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| By: hctomorrow Sunday March 21, 2010 10:30 am | |
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11 Comments
Very informative diary, hctomorrow. Well researched. I learned a lot. Thanks.
We must be cautious.
I’m ready for anything.
(Are we geeks or what?)
Eris help me I didn’t get what cassi was going on about at first. Not enough sleep last night.
I suppose we could spend the rest of the thread doing Star Wars quotes. Might cheer everyone up.
Today Billionaires Shower Dollar Bills, Gratitude on Sen. McConnell. See the awesome video. Mitch can’t get out of there fast enough!
Yeah. Isn’t it ironic that the health care ‘reform’ package benefits the ultra wealthy executives of the health insurers a thousand times more than the American people?
Mitch is doing the right thing, opposing this. Just, as usual for a Republican, for the wrong reasons.
hctomorrow;
Before pitching a single payer option move for a year to a country that has that system. I did. Hospitals are disgusting, you can’t get access to instruments that sit idle because nobody gives a dam if they get used or not, and your options for medications & treatments is very limited. You wait years for treatment. Is like East Germany. Is horrible.
And yes, in your example a second hospital would lower costs, absolutely because the first one would have a great incentive to improve their system to compete.
Oh, but don’t worry: the country is full of losers and when their premiums triple in a year or so, instead of figuring out that Obamacare was a piece of crap of a bill; they will be also asking for a single payer, just like you.
It would be funny, if it didn’t screw up everybody’s lives too.
‘Yes, it’s so hard to see how setting 15 cents of every healthcare dollar on fire and flushing it down the Wellpoint toilet would drive up costs.”
So you think that the US government could administer a health care plan cheaper than Wellpoint? According to Robert A. Book, Ph.D.(Senior Research Fellow in Health Economics in the Center for Data Analysis at The Heritage Foundation)in 2007 Medicare’s administrative costs were $509 per primary beneficiary, compared to private-sector administrative costs of $453. In the years from 2000 to 2005, Medicare’s administrative costs per beneficiary were consistently higher than that for private insurance, ranging from 5 to 48 percent higher, depending on the year.
You see what you want to see and print drivel!
By all means lets cite the Heritage Foundation. The winger think tank that hires war criminals. After all, when you break international law, lie a country into war, at least you can still go to the Heritage Foundation! Your the one printing drivel. For every study you want to cite claiming that the private insurance industry has lower administrative cost than Medicare there are another 10 saying the opposite. Heres one that says Medicare is 3.3% while private insurance is 16.7%. http://www.cahi.org/cahi_contents/resources/pdf/CAHIMedicareTechnicalPaper.pdf
Here is Paul Krugman explaining why The Heritage Foundation, and you, should never be believed when it comes to citing
administrative costs.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/06/administrative-costs/
Have a nice day
Thank you for doing the legwork so I didn’t have to!
Yeah, poppa, do me a favor and take your BS somewhere else. Actual studies have consistently shown Medicare to have a massive advantage in efficiency over private plans; that’s simply not in dispute, anymore than the sun not being devoured by a dragon each night. Well meaning people can and do argue over precisely how much more efficient it is, since there are certain obvious demographic factors at play (when your pool is all of one particular age group it might be easier to administer, when you spend more per person your administrative share of spending will naturally go down, so an older sicker pool like Medicare will look slightly more efficient than it would be applied to younger populations, etc)
Your scary stories don’t phase me. 45k people a year die for lack of coverage in the US. I don’t care how gleaming the hospitals for our wealthy are, when tens of thousands of Americans die to line Wellpoint’s pockets it’s an inherently unjust situation.
Plus I’ve had the luxury of experiencing some of the worst of our Glorious Healthcare Experience here in America. Doctors who refuse to treat you when you’re in pain. Insurance forcing you to go through primary care doctors who can’t help you because of an utter lack of talent and imagination. “Specialists” who spend fifteen minutes dismissing your claims and leaving you to suffer. Drug companies who charge ridiculous and unaffordable expenses for everything. Collections agencies going after years old medical debt.
Screw your scare stories. I’ve lived them and worse besides, here in America.