Comments on: They Sold Their Souls

By: Bryan

Bryan — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 04:30:23 +0000

Yeah, it’s pretty amazing how citing specific laws improves memories when dealing with businesses.

I have an acquaintance who did a lot of business flying and he had cards printed with the various rules regarding what airlines had to do when they screwed up. He claimed it saved him a lot of time trying to reason with gate attendants.

By: whig

whig — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 04:24:14 +0000

Of course, I was born with my condition, and my sister-in-law sent me a law that in California means I should not have been forced into the HIPAA-pool at all (genetic diseases are protected), but I don’t want to be a bastard to KP and force them to drop my rates. Maybe I should, but I already feel kind of bad being as expensive to treat as I am.

By: whig

whig — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 04:13:35 +0000

What is truly remarkable is when you cite the specific law, they immediately *do* know.

By: whig

whig — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 04:09:11 +0000

I’d be out of luck in California if I didn’t do my legal research and tell Kaiser that they were required to cover me, because they won’t tell you how to get covered, and they deny knowledge of it until you tell them the law.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 00:14:40 +0000

That is the basic problem for a lot of people – if you are ever diagnosed with anything, you become tagged as “existing condition” and without intervention you can’t get insurance. You would be out of luck in Florida.

By: whig

whig — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 23:27:31 +0000

Steve, I paid a fortune for health insurance in Pennsylvania. I pay less than half as much for insurance in California. The difference is that in California, Kaiser was required (as all insurers are in this state) to offer their two most popular policies to HIPAA-qualified patients with pre-existing conditions, albeit at extra cost. I am not covered through my wife, so I’m not sure where that came from. For awhile in Pennsylvania, I was, kind of…because Highmark kicked me out of their insurance pool, we created a corporation, made my wife a sole corporate officer and joined the chamber of commerce in order to force Highmark to issue a policy. That was over a thousand dollars a month, plus chamber dues.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 21:15:00 +0000

When I was an employee, I don’t remember anyone asking me who I wanted heath coverage with, I got a Blue Cross/Blue Shield card with my ID and pamphlet on the system.

The Massachusetts experiment is going to be helpful for fighting what Hillary proposes and all of the insurance based systems. You can’t require private insurance companies to cover people they don’t want, so you are going to end up with an “assigned risk pool” just like car insurance.

We are seeing foreign doctors and nurses even down here and the interaction with the local version of English is not a pretty sight.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 19:55:39 +0000

Indeed, with K-P I have to use their doctors and clinics and hospitals and everything. It’s socialized medicine in the small, with all the worst irritances of the British health system, including the fact that English is not the native language of most of the doctors and very few of the doctors graduated from American medical schools (the latter actually bothers me more than the former, American medical schools still have much higher standards than Pakistani or Indian medical schools irregardless of what K-P tries to say).

Furthermore I don’t have any choice. My employer chooses my insurance, not me.

I’m just waiting for the Governator to leave office so that his Democratic successor can sign the Canadian-style health insurance bill that the Governator has already vetoed once. The Governator has proposed a Massachusetts-style RomneyHillaryCare system, but the Democrats in the state lege aren’t buying it — they look at Massachusetts and see a mess.

-Badtux the Health Penguin

By: Bryan

Bryan — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 03:44:57 +0000

While the emergency battlefield care is the best in the world, the military health care system is socialized medicine and the standard care has one annoying problem – you can’t always get the doctor you want, you get the doctor they assign to you.

The GOP keeps taking about choice, but most of the insurance plans in this area tell you which doctors you can see and which labs you have to use for tests. That is really annoying.

By: Steve Bates

Steve Bates — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 02:42:00 +0000

I’m glad someone is making that distinction clearly. No wonder Hillary burst into laughter when some GOPer described her proposal as “socialized medicine…” so did I.

I had one encounter with actual socialized medicine, in Austria in 1978. On the whole, it was a very satisfactory encounter, to the extent one can judge anything when one is as sick as the proverbial dog. And I was merely a legal resident for a summer, the kind of person the GOP back home would have argued didn’t deserve public medical care. But the Austrians gave it to me, at a very reasonable cost.

I have no dog in the race regarding the generalities of the system we end up with. I don’t care if it fits in one or another “-ism”; health care is not intrinsically ideological for me. I don’t care, in general, how I pay for it, through taxes or privately, as long as the system is reasonably efficient and distributes both care and costs fairly.

OTOH, I care a great deal about getting good care for a price everyone can afford. Most of us are getting neither of those now. And the private insurance companies are making out like bandits… indeed, they are bandits.

Health care is unlike any other service. It is not like auto repair. There is no body of evidence showing that pooling all our resources would enable us to negotiate better prices for brake jobs; competition does an adequate job there. But there is in my opinion overwhelming evidence that we could do better in health care by cutting out the for-profit middlemen from the payment process. Only a seriously broken political process allows a medical care payment system as disastrous as our current one to continue in place.

For what it’s worth, whig, I pay a friggin’ fortune for individual private insurance. Sometimes that’s what one has to do as an independent contractor with no spouse whose insurance one can ride on. The closer I get to not being able to afford insurance at all, the better all the other systems… France’s, Britain’s, Canada’s… look to me.

And what Bush just did to the children with his SCHIP veto should earn him a free trip to Hell. (Too bad I don’t believe in Hell.)