Comments on: The Stupid

By: Badtux

Badtux — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 04:36:47 +0000

They qualify under the classic definition of pornography in that they are offensive to community values and have no socially redeeming features. Amen, brother. Amen. - Badtux the Applauding Penguin .-= last blog ..Heckuva job, Baucus =-.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:43:11 +0000

In reply to Badtux.

Badtux, my solution is Medicare for All, HR 676, single payer. KP and the Mayo Clinic are special hybrids, and not the norm. I had BC/BS for years on both individual and group contracts through college, work, and on my own. They essentially covered everyone in the county in New York where I lived, and everyone paid the same rate for the basic package, regardless of your status in a group. Essentially, individual coverage was just a different group. The group number changed on my card, but my personal number didn’t change in a decade.

Any time now my older brother will be shifting from KP to Medicare because he has some stuff that needs to be taken care of, and KP has been stalling. If you hit 60 with any of these companies, they are going to stiff you on care, hoping to transfer the costs to Medicare.

I’m sick of trying to deal with them as both an employer, and a policy holder. They lie, they take your money and refuse to honor the term of their policies. They qualify under the classic definition of pornography in that they are offensive to community values and have no socially redeeming features.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 21:33:35 +0000

Bryan, it isn’t that simple. I have Chiseler Permanente HMO. Thing is, Chiseler Permanente, while officially not-for-profit, basically operates on behalf of major employers here in California with a mandate to do one thing, and one thing only — provide the least medical care they can get away with for the lowest price possible. This isn’t surprising when you realize that it was founded as basically the company doctor for the Henry J. Kaiser family of shipyards, mines, and aluminum foundries in order to keep those pesky private physicians away from Kaiser’s workers, and while Kaiser obviously opened it up to other employers and individuals, it still has that company doctor mentality. So as a result, my boss has been forced to suffer for three months with a crushed disc in his back before he gets even the slightest effective treatment (i.e., a direct injection of anti-inflammatories directly into the spinal column where the disc is inflamed), instead being “treated” with oral anti-inflammatories and pain killers that are useless for this condition (since they cannot make it past the blood-brain boundary at the spinal column). They’re slaves to their statistical model that says, “most people who come in with back problems, if you send them away with aspirin, will be ‘cured’ within a few months as they naturally heal”, he had to fight even to get the MRI that showed the crushed disc and three slipped discs because they objected “but MRI’s will often show asymptotic slipped discs in absolutely healthy college students, see, here’s our paper proving that an MRI isn’t necessary to diagnose a back problem.”

Health insurers will continue a race to the bottom to fund as little as possible as long as their major purchasers are employers rather than individuals, regardless of whether they’re for-profit or not-for-profit. This might reduce costs but at the expense of healthcare. So going not-for-profit is not going to work as long as health insurers are working for employers, not for us. Sen. David Vitter has that much right. The rest of his prescription is utter nonsense, but frankly, employer-funded health insurance just ain’t working nowdays. We need either Medicare For All, or at least a Swiss-style system with mandates and subsidies for individual insurance that has sufficient mandates and subsidies so that everybody can afford health care. If we eliminated every bit of profit from the private health insurance system, that would reduce total health care spending by a whole 5% at most… not a small decrease, but certainly not the cause of the current cost escalation. There’s no magic bullet that will take healthcare back to being as cheap as it was in 1960, because modern medicine is simply more expensive and can cure far more diseases than in 1960 (if you got kidney disease in 1960 you *died*, for example — dialysis was still in its early experimental stages, and organ transplants were science fiction), and “make all insurers not-for-profit” can’t change that fact because the cost escalation is happening on the provider side, not the insurer side.

– Badtux the Numbers Penguin

By: Bryan

Bryan — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:43:49 +0000

Back when Blue Cross/Blue Shield was a mutual insurance company we didn’t have these problems. It is only when the health insurance companies became for-profits that all of the abuses started.

The solution would be to return insurance companies to their mutual roots, but no one will get behind that idea.

By: LadyMin

LadyMin — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:29:03 +0000

I actually took a look at the Pelican Institute's Report. Ugh... I can't really take their conclusions seriously. But I guess you can twist the facts any way you want to prove your point. What these guys need is a time machine. Then they can go back 100 years where they belong. .-= last blog ..Zucchini Muffins =-.