Healthcare going forward

[TX-Beau]

I decided to check the math.

I've paid in about $387,000 in health insurance, including medical, dental, vision, mental, and prescription.

By the records I have I've gotten about $238,000 in services, better than a quarter of that for getting my hips fixed, about half due to emergency care and hospitalization that followed.

I have no problems with insurance money going to people who need it, I object to greedy people who prey on the healthy then toss out the sick.

 

[gsdx]

By the records I have I've gotten about $238,000 in services, better than a quarter of that for getting my hips fixed, about half due to emergency care and hospitalization that followed.

I've had one hip replaced, the other hip plated and pinned, a wrist plated and pinned, and 5 weeks in a hospital bed with round-the-clock nursing, and 3 meals a day.

It cost me a total of $90 for 2 rides in the ambulance.

 

[Benvolio]

With socialized medicine a big part of the tax money is spent on the bureaucracy and federal employees are better paid than corporate employees and are less efficient. Beaurucrats love to waste money; corporations hate it.

 

[KaraBulut]

I just heard Trump blame it on the Democrats.

I heard him, and I didn't hear blaming, I head him say they knew they wouldn't get any Democrats, and that they didn't, but they hadn't been able to make all the Republicans happy.

There was a leak last week from one of the Republican meetings with Trump where he said he would blame the Democrats if the bill didn't pass. There's also been a couple more leaks today about quotes from Trump:

The blame game: Trump blamed Democrats for the failed health care bill, saying they didn't support it.
"Let Obamacare explode": The President says Obamacare is about to "explode," signaling that he won't be proactive in saving it because its failure will force Democrats to come to him.

One of two things will happen- either the costs will begin to go down as the CBO originally predicted or if the individual market does fail, people will be uninsured and they're going to blame whoever is in power.

My guess is that it's going to get settled with the 2018 election... and possibly the outcome of some of the investigations that are going on about the Russian connections.

^ Obamacare is a Heritage Foundation idea.

And was implemented first in Massachusetts by a Republican governor.

I decided to check the math.

I've paid in about $387,000 in health insurance, including medical, dental, vision, mental, and prescription.

By the records I have I've gotten about $238,000 in services, better than a quarter of that for getting my hips fixed, about half due to emergency care and hospitalization that followed.

And the sad truth is that if you didn't have insurance and didn't get the preferred provider contractual discounts that having insurance affords you, you were probably looking at close to $1 million in costs.

These days, people don't just need health insurance for catastrophic care. You need insurance to get a reasonable price for all of your care because the "charge master" price for healthcare in the US is about 400% of the contracted price.

The idea that the "free market" is the answer to healthcare prices completely ignores how the "free market" has resulted in healthcare that is ridiculously expensive and has no better outcomes that healthcare in countries with socialized healthcare (and in some cases, the outcomes in the US are worse).

 

[gsdx]

With socialized medicine a big part of the tax money is spent on the bureaucracy and federal employees are better paid than corporate employees and are less efficient. Beaurucrats love to waste money; corporations hate it.

You will never, ever, convince me or any other Canadian that what we have here is worse than what you have there.

FYI:

Insured hospital services and insured physicians' services, introduced in 1959 and 1966 respectively, were combined under the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) in 1972. The Department of Health became the Ministry of Health in 1971, and then the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care in June, 1999.

http://www.health.gov.on.ca/en/common/ministry/history.aspx

It can be done. It has been done, and very efficiently. Your arguments above are desperate nonsense and mean nothing.

 

[Kulindahr]

I've had one hip replaced, the other hip plated and pinned, a wrist plated and pinned, and 5 weeks in a hospital bed with round-the-clock nursing, and 3 meals a day.

It cost me a total of $90 for 2 rides in the ambulance.

My new hips cost me almost a quarter-year's income out of my pocket.

 

[Kulindahr]

With socialized medicine a big part of the tax money is spent on the bureaucracy and federal employees are better paid than corporate employees and are less efficient. Beaurucrats love to waste money; corporations hate it.

That's nice, but let's stick to talking about the ACA and the proposed ACHA.

 

[Kulindahr]

And the sad truth is that if you didn't have insurance and didn't get the preferred provider contractual discounts that having insurance affords you, you were probably looking at close to $1 million in costs.

These days, people don't just need health insurance for catastrophic care. You need insurance to get a reasonable price for all of your care because the "charge master" price for healthcare in the US is about 400% of the contracted price.

The idea that the "free market" is the answer to healthcare prices completely ignores how the "free market" has resulted in healthcare that is ridiculously expensive and has no better outcomes that healthcare in countries with socialized healthcare (and in some cases, the outcomes in the US are worse).

Yeah, I remember looking at the costs if I hadn't had insurance, for my hips, and it would have been a total of some $60,000 more. A great deal of that would have been hospital costs, which as it was were at a flat fee I didn't have to pay a penny for.

Free market -- I'm not sure where this fits into that, but a friend's mom needed a stomach operation and ended up having it done in Brazil. Why? Because for less than the price in the U.S. she could take the entire family along for an overseas vacation while she was in the hospital -- and all the information online showed that the Brazilian doctors and facilities were just as good as those in the U.S.

Of course a free market would let Americans get the meds from Canada or Mexico, and a free market wouldn't allow one private organization to control the number of medical schools, medical students, and thus doctors.

 

[Kulindahr]

You will never, ever, convince me or any other Canadian that what we have here is worse than what you have there.

FYI:


http://www.health.gov.on.ca/en/common/ministry/history.aspx

It can be done. It has been done, and very efficiently. Your arguments above are desperate nonsense and mean nothing.

Canadian friends in B.C. told me my wait for hip replacement here was all of three days shorter than it would have been in Canada. But the wait times for preliminaries would have been equal or shorter, enough so that from the moment the doctor decided a replacement was a good idea to when I would have gotten a replacement would actually have been shorter.

Though my docs pointed out that only a few years ago it all would have been longer; the system has changed so instead of sending x-rays off to be developed and wait several days for their return, the images are available on computer within twenty minutes, and the same with a number of other preliminary procedures. And as I recall, some of that improvement was due to the ACA.

 

[KaraBulut]

...Free market -- I'm not sure where this fits into that, but a friend's mom needed a stomach operation and ended up having it done in Brazil. Why? Because for less than the price in the U.S. .

Several countries are marketing "healthcare tourism" like the US used to do in the 1980s. Their advantage is price. There are some issues with infection rates, especially in countries like India. But when the cost of a plane ticket to India plus the cost of the surgery is less than the cost of the same service in the US, you can't blame them for shopping around.

Another interesting trend is people who are retiring from the US to Costa Rica and Mexico. They can get good deals on real estate and they get healthcare that is much lower cost than in the US.

You will never, ever, convince me or any other Canadian that what we have here is worse than what you have there.

There's a lot of variance between the Canadian provinces (which is a good reason to argue against state-control healthcare versus federal standards). Wait times in Quebec tend to me longer because of high demand. There's also issues with staff retention because salaries for nurses and physicians are lower in Canada compared to the US. But the quality of care in the Canadian provinces is the same quality as in the US, there's less "over-treatment" and on the cost to the patient- there isn't any comparison.

...Though my docs pointed out that only a few years ago it all would have been longer; the system has changed so instead of sending x-rays off to be developed and wait several days for their return, the images are available on computer within twenty minutes, and the same with a number of other preliminary procedures. And as I recall, some of that improvement was due to the ACA.

In fairness, not so much the ACA as two other related bills- American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA- the much hated "stimulus" bill of 2009) and a related piece of legislation called Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH). These acts invested about $36.5 billion into getting physicians and hospitals to move medical records to electronic form.

Your hip xray wasn't done on film like in the old days. The image was electronic and was probably transmitted electronically to a radiologist who read the image from his home or office. During the surgery, an electronic image was available on a viewscreen if the surgeon needed to view it before the surgery.

In the old days, it would have taken hours to get films read and the reports written and surgery scheduled.

 

[KaraBulut]

Speaking of orthopedics....From this morning- before the bill was pulled this afternoon- an interview with the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Dr Tom Price (an orthopedist by training). There's something creepy about this guy beyond the fact that he's flat out lying...

 

[rareboy]

^ I suspect that his ascendancy is at an end because of all of this.

All the lies that he's told, that Ryan told and that Trump told while they were trying to steamroll this legislation through didn't work.

And it was the Republicans themselves who brought it crashing down.

 

[rareboy]

I heard him, and I didn't hear blaming, I head him say they knew they wouldn't get any Democrats, and that they didn't, but they hadn't been able to make all the Republicans happy.

Well your ears were being kind to him, because everyone else heard him trying to blame the Democrats for the defeat as he read of Kellyann Conway's script.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-39388815

And story after story has brought up the same fact....the Republicans own the House (by a healthy majority) and the Senate. They shouldn't need any support from the Democrats.

This spin is pure Conway.

'You mean we couldn't get our party to vote for legislation that would burn Obamacare to the ground?'

Let's blame the Democrats.

 

[rareboy]

Obama be like

 

[frankfrank]

I'm surprised it took so long to post about it. I heard it as 7AM on this morning's news.

At that point, the vote was still planned for Friday afternoon. What happened at 3:31PM EDT Friday, the complete implosion of the bill, was different.

^ That's just cray.

You ought to break something really expensive just to get some of your money back.

Or at least make the doc give you a good rectal exam each year.

His figures are not all that unusual. I actually fall below the curve; I probably paid considerably less for health insurance than many people have. All told, I probably paid around $150,000 in the years before I turned 65 and got on Medicare. The only thing that saved me at all was general good health, because when I did get sick, it turned out my insurance was a piece of shit.

 

[gsdx]

Well your ears were being kind to him, because everyone else heard him trying to blame the Democrats for the defeat as he read of Kellyann Conway's script.

I just listened to him and, from what I heard after all of his boisterous campaign bravado, was that they couldn't swing any Democrat votes while making very little of the Republicans who turned their backs on it. In the end, it seemed he was handing it all back to the Democrats to come up with something better than Trumpcare. (I thought they already did.)

I loved this Guardian headline:

"Trump tried to burn down Obamacare. He set his hair on fire instead"

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/24/trump-obamacare-trumpcare-defeat

 

[rareboy]

Of course the outcome is that TrumpCo. will now actively seek to sabotage Obamacare....with a man like Price at the helm of HHS, it is almost certain that as an act of revenge, if nothing else, the White House will burn the house down with everyone still inside.

“It’s going to be interesting to see how they balance the responsibility for ensuring the government functions with their hatred for the law,” said Spencer Perlman, director of health-care research at Veda Partners. “If they want to completely sabotage it they probably could, and call it a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/go...l-unleash-hhs-to-bedevil-obamacare-2017-03-24

The latter is all the more likely because the ACA works best with the help of administrative support and resources. Think of the ACA as a plant, one that requires light and tending-to, that gets inherited by a downright hostile owner.

 

[KaraBulut]

... because when I did get sick, it turned out my insurance was a piece of shit.

There was a significant lobbying effort on the part of the insurance companies to bring back these types of policies (the ACA requires insurance companies to provide certain minimum benefits). Repeal of the ACA would have brought back these policies under the guise of "insurance choice".

 

[rareboy]

I recall that one aim of ACA was to cleanse the market of these legal scams. Millions of Americans were paying insurance companies for garbage policies that essentially covered nothing.

 

[kallipolis]

Obama be like

Like wise...............