Via Sinfonian at Blast Off!, Charlie Crist, the Republican governor of Florida, seems to be proposing a better health care plan than leading unDemocratic¹ Party Presidential candidates. He even acknowledges problems with dental care.
I know the unDemocrats are the party of change, because they have been nickel and diming me for years without doing anything about anything.
1. You can’t disenfranchise people and call yourself democratic.
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11 comments
i’m with sinfonian, i won’t be blowing kisses in crist’s direction just yet either.
$150/month, that’s awfully low when you’re talking about for-profit insurance. and crist thinks he can offer a plan that’s maybe even lower than that?! dear god, can i have some of whatever he’s smoking?
the wall street journal thinks crist’s plan sounds suspiciously like tennessee’s plan, where for $150/mo you get a maximum of $15,000 hospitalization and a total maximum benefit of $25,000. one presumes that’s a yearly cap, rather than a lifetime cap, but either way, that’s enough for a few doctor visits, a few tests, and maybe a broken arm if you fall off your skateboard. i’m thinking a heart attack possibly costs more than $25,000, and i know for a fact that cancer costs way more than that.
the only other plans i’ve ever actually known people to buy here in paradise in that same price range are [1] those ultra-high-deductible plans [deductibles of $10,000 or more]; [2] ‘wellness plans’ that cover only doctor visits and limited testing [no hospitalization or specialists]; [3] low-ball bids when an insurance company wants to break into a market or acquire a big customer [and the next year’s rates go way up].
The plan will only work if you get the healthy to buy in with the less well. That’s the reason universal health care works. It can’t possibly be a for profit plan, but if you include all state and local government workers and the currently uninsured you have a large pool of people.
You have to have an economy of scale and non-profit status to be feasible, but at least Crist is trying, which is more than the unDems are doing. After his experience with the insurance industry over hurricane insurance, I don’t think Crist believes they will be of any help in a solution.
The lege won’t do anything, so he can put out all kinds of plans.
Just for the record, my INITIAL hospitalization which was actually for pneumonia – one week, $32K. Part of that included use of nuclear medicine for a bronchoscopy and CT guided needle biopsy for the tumor, which came to about $10K.
So, yeah – one week treatment for pneumonia, which meant basically room & board, antibiotics, and respiratory therapy ran easily $22K.
That was JUST hospitalization – doesn’t include the doctor bills which I confidently expect to come pretty close to equal when you factor in the ER physician, radiologist, surgeon, and respiratory therapists.
Around here it’s $500 to walk into the Emergency Room, but when you have 4 million people paying $150/month that’s $7.2 billion dollars a year. That’s just a guess about the number of currently uninsured people in Florida, but there aren’t many jobs that have benefits in this state outside of the military or the government.
The average uninsured rate charged is twice the insured rate.
Charlie Crist, the Republican governor of Florida, seems to be proposing a better health care plan than leading unDemocratic¹ Party Presidential candidates.
better? really? crist doesn’t believe the insurance companies can be part of the solution? skeptical commenter remains… skeptical.
COMPREHENSIVE MARKET-BASED STRATEGIES TO ADDRESS THE UNINSURED IN FLORIDA
The lege won’t do anything, so he can put out all kinds of plans.
i won’t argue with you on that. nor will i argue with your unDem label.
You also haven’t commented on the fact that I found the cause if the “phantom lines”, but that’s OK.
At least, Charley hasn’t said “tax credits”, which sets me off, and he understands that you have to have everyone covered.
We are going to end up with a state or regional home/business insurance company the way things are going because the insurance companies don’t want to cover wind damage at all. When that happens, or if the flood insurance program is amended by Congress to make wind damage available, I think many will see the reality that insurance companies don’t really want to be in the insurance business.
At that point, the reality of the health insurance mess can be presented and we might make some progress that will actually help people.
[…] sounds like a Democrat sometimes, and he definitely has a lot of Democratic fans…” and Why Now? – Someone Want To Explain This: “Charlie Crist, the Republican governor of Florida, seems to […]
i did notice that they were gone. i didn’t say anything because i was afraid i might somehow get suckered into learning something about stylesheets. or html. or something. i am supremely content in my almost-idiot-proof point-and-click little world.
but ok, curiosity killed the commenter — what was it?
it looks like charlie’s health insurance pilot program would be coming to my county, though possibly not to my neighborhood. hard to consider a neighborhood underserved when all the neighbors are already in medicare, the lucky bastards. that said, and all my grousing aside, i’ll probably sign up for it if it’s available here.
on the property insurance, i don’t know whether we can blame crist or not, but the general sequence of events in my neck of the woods went something like this [so far]: ivan… insurance rates double… crist gets tough on insurance companies… insurance rates go up again, but only by half this time.
it’s always amazed me that wind and water damage have always been considered separate perils, especially here in hurricane alley, but i guess not enough rich people got inconvenienced by their insurance companies before now. it’s going to hurt me if trent lott’s front porch 😈 is what finally gets us going in the right direction on that.
It was a bloody graphic 1 pixel high that I had to add hundred pixels of width to and darken the end pixels. I’ve been looking at style sheets for almost a week, and it was a graphic.
You have some non-profit hospitals in your county, no such luck over here, so it might have a chance.
I don’t blame the Repubs for getting suckered, they are Repubs, so I set the bar low…OK, I lay it on the ground. The 60-day session is just absurd and leads to a lack of progress and understanding on the issues, especially with term limits. They are at the mercy of staff and lobbyists because they don’t have time to read what they are passing.
The insurance companies don’t want to sell wind coverage in the state and the sooner the state understands that and moves to create a pool, or pushes Congress to create a pool, the better. Half the country lives within 50 miles of a coast line, so there are a lot of people who aren’t going to be able to afford insurance.
You can’t get a mortgage, no matter what your credit looks like, or operate a business if you can’t get insurance.
In Right To Work states, if you’re single (or divorced) there’s a ton of folks working at $25K a year or less. $150/mo would not be affordable for many of them, esp if they need a car just to work.
Of course, that’s relative to other choices some will continue to make. If they choose to forgo cable TV, computers and ISPs, never go out to eat or to a movie, skip savings, skip any retirement plan, buy nothing but thrift store clothes, pay no child support, have no pets, never buy Xmas or birthday gifts, they probably can afford it at $25K/yr but at minimum wage or even $20K, it still remains impossible.
Kevin, you can get a one bedroom apartment for $350/month locally – the cost of living is very low in much of Florida, outside of the tourist areas. That’s the only reason it will work, because the cost of insurance of any kind in Florida is unrealistically high.
We also are increasing the minimum wage in the state thanks to a referendum, so we have a higher minimum wage than much of the nation.
It still won’t work unless the pool is large enough and includes enough healthy people to make up for those with pre-existing conditions.