Even CNN Has Noticed
Tom Cohen writes that False rumors influencing health care debate [Gee, ya think?]
WASHINGTON (CNN) — A woman asked Rep. Allen Boyd at a town hall meeting the other day if health care reform proposals would force people to let the government access their bank accounts.
“That’s not true,” the Florida Democrat responded. “When someone sends you something on the Internet that sounds crazy, how about just checking it a little bit?”
The CNN Truth Squad, which fact-checks political claims, has debunked the bank-access rumor as false. Yet that claim, and others that have been disproved, keep coming up in the national debate on health care reform, inflaming an already emotional issue.
…
Wendell Potter, a former insurance company communications executive, told CNN that the insurance industry deliberately spreads false information with the goal of disrupting the debate.
The insurance industry hires public relations firms that create front groups to try to “destroy health care reform by using terms like ‘government takeover of the health care system’ or we are heading down toward a ‘slippery slope toward socialism’ or ‘we’re going to kill your grandpa’ because of these health care regulations,” said Potter, now a senior fellow at the Center for Media and Democracy, which calls itself a nonpartisan watchdog group on public relations spin.
Asked to respond to Potter’s accusation, the president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, Robert Zirkelbach, acknowledged in an e-mail Wednesday that the group opposes some aspects of Democratic health care proposals.
“We have been very clear and up front since day one about our opposition to a government-run insurance plan that would dismantle employer coverage, bankrupt hospitals, and increase the federal deficit,” Zirkelbach’s e-mail said. He denied that employees of his group, which is the national association of health insurers, were “responsible for disruptive and inappropriate tactics at health care town hall meetings.”
However, some of the language cited by Potter is used by politicians, including Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, who told the NBC program “Meet the Press” on Sunday that “the Democrats want a government plan, where the government will take over health care.”
Alan Boyd is probably listed as a Blue Dog, but Dixiecrat is closer to the truth, and so are the people he represents in Florida’s district 2. The only reason he isn’t a Republican is because people don’t want to go to the trouble of changing their party affiliation. Whoever is asking the question, probably isn’t from the district or they would know better. The thing is, they really need Medicare for All in district 2, because it contains some the poorest counties in the state.
The health insurance companies, insurance companies in general, have no intention of reducing profits. Any savings they make are going to profits, not reduced premiums, just ask anyone in a state that went with the “tort reform” program of the malpractice insurers. Their cost may have been reduced, but the premiums continued to rise. These people exist to make money, they don’t give a damn about policy holders. In many states they have monopolies, so why would they?
25 comments
These people exist to
maketake moneyfixed it for ya.
.-= last blog ..Woman’s best friend’s best friend =-.
yes, i’m pretty sure boyd is officially a blue dog; i’m pretty sure i saw his name on the house.gov blue dog website.
and yeah, he’s not serving his constituents well at all if he’s for anything other than medicare for all. i think there might be a few counties in central/south florida that are as poor as some of the ones in fl-02, but not many.
.-= last blog ..Woman’s best friend’s best friend =-.
The little ones along the Alabama and Georgia are truly dirt poor, as in the dirt is too poor to even raise kudzu. The chicken processors wiped out the few people who had a start at making a living when they walked away from what poultry farmers thought was an agreement to buy their birds.
When turpentine went away and St Joe changed from paper to land development, the job opportunities became severely limited.
These are people who need help to get anything.
What about that ugly rumor that 50% of bankruptcies are caused by healthcare costs? It just isn’t true. The Democrats are intentionally misquoting a Harvard study to spread fear among the populace on that one.
What about Obama’s statement that he would take back $60billion in subsidies from the Insurance companies to finance this healthcare bill? Not quite true. He will not take back subsidies for Medicare, SCHP, COBRA, Medicaid or veterans benefits, so where else is that $60 bil that he spoke of coming from? it’s not, but none of the media want to question those things.
The Democrats aren’t going to pass this bill because they are too divided on it. Why do they keep telling us the Republicans are somehow at fault?
Liberals do not question Democratic dishonesty.
I assume you are referring to Medical Bankruptcy in the United States, 2007: Results of a National Study which was published in The American Journal of Medicine which says that 62.1% of personal bankruptcies in the US were caused by medical expenses. The 50% figure, is actually 49.6%, and that represents the percentage of personal bankruptcies that involved medical expenses by people who had medical insurance, which is 80% of all medical bankruptcies.
Math is not easy for some, so I excuse your confusion, and all you need to do is read the study for yourself, so that you might avoid embarrassing displays of ignorance the next time. The 62.1% figure is in the introduction on the first page.
Not that it really matters, but I’m not a Democrat and didn’t vote for Obama or McCain.
As for why people blame Republicans, well when you have committed war crimes, abrogated treaties, violated laws and the Constitution as the previous Republican administration did, it becomes a habit to consider Republicans criminals.
dirt that won’t support kudzu is poor indeed.
.-= last blog ..Fortunately, =-.
I’m afraid the ability to know how to think, assess information, and check it for validity is lost on a major portion of citizens of this country.
It’s almost as if they’ve reverted to enabled 7th graders proudly denouncing something because somebody told them it’s so, and they don’t like it one bit.
Oh course they don’t really care if it has nothing to do with what’s in a particular health care bill or not.
The message seems to be we’re ignorant and it feels GOOD!! Now don’t you try and get me with that ” consequences of actions thing.”
how bout we start keeping track of the public officials that so readily spout falsehoods? I dont consider myself allied to any party but rather line up with those whom are trying to accomplish something use full. I pay my families health insurance myself every month and over the past 4 years it has doubled ! I am no economist but even i can recognize an alarming trend ie my income has not kept up. (hardly) Secondly i want to live in a country where the sick are cared for. it seems readily obvious that we are not doing very well and the system left to itself is not accomplishing the job. The answers are not obvious nor could they possibly be found in one try yet there are those who seem so anxious to derail the process with fear rather than debate the solutions with truth and objectivity. Quotes like “this will be Obama’s waterloo” expose how are politicians approach this like a game to be won or lost rather than a path to be navigated. When representatives such as Republican Senator Chuck Grassley feel free to make up facts to support their arguments I say vote them out next time!
The schools still try to do their best to educate people, but they keep getting tasked with all kinds of things that aren’t really their problem, and then criticized for not being able to do things they were never supposed to be doing. Add in the “agendas” of some of the school boards that also have nothing to do with what schools are supposed to be doing, and it’s not surprising that kids aren’t learning.
Emphasizing “the test” is a great way to force failure.
Going along with “the herd” is a lot easier than thinking for yourself. The problem is that the herd is concerned with its survival, not yours.
OK – is it true that the Obamacare will pay for illegal imagrants, undocumented workers or what ever they are called this month? YES it will. How about what Gov Palin stated about the death counseling? They said it didn’t exist, yet the Dems removed this clause from the bill. Knowledge. Do more that Obama and congress has done in the last few months…Read the bill people! Decide for yourself. Stop letting Pelosi and Reed stuff 1000+ pages of pork down our throats through fear and intimidation.
The thing is Rick, having everyone covered is a matter of self-preservation. If someone catches the Swine Flu, or something else, and isn’t covered, we don’t know it’s spreading and it will be much worse for everyone, no matter what their insurance status is.
Standard pre-natal care costs a total of about $500 for the entire pregnancy. One day in a neo-natal unit is $100,000. It is criminally stupid not to make pre-natal care available to everyone. Canada and Europe have very few neo-natal centers, because they don’t need them.
Other countries catch problems early, while people in the US don’t go until it is an emergency. We need all of these extra hospital beds and other medical centers because we let things go until they are major emergencies, rather than catching them when they could be handled in a doctor’s office. This is stupid, It is a waste of money and resources.
A single payer system is the cheapest way of providing health care to people, because it wipes out the 30% overhead fee that goes to insurance companies. That is a 30% reduction before you start looking at all waste in the delivery of health care. Before anyone can tell me the current system works, they have to explain why a half liter of salt water in a plastic bag costs $250. Normal saline is sodium chloride, table salt, in distilled water, and hospitals charge $250 per half liter “unit”. How is that not a rip-off?
Your ignorance is rather overwhelming, John, but I’ll try to help you out.
1. Current law requires that hospitals treat anyone who comes into an emergency room, regardless of their ability to pay. There’s nothing in any of the current bills [there are at least 4 different bills on health care currently in Congress] that changes that existing requirement. This has been the law for years.
2. Obama hasn’t got a health care bill in Congress, nor has he endorsed any of the current bills.
3. Former Governor Palin is totally wrong in her pronouncement. In several of the bills there are provisions to pay doctors once every 5 years for an office visit to discuss living wills/medical directives. It is a change to Medicare, and thus, is only available to those 65 and older on Medicare.
4. The provision in the Senate bill was added by Senator Johnny Isakson (R-Georgia), and Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has vowed to remove it. Not a Democrat in sight.
5. The only bill with 1000+ pages is HR 3200, which hasn’t even cleared all of the committees, and has almost no similarity to what is going on in the Senate.
Assuming you spelled you name correctly, that’s the only thing about your comment that is correct, John.
We need all of these extra hospital beds and other medical centers…
actually, we don’t really have extra hospital beds, and could use a few more: we’re waaaaay down the list [#27 by this accounting] on hospital beds.
a couple of references for john:
section 246, page 143 here, of hr3200, is titled NO FEDERAL PAYMENT FOR UNDOCUMENTED ALIENS. apologies for the shouting, but it’s a direct c&p from the thomas link, and the situation sorta seemed to call for it anyway.
the part about MEDICARE paying for help with living wills and such, instead of making people pay for this help out of their own pockets, starts on page 424 [section 1233].
i think the health ‘reforms’ that congress is pushing aren’t worth the paper [and pixels] they’re written on, and am hoping these bills will all die [and get replaced by single payer], so i usually refrain from correcting people’s mistaken notions, but some days even i can’t stand it.
raise taxes a little on all of us, a lot on the richest of us, and open up medicare to everyone.
.-= last blog ..Fortunately, =-.
My point on the beds was the same as neo-natal units – if you catch things early, you don’t need hospitalization.
Actually, the number of beds is splotchy. We have too much medical care in my area, for the number of people, but if you head up to the I-10 corridor there’s almost nothing. Medical care isn’t based on people, it’s based on the money available.
He mentioned the provision on living wills being removed, that is only talked about in the Senate bill by Grassley, and Isakson is pretty annoyed about the way Palin characterized his provision and Grassley’s grand-standing. Isakson makes Grassley look like Karl Marx.
///Edited by moderator as a double post. The original is comment 8, up a ways.///
The opponents of health care reform routinely insult the Canadian health care system. I think every American should watch this video:
http://johnrj08.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/this-is-a-must-see-for-every-american-who-is-interested-in-health-care-reform/
Welcome in John.
Some people just don’t want to understand anything that runs counter to their prejudices. They don’t seem to accept that the “government” is all of us; that’s what “We the People” is all about at the start of the Constitution.
true about the splotchy allocation of resources being a problem.
on the overall need for resources, it’s expensive to keep spare capacity, but it’s nice to have some in case of emergency.
the authors of the dartmouth atlas project make a big to-do about ‘supply-sensitive medicine’ [ie, spare capacity just sitting around is going to get used whether it’s really needed or not] being the driver of costs, but in combing through their data tables, i’ve found enough areas where that doesn’t seem to hold true. san francisco, touted as being ‘efficient’ [ie, low-spending] has the highest number of doctors per capita in the country, and by a good-sized margin too. rochester mn, home of the mayo clinic [also touted as ‘efficient’] has a noticeably higher number of specialists per capita than does the much-maligned mcallen, for example. not sure which data they cherry-picked to ‘prove’ that having more specialists per capita causes higher spending to happen.
similarly, i didn’t find anything especially predictive about the number of hospital beds per capita either, but i didn’t look at that dataset as closely.
the two interesting [to me] things i’ve found so far in their data…
while there is a subset of the data where higher spending correlates [weakly] with higher mortality, the very highest-spending regions all have lower-than-average mortality [none, zip, zilch, zero areas having higher than average mortality spent much more than the national average in $$, and most of those areas spent well less than the national average].
there’s a general trend, again a very weak correlation: the greater the number of doctors per capita, the lower the mortality rate.
there’s a positive correlation [also weak] between hospital beds per capita and mortality, suggesting that yes, hospital beds kill people! 😈 but coupled with the negative correlation of doctors and mortality, it looks [to me, on the surface] that possibly it’s understaffed hospitals killing people, but i’d have to dig into the data a lot more than i have so far to try to prove or disprove that hypothesis.
we could maybe afford more doctors and hospital beds where they’re needed if we weren’t giving that money to insurance company fatcats instead [not to mention hospital chain fatcats]. since digging into all this, i’ve become a fan of the vha and the nhs. forget medicare, nationalize the whole darn thing.
.-= last blog ..Fortunately, =-.
If either swine flu or bird flu strike in a meaningful way a lot of areas are going to be in big trouble, as the for-profit hospital chains tend to buy up smaller hospitals and then shut them down to force up the utilization of their facilities and reduce the workforce to the minimum required by law.
Logically the initial introduction of specialists in an area would increase costs in that area, as people who were once referred to other areas for treatment, can no be treated locally. It hasn’t been that long since people in this area would be referred to hospitals in large cities, like New Orleans, Jacksonville, or Birmingham for certain conditions, but are now treated locally. That would definitely skew the numbers, as the spending was there, but it appeared in other locations that had the facilities for the problem.
I think that under-staffing is a major problem in outcomes. If there isn’t adequate staff of all kinds, including housekeeping and maintenance, hospitals become cesspits of infection. When you have 80k+ dying from mistakes, and another 80k+ from hospital infections every year, things are broken.
We have to do something, and HR 3200 doesn’t deal with any of the problems, it makes them worse in many ways.
we’re still a lower-than-average-spending area, and a higher-than-average-mortality area here in the panhandle [going by the dartmouth data], and yes, there’s increased specialty medicine here that people went away for before, but we still send a lot of people away to shands in gainesville, to mayo in jacksonville, to uab in birmingham.
and i now know 3 people, from here, who have traveled to france for cancer treatment, because they had the money and felt they could get cutting edge treatment there. and back when i had insurance and could afford to go to doctors [and consider elective surgery] one of them suggested i either travel to germany for it, since they were doing it better there, or wait a few years until the new technique made it here and several doctors had had a chance to learn and practice it.
it’s beyond me how supposedly smart people can look at not just the hospital industry and the insurance industry, but a range of industries, and NOT see that competition often means ‘put the other guy out of business by hook or by crook’. it’s pollyanna-ish in the extreme to believe that competition always and only results in lower prices and higher quality and more choices.
it’s also beyond me how supposedly smart people can expect doctors to practice cutting-edge medicine when they have to spend significant amounts of their time arguing with insurance companies.
sigh… and i haven’t even got to the maintenance and housekeeping yet.
bird flu, yeah. one of my favorite bloggers [for his writing style, not for his philosophical bent] once wrote a story [long since disappeared from the interwebz] that contained the line in 1918 a single sparrow killed 50 million people with its bare hands! [i could be misremembering that number].
.-= last blog ..Fortunately, =-.
The Spanish flu outbreak was at least 50 million deaths.
You look at the media business, newspapers included, and there’s no competition. WalMart wipes out local competition in many markets. Lowes and Home Depot kill local hardware stores. Banks keep consolidating. Industry after industry is being homogenized by a few big corporations.
When they get caught, they pay the fine, and continue on their way.
It isn’t even cutting edge medicine. My Mother’s kidney doctor couldn’t make a living in a solo practice because of the overhead of his billing staff. Doctors are one group who could “go Galt” and have it stick.
The regulations are written to help corporations, and doctors are small businesspeople, so they get screwed.
It isn’t even cutting edge medicine. My Mother’s kidney doctor couldn’t make a living in a solo practice because of the overhead of his billing staff.
too true. i’ve forgotten where i saw it, some video on the web i think, but in france the doctors in solo practice often don’t even have receptionists, let alone billing clerks. their system is that simple to work within. one of the deals the doctors made with the french govt way back when was that they’d accept a national health insurance scheme if the insurers weren’t allowed to dictate treatments. [i’d go look up a link to that, but my computer is still/again having issues].
.-= last blog ..Fortunately, =-.
If we can get single payer through, Dr. Martin will be back in solo practice in a flash. He is constantly complaining to anyone who will listen that he’s tired of having the group tell him how to practice medicine, especially telling him that he “wastes too much time with patients”.
wasting time with patients, what a concept. these people sound like they’d faint dead away at the thought of making house calls [which my parents’ doctor does, to a limited extent].
.-= last blog ..Fortunately, =-.
He is supposed to have three patients per hour. That’s like the piece-rate I got when I worked on an assembly line in the 1960s. That’s how Soviet factories were judged, by the number of units they produced, not on the quality of the units. I think people know how that worked out.