank you.
As they found out in the randomized study in Oregon. Obamacare caused a 40% increase in ER visits.
There are problems in life which are actually made worwe by throwing money at them...
Republicans have voted more than 50 times to repeal or alter Obamacare as the popularity of the legislation continues to be nearly non-existent.
The reason why it has not been repealed is because it is held in the Senate by Harry Reid and the other rats. So stop complaining that the Republicans are not doing anything. Instead make sure that we will take the Senate back and increase our seats in November. If you don't care then I know where you stand
You would be wrong in that. We have a $2.2 trillion health care industry in this country. And on an average year malpractice costs nationwide run about $7 billion, or one third of one percent. Something like half the states in the country enacted tort reform that caps malpractice awards, and there is zero evidence that it has led to lower healthcare rates in any of them.
The Healthcare system we had before Barry and his socialist gang forced 0bamascare on us worked pretty well. Why can’t we repeal 0bamacare, impeach and incarcerate Barry and his traitors, and go back to what we had?
The power of a de facto repeal has always been within the ability of the Republican controlled House. All they had to do was to not fund it.
The rest of your comment is not germane to anything I said here.
The costs of lawyering have to include the massive insurance policies which doctors have to have, and needless CYA tests which are now being required prior to operations, and numerous similar things. It’s very hard to get an absolute handle on.
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