Welcome Guest [Log In] [Register]
Add Reply
ObamaCare; All HealthReform News / Comments
Topic Started: Jun 17 2009, 12:52 PM (1,680 Views)
Lodge Pro 345
Member Avatar

.

Wall Street Journal: Son of Medicaid!
MUST READ!


JUNE 18, 2009

'Public Option': Son of Medicaid
Lard atop lard that only a politician or bureaucrat could love.


In his speech on health care to the American Medical Association, President Obama explained why the U.S. has "failed" (yet again) to provide comprehensive reform that "covers everyone." He had a list of the failing people, who "simply couldn't agree" on reform: doctors, insurance companies, businesses, workers, others. And "if we're honest," he said (ergo, disagreeing with this is dishonest) we must add to the list "some interest groups and lobbyists" who have used "fear tactics."

It seems to me, if we're honest, that one other contributor to the health-care morass should have been on the president's list: Congress. Indeed a close reading of Mr. Obama's speech suggests he holds the political class innocent insofar as he blames everyone else but them. Can this be true?

Back before recorded history, in 1965, Congress erected the nation's first two monuments to health-care "reform," Medicaid and Medicare. Medicaid was described at the time as a modest solution to the problem of health care for the poor. It would be run by the states and "monitored" by the federal government.

The reform known as Medicaid is worth our attention now because Mr. Obama is more or less demanding that the nation accept another reform, his "optional" federalized health insurance program. He suggested several times before the AMA that opposition to it will consist of "scare tactics" and "fear mongering."

Whatever Medicaid's merits, this federal health-care program more than any other factor has put California and New York on the brink of fiscal catastrophe. I'd even call it scary.

Spending on health and welfare, largely under Medicaid, makes up one-third of California's budget of some $100 billion. In New York Gov. David Paterson's budget message, he notes that "New York spends more per capital ($2,283) on Medicaid than any other state in the country."

After 45 years, the health-care reform called Medicaid has crushed state budgets. A study by the National Governors Association said a decade ago that because of "new requirements" imposed by federal law -- meaning Congress -- "Medicaid has evolved into a program whose size, cost and significance are far beyond the original vision of its creators."

In his speeches, Mr. Obama makes the original vision of his "public option" insurance plan sound about as simple as driving through toll booths with an electronic pass on your windshield. It's going to be all about "best practices" with patients "reimbursed in a thoughtful way," as if the federal government is about to become just another big Google.

Medicaid is a morass. Since the program's inception, Congress has loaded it up every few years with more notions of what to cover, shifting about 43% of the ever-upward cost onto someone else's tab, mainly the states. A 1988 congressional mandate requires local schools to pay for schooling and related services for disabled children, but because Congress underfunds its mandates, the states pay the rest through Medicaid.

The list of add-ons is endless, and there's little about it that is thoughtful. Why shouldn't one think that, as with Medicare and Medicaid, the Obama Public Option in time will become an impossible fog for patients to navigate? But unto eternity the program's administrative complexity will provide work for bureaucrats, Members of Congress, their staffs, lobbyist spouses and the "health-care" establishment of foundations and economists.

Oh, and the courts. The fact that this is a public program ensures not just congressional meddling but also makes it vulnerable to litigation. Over time, the Sotomayors of the federal bench will make it bigger. One piece of California's incredible budget mess flows from a federal judge's 2006 decision to seize control of the state's prison-health system and make the state pay billions for new health spending imagined by his appointed federal overseer.

Medicaid alone didn't put California and New York on the brink. Add in spending on public education and you've accounted for about 60% of their budgets. This drives the deficits and gets all the ink, but not least among the casualties of bigness is the idea of governance.

The elected legislatures of California, which holds 36.7 million American citizens, and New York, with 20 million, are essentially falling apart as governing bodies. The whole country has witnessed the spectacle of the comic "coup" in New York's Senate in Albany the past two weeks.

With collapse comes a truth: The bigger the government, the smaller the politicians. As mandated entitlements grow, the spending "crowds out" the need or obligation to think or to govern. Legislators with nothing very real to do become lazy, slack and corrupt. They become Albany. Or Sacramento. Or Trenton.

Mr. Obama's plan is intended to "guarantee" health insurance for all. Whatever the truth of that, its outlays -- larded atop Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security -- guarantee that Congress will become more like the states' clown shows. But they are expensive clowns.

In his speech, Mr. Obama said the cost of the Public Option won't add to the deficit: "I've set down a rule for my staff, for my team -- and I've said this to Congress -- health-care reform must be, and will be, deficit-neutral in the next decade." If we're honest, that means tax increases are inevitable. Sounds scary to me.

Write to henninger@wsj.com

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124528251402125409.html


.

Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Kethra

wayne fontes
Jun 17 2009, 08:13 PM
Hey LodgePro, Read This blog post about what meaningful health care reform would entail.
Bah I already wrote the exact same thing here.

Obama's health care plan is a band aid on a traumatic amputation. Your still going to bleed to death.

Its stupid
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Joan Foster

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=330130725124804


The Congressional Budget Office projects that the latest Democratic bill in the Senate would add another $1 trillion to the budget over the next decade, and they suggest that's only a partial estimate.

Remember when the Democrats and their media allies wailed about how the Iraq War wastefully drove up the national debt?

The Post's chart estimated that the Iraq war costs from 2003-2008 totaled $551 billion, a pittance compared to the massive load of debt the Democrats want to pass right now. And they want to pass it at breakneck speed, so just like the "stimulus" bill, it will become law before the public learns its manifold outrages.

Sadly, this Washington Post article notwithstanding, the news media aren't questioning the new health "reform" drive. They are enabling it.

ABC News has announced plans to put Barack Obama in prime time again from the White House to push his health-nationalizing agenda for an hour — and then another half-hour on "Nightline."

ABC will broadcast live from the White House for "World News" and "Good Morning America," interviewing both Barack and Michelle Obama.

It's bad enough that NBC News just gave Obama two hours of fluffy promotion in prime time (followed quickly by two hours of prime-time fluff reruns).

Dissent Not Tolerated

Now, ABC isn't going to promote how Obama buys hamburgers for the staff and has a cute puppy. They're going to help him sell his hard-left "Prescription for America."

Forget participation. ABC isn't allowing time even for any official Republican rebuttal. Republicans will have to hope they find a spot or two in the audience ABC News selects with the promise of "divergent opinions in this historic debate."

ABC also promises the participation of its medical correspondent Dr. Tim Johnson, who's been a blatant cheerleader for a European-style "right" to health care.

This isn't unprecedented. ABC handed over two hours of morning airtime after Columbine for Bill and Hillary Clinton to lament our country's gun culture in 1999.

In 1994, NBC News offered the Clintons a two-hour special to promote Hillary-care, paid for by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a major supporter of socialized medicine. The Democrats always seem "overprivileged" when they want to sell their programs on network news.

Skepticism is warranted when ABC promises "divergent opinions," which probably means a debate between leftists, that people who want a single-payer socialist system will be granted the floor.

No Close-Up For Bush

If the past is prologue, if Charlie Gibson has any tough questions for Obama, he'll be asking him to explain why our ultraliberal president's too much of a conservative on health care.

snip

More conservative White Houses have not been awarded a supportive network platform. Does anyone remember that ABC prime-time special that allowed President Bush to sell Social Security privatization in 2005?

Or the two-hour, 2006 prime-time Bush White House special promoting the War on Terror? Try not to laugh too hard at the impossibility of such a concept.

You can just hear the protests, can't you? "Why, we can't do that! We're journalists!"

In prime time, Barack Obama is overexposed and underchallenged.

If ABC wants to add any sliver of credibility to all this freely offered airtime, it will ask the president to defend adding $10 trillion to the national debt in the decade to come, and ask if the current government's priorities should really require a deficit three times the "investment" of World War II.
Edited by Joan Foster, Jun 18 2009, 12:29 PM.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
LTC8K6
Member Avatar
Assistant to The Devil Himself
$4T not $1T:

http://spectator.org/blog/2009/06/16/report-kennedy-bill-would-actu

Numbers may be way off regarding Obama's 100K deaths a year:

http://www.pointoflaw.com/archives/2009/06/those-hundred-t.php
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Baldo
Member Avatar

No doubt we need health care reform but we must first start on controlling costs. That is what is killing us.

Before any expansion of Health-care we must get costs contained.

1) We don't even have enough Doctors, Nurses, and buildings to handle an influx of 50 million new people.
2) Any Health Based Savings in Preventive Care will take a Decade to get any results. (Not that it isn't a bad idea)

But more than anything we must be honest. The rich won't be paying for everybody. The middle class will take a hit, a huge hit. Kennedy is trying to exempt Union Health-care benefits from a surcharge while the rest of us pick up the tab. Great idea huh? Exempt Federal, State ,Local Govt Employees Unions and all Unions so that non union people have to pay. Sounds like a recruitment plan to me.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Baldo
Member Avatar

I wish we should vote on this! They are not even telling is what it going to cost us!

...Across the Capitol, Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee privately circulated a list of possible tax increases to pay for expanded health care.

They ranged from raising the Medicare tax, slapping a 10-cents-per-can increase on sweetened drinks, raising the alcohol tax, imposing a new payroll tax on employers equal to 3 percent of their health care expenditures and taxing employer-provided health insurance benefits above certain levels.

Also under consideration was a value added tax, a sort of national sales tax, of up to 1.5 percent or more, with housing, education, financial services and medical care potentially exempt.

House Democrats were expected to unveil an outline of their own to expand health coverage on Friday, although several officials said they did not plan to include mention of the tax increases under consideration....snipped

http://tinyurl.com/ng2s23
Edited by Baldo, Jun 18 2009, 10:13 PM.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Lodge Pro 345
Member Avatar

.
Obama's Doctor Knocks ObamaCare!


Obama's Doctor Knocks ObamaCare
David Whelan, 06.18.09, 5:08 PM ET

David Scheiner, an internist based in the Chicago neighborhood of Hyde Park, has a diverse practice of lower-income adults from the nearby housing projects mixed with famous patients like U.S. Sen. Carol Mosely Braun, the late writer Studs Terkel and, most notably, President Barack Obama.

Scheiner, 71, was Obama's doctor from 1987 until he entered the White House; he vouched for the then-candidate's "excellent health" in a letter last year. He's still an enthusiastic Obama supporter, but he worries about whether the health care legislation currently making its way through Congress will actually do any good, particularly for doctors like himself who practice general medicine. "I'm not sure he really understands what we face in primary care," Scheiner says.

Scheiner takes a few other shots too. Looking at Obama's team of health advisors, Scheiner doesn't see anyone who's actually in the trenches. "I have a suspicion they pick people from the top echelon of medicine, people who write about it but haven't been struggling in it," he says.

Scheiner is critical of Obama's pick for Health and Human Services secretary--Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, who used to work as the chief lobbyist for her state's trial lawyers association.

"He doesn't see all the pain, it's so tragic out here," he says. "Obama's wonderful, but on this one I'm not sure if he's getting the right input."

What should the president be focused on? Scheiner thinks that a good health reform would be "Medicare for all," a single-payer system where the government would cover everyone and pay for it by cutting out waste in the system. "A neurosurgeon gets paid $20,000 for cutting into the neck of my patient. Have him get paid $1 million a year instead of $2 million or $3 million. He won't starve," Scheiner says.

Scheiner thinks that Obama's "public plan" reform doesn't go far enough. He supports the idea of that option for people who don't like or can't afford their HMO. But he worries that it will be watered down or not happen at all. "It's nonsense that the private insurance companies need to be protected," he says. "Why? Because they've done such a good job?"

He thinks that Americans have been scared into believing that they will lose the coverage they already have if a public plan is created. And he worries that nobody cares about the 50 million uninsured. "I have people who have lost their jobs and come to me and I give them drug samples," he says.

Scheiner says he thinks that Obama probably sees the virtues of a single-payer system but has decided it would be politically impossible to create one.

Reid Cherlin, an assistant White House press secretary who covers health issues, wrote in an e-mailed statement, "The President has been clear that while a single-payer system may work in some countries, it makes the most sense for us to build on what works in the system we have and to fix what's broken.

"He would certainly agree that there's too much waste in the system--where families, businesses and governments pay too much for too little," he added, "and that's why he's committed not just to expanding coverage but to reforming the health system to provide high-quality care at a lower cost to more Americans."

Scheiner says he never thought it was appropriate to talk about health policy with Obama, especially once he became a U.S. Senator. The one exception was medical malpractice reform. "I once briefly talked to him about malpractice, and he took the lawyers' position," he says.

Obama reiterated his opposition to caps on medical malpractice-related damages when he addressed an audience of doctors earlier this week at the American Medical Association's annual meeting. (See "Will Doctors Buy Obamacare?")

Scheiner, like most others in his profession, thinks that it should be harder to sue doctors and that awards should be capped. He says that he and other doctors must order too many tests and imaging studies just to avoid being sued.

Scheiner graduated from Princeton and then started at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons 50 years ago. After training in internal medicine in Chicago he joined a practice in Hyde Park. His partner was Quentin Young, a doctor known for supporting universal coverage and for briefly being the personal physician of Martin Luther King Jr.

Before selling his practice, he watched his income decline over the years to what he calculated to be $22 an hour ($2,100 every two weeks after withholding for taxes, health insurance and malpractice insurance.)

Scheiner thinks that any health reform should involve paying primary-care doctors better so they don't have to rush through appointments to make ends meet. He says that the medical students he encounters are no longer even taught how to do a patient history and physical exam. Patients get imaging studies and lab work instead of actual work-ups. "It's like in Star Trek where Bones had the thing he would wave up and down. They don't even talk to patients," he says.

http://tinyurl.com/mh3wlb
.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Joan Foster

This is a must read: hope some of our elected dopes are reading and listening to this CEO...

Skin in the Game..


It's Steve Burd's eighth or ninth trip to Capitol Hill this year -- he can't quite remember. Sitting in a hotel lobby late last week, what the busy Safeway CEO does know is that by the end of this trip, he'll have told all 100 U.S. senators his company's health-care story. That alone might deserve applause.

As most of corporate America sits on the health-care sidelines -- issuing vague statements, trying not to offend a new U.S. president -- Mr. Burd has charged into the political debate. "I'm here because health-care simply isn't a partisan issue," he says. There is what works, and what doesn't. "I'm genuinely concerned someone might try to solve this by nationalizing health care, at the moment we at Safeway have proven that it is the market that reins in costs."

Prove it, he can. As recently as 2004, Safeway was suffocating under health-care costs growing at 10% a year. Mr. Burd, who had long been intellectually and politically drawn to the health-care issue, decided it was time to hit the restart button. He blew up the company's existing health-care structure and replaced it with one that embodied market principles -- choice, responsibility, competition and price.
[POTOMAC WATCH] Getty Images

Steve Burd (R), president and CEO of Safeway, testifies before Congress.

Today, Safeway has accomplished what Washington claims is the goal: The company's per-capita health-care expenses have remained flat, compared to the near 40% increase experienced by the rest of corporate America over the past four years. This has not been done by cutting care or shifting costs to employees. Nearly 80% of the 30,000 nonunion Safeway workers who take part in the program rate it good, very good, or excellent.

Magic? Not even. Mr. Burd explains that the "cure for today's ills is simply removing the obstacles to a free health-care market."

The Safeway plan has two main parts that work in tandem. The first involves giving employees a financial stake in the system. Safeway demolished the traditional PPOs and HMOs that encourage consumers to be cavalier about costs. The company today fully pays for an array of primary and preventive visits and tests. But beyond that, employees have skin in the game. The company deposits $1,000 each year into a "health reimbursement account," which workers can use to pay for care. The next $1,000 in expenses is the employee's responsibility. After that, employees pay 20% of costs up to a $4,000 maximum.

Safeway workers these days treat that first $1,000 carefully, since anything beyond it comes out of their pockets. The company is alive with stories of people who no longer visit the emergency room for routine care but instead call around to doctors to ask prices, and swap information with colleagues. Safeway is doing its part to improve price transparency, by having its care administrator, Cigna, analyze claims information. One discovery was that within 30 minutes of its California headquarters routine colonoscopy prices ranged from $700 to $7,000. By the end of the year, employees will be able to go on a Web site, punch in a zip code, and get a list of providers and costs.

The second part of Safeway's plan was an embrace of the obvious: Healthy people cost less. Mr. Burd notes that 75% of health-care costs are the result of four conditions -- cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity. The majority of these are preventable. "Obesity in this country went from 18% to 40% in 20 years -- this is not genetics, this is behavior," he explains. He says that an obese employee can require 10 times the number of doctor visits in a year than someone of healthy weight.

The result was Safeway's "Healthy Measures" program, which is voluntary. Employees are tested for smoking, weight, blood pressure and cholesterol. Every area they "pass" results in a reduction in their premium, of as much as $1,560 for a family, a year. Those who fail but prove progress can get refunds. Safeway complements this with an intense culture of health: weight-loss tips, fitness competitions and smoking cessation programs.

Critics of price incentives argue that they pressure consumers to forego necessary care. Mr. Burd counters that Healthy Measures and the company's free preventive care -- designed to catch problems before they become expensive -- have in fact resulted in a healthier work force. Safeway's smoking and obesity rates are roughly 70% the national average. The program has even been cautiously greeted by Safeway's union leaders, who understand that soaring health costs are eating into union wages.

When I ask Mr. Burd what he hopes to accomplish here, he is blunt that one goal is to prevent a "public option" that would only "piggyback on the experience of Medicare." It's a "Trojan Horse" that will steer people to government and ultimately squeeze out innovative programs like his.

He's also working to ensure that any health-care bill contains provisions that would replicate or encourage Safeway's success. That includes changing current law so that he can offer even steeper premium discounts for good behavior. It also includes his idea to make available Medicare's vast database of providers and costs so Americans can shop around. An optimist, Mr. Burd says he's had "extraordinary receptivity" from both sides of the aisle.

As for his fellow CEOs, Mr. Burd is eager to debate anyone who thinks he will escape costs by dumping health care on the government. Business will still be taxed to pay for the program, making the U.S. less competitive. Far better, says Mr. Burd, for companies to control their destiny, and prove markets can also work for health care. We're about to find out if Washington will let them.

Write to kim@wsj.com
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Texas Mom

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/catherine-maggio/2009/06/19/bmi-s-julia-seymour-exposes-media-s-lies-fox-business


Wait til you read this and look at the REAL numbers of UNINSURED!


How many uninsured Americans are there really? It’s a number that the mainstream media have repeatedly misrepresented to make the health care “crisis” seem worse than it is.

Business & Media Institute’s Julia A. Seymour hammered this point in an apprearance on Fox Business. Seymour exposed the common error by breaking down the actual number to more than 30 million less than the media claim it is.

Journalists have used the statistic of 46 million-47 million uninsured Americans, but as Seymour told Fox Business, this number was wildy inflated. “The Census Bureau comes up with this number and they said that the number of uninsured is really 45.6 million people. But that's total people, and that includes almost 10 million who are non-citizens,” Seymour clarified.

That meant the label “Americans” after “uninsured” was totally inaccurate. But that wasn’t the only ambiguous part of this overused statistic. Seymour also broke the statistic further down, explaining that almost 9 million were young people who didn’t need of health insurance, and 9 million were those who make more than $75,000 and chose not to buy insurance.

Seymour spelled out to host Stuart Varney that contrary to what the media have told their viewers, the number of “chronically uninsured,” according to the liberal Kaiser Family Foundation, was only somewhere between 8 million and 13 million people.

But even these people were not lacking in health care. “We all have healthcare, but the media say healthcare because they use that term to promote universal coverage. What they really should be saying is that there are a number of people without health insurance…” Seymour explained, “So the crisis is actually much smaller than the news media make it out to be.”
Edited by Texas Mom, Jun 19 2009, 04:00 PM.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Lodge Pro 345
Member Avatar

.
Wonder Why?


In reading the many articles in the various media about HealthCare reform, so many in the media are pointing to one locality paying more than a nearby locality without any difference in results. They have decided to use two Texas towns and repeat this incessantly.

They claim this singular fact exposes how much money there is that can be cut from Health Care costs without affecting the quality of care delivered.

I have to wonder why it is that these people haven't noticed that California, NY, and DC are at the Top of costs per student in Public Schooling, yet near the bottom in scores? A much more radical (and compelling) example of Government ineptness than one Texas town paying less than another.

We know the people writing these articles in the WAPO, Newsweek, and the NYT support Public schools. Why is that?

.

Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Kerri P.
Member Avatar

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31467718/ns/politics-white_house
Obama may need firmer hand on health care
President's light touch approach to reforming system appears to backfire

updated 4:33 a.m. ET, Sun., June 21, 2009

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama is seeing the downside of his light touch on revamping the nation's health care system.

Congressional Democrats are off to a halting start, blindsided by a high cost estimate and divided over how to proceed. The confusion has emboldened Republican critics of the administration's approach to its top domestic priority.

While too early to rule out eventual success, it seems Obama will have to be more forceful and hands-on.

Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who once was Obama's choice for shepherding the plan through Congress, said the chance that the legislation will pass is no better than 50-50. Those are fairly good odds, he said, for such complicated proposals that stir deep passions.

Joel Johnson, a former Clinton White House aide who lobbies for health care companies, was more optimistic. "This is probably right where it's supposed to be," he said.

"It's still a hard slog," Johnson said. "It will have some near-death experiences" along the way, which is typical for far-reaching, complex legislation, he said.

snip...
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Joan Foster

What former CBS news correspondent Bernard Goldberg identified in the title of his recent book, A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media, has not cooled in the slightest.

Not since John Fitzgerald Kennedy wowed the press with his looks and charm and the elegance of his wife, Jackie, has a president been so widely idolized by those members of the Fourth Estate who are supposed to report with some objectivity on presidential policies and promises. This is not a healthy thing. We are not some backward nation worshiping a Dear Leader - are we? Well, are we?

There's much buzz this week about the decision of ABC News to air a special edition of its World News program June 24 from the White House. Charlie Gibson will anchor the news from the Blue Room in a program described by the network as a special town hall meeting on health care. Republicans (remember them?) are very upset about this, maybe because their views on health care reform (whatever they might be) are being left out of this telecast. They think having the president's views amplified on television without opposition is pretty chilling.

Ken McKay of the Republican National Committee wrote to the head of ABC News to complain. He said, "Today, the Republican National Committee requested an opportunity to add our party's views to those of the President's to ensure that all sides of the health care reform debate are included. Our request was rejected." Further, he said, "I am concerned that this event will become a glorified infomercial to promote the Democratic agenda."

Well, yeah. Ken wasn't born yesterday. ABC honchos are insulted by such a scurrilous take on their enterprise, insisting that their people will be in charge of picking the folks in the audience and who will be allowed to ask what of Mr. Obama and will be very objective about it. See, that'll guarantee fairness, won't it? The network says this White House appearance was arranged on its own initiative, suggesting to the gullible that longtime ABC News correspondent Linda Douglass' current job as the director of communications at the White House Office of Health Reform played no part in this. OK, it was mere coincidence.

Cue the laughter - though this isn't really a laughing matter, because the reform of health care was supposed to be, and should be, a bipartisan exercise. Even though the Republican Party rendered itself at least temporarily irrelevant by its performance post-2000, the fact is that Barack Obama is not president of the United States by acclamation. At least 40 percent of Americans identify themselves as conservatives, and their views should play a part in the discussion about what to do about the unsustainable skyrocketing costs of medical care in their country.

That ABC thinks it kosher to broadcast a program from the White House of teleprompted comments from Barack Obama and vetted questions from a handpicked audience and to exclude opposite views speaks volumes about media bias. To those of us on the political right, this comes as no great surprise. We're used to being defamed, decried, ignored and belittled by the mainstream media that we despise in return because of their bias against our "retrograde" beliefs and against us.

But we are outraged. We oppose the direction of our government toward ever more control over our lives. We know that Barack Obama is not The One but rather an ambitious, charismatic politician who won the big prize. We know that society is not perfectible. We know that we have spent ourselves into bankruptcy. We worry about the future facing our children and their children.

Unlike the people at ABC, we are not in a slobbering love affair with our current White House Occupant and are suspicious of all who hold great power.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Baldo
Member Avatar

That plan is similar to Whole Foods Market Plan. I suspect opposition to it basically rests in special interests. For one, certain unions have "super plans" which are gold plated. Members pay little and have complete medical, dental, and eye coverage. Senator Kennedy doesn't want to touch them. In the most recent plan to tax the employee benefits they are even proposing to exempt these union plans. Also a competitive system means lower costs with drugs and downward pressure on compensation.

Don't you hate that high deductible on your insurance policy? You have to pay thousands of dollars before insurance covers your care. That's terrible, some say, but is it really? A version of it may be the key to lowering costs and putting you in charge of your health care.

Five years ago, the grocery chain Whole Foods Market switched to a different kind of health insurance, a policy that puts patients more in control.

CEO John Mackey explained the appeal of these policies. "Because it's like, 'At last, I can go to that acupuncturist! At last, I can go to my chiropractor! At last, I can spend the money the way I want to spend it.'"

Whole Foods has an insurance policy with a high deductible. That means an employee like Braden Weirs must pay about $1,000 before his insurance kicks in. If he gets cancer or heart disease, his insurance covers it.

But if he has a sore throat or a sprained ankle, he pays.

To help workers pay, Whole Foods puts money into an account for them. Weirs got $1,500 this year. If he doesn't spend it on medical care this year, he keeps it and the company adds more next year.

"And I have plenty of money left over," Weirs said. "So I can go get my new prescription glasses at the end of the year."

Individual Responsibility
Most companies call these accounts Health Savings or Health Reimbursement Accounts. The company saved money, too. "Our costs went way down," said Mackey.

Still, some employees were angry about the plan. They said they wanted their full coverage back.

"When you go from a system where people are very dependent and now you're telling them, 'Hey, you have to take more responsibility for your own health.' … That was frightening to them," Mackey said. "Because they were going to have to be responsible for themselves, they weren't going to be taken care of any longer."

So, Mackey held a vote among his employees on the plan. "The result was, 77 percent of the team members voted for the health plan that we have today," Mackey said. ..snipped

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Stossel/story?id=3602579&page=1
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Lodge Pro 345
Member Avatar

.
The Dems, if they raise taxes on existing Health Care insurance, are considering exempting Unions - at least for the remainder of their existing contracts. That could be 3-5 years.

Shocking to actually, specifically exempt your constituents with Cadillac health-plans, but there is no shame.

Their concern, reportedly, is that there will be a stampede to extend current contracts and the money that they want coming in won't hit the mark.


Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
LTC8K6
Member Avatar
Assistant to The Devil Himself
We had the option of an HSA this year at work. We didn't know enough about it to seriously consider it.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
1 user reading this topic (1 Guest and 0 Anonymous)
ZetaBoards - Free Forum Hosting
Free Forums. Reliable service with over 8 years of experience.
Learn More · Sign-up for Free
Go to Next Page
« Previous Topic · LIESTOPPERS UNDERGROUND · Next Topic »
Add Reply