BS: Republican response to Health Reform

Subject: RE: BS: Republican response to Health Reform
From: Donuel
Date: 05 Apr 11 - 07:31 PM

The nest Republican candidate

Subject: RE: BS: Republican response to Health Reform
From: Donuel
Date: 05 Apr 11 - 11:44 PM

http://usera.imagecave.com/donuel/medicare3.jpg

Subject: RE: BS: Republican response to Health Reform
From: GUEST,999
Date: 06 Apr 11 - 03:47 AM

I am surprised so many people think it was ever otherwise.

Subject: RE: BS: Republican response to Health Reform
From: Sawzaw
Date: 18 May 11 - 03:20 PM

Health care costs explode

May 16, 2011

The annual Milliman Medical Index (MMI) contains some grim tidings for health insurers and others concerned by the rising cost of health care, as for the fourth straight year, costs rose by at least 7%.

The MMI found that for 2011 the average cost of health care for a family of four covered by a preferred provider plan now stands at $19,393, up from $18,074 in 2010. The 2011 tally reflects the steady rise charted in health costs over the last decade. By way of comparison, the MMI for 2002 was $9,235.

The study delves deeply into the causes behind this cost inflation. For example, the study notes that even though hospital spending is only 48% of total health care spending, increases in facility spending accounted for 60% of this year's total increase in costs.

For the third year in a row, spending at outpatient facilities rose faster than any other component of patient care, climbing 10%. Milliman attributes the growth in cost to the fact that existing outpatient services have increased in price while new, more expensive services continue to emerge.

Pharmacy costs were another source of cost inflation, rising 8%. Although a quarter of that increase came from broader usage of pharmaceuticals, most of the change came from higher average prices.

These rising costs present a challenge for insurers, which are facing more political pressure to keep premiums down. Indeed, the report calls health care reform the elephant in the room and predicts that insurers will become subject to greater scrutiny of their rates.

Subject: RE: BS: Republican response to Health Reform
From: GUEST
Date: 18 May 11 - 03:24 PM

Gee, Sawz, maybe if the Repubs hadn't blocked real health care reform & spawned a raft of idiotic court challenges to the emasculated bill that did pass, these increases wouldn't be the case.

Subject: RE: BS: Republican response to Health Reform
From: Sawzaw
Date: 27 May 11 - 08:51 AM

If then proves what? If then changes what?

A. there are an infinite number of ifs.

B. No one knows what the result of those alternate realities would be.

It is wishful thinking.

A way to avoid reality.

Take the if then argument to your health insurance company [whose lobbyists were hired to write the bill] and tell them it should not cost so much.

Subject: RE: BS: Republican response to Health Reform
From: Greg F.
Date: 27 May 11 - 10:00 AM

B. No one knows what the result of those alternate realities would be.

Actually, the Congressional Budget Office (and others) did a pretty good analysis of the result of "those alternate[sic] realities" and how much money a real health care bill would have saved across the board.

The TeaBagger Repubs still torpedoed it. Not that you, or they, would want to confuse the issue with facts.....

Subject: RE: BS: Republican response to Health Reform
From: Bobert
Date: 27 May 11 - 11:24 AM

The Tea Baggers largest fear is that they won't be able to sink the Affordable Care Act and it proves to be successful...

But here's another twist on Republican thinking... Remember the death panels??? Well, if the Ryan and the Repubs had it their way then Medicare would disappear and health insurance companies, interested solely on profit, would be making the life and death decision for our elderly...

Hmmmmmmm???

Where does the hypocrisy end with the current batch of Repubs???

B~

Subject: RE: BS: Republican response to Health Reform
From: saulgoldie
Date: 28 May 11 - 10:39 AM

No matter who is providing health insurance, the private or the public sector, there is one truth that no one is honestly discussing. That is the fact that everyone dies, regardless of what is done to or for them. At some point, either they just die on their own, or medical help can no longer sustain them.

If some entity is providing health care, at some point, some person will decide that they will no longer provide whatever care is keeping the person alive.

The right-wing hysteria machine calls this decision a "death panel." But in the private sector, the decision is often made way before the end of life period in favor of profit and the withholding of care. So many patients end up suffering and dying much earlier than they would have if they had received relatively "normal" health care.

Remember that in the private sector, the motive is only secondarily providing goods or services, but primarily making a profit. For a health care company, this means taking in as much as possible in premiums, and delivering as little service as possible (to keep profits high). So in this situation, some clerk looking at claim forms acts as the de facto death panel.

Nevertheless, in whatever system of providence of care, someone, somewhere is going to make a decision based on the quality of life, the relatives' wishes, if there are relatives, and yes, the cost. It is not a happy thing, thinking about whether or not to provide care. But the choice is going to be made by some person. Doing nothing, is, by the way, a choice.

A number of years ago, the State of Oregon wisely made a list of all the medical conditions that might be covered and rated them on whether or not they would cover them. I have not been able to find this list. But IIRC, it was something like 804 conditions. Oh, I just found the list here:

http://www.oregon.gov/OHA/OHPR/HSC/current_prior.shtml


The conditions included broken bones, stitches, the usual illnesses, including viruses and cancers. One of the conditions was anecephalia, a baby born, with extensive medical intervention against the will of Nature, with no brain. This was one of the conditions they decided they would not cover.

Curiously, I also remember a piece on the news about a woman (in Florida, I think, but it doesn't really matter), who had an anecephalic baby and was insisting that the baby be kept alive with machinery at the cost of something like $500,000 dollars per year.

The questions that one must consider are whether the baby had any remote hope of anything resembling a normal life, and what were the opportunity health costs of keeping it "alive."

How many broken arms, cases of pneumonia, tonsillectomies, early stage cancers, diabetes, and other conditions would not be able to be treated if this one baby got its half a million dollars a year to keep it "alive" on machines.

I do not know the outcome of this. But someone decided either to sustain the baby and forgo treatment of all the others in need of health care, or someone decided to unplug it and let Nature do what she would have done in the first place if medical science had not intervened.

Now, some may argue that the baby in question was "entitled" to health care because it was "a life." This assertion begs the bigger question of who should get care, and what is the structure that should deliver that care.

Saul

Subject: RE: BS: Republican response to Health Reform
From: Ebbie
Date: 28 May 11 - 11:35 AM

Oregon-Health in the state of Oregon is in trouble, primarily because Oregon took a big hit in the recession and has not yet recovered. Several years ago they dropped - or planned to - a great many of those covered under the plan.

But they kept a great many on its rolls. My brother had been a very heavy smoker, developed emphesema, couldn't walk 10 feet without gasping for breath. He was on Oregon Health and they did a fantastic job keeping him alive. A person who was congenitally suspicous of government with its authority and rules, he ended up totally dependent on it.

The last few years of his life he was in and out of the hospital dozens of times a year. I have no idea what they did- but the medics would come to his home and take him in unable to breathe and then call four or five hours later to have someone come collect him. He would be back to his normal breathless self.

He died at the age of 72, having lived much longer than he had any reason to expect.

Subject: RE: BS: Republican response to Health Reform
From: Sawzaw
Date: 28 May 11 - 12:06 PM

Torpedoed it how? What changes did they make to the bill?

They were all ignored and rejected and the bill went through as designed by the Democrats and guaranteed to save money except that in reality, health care costs are still rising at the same rate they were, nothing has changed and the only way to avoid the reality to blame it on the folks who said I told you so.

Exactly what and where in the bill was there anything to contain health care costs? What was taken out of the bill that would have prevented the current rise in health care costs?

Some facts from the people that live in the "if then" world might avoid the confusion that they claim others are creating.

"if the Ryan and the Repubs had it their way then"

The Democrats had it their way and this is the result, reality. Health care going up and up.

Subject: RE: BS: Republican response to Health Reform
From: dick greenhaus
Date: 28 May 11 - 11:35 PM

The median income fo all US MD specialists is over 350,000 per year.

Subject: RE: BS: Republican response to Health Reform
From: Bobert
Date: 29 May 11 - 07:15 AM

There are lots of reasons why health care in the US is so expensive as compared to European countries but the one common denominator that all of or European competitors have is that they provide health care for their citizens...

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm???

European countries spend an average of 8% of their GNP on health care and rank higher in every good category that the US in level of health and life expectancy...

The US is the only developed, industrialized nation that does *NOT* provide health care for all of it's citizens yet pays a whopping 17% of it's GNP for health care and doesn't even break the "Top Ten" in terms of being a healthy nation... Even our infant mortality rate (not factoring in abortion) is in the 20s... That sucks...

Dick is right... It's partly for the high salaries that specialists get... $350,000 a year is alot of dough... But it's not only that... Every rinky dink health center buys equipment to do tests that they frankly don't need and in many cases don't have the properly trained people to run the machines??? But they'll have their doctors order up these tests just to pay for the friggin' machine... And then there are stockholders who invest in hospitals who want dividends...

B~

Subject: RE: BS: Republican response to Health Reform
From: dick greenhaus
Date: 30 May 11 - 01:15 AM

So far, we haven't had much of a change in health care reform; just some tweaking of the health insurance business. This IMO, is a good thing...as far s it goes, but there are feasible ways of lowering health care costs: allowing the government to bargain on drug prices, making sure that there are enough doctors in less-profitable locations ( setting up s "Med Corps", where the Feds would pay medical school tuitions for qualified pre-meds in exchange for a period of assignment
in MD-deprived areas), providing software for uniform computerized record-keeping, and lots more.

Subject: RE: BS: Republican response to Health Reform
From: dick greenhaus
Date: 30 May 11 - 09:35 PM

Banning popular media advertising of prescription drugs would also help.

Subject: RE: BS: Republican response to Health Reform
From: Sawzaw
Date: 06 Jun 11 - 01:22 AM

I never said health care was not too expensive. It is too expensive and the costs are climbing too fast.

I am all for health care reform that reduces the costs. Who the hell wouldn't be?

The problem is the current health care reform does not do a damned thing to reduce or even contain the cost.

Who the hell would not be against a health care reform does not do a damned thing to reduce or even contain the cost.?

Subject: RE: BS: Republican response to Health Reform
From: dick greenhaus
Date: 06 Jun 11 - 12:05 PM

For some idiot reason, it's easier to get folks to fork out a thousand dollars to a private insurance outfit than to get them to pay five hundred bus in taxes to get th same health care.

Subject: RE: BS: Republican response to Health Reform
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 07 Jun 11 - 07:03 AM

Wherever you live the cost of medical services tends to rise, as more sophisticated medical treatments get developed.

Of course when you have sky high costs to start with it's all a lot worse. And reforms of health services which enable everyone to get the help they need which they haven't been getting is liable to be pretty expensive if it isn't accompanied by an attack on profiteering.

Letting poor people suffer and die is cheaper I suppose.

Subject: RE: BS: Republican response to Health Reform
From: Sawzaw
Date: 09 Jun 11 - 12:32 AM

ObamaCare will lead to a dramatic decline in employer-provided health insurance with as many as 78 million Americans forced to find other sources of coverage.

This disturbing finding is based on my calculations from a survey by McKinsey & Company. The survey, published this week in the McKinsey Quarterly, found that up to 50% of employers say they will definitely or probably pursue alternatives to their current health-insurance plan in the years after the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act takes effect in 2014. An estimated 156 million non-elderly Americans get their coverage at work, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute.

Before the health law passed, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that only nine million to 10 million people, or about 7% of employees who currently get health insurance at work, would switch to government-subsidized insurance. But the McKinsey survey of 1,300 employers across industries, geographies and employer sizes found "that reform will provoke a much greater response" and concludes that the health overhaul law will lead to a "radical restructuring" of job-based health coverage.

Another McKinsey analyst, Alissa Meade, told a meeting of health-insurance executives last November that "something in the range of 80 million to 100 million individuals are going to change coverage categories in the two years" after the insurance mandates take effect in 2014.

Many employees who will need to seek another source of coverage will take advantage of the health-insurance subsidies for families making as much as $88,000 a year. This will drive up the cost of ObamaCare.

In a study last year, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, estimated that an additional 35 million workers would be moved out of employer plans and into subsidized coverage, and that this would add about $1 trillion to the total cost of the president's health law over the next decade. McKinsey's survey implies that the cost to taxpayers could be significantly more.

WSJ

Subject: RE: BS: Republican response to Health Reform
From: Sawzaw
Date: 10 Jun 11 - 11:22 PM

Santa Monica, CA ~ Consumer advocates are calling Blue Shield's 59% premium hike Exhibit A for legislation that would allow the Insurance Commissioner to curb health insurers' rate hikes.

In California and most states, health insurers can raise premiums without providing any detailed justification and without any fear that a regulator will investigate and potentially block rate hikes. With federal health reform's requirement that 80% of premiums must be related to healthcare services and only 20% on profits and administration, it is likely that Blue Shield and others will increase payouts to medical providers in order to increase premiums and their own total income.   

The "medical loss ratio," as the 80%/20% rule is known, does not limit how much insurance companies spend on things like advertising and profits unless the rule is applied in conjunction with regulation of rates. Without regulation, as is the case with Blue Shield, insurance companies are using the federal law as an excuse to increase premiums.

"Californians are not the only ones about to suffer through huge price spikes," said Consumer Watchdog President Jamie Court, author of The Progressive's Guide To Raising Hell. "Blue Shield's announcement foreshadows what we'll be seeing around the country in every state that refuses to take on the insurance industry and enact real regulation. Insurance companies are limited to 20% of premiums for profit and overhead, so in the absence of price limits they have every incentive to pay doctors and hospitals too much in order to let premiums rise and pad their 20%"

So there is your cost cutting measure folks. Only 20% of whatever the costs are go towards profit and overhead.

So all they need to do to make more money is to spend more on the overall cost of healthcare and they make a bigger profit.