Thread: Obama outlines health care plan for all

Originally Posted by anothersta

And lucky for me, my veterinarian has agreed to be my primary care physician if the universal health care goes through, so I'LL still have good healthcare.

rolling

Originally Posted by anothersta

You think being septic DOESN'T require hospital care??

I'd put my dog in the hospital for that. YOU could've told the doc the tests have already been done if you didn't want them done again.

I've worked in the medical field, I KNOW medical equipment and how operator technique is everything.

Retesting is a safety issue and a 'making sure the last test was correct' issue. Everything doesn't necessarily show up on the FIRST test and sometimes the SECOND. DH had to have THREE Lyme disease tests before it started showing up.

My shepherd had 2 blood tests for his kidneys when he was younger to verify the first one was correct. Many of the dogs have multiple mange scrapes when they first get here to verify boo boos aren't mange.

And lucky for me, my veterinarian has agreed to be my primary care physician if the universal health care goes through, so I'LL still have good healthcare.

Not always does being septic require hospitalization. BUT the point being, if they would pay attention to their patients, be "involved" then they would be able to find what causes certain issues, time and time and time again. Retesting is great if searching for a problem, retesting because they "can" is the problem. I too have worked in the medical field and I see the waste and over charging etc.

I wonder if additional testing would also include no second opinions allowed. Took grandson to 3 docs before one finally said "Hey! I think your kid is almost blind"

retesting because they "can" is the problem. I too have worked in the medical field and I see the waste and over charging etc.

If YOU see that happening, you should be reporting it. If you aren't, well, you have no one to thank but yourself. If I ever saw a doc doing something I thought was unethical, I told anyone who would listen.

Sitting by the sidelines seeing it happen doesn't help anyone.

Elimination of 4th Amendment Protections Part of Health Bill
Dan Collins

That’s part of the cost of “high-quality, affordable health care”.

And it’s so large that Patients United Now had to split it into nine different parts http://patientsunitednow.com/?q=node/233 and to put out a bleg for an Army of Patients to scour the bill. The title:Quality Affordable Health Care for All Americans. And the first thing past the title?

[Note: Further revisions are needed to complete the work of integrating provisions into the existing HIPAA structure.]

Maybe they should have finished doing the actual work on the bill before introducing it. I haven’t had a chance to look at the rest of it, but I’m certain we have plenty of Hot Air readers willing to take caffeine intravenously and put off seeing Star Trek for the 5th time to dig through the bill and find the land mines. Drop me a line or post a comment with the most troubling references, and we’ll update the post as we go. In the meantime, watch PUN communications director Amy Menefee discuss the dangers of government-run, single-payer health insurance:

video at http://hotair.com/archives/2009/06/0...ally-released/

It’s worth noting that HIPAA ensures patient privacy, which should be a really big deal if we’re letting the government run everything. Without knowing how or whether this works with HIPAA, how can Congress even consider this bill? Speaking of which, on pages 39-40, take a gander at Section 3102, Financial Integrity:

(1) IN GENERAL - A State shall keep an accurate accounting of all activities, receipts, and expenditures of any Gateway operating in such State and annually submit to the Secretary a report concerning such accountings.

(2) INVESTIGATIONS - The Secretary may investigate the affairs of a Gateway, may examine the properties and records of a Gateway, and may require periodical reports in relation to activities undertaken by a Gateway. A Gateway shall fully cooperate in any investigation conducted under this paragraph.

“Gateway” means “provider,” and this appears to do away with that pesky Fourth Amendment, which normally requires search warrants and probable cause to access the records of individuals and businesses. Not under ObamaCare! Now, everyone belongs to the government … rather than the other way around. George Orwell, call your office!

Update III: Jazz Shaw mainly agrees, but sends a jab to my ribs:

A lot of these voices are the same folks that didn’t seem to think it was any big deal for the government to intercept electronic communications without a warrant, even if one of the participants was a U.S. citizen. They also didn’t care much if the Feds checked out what you were browsing on the computers at the local library or even the books you checked out. In fact, it almost seems as if there’s no problem with such activity so long as it’s a Republican president and he’s doing it in the vague and ambiguous name of the “war on terror.”

He finishes with a Victor Lazlo-esque “Welcome back to the fight” valediction, but in this case, we’re talking apples and oranges. First, even the NSA program required some sort of probable cause to surveil a communication line, and the FISA court did have some oversight eventually. I won’t dismiss this entirely, though, because it does touch on the same values, but I would also note that the NSA program was intended to catch terrorists, and not doctors who may or may not be billing the government correctly.




But don’t worry, I don’t think the NSA will be in charge of it. As long as the administration and the Congress are undertaking such sweeping reforms, I think that it’s high time that we include a citizen’s right to high-quality, affordable legal representation.

This just doesn’t go far enough, in my view.

Originally Posted by Jolie Rouge

But don’t worry, I don’t think the NSA will be in charge of it. As long as the administration and the Congress are undertaking such sweeping reforms, I think that it’s high time that we include a citizen’s right to high-quality, affordable legal representation.

I hear ACORN is hiring again, this time posting positions in the medical field.....no experience necessary.....having a 'record' is a plus....

The Obamacare to Come
Dems’ health-care plans do not provide the reform most Americans seek.
By Michael Tanner

Drip by painful drip, the details of the Democratic health-care-reform plan have been leaking out. And from what we can see so far, it looks like bad news for American taxpayers, health-care providers, and, most important, patients.

The plan would not initially create a government-run, single-payer system such as those in Canada and Britain. Private insurance would still exist, at least for a time. But it would be reduced to little more than a public utility, operating much like the electric company, with the government regulating every aspect of its operation.

It would be mandated both that employers offer coverage and that individuals buy it. A government-run plan, similar to Medicare, would be set up to compete with private insurers. The government would undertake comparative-effectiveness and cost-effectiveness research, and use the results to impose practice guidelines on providers. Private insurance would face a host of new regulations, including a requirement to insure all applicants and a prohibition on pricing premiums on the basis of risk. Subsidies would be extended to help middle earners purchase insurance. And the government would subsidize and manage the development of a national system of electronic medical records.

The net result would be an unprecedented level of government control over one-sixth of the U.S. economy, and over some of the most important, personal, and private decisions in Americans’ lives.

Let’s look at some of the most troubling ideas in detail.

An employer mandate.

Employers would be required to insure their workers through a “pay or play” mandate. Those who did not provide “meaningful coverage” for their workers would pay a penalty, equal to some percentage of their payroll, into a national fund that would provide insurance to uncovered workers. Such a mandate is, of course, simply a disguised tax on employment. As Princeton University professor Uwe Reinhardt, the dean of health-care economists, points out, “[That] the fiscal flows triggered by mandate would not flow directly through the public budgets does not detract from the measure’s status of a bona fide tax.” Estimates suggest that an employer mandate could cost 1.6 million jobs over the first five years.

An individual mandate.

As is the case with an employer mandate, an individual mandate is essentially a disguised tax. It is also the first in a series of dominoes that will lead to greater government control of the health-care system.

To implement an insurance mandate, the government will have to define what sort of insurance fulfills it. As the CBO puts it, “an individual mandate . . . would require people to purchase a specific service that would have to be heavily regulated by the federal government.” At the very least, deductible levels and lifetime caps will have to be specified, and a minimum-benefits package will likely be spelled out. This means the oft-repeated promise that “if you are happy with your current insurance, you can keep it” is untrue. Millions of Americans who are currently satisfied with their coverage will have to give it up and purchase the insurance the government wants them to have, even if the new insurance is more expensive or covers benefits the buyer does not want.

A “public option.”

The government would establish a new universal-health-care program, similar to Medicare, that would compete with private insurance. Regardless of how it is structured or administered, such a plan would have an inherent advantage in the marketplace because it would ultimately be subsidized by taxpayers. It could, for instance, keep its premiums artificially low or offer extra benefits, then turn to the U.S. Treasury to cover any shortfalls. Consumers would naturally be attracted to the lower-cost, higher-benefit government program.

A government program would also have an advantage because its tremendous market presence would allow it to impose much lower reimbursement rates on doctors and hospitals. Government plans such as Medicare and Medicaid traditionally reimburse providers at rates considerably below those of private insurance. Providers recoup the lost income by raising prices for those with private insurance. It is estimated that privately insured patients pay $89 billion annually in additional insurance costs because of cost-shifting from government programs. If the new public option would have similar reimbursement policies, it would result in additional cost-shifting of as much as $36.4 billion annually. Such cost-shifting would force insurers to raise their premiums, making them even less competitive with the taxpayer-subsidized public plan. Lewin Associates estimates that as many as 118.5 million Americans, nearly two out of every three people with insurance, would shift to the government program. The result would be a death spiral for private insurance.

Given that many of the most outspoken advocates of the “public option” have, in the past, supported a government-run single-payer system, it is reasonable to suspect they support a public option precisely because it would squeeze out private insurance and eventually lead to such a system.

President Obama himself has said that if he were designing a health-care system from scratch, his preference would be a single-payer system “managed like Canada’s.” He has also said that, while his proposal is a less radical approach, “it may be that we end up transitioning to such a system.”

Comparative- and cost-effectiveness research.

In an attempt to control health-care costs, the government would undertake research to determine which health-care procedures and technologies are most effective and, more ominously, cost-effective. Of course, there is a great deal of waste in the U.S. health-care system, and if the government’s goal were simply to provide better information there would be little cause for concern. But there is every reason to believe such research would be used to impose restrictions on how medicine is practiced. For example, some reform advocates have said that when an insurance company fails to comply with government practice guidelines, workers should no longer be able to exempt the value of that company’s plans from their taxable income.

There is no doubt that other countries use comparative-effectiveness research as the basis for rationing. For example, in Great Britain, the National Institute on Clinical Effectiveness makes such decisions, including a controversial determination that certain cancer drugs are “too expensive.”

The U.K. government effectively puts a price tag on each citizen’s life — about $44,305 (£30,000) per year, to be exact, under NICE’s guidelines. That’s just a baseline, of course, and, as NICE chairman Michael Rawlins points out, the agency has sometimes approved treatments costing as much as $70,887 (£48,000) per year of extended life. But such treatments are approved only if it can be shown they extend life by at least three months and are used for illnesses that affect fewer than 7,000 new patients per year.

The final health-care-reform bill is likely to include a number of other bad ideas: a host of new insurance regulations that will drive up costs and limit consumer choice (under one leaked proposal, Americans would be limited to a choice of four standardized insurance plans); subsidies for middle-class families (a family of four earning as much as $83,000 per year would receive subsidized care under one proposal); and government preemption of private investment and research into health IT. All of this would come at a cost to taxpayers of at least $1.5 trillion over the next ten years.

The American people are right to demand health-care reform.

The current system is broken.

But taken individually, most of the ideas currently being considered by Congress would make the problems we face even worse. Taken together, they amount to a complete government takeover of the American health-care system. That is not the type of reform most Americans seek.



http://article.nationalreview.com/?q...QyZTllOTI2M2I=

Conservative blogger Dan J. at Falling Panda reports on what’s going on at those Obama health care meet-ups.

Check out his account here. http://fallingpanda.blogspot.com/200...e-meet-up.html

Bottom line: Hope for defeating the Obamacare behemoth lives:

I came away from this meeting with a renewed confidence that Obama would not be able to rely on his loyal activist army to sell nationalized health care. While these individuals are passionate and are perfectly capable of handing out flyers and talking about “hope” and “change” during an election cycle, they were clearly grossly under prepared to answer questions about an issue as complex as health care from concerned citizens.

Perhaps I’m wrong. I’ll find out on June 27 when the Obama army takes to the streets and we see the results of the brainstorming sessions in action. However the entire time I was at the meeting, for all of the talk of “Health care for all” and how “meaningful reform can’t wait” there was not a single question or mention of the programs potential costs to the taxpayer. If these well meaning activists are under the impression that they won’t be confronted by individuals who are already incensed with Obama’s proclivity to spend large sums of money and his failure to propose any realistic way of paying for it all, then they have another thing coming.

Concerned citizens have a good chance of killing this ill conceived health care overhaul. I’m convinced of this after seeing first hand those who Obama has fighting for him on the ground.

Obama’s whole strategic campaign is starting to unravel. His whole strategy reminds me of the German approach to the Battle of the Bulge.

Like the Germans he does not have the political logistics for a sustained effort. That is why he is constantly claiming the need to act NOW. After TARP and the bailouts, individual Congressman and Senators up in 2010 are starting to feel the heat.

When this thing unravels, it’s going to do so BIG TIME. The reversal could be stunning. We saw today a Today Show satire of the TOTUS. That is an attention getter.



Diving into the Kennedy-Dodd health care takeover bill.
Keith Hennessy

http://keithhennessey.com/2009/06/08...y-health-bill/

Originally Posted by anothersta

I wonder if additional testing would also include no second opinions allowed. Took grandson to 3 docs before one finally said "Hey! I think your kid is almost blind"



If YOU see that happening, you should be reporting it. If you aren't, well, you have no one to thank but yourself. If I ever saw a doc doing something I thought was unethical, I told anyone who would listen.

Sitting by the sidelines seeing it happen doesn't help anyone.

I think you like to argue. You can report all you like. It will do NOTHING, unless you can prove it. You can't prove much because of the laws and violating others rights. I would love to know how you would go about reporting a doc for testing when not "needed"?

Originally Posted by YankeeMary

I think you like to argue. You can report all you like. It will do NOTHING, unless you can prove it. You can't prove much because of the laws and violating others rights. I would love to know how you would go about reporting a doc for testing when not "needed"?

You forget, I'VE worked in hospitals VERY close to doctors. If I hadn't said something about what a doctor was doing to the administrators, it would've continued.

EVEN IF nothing is done about it, at least I TRIED. You sat there and watched.

How would you report a doc doing testing when not needed? How's bout starting with the AMA?

You can't predict the future. Although, it's an excuse for sitting idly by while a doc rips off the patient and insurance companies.

I don't like to argue and resent that accusation.

The gov getting involved isn't going to solve waste if people who see it don't speak up. You chose not to, so stop complaining about it. You want a change? You had the power to say something, you knew the situation, you chose not to......

I'd hope you'll do things differently if there's another opportunity.

Originally Posted by SurferGirl

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Now that is a great idea. I really should talk to my dog's vet. I like him much better than a regular doctor and he's really hot.

lol

Do you know what happens to people who can't cut it in veterinarian school?

They become MD's