This is a false choice: either the government does health care or we're at the mercy of the large insurers.
The large insurers ARE a huge portion of the problem, but the other portion IS the government. Right now, though when it won't work they will change what they advocate, Dems claim that private insurance will be used to provide health care. However, they're very careful to NOT reform the numerous flaws of insurance.
Insurance companies routinely deny contract law.
Linda Peeno, MD testified that she would regularly deny legitimate claims to save the company money:
http://www.thenationalcoalition.org/DrPeenotestimony.html
Anti-trust laws are NOT enforced against the large insurers:
"the vast majority of health insurance policies are through for-profit stock companies. They are in the process of “shedding lives” as some term it when “undesirable” customers are lost through various means, including raising premiums and co-pays and decreasing benefits (Britt, “Health insurers getting bigger cut of medical dollars,” 15 October 2004, investors.com). That same Investors Business Daily article from 2004 noted the example of Anthem, another insurance company. They said the top five executives (not just the CEO) received an average of an 817 percent increase in compensation between 2000 and 2003. The CEO, for example, had his compensation go from $2.5 million to $25 million during that time period. About $21 million of that was in stock payouts, the article noted.
A 2006 article, “U.S. Health Insurance: More Market Domination, More CEO Compensation”
(hcrenewal.blogspot.com) notes that in 56 percent of 294 metropolitan areas one insurer “controls more than half the business in health maintenance organization and preferred provider networks underwriting." In addition to having the most enrollees, they also are the biggest purchasers of health care and set the price and coverage terms. “’The results is double-digit premium increases from 2001 and 2004—peaking with a 13.9 percent jump in 2003—soaring well above inflation and wages increases.’" Where is all that money going? The article quotes a Wall Street Journal article looking at the compensation of the CEO of UnitedHealth Group. His salary and bonus is $8 million annually. He has benefits such as the use of a private jet. He has stock-option fortunes worth $1.6 billion."
--Save America, Save the World by Cassandra Nathan pp. 127-128
The government appears totally impotent in dealing with these abuses (part of the article):
"While growing into a colossus, UnitedHealth has repeatedly failed to perform its basic job of paying medical bills. UnitedHealth, which covers 70 million Americans, has been sanctioned in nine states for paying claims slowly; shortchanging doctors, hospitals, or patients; or poorly handling complaints and appeals.
One Nebraska woman complained to state regulators that UnitedHealth's computers had incorrectly rejected claims related to her son's surgery six times.
At one point, UnitedHealth owed Dr. George Schroedinger, an orthopedic surgeon, $600,000. He and his clinic sued UnitedHealth of the Midwest in 2004.
Deciding for the clinic, U.S. District Judge Stephen Limbaugh of Missouri declared that the company's claims processing systems were "flawed in many ways, denying, reducing, and improperly processing claims on a regular basis. And despite innumerable requests, United was unwilling to remedy the underlying errors in its systems" (Star-Tribune Dec. 12, 2007).
Payment troubles continued after the verdict, and Dr. Schroedinger filed a second lawsuit. "These people can never get it right, which says to me that they just plain lie," he said in an interview.
Failure to pay isn't the only complaint. The insurer also gives incorrect information on which physicians are in its network, creating enormous problems for physicians' staff.
The AMA said that no other insurer has prompted as many complaints as UnitedHealth about abusive and unfair payment practices. AMA officials have met with UnitedHealth executives 16 times since 2000, with little to show for it.
"They have always got a new plan to fix it," said Dr. William G. Plested III, past president of the AMA. But "nothing ever happens."
It seems to us that this case is just the tip of the insurance iceberg. More and more stories are appearing daily in the news media about how insurance company are instructing employees their jobs are to deny claims and/or delay payments.
With such a high percentage of medical premiums and other costs going to the legal profession, to maintain compliance with endless government rules/regulations and being hoarded by the insurance companies and executives — is it any wonder medical costs are increasing so dramatically?
It's time to take a closer look at the medical insurance companies.
UnitedHealth Group is not the first medical insurance company to rob patients, hospitals and clinics to pay obscene salaries to their executives.
It's a modern day robbing patients to pay pimps.
Michael Arnold Glueck, M.D., comments on medical-legal issues and is a visiting fellow in economics and citizenship at the International Trade Education Foundation of the Washington International Trade Council.
Robert J. Cihak, M.D., is a senior fellow and board member of the Discovery Institute and a past president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.
http://www.newsmax.com/medicine_men/medical_insurance/2008/01/03/61543.html
Therefore ALL plans which "rely" on private insurance WITHOUT correcting abuses will FAIL to do what any sane person wants. A sane person is NOT hooked on the delivery mechanism, but wants:
Quality, Affordable, Accessible care for all.
That means we have to go with what WORKS and what DOES work is the free market which we have only POCKETS of in the States:
Read:
http://www.azcentral.com/community/gilbe...
A doctor owned and run hospital that sees everyone gets care, no matter what happens to the bottom line.
http://www.simplecare.com/ a doctor-driven group where reasonable rates are charged.
Note you can go to a walk-in clinic at Wal-Mart or CVS or the like in many cities and get many of the most typical reasons for seeing a doc addressed for under $100.
For those who want UHC, you have been sold a bill of goods--it's BS--it's RATIONED care (YOU die because you're not worth keeping alive) and it BANKRUPTS people. Some FACTS:
From a Canadian doctor now living in the US:
"...Another sign of transformation: Canadian doctors, long silent on the health-care system’s problems, are starting to speak up. Last August, they voted Brian Day president of their national association. A former socialist who counts Fidel Castro as a personal acquaintance, Day has nevertheless become perhaps the most vocal critic of Canadian public health care, having opened his own private surgery center as a remedy for long waiting lists and then challenged the government to shut him down. “This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week,” he fumed to the New York Times, “and in which humans can wait two to three years.”
And now even Canadian governments are looking to the private sector to shrink the waiting lists. Day’s clinic, for instance, handles workers’-compensation cases for employees of both public and private corporations. In British Columbia, private clinics perform roughly 80 percent of government-funded diagnostic testing. In Ontario, where fealty to socialized medicine has always been strong, the government recently hired a private firm to staff a rural hospital’s emergency room.
This privatizing trend is reaching Europe, too. Britain’s government-run health care dates back to the 1940s. Yet the Labour Party—which originally created the National Health Service and used to bristle at the suggestion of private medicine, dismissing it as “Americanization”—now openly favors privatization. Sir William Wells, a senior British health official, recently said: “The big trouble with a state monopoly is that it builds in massive inefficiencies and inward-looking culture.” Last year, the private sector provided about 5 percent of Britain’s nonemergency procedures; Labour aims to triple that percentage by 2008. The Labour government also works to voucherize certain surgeries, offering patients a choice of four providers, at least one private. And in a recent move, the government will contract out some primary care services, perhaps to American firms such as UnitedHealth Group and Kaiser Permanente.
Sweden’s government, after the completion of the latest round of privatizations, will be contracting out some 80 percent of Stockholm’s primary care and 40 percent of its total health services, including one of the city’s largest hospitals. Since the fall of Communism, Slovakia has looked to liberalize its state-run system, introducing co-payments and privatizations. And modest market reforms have begun in Germany: increasing co-pays, enhancing insurance competition, and turning state enterprises over to the private sector (within a decade, only a minority of German hospitals will remain under state control). It’s important to note that change in these countries is slow and gradual—market reforms remain controversial. But if the United States was once the exception for viewing a vibrant private sector in health care as essential, it is so no longer."
http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_3_canadian_healthcare.html
The NHS, the oldest system, is in Britain:
"“Staff are being laid off, and deficits are at an all time high (£1.07bn for 2005-2006)” (Hazel Blears, Labour Party Chair and Minister Without Portfolio, labourachievements.blogspot.com/2006/08/23-investment-in-nhs.html).
In the National Review Online article, Coburn & Herzlinger state “more than 20,000 Brits would not have died from cancer in the U.S.” Just recently Alex Smallwood of the BMA (British Medical Association) was quoted in the Scotsman as saying: “’Rationing is reduction in choice. Rationing has become a necessary evil. We need to formalise rationing to prevent an unregulated, widening, postcode-lottery of care. Government no longer has a choice.’” (Moss, “NHS rationing is ‘necessary evil,’ says doctors,” 26 June 2007).
I can go on with respectable sources, such as the OWN governments. Let's do France as people have been LIED to about how wonderful that system is--if you need PRIVATE HEALTH insurance to be provided by employers 80% of the time, CLEARLY the government system is NOT so hot:
The much lauded French system raises some questions as well. From their Embassy site (ambafrance-us.org) they state that 96 percent of the population receives free or 100 percent reimbursed health care. They state the system is part of their Social Security and is funded from worker’s salaries (60 percent), “indirect taxes on alcohol and tobacco and by direct contribution paid by all revenue proportional to income, including retirement pensions and capital revenues.” They state that it appears that health insurance pays less to its doctors in France than in other European countries, but that 80 percent of the public have supplemental health insurance, typically from their employers. If they’re providing so well for the needs of the public, why is there a need for “supplemental” health insurance for the majority of the public and what about the additional cost that imposes? The site states that the poorest have free universal health care, funded by taxes. Long-term illness sufferers are to be reimbursed for their treatments. They do have private clinics, as well as public hospitals, and not-for-profit healthcare. In fact, “private medical care in France is particularly active in treating more than 50% of surgeries and more than 60% of cancer cases.”
Private insurance, which the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) site said in a 2004 report, was held by 92 percent of the French, helps to cover both vision and dental care which are not well covered under the government system. “The public system is facing chronic deficits and recent cost containment policies have not proved very successful.” The government is interested in having more of the tab picked up by private insurance (Buchmueller & Couffinhall, “Private Health Insurance in France,” 2004, oecd.org).
And, in the US, what the libs point to as the great program is the closest thing to UHC we have--Medicare. Unfortunately, it makes MY case that UHC does NOT work. Again, FACTS:
In the US, Medicare is going bankrupt. In 1998, Medicare premiums were $43.80 and in 2008 will be $96.40--up 120%. "Medigap" insurance is common because of the 20% co-pay required for service. Medicare HMOs are common because they reduce that burden without an extra charge in many cases. HOWEVER, many procedures which used to have no or a low co-pay NOW cost the full 20% for the HMO Medicare patient. ALSO the prescription coverage they tended to offer has been REDUCED in many cases to conform to the insane "donut hole" coverage of the feds. Doctors are leaving Medicare because of the low and slow pay AND because the crazy government wants to "balance" their Ponzi scheme on the backs of doctors.
"That dark cloud lurking over the shoulder of every Massachusetts physician is Medicare. If Congress does not act, doctors' payments from Medicare will be cut by about 5 percent annually, beginning next year through 2012, creating a financial hailstorm that would wreak havoc with already strained practices.
Cumulatively, the proposed cuts represent a 31 percent reduction in Medicare reimbursement. If the cuts are adjusted for practice-cost inflation, the American Medical Association says Medicare payment rates to physicians in 2013 would be less than half of what they were in 1991."
http://www.massmed.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=vs_mar05_top&TEMPLATE=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm&CONTENTID=11037
And when you turn it all over to the tender mercies of the government in the US you do get rationed care. Again more FACTS:
Oregon's at least honest about the FACT that ALL government health care IS RATIONED care:
"But the real-life story of 18-year-old Brandy Stroeder may come to embody a harsher truth: namely, that even as we perfect more and more advanced medical procedures, not everyone is going to have access to them. And, as Americans struggle to come up with an equitable health care system, that even the best-intentioned system can seem heartless when forced to balance the good of thousands against an individual's suffering.
The story began last fall when doctors told Brandy, who lives with her single mother in a weather-beaten farmhouse about an hour south of Portland, Ore., that she was likely to die within a year unless she got a simultaneous lung-liver transplant, an operation that has been performed fewer than a dozen times in the United States.
Under Oregon's unique Medicaid system, which openly rations healthcare in order to provide basic care to as broad a population as possible, Brandy was eligible for a liver transplant or a lung transplant, but not both. In January, and again after a review in May, the state-run health plan said no. There wasn't enough data to show the $250,000 procedure was worthwhile, the health plan's administrators said, and the plan didn't cover experiments.
But Brandy wouldn't take no for an answer. A tough, determined young woman who had managed to work part-time at a photo studio, baby-sit her boss's children, coach the high school football team and maintain a 3.2 grade point average between numerous and prolonged bouts in the hospital, Brandy wasn't about to give up her life without a fight. She sued the state of Oregon, charging that it was making a flawed moral choice in refusing to save her life. Since then her caustic, articulate criticisms of the Oregon system have given a vivid sense of the obstacles any universal healthcare plan for the nation would face.
"They'll pay for an alcoholic to get a liver transplant because they've been drinking all their life," she says, sitting with her mother at a rickety picnic table under a cherry tree by her front door. "They'll pay for a heroin addict to get cured, to help someone kick the cigarette habit. Those are things people do to themselves. If you put it to a vote the people would say pay for some girl's operation instead of some alcoholic's liver transplant or some crack head's needles. I just think it isn't very fair.'"
http://archive.salon.com/health/feature/2000/07/07/brandy/
Texas has also been the boldest in supporting the growing-in-popularity "futile care theory":
"Texas, however, has become ground zero for futile-care theory thanks to a draconian state law passed in 1999 — of dubious constitutionality, some believe — that explicitly permits a hospital ethics committee to refuse wanted life-sustaining care. Under the Texas Health and Safety Code, if the physician disagrees with a patient's decision to receive treatment, he or she can take it to the hospital ethics committee. A committee hearing is then scheduled, all interested parties explain their positions, and the members deliberate in private.
If the committee decides to refuse treatment, the patient and family receive a written notice. At that point, the patient/family has a mere ten days to find another hospital willing to provide the care, after which, according to the statute, "the physician and health care facility are not obligated to provide life-sustaining treatment."
Since the patients threatened with death by ethics committee are often the most expensive to care for, it will often be difficult for families to find other institutions willing to accept a transfer. But the futility deck may be especially stacked against Houston patients. Many city hospitals participate in the "Houston City-Wide Guidelines on Medical Futility," raising the suspicion that participating hospitals will not contradict each other's futility decrees.
If so, this would mean that patients seeking refuge from forced treatment termination will have to be transported to distant cities, as has already occurred in a few futile-care cases, perhaps even out of state. Illustrating the level of hardball some hospitals play against patients and families, the Clarke family's lawyer Jerri Ward told me that St. Luke's agreed to pay the $14,806 transportation costs to transfer Clarke to a hospital in Illinois — more than 1,000 miles away — if the decision to transfer is made on Thursday (4/27). If the family doesn't decide until Friday, the hospital will pay only one-half of the cost of transportation. Thereafter, it would pay nothing."
http://www.nationalreview.com/smithw/smith200604271406.asp
So, clearly UHC does NOT work, never has worked, and cannot work. Fortunately, a real system that does work CAN be created by reforming abuses and that's discussed in this book which provides a revamping of government health care programs that now exist to also allow ANYONE to get catastrophic care coverage WITH preventative medicine measures included:
http://www.booklocker.com/books/3068.html
Read the PDF, not the blurb, for the bulk of the plan. Book is searchable on Amazon.com
Cassandra Nathan's Save America, Save the World