Forgive me if I'm asking a stupid question or making a stupid comment, as I don't keep up on the day-to-day happenings re your healthcare bills.
Don't feel so bad, much of our country can't follow it let alone want to. Too much information is put out there to confuse and frustrate people so they can cave in and say 'what ever'
What I'm getting tho, is that many Americans are totally against having the type of healthcare we have over here, where everyone (except illegal aliens) is covered, for whatever reasons you have (thoughts of inferior healthcare, whatever)..
I think what scares a lot of people is the change to any system that we don't have control over which in our case we do. There is really nothing wrong with the government "helping" people out when they need it but it is the forcing us to make changes to something that works for the majority of the country in order to cover those who don't have health insurance.
At the same time, actually paying for healthcare services is way too expensive for normal people to afford if they actually get sick and need surgery / hospitalization, so they have to have an insurance plan to cover them for that possibility.
I don't agree with that, simply because I am one of the examples of being without money and having something major happen, not once but twice in my life. I been without insurance several times in my life and when these events happened, I didn't panic but decided to force the issue onto the doctors who then were willing to work with me, not against me.
Then there are lots of people who can't afford the insurance, so they have none. They skim by without paying for anything, until such time as they become sick and need surgery / hospitalization. No insurance, can't afford the costs they're incurring... so who pays those bills? Someone does. Is it the government?
First off this has always been the case, only in the last 15 years it has been a "national crisis". The cost of insurance has gone up too much not because of the insurance companies but because of things outside of their control. One is the mitigating factor involved with this is the punitive damages awards related to medical lawsuits, where in some states there are no limits at all. The other factor is the mandates from the state who actually regulate the insurance programs which should be uniformed.
You must remember that the government doesn't pay a dime in anything, they can't here because we are the government. For every dime spent in for an uninsured person, the cost to the tax payer is 60 cents so the one reason why we need to "insure" people is to bring down the mandated costs affiliated with court orders that everyone must get care.
If lots of people with no insurance are getting sick and costing mega bucks, wouldn't it make sense to mandate that you must have insurance? What is the alternative? To continue to pay the outrageous healthcare bills for people who refuse to carry insurance?
Yes that is a logical solution but then other factors come into play, like the need to limit within a budget the care a single person ro family gets. If there is mandated insurance, and the insurance company is not allowed to compete for subscribers, they have a limited amount of revenue that they have to spread thin which means that something has to give. If they are in a state that mandates tattoo removal which is generally $5000 a tat, and one of their subscribers has say 12 or 14 of them to remove, when they look at high cost medical procedures like bone marrow transplant, they may say "ok we got $70,000 going here for tats so we have to limit the medication to prevent rejection for the lukemia patent" and without telling anyone the doctor has to look at what they can now give and base his medical decisions on just the insurance company's inablity to pay. I know that a lot of people will say this happens but it happens in HMOs more than anywhere else.
As an outsider looking in, and admittedly not knowing all the details, it just seems to me that no matter what they try to do, they're wrong.
So..... what do you people who oppose 'free' healthcare for all legal residents, as well as opposing a mandated requirement to carry insurance, propose they do about this huge problem?
I would like to start with harmonizing the mandates through out the 50 states. Eliminate this idea that tattoo removals take place over other procedures.
The second thing I know would help is force the states to allow competition over state lines, they don't not because of anything medical but because it is a revenue maker.
The third thing is we need to start cutting back on medicaid and medicare with some of these frivilous things - viagra for medicare subscribers?
The fourth thing that can be done is simple tort reform coupled with a national doctor licensing system where one doctor can't take off to practice somewhere else. With that, we need to limit the amount of foreign doctors who don't go through our system.
The fifth thing is with medicare Part D tell the pharma compaines the same thing your country did - we will pay for X drug at this price - no negotiations and threaten them with pulling their patent on the drug.
Should the sick that can't afford either healthcare or insurance be denied medical help? Is that your answer?
Here in this country, unlike other countries anyone who shows up to a hospital must be taken care of. Many times the hospital will provide some sort of follow up care but there are a growing amount of doctors who provide free or near free services.
Remember they, our government who has yet to do anything right, wants to change an entire systtem that works and gives us cutting edge medical care to cover everyone at the cost of those who can afford health care - in other words we have 317 million people in this country, only 12 million have no health care and can't get proper care (it is no where near the 47 million they claim) and that works out to less than 5% of the people who actaully need health care. Instead of takign the stimulas money which has done nothing for us, we could have taken care of 24 million with it and had change left over.
