Journal snowgirl's Journal: Corporate Death Panels Kill Again 18
It's amazing how some people are so quick to talk about rationing and "death panels" that will kill people after the Government takes over healthcare, yet they fail to recognize the death panels that are already operating.
A woman operating under Medicaid--the insurance granted to people who are too poor to provide for their own healthcare--was dealing with liver failure and needed a transplant. After being forced to convert to a private healthcare plan as part of an overhaul that seems to be a large part of the anti-socialist agenda of taking every public service and turning it into a for-profit private industry, Alisa Wilson was continuously denied the transplant that was medically necessary to save her life.
About a week and a half ago, attorneys working on Wilsonâ(TM)s behalf said the insurance obstacles had been worked out. By then, however, her health was too shaky to risk going under the knife.
âoeIf they did it months ago, my daughter would be alive now,â her father said.
Would this poor woman still be alive today if we had a universal healthcare system? This isn't something that can truly be answered, because there are a hojillion factors that go into who gets a transplant and who does not. However, we could at least be sure that this woman's care would have been provided on a per-need basis, rather than a profit basis.
Life and Death choices are made all the time by doctors, and insurance providers. It's absolutely ridiculous to pretend like "death panels" will spontaneously pop into existence under universal healthcare... they already exist, and they're being run by profit mongering corporatists right now.
Shift from one group of bureaucrats to another (Score:1)
All you'll get are more bureaucrats. A parasitic biomass that destroys everything in its path. And they will never accept the one, true plan.. It would be their end..
New technology will mitigate the donor issue. We already have living donors for kidneys and livers.. and the onions you can get from the store. So..
Good food, good meat
Good god, let's eat!
death panel (Score:2)
You're absolutely right. It may actually be worse right now. Insurance companies look at the profit/loss margins. They'd prefer to give a transplant to a 20-something person in otherwise perfect health
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Fully agree. I find it pretty sickening that the sick still have to pay more than everyone else since I was brought up with a system where anyone who needs treatment, gets treatment, and National Insurance contributions are not affected by your level of health. They may be affected by pay grades, I'm not sure - but I have no problem with that if it's the case.
moof (Score:1)
The basis of the objection is the familiar competition vs. monopoly and barrel-of-a-gun power thing. I.e. in theory at least, when handled in the private sector, bad ins. co's. should do less well and then either change or go out of business. I.e. drag your feet on paying your claims, and you should get fewer customers, as they exercise their choice in the market place. That's the theory, which I think is sound. The problems reside in our current practice, and I think include:
1) Our govt. allowing there to
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The problem is that there is no solution. Nobody wants to spend their life elbow-deep in someone else's guts for $40k a year, so the choices are paying doctors big bucks to do the dirty work, or the work doesn't get done. You can try to force doctors to do the work cheap, but when they quit, what then? Pick random people and tell them to play doctor?
The best possible outcome would be for people to come to terms with death and accept that life has a 100% mortality rate. Once health care becomes an elasti
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Esp. since they couldn't afford the malpractice ins. at that pay level. All the legalism in the U.S. has got to amount to a lot of overhead, stealing from GDP and our work and free time. Leftists like to cry about, and rightfully so, middleman banksters, who don't contribute anything and only exist to skim wealth off others and the system, but you never hear them bitch about lawyers, who do the same. Which unfortunately me
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"Banksters" and lawyers, government and corporations, left and right, god and nothing... phooey!
The sign says, "Don't feed the bears"...
Re: (Score:1)
Damn it! It was supposed to be:
The sign says, "Don't feed the bears". How it got turned into, "Don't eat the apple", I'll never know..
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All the legalism in the U.S. has got to amount to a lot of overhead
Probably true in the general case, but in the case of medical malpractice, there are already states that have implemented tort reform that has effectively eliminated malpractice suits, yet spending on medical care has yet to go down. Texas capped noneconomic damages at $250k and now you might get a lawyer to help you if the doctor cut off the wrong arm and left it in your chest cavity while snorting cocaine off your backside as they raped y
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Aside from a few reddish states, I don't think sensible tort reform is very widely implemented, nor will be. And finding a lawyer who will take your case has always been a problem, if it's small change and not a slam dunk. Imagine trying to find a doctor who would take your cancer case in that kind of scenario, if his compensation has a low chance of him even breaking even on the endeavor. Maybe we need catastrophic legal insurance as an available product, which would provide a choosable minimum baseline of
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I just have to point this out:
All the legalism in the U.S. has got to amount to a lot of overhead, stealing from the GDP and our work and free time.
But yet earlier:
Add time limits to them if need be -- write more detailed rules while pertaining parties remain obstinate about trying to weasel out of them.
So, which is it? Legalism is a problem, or legalism is the solution?
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My POV is that legalism should be minimal and reactive, not comprehensive and proactice. Because micromanaging peoples' affairs is undignified.
So to me it's not a "which", but a "when" and "how much".
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legalism should be... not comprehensive and proactive
This is the exact legal system that the US legal system is based on: Common Law.
It also led to inconsistent laws, and just as much extensive crazy weird shit as any other system.
Scarcity (Score:2)
So long as a resource is more scarce than the need for it, someone will miss out... and someone will decide who lives and who dies.
My other half just got a job doing that, more or less. Sucks.
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So long as a resource is more scarce than the need for it, someone will miss out... and someone will decide who lives and who dies.
My other half just got a job doing that, more or less. Sucks.
Definitely a "sad but true" statement here. Tough choices will have to be made about this stuff, and I would never claim that under a Universal Healthcare system everyone would get everything they ever needed. I do however think that money would be spent better. BillDog kind of suggest that there would be more overhead. And perhaps that is true, but profit is a massive overhead as well, and corporations are under a duty to their shareholders to maximize that overhead.
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Oddly, public health plans tend to spend a substantially larger percentage of their revenue on medical services rendered than do private health plans. (Although I don't have it at the moment, there's substantial data to back this up, which is findable on teh googles.)
So from a fiscal efficiency perspective, I'm a big fan of Universal Basic* Healthcare.
[*: With emphasis on Basic, because of the aforementioned scarcity. Check out the Oregon Health Plan [wikimedia.org] for a reasonable model.]
If you like that, wait'll you get a load of AZ (Score:2)
See if you can find the Olbermann shows from the first part of the week on line somewhere and listen to how Arizona pulled the rug out from under people who were actually being prepped for transplant surgery.
Death (Score:1)
Death by spreadsheet.