Obama administration fights to save healthcare law

roughdraft274 said:

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He was talking about insurance companies, not government.

Seriously, is it that hard to read your own source? Lord.

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In 2001 the economist Milton Friedman read up on health care, discovered that the inefficiencies in our system trace back to a single policy mistake, worked out a policy test that would help us correct it and then described his findings in a few thousand words of plain English.

Because, Friedman saw, most payments for medical care are made not by the patients who receive the care but by third parties, typically employers. Since, in Friedman's phrase, "nobody spends somebody else's money as wisely as he spends his own," this third-payer system by its very nature introduces inefficiencies throughout the health care system.

The reason for this wasteful third-party system? The tax code. Money spent on health care is exempt from the income tax only if the health care is provided through an employer. "We have become so accustomed to employer-provided medical care," Friedman wrote, "that we regard it as part of the natural order. Yet it is thoroughly illogical."

Medical Analysis By Milton Friedman - Forbes.com

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zimmer said:

What would be smart is to get government out of the healthkare business. We have a Communist System with Communist results.

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1.The US has the most expensive healthcare system in the world. It is almost twice as expensive as every other developed nation. This is largely due to administrative costs which account for 19-25% of healthcare costs, and up to 34% at for-profit hospitals.

2.Other than South Africa, America is the only developed country in the world that does not provide healthcare for all of its citizens.

3.Yet, the US ranks 26th in infant mortality and 24th in the number of healthy years a person can expect to live - putting America’s healthcare system in the company of Cuba and Slovenia rather than Canada and Western European nations.

4.And, despite ludicrous right-wing anecdotal claims of high dissatisfaction among those who live in countries with universal healthcare, the reality is that, with the exception of Italy, Americans are more dissatisfied with their healthcare than are the citizens of every other developed nation, including England, France, Germany, and Canada. Moreover, US doctors spend less time with patients that do doctors in other nations.

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we kill more living breathing baby's than Slovenia

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In a chapter in his novel "The Cancer Ward" titled "The Old Doctor," Alexander Solzhenitsyn compares "private medical practice" with "universal, free, public health service"...

Mr. Solzhenitsyn himself had no personal experience on which to base his account and yet, in what I have long regarded as a striking example of creative imagination, ...

Lyudmila Afanasyevna: "All right, but how many of these family doctors would be needed? They just can't be fitted into our system of universal, free, public health services."

Dr. Oreschenkov: "Universal and public—yes, they could. Free, no."

Lyudmila Afanasyevna: "But the fact that it is free is our greatest achievement."

Dr. Oreschenkov: "Is it such a great achievement? What do you mean by 'free'? The doctors don't work without pay. It's just that the patient doesn't pay them, they're paid out of the public budget. The public budget comes from these same patients. Treatment isn't free, it's just depersonalized. If the cost of it were left with the patient, he'd turn the ten rubles over and over in his hands. But when he really needed help he'd come to the doctor five times over. . . .

...everywhere there's a schedule, a quota the doctors have to meet; next! . . . ...and the doctor's job is to catch the frauds. Doctor and patient as enemies—is that medicine?"

...His first responsibility is to the managed care entity that hires him. He is not engaged in the kind of private medical practice that Dr. Oreschenkov valued so highly.

For the first 30 years of my life, until World War II, that kind of practice was the norm. Individuals were responsible for their own medical care. They could pay for it out-of-pocket or they could buy insurance. "Sliding scale" fees plus professional ethics assured that the poor got care...

Because private expenditures on health care are not exempt from income tax, almost all employees now receive health care coverage from their employers, leading to problems of portability, third party payment and rising costs that have become increasingly serious. Of course, the cost of medical care comes out of wages, but out of before-tax rather than after-tax wages, so that the employee receives what he or she regards as a higher real wage for the same cost to the employer.

A second major change was the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. These added another large slice of the population... was mostly paid by a third party, providing little incentive to economize on medical care. The resulting dramatic rise in expenditures on medical care...

Milton Friedman: A Way Out of Soviet-Style Health Care - WSJ.com

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zimmer said:

ROTFLOL... I merely paraphrased Milton Friedman (see below), and he and his Chicago School and Austrian School of Economics have a pretty good record, and Milton Friedman calls the system Socialist-Communist and Communist. It is what it is.



This quote was before the dung called ObamaKare as Friedman died in 2006... now we have government picking favorites too, assisting those with connections... just like in the USSR. It's Animal Farm Kare.

Would you like to try again?

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Boo Radley said:

Yes, you prove you can quote and misquote anything on the internet. Nothing you describe has been remotely proposed. Your extreeme hyperbole gets wilder by the minute.

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roughdraft274 said:

Do you understand the difference between the countries budget and deficit and a businesses budget and profits?

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Saying that a bill will save the country money is not the same as saying it will save businesses money. Find a link where Obama said that businesses will save lots of money right off the bat because of this legislation and you'll have a point. Until then you're talking about two different things.

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Now the administration is back with even more ammunition aimed at silencing critics. A new report attempts to quantify exactly how much individuals and businesses might save once the law is phased in starting in 2014.

According to the report, premiums are expected to be lower than they otherwise would be without the law. For example, it says, middle-income families could save as much as $2,300 by purchasing coverage through the new health insurance exchanges; small businesses could save as much as $350 per family policy; and even large businesses will save, it says, because more healthier people will have insurance, thus better spreading risk.

snip {Opposition says:}

AHIP says that while the law may save individuals and businesses money through tax credits and other mechanisms, that's not the same as slowing the growth of health spending. "While tax credits are important to help people pay for coverage, tax credits do not bring down the growth of medical costs or reduce health insurance premiums."

Administration Says Health Law Will Lower Premiums, But Critics Disagree : Shots - Health Blog : NPR

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Boo Radley said:

Yes, you prove you can quote and misquote anything on the internet. Nothing you describe has been remotely proposed. Your extreeme hyperbole gets wilder by the minute.

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Boo Radley said:

health care spending has been a major problem before refom. Right now we spend more for less. If we spent more for more, that would be an improvement. Spending less for more would be better still. We need more work on reform, to go further and not with less.

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„Welcher Patient geht leer aus?“
(Which patient is going to go empty handed?)
Eckhard Nagel transplant surgeon from the National Ethics Council explains the need to ration medical care

FOCUS: German health politicians will assert that full coverage of the population would remain with the forefront of medicine. In contrast, the National Ethics Council now proposes a new public debate about rationing. Is this really necessary?

Nagel: Announcements, for each treatment was at all times hochleistungsmedizinische feasible, I think is a dangerous suppression of reality. Rationing is part of everyday life in medicine and will increase in future (ZIMMER PERSONAL NOTE: in socialist systems). Even today, patients have to wait for important operations, because such are not enough seats for its intensive care are available. Also needs to be decided in transplantation medicine, which patient receives a saving institution and which no seats, and possibly died on the waiting list. This dilemma is considered too little.

FOCUS: Why has not held a public discussion about rationing?

Nagel: The allocation of limited health goods from cost factors is an extremely sensitive issue on which our society is ill prepared. Politicians have made the experience that she had rather inconvenient truth. Otherwise they run the risk of being punished as a bearer of bad news - for example at the ballot box. Despite everything, I believe it is their duty to clearly identify the problem situation, even if there is no easy way out of it visible.

FOCUS: Can we avoid the limited allocation, as we raise more money for the health system?

Nails: At the moment already. However, medical progress has no foreseeable limits. We are made in each case to the question of what we can afford. Is it even possible to provide all health goods as before to after the of equality? Or should the treatment after the budget of the patient, his age or his social embeddedness judge? Must pay an injured his therapy out of pocket if he caused the accident itself? Such scenarios have to respond, and that takes is an ethical debate.

FOCUS: Should 85-year-old fear that they will receive an artificial hip or heart valve?

Nagel: I think so. But of course, decisions on ethical dilemmas remain conflict is not enough. We must strive just to the best of all strategies. This decision process needs to be maximized transparent (ZIMMER PERSONAL NOTE: ROTFLMFAO). Only then will the people get the feeling that they are involved in the deliberations, even if they do not approve of (ZIMMER PERSONAL NOTE: ROTFLMFAO... THEY CANNOT COMPLAIN WHEN THEY ARE DEAD).

FOCUS: What do you fear, when politicians and citizens continue to ignore that rationing has to be?

Nagel: This can have fatal consequences, in which the patient - and we all suffer - unnecessarily sometime. As will be discussed today about the cost of health only in the short term and with slogans, emotional statement to the situation. This is an unfortunate way to kick start the discussion, because it causes anxiety. Citizens feel existentially delivered.

Eckhard Nagel, 46, a health scientist of the University of Bayreuth.

The Augsburg surgeon was appointed in 2001 in the National Ethics Council.

Medizin: „Welcher Patient geht leer aus?“ - News - FOCUS Online

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MrVicchio said:

It won't make it to the SCOTUS and survive. The entire mess relies on forcing American's to buy a good or service from a private company else pay a fine, just for living. No one in their right mind wants a Gov't with that sort of power.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: An analysis of this comment by President Barack Obama was published on April 1, 2010. After it appeared, the Heritage Foundation's communications office contacted us to argue that our rating of Mostly True was too generous to the president. We did some additional reporting to review our ruling. Our second round of reporting -- primarily talking to conservative policy experts outside of Heritage -- solidified our initial conclusions. Below is the updated version of our story, which retains the rating of Mostly True, published April 26, 2010.

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On numerous occasions, Heritage scholars wrote approvingly of the exchange system in Massachusetts, known as the Connector. In a paper about the Massachusetts plan published on April 11, 2006, Edmund Haislmaier, a Heritage fellow in health care policy, wrote of the "truly significant and transformative health system changes that the legislation would set in motion."

Specifically, Haislmaier wrote that "this concept of organizing a state's insurance markets around a central clearinghouse represents a dramatic departure from recent state health insurance reform proposals. States have spent the past 15 years trying to expand health care coverage to small-business employees, with virtually no positive results. The Massachusetts legislation represents a bipartisan commitment to move away from the policies that have largely failed to make progress in covering the uninsured for the past 15 years."

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Boo Radley said:

Zimmer, no one has proposed anything like a communist system, so you not only are hyperbolic, but you're using a complete strawman argument. Come on, tone it down to something more like what s actually being proposed.

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hazlnut said:

Apparently the Heritage Foundation did.

Obama says Heritage Foundation is source of health exchange idea

Sorry, V, this one has been checked and double checked when the Heritage Foundation argued the first rating of 'Mostly True' was too generous to Obama.



Keep in mind the Massachusetts law mandates that every citizen in the state obtain health coverage...



You always talk about people taking personal responsibility, but when there is a moderately regulated market for you to purchase health care, and the Gov says shop here and choose a program that fits your budget and needs, you all complain... "What if we don't want to choose?"

Like the song says: You still have made a choice.

And what you call a "fine" is a actually small amount on your taxes to a general fund to take responsibility for yourself and not rely on the rest of us to foot the hospital bill.

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zimmer said:

I'll side with Milton, and Solzhenitsyn... and their defining USSR Kare and finding "A Way Out of Soviet-Style Health Care".

Milton Friedman: A Way Out of Soviet-Style Health Care - WSJ.com

I know you mean well and your Lib buddies have inner Primal Screams when they're tied to promoting Communist styled systems (not that Michael Moore and other Leftist mouth pieces would do that) but all I can say is... change your spots.

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Boo Radley said:

It's not a side, it's a fact. No one has proposed any communist system. Hyperbole and strawmen don't change that.

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j-mac said:

Under a single payer system like what you want to see, would there be a choice to not have the government system? If I were denied treatment could I pay for it myself?

j-mac

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Boo Radley said:

It's not a side, it's a fact. No one has proposed any communist system. Hyperbole and strawmen don't change that.

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zimmer said:

It is a Communist styled system. I think Friedman and Solzhenitsyn made the case clearly, in terms an average person can understand if they opened their minds. (See the link in my signature. You might want to read the book. It is there for folks precisely like you.)

Today we have the Full Animal Farm Effect too. Some being more equal and better connected than others and able to be exempted.

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j-mac said:

Well, you certainly have a lot of caveats in there..

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Boo Radley said:

No, they don't. The drink the same silliness you're drinking. It is nothing of the kind.

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Charlie Munger: Another thing I think should be avoided is extremely intense ideology because it cabbages up one’s mind. You see it a lot with T.V. preachers -- many have minds made of cabbage -- but it can also happen with political ideology. When you’re young it’s easy to drift into loyalties and when you announce that you’re a loyal member and you start shouting the orthodox ideology out, what you’re doing is pounding it in, pounding it in, and you’re gradually ruining your mind. So you want to be very, very careful of this ideology. It’s a big danger.

In my mind, I have a little example I use whenever I think about ideology. The example is these Scandinavia canoeists who succeeded in taming all the rapids of Scandinavia and they thought they would tackle the whirlpools of the Aron [sp.] Rapids here in the United States. The death rate was 100%. A big whirlpool is not something you want to go into, and I think the same is true about a really deep ideology.

I have what I call an iron prescription that helps me keep sane when I naturally drift toward preferring one ideology over another and that is: I say that I’m not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who support it. I think only when I’ve reached that state am I qualified to speak. This business of not drifting into extreme ideology is a very, very important thing in life.

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Boo Radley said:

Aagin, Zimmer, facts are facts. no one has suggested anything liek a communist sytem. Doesn't matter who you quote, what koolaid your drink, the facts are still the facts.

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Erod said:

If it's so great, why are so many unions asking to be exempted from it?

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