liblady said:
who is "they"? it seems to me at least obama is willing to take this on, depsite the blue dog dems and the republicans. if people were HONEST, most would acknowledge we need reform, as you did. instead, what we have is more fear mongering and outright lies (euthanasia?) being thrown around.
we will never get anywhere unless we actually start the car.
We need reform, but the reform we need starts at a much more fundamental level than what Obama is trying to do. He's just trying to wallpaper over the problems, not solve them.
The problems in the medical field are twofold:
1) First, America is sue-happy. We've raised a generation of lawyers who will sue anyone and everyone at the drop of a hat and they all know that the medical profession is ripe for picking. Most doctors just don't have the time to sit in a courtroom answering ridiculous claims from an idiot lawyer and therefore just let their malpractice insurance take care of it. That's exactly what the lawyers are counting on, they make money without ever having to prove they have a case. That's why you get ambulance-chasing lawyers like James Sokolove on TV advertising for massive class-action suits.
I have a friend who is a doctor and he pays over $100k a year in malpractice insurance premiums! And he's never had a problem in his life. Yet. That cost has to be passed on to the consumers and multiply that by the number of doctors and nurses out there and you've got billions of dollars a year in extraneous costs that have nothing whatsoever to do with healing anyone.
2) Secondly, the insurance companies and the government don't pay their bills. Billing Medical and Medicaid is a nightmare, they just don't send you back what they've been billed for. Most insurance and government entities pay about 10% of what they're billed. If a procedure costs $200, the hospital will get sent $20. Hospitals realized that in order to actually recoup their losses, they have to raise their rates. That means that to get their $200 reimbursed, they have to charge $2000 for the procedure. That's great, they get their $200 back, but if an uninsured person walks in the door, the law demands that they charge them $2000 too.
Why you think that Obama's big health reform plan is going to change the situation any is beyond me. They're still going to pay a pittance for services that cost more than the hospitals are getting and hospitals are going to go out of business, just like they are today.
If he wants to make a difference, he needs to address the core issues of why medical costs are so high to begin with, but he doesn't have the guts to touch it, any more than the Republicans would. It's a political hot potato, the insurance industry has tons of money to spend on buying votes and bribing politicians, nobody is going to vote against their own political sugar daddies.
Poll added 
