Comments on: Health care reform needs to pass now, and here’s why

By: Cynthia

Cynthia — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 06:31:14 +0000

I was not too concerned with health care reform until a short time ago. I have good coverage and purchased coverage for my two college aged sons that recently went off my policy. I was concerned with the rising cost for the premiums, co-pays,medications etc but not alarmingly so. That all changed when I went for an appointment and was presented with a new form requiring me to pay the insurance portion of the bill if not paid within 60 days by the insurance company. I was refused as a patient when I would not sign. Most middle class people do not have the funds to cover even one major medical event out of pocket-even if they eventually do recoup the funds from the insurance company. The willingness of doctors to turn away paying patients leads me to believe they can’t be suffering too much, at least not in my area. My respect for doctors and the medical industry in general is suffering due to the current climate. I am starting to feel like the medical community is trying to punish the patients for having insurance. I thought I was being a responsible medical consumer but now I feel it is pointless to plan. The medical industry is shooting itself in the foot. The whole county will be screaming for federalization if this keeps up.

By: IVF-MD

IVF-MD — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 18:17:13 +0000

I might be a little late coming to this discussion, but after reading the four arguments cited, I’m surprised.

1. The current system is worse then broken.
However terrible the current system is, it is due more to TOO MUCH GOVERNMENT MEDDLING AND CORRUPTION rather than not enough government. So then this is the argument to give up more individual control and hand it over to politicians?? How does that make sense?

2. If we don’t act now, reform may never happen.
When I was younger and more naive, I would go buy a car and the salesman would offer me a “special deal”, but hey, if I walked out of that lot without buying no, I may not be able to come back and get the same deal tomorrow. Does this kind of trick really fool anyone anymore?

3. We are so close.
Same argument as #2

4. There are actually some good things that will happen if reform is passed.
Such as what? Arbitrarily “giving coverage” to everyone sounds deceptively great, but it HAS to come from somewhere. There has to be a cost. Otherwise, why not pass even more “reform” bills giving everyone 5-bedroom homes, lifetime free gasoline, unlimited health care and all-the-ice-cream-you-can-eat.

Supporters of the bill cite this boost in “coverage” as being an improvement. What good is Medicare-for-all if providers stop taking Medicare? Or if good people stop going into medicine?

As a physician or if I were an insurance company, I would probably benefit from this bill going through. But I’m also a potential patient as are the members of my family and I care more about our health care options than I do about being in a special-interest group which can take advantage of lobbying the government to help me cheat the public.

By: Tad

Tad — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:11:53 +0000

These bizarre rumors and myths are so easy to look up, I’m amazed people don’t spend the 15 seconds it takes to do so.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/medical/euthanasia.asp

By: Paula

Paula — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:29:45 +0000

D. Henry—-
I read page 425 of the Senate bill (as passed) and see nothing at all about counselors telling patients how to kill themselves. Read it yourself. You won’t find one word about suicide, death panels, killing oneself or anyone else. Nada.
That section of the bill provides reimbursement for physicians when they discuss living wills and advance medical directives with elder patients, something everyone of any age should do anyway. For an annotated discussion of that section of the Senate bill, see Wikipedia’s entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America's_Affordable_Health_Choices_Act_of_2009
I’ll happily pay my doc for her time and expertise so we can discuss end-of-life issues long before I need to make important decisions, knowing I might not make good choices in the heat of an emergency situation.

By: D. Henry

D. Henry — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:02:06 +0000

Did you know that on page 425 of the health reform bill it says that a scheduled meeting every 5 years will have people on Medicare seeing counselors that will tell them the various ways to kill themselves painlessly? Think about it this way. How much are your parents worth to you? More than $400 billion?

By: Tad

Tad — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 11:58:35 +0000

The recent economic stimulus package is a good example of what you end up having to do when you let a problem fester until it becomes a national emergency. We can do something about health care now, or we can do something about it later. But just like the economic stimulus, the longer we wait, the more massive and expensive it’s going to turn out to be.

By: MatthewBowdish

MatthewBowdish — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:26:26 +0000

Get used to it…The patient will not be making the decisions under the new system.

By: MatthewBowdish

MatthewBowdish — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:24:54 +0000

I am not quite sure how one could read my first reply and conclude that I don’t want reform. Seems like the strawmen are out in force. But to say you would “rather have a bill that ends up not paying for itself than doing nothing. Nothing will definitely lead to increased spending/costs” neglects several issues. We already have runaway entitlement spending that is bankrupting the country. To add to this another $2.5T entitlement programs makes the already required entitlement reforms that much more difficult, unless you are trying to crash the system. If anything, doing nothing in the short run (if by “doing nothing” you mean not passing this top-down, hyper-partisan bill) may actually be better than passing it. But we need good reforms, not 1970s Nixon-era price controls that have been shown to raise prices and crease choice in the end.

Furthermore, I am not only opposed to this bill because it will add trillions to the already bloated debt. This bill will fundamentally change the relationship between citizen and government. Instead of encouraging more accessibility through cheapening the costs, it creates a new entitlement that will politicize and bureacratize just about every medical decision we make. It’s strange that democrats make a big deal about ‘getting govt out of our wombs’ and then favor the feds turning private insurers into public utilities, and thus dictating what can and cannot be covered through such mechanisms as the Medicare advisory board, community rating, price-controls, etc. The day this bill passes is the day that American exceptionism dies.

What we need is real reform that encourages patients to have a greater stake in their healthcare decision-making, that encourages real competition, that plays to what makes American great and not some Euro-style, govt-backed giveaway to big insurance companies that removes patients even further from the freedom to choose what kind of health care is important to them.

Again, passing bad legislation will give you bad outcomes in the short-term as well as the long-term.

By: MatthewBowdish

MatthewBowdish — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:07:07 +0000

The Kaiser Health tracking poll is the only one of many polls, most of which show somewhere around 52-55% against the bill and 43% in favor. See Rasmussen, CNN, WashingtonPost, etc. If you are going to argue that the percentage that voted for Obama is significant, it’s difficult to downplay that roughly the same percentage of Americans is opposed to this HCR bill.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/11/AR2010031102904.html

By: ninguem

ninguem — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 02:47:39 +0000

BobBapaso it’s what the current Administration and Congress don’t want to hear. The one thing that has five years supportive data, is the one thing they don’t want to do.

It puts the healthcare dollar under the control of individuals.

That’s an existential threat to the left.