If you changed jobs you got a different employer’s code, but your member number stayed the same. My individual policy was actually cheaper than my group policy, because I dropped the coverage for “grrrl stuff” like “birthing babies”, and saved $10/quarter.

Obama belongs to the Chicago school of idiots, and we are all paying the price of their failed policies. Fewer and fewer people can afford to pay the premiums and the “health care industry” had better start coming to grips with that reality. They have priced themselves out of the market, just like American manufacturers.

the problem of course, is that for that to work we’d have regulate, regulate, regulate. at a minimum we’d have to bring out all our anti-trust big guns and break up the huge insurance conglomerates, then we’d have to make them all into non-profits, and we’d have to outlaw for-profit insurance [at least for all the care that’s considered medically necessary], and last, we’d have to disincentivize the co-ops from engaging in competition.

which is all backwards from what the stupid congress critters believe and the evil congress critters want: which is for the competition provided by small non-profit co-ops to force the big for-profit insurance companies to lower their prices and raise their quality.

ROFL

i’d explain predator-prey relationships to these people, since i have a degree in it, but first i’d have to pick myself up off the floor, which hardly seems worth the trouble.

and obama would have us believe that expanding medicare would be a disruption! he’s either dumber than a box of rocks [which i don’t believe] or else he’s hoping that we’re box of rocks stoopid [which i do believe].
.-= ´s last blog ..fizzickz lab =-.

They do everything except what they claim to do – pay for health care.

No one has come up with a believable reason for Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Alabama advertising. They have around 80% of their market, so who are the ads for? That’s the kind of waste that drives me up the wall.

The worst part of it is that it didn’t have to be this way.

When I lived in upstate New York I had BC/BS, but so did everyone else. I had it through college, because it was so cheap that it was included in your college fees. At the time it was a mutual insurance company, which is why it was so cheap. You could afford it on unemployment insurance.

Because it was so wide spread all of your other insurance was cheaper, because the chance of someone being without insurance was so minimal. There were no non-profit hospitals in the city, but costs were low, because they weren’t struggling to collect money, or filling out multiple different forms.

When I moved to California I was floored at the prices for everything.

Since I left, BC/BS has converted to “for profit” status in that county, and the costs went through the ceiling.

No one would have been interested in a public plan in the old system, but the mood is definitely different now.

bite your tongue! it’s an extremely effective and efficient industry — at robbing the rest of us to insure the health of the fatcats’ swiss bank accounts.

The facts are plain for anyone who is willing to face them: Medicare beats nothing by infinity, and beats private insurance by an efficiency the private insurers don’t even want to think about. Give me the choice, in real life, face on, and watch how quickly I choose Medicare-for-all… and how quickly my financial situation benefits from the choice.

There is waste and fraud in our Medicare system, and more needs to be done to address it, but it is no where nearly as inefficient or ineffective as the private health insurance system in this country.

What I told them (really, their twenty-three year old staffers) is that I failed understand why Republicans demonized government, when the corruption and incompetence of the private sector is what got us into this recession in the first place. You listen to them spin it out and think that somehow the private sector has a purity to it that government does not. It’s so pure, as a matter of fact, that CEO’s gave themselves bonuses out of the stimulus money and still continue to fly across the country in private jets.

Regarding health care, I told them that government was no less flawed than the private sector, and thus they ought to entrust a public option to it with the same regard they have for their sainted private industry.
.-= ´s last blog ..Extreme Amusement =-.