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Greenspan Chides Republicans For Pushing To Extend Bush Tax

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number5
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14 Nov 2010, 9:35 pm

Inuyasha wrote:
If obamacare is so great why all these big businesses and unions begging to be exempted from having to follow it?

I have a seperate topic for this, but figured I should point it out.


It's not so great. It's a small step in the right direction, at best. I fully support a single-payer system and to me, anything less is thoroughly disappointing.



auntblabby
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14 Nov 2010, 10:28 pm

number5 wrote:
Medical bankruptcies are very common and the current system destroys both lives and livelihoods of those who are unfortunate enough to become sick. It doesn't just affect the low income folk either. A middle, or even upper-middle class family can easily loose it all, depending on the severity and long term prognosis of the illness/injury.


the late christopher reeve was one such upper-class person who ran out of insurance, after his paralysis. the people who see this situation as only natural and laudable, have a screw loose somewhere. if it weren't for his buddy robin williams, reeve would have ended up broke and forgotten in a nursing home somewhere. [not to criticize criminally underfunded nursing homes which contain the hardest-working nurses' aides.]



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14 Nov 2010, 10:30 pm

number5 wrote:
Inuyasha wrote:
If obamacare is so great why all these big businesses and unions begging to be exempted from having to follow it?

I have a seperate topic for this, but figured I should point it out.


It's not so great. It's a small step in the right direction, at best. I fully support a single-payer system and to me, anything less is thoroughly disappointing.


as modest as it was, it was the biggest step in the right direction possible under the current socially darwinistic bible-belt mentality of this nation. [american] politics is merely the art of the possible, not of the optimal.



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14 Nov 2010, 10:32 pm

ruveyn wrote:
number5 wrote:

Medical bankruptcies are very common and the current system destroys both lives and livelihoods of those who are unfortunate enough to become sick. It doesn't just affect the low income folk either. A middle, or even upper-middle class family can easily loose it all, depending on the severity and long term prognosis of the illness/injury.


Does the need of person A constitute a duty for person B, if B could fulfill that need?


given a choice between broad-based taxation, issuance of public debt or just printing money, taxation is the most reasonable method of funding government at any level. so to answer your question, i would say persons B-ZZZZZZ, in exchange for a modest portion of their profits, would be living in a more humane society, secure in the knowledge that should misfortune happen to them, they won't just be dumped on the curb.



Inuyasha
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15 Nov 2010, 1:28 am

number5 wrote:
Inuyasha wrote:
If obamacare is so great why all these big businesses and unions begging to be exempted from having to follow it?

I have a seperate topic for this, but figured I should point it out.


It's not so great. It's a small step in the right direction, at best. I fully support a single-payer system and to me, anything less is thoroughly disappointing.


Sorry but I trust government even less than I trust insurance companies, and btw hope you enjoy death panels.

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt143175.html

The newsbusters link within the topic will be of interest, specifically the video that is in the article.



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15 Nov 2010, 1:54 am

Inuyasha wrote:
Sorry but I trust government even less than I trust insurance companies, and btw hope you enjoy death panels.


what makes you think insurance companies are not themselves death panels? if you are not profitable for them, they would not care if you were dead or not. why do you trust insurance companies more than uncle sam? what have they as entities done to earn your trust?



mcg
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15 Nov 2010, 2:09 am

auntblabby wrote:
Inuyasha wrote:
Sorry but I trust government even less than I trust insurance companies, and btw hope you enjoy death panels.


what makes you think insurance companies are not themselves death panels? if you are not profitable for them, they would not care if you were dead or not. why do you trust insurance companies more than uncle sam? what have they as entities done to earn your trust?
Insured me per the terms of the contract I signed with them.



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15 Nov 2010, 2:12 am

mcg wrote:
auntblabby wrote:
Inuyasha wrote:
Sorry but I trust government even less than I trust insurance companies, and btw hope you enjoy death panels.


what makes you think insurance companies are not themselves death panels? if you are not profitable for them, they would not care if you were dead or not. why do you trust insurance companies more than uncle sam? what have they as entities done to earn your trust?
Insured me per the terms of the contract I signed with them.


how do you know they won't drop you for having some medical condition you never knew lurked within your system? this is a common practice. nobody outside of an MD can know for sure what things are lurking in their bodies. many cancer patients found themselves dumped by their insurance companies. they wasted their money on exorbitant premiums for many years only to get the shove when they really need the insurance company to do the right thing by them instead of screwing them over. it CAN happen to you.



mcg
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15 Nov 2010, 2:16 am

auntblabby wrote:
mcg wrote:
auntblabby wrote:
Inuyasha wrote:
Sorry but I trust government even less than I trust insurance companies, and btw hope you enjoy death panels.


what makes you think insurance companies are not themselves death panels? if you are not profitable for them, they would not care if you were dead or not. why do you trust insurance companies more than uncle sam? what have they as entities done to earn your trust?
Insured me per the terms of the contract I signed with them.


how do you know they won't drop you for having some medical condition you never knew lurked within your system? this is a common practice. nobody outside of an MD can know for sure what things are lurking in their bodies. many cancer patients found themselves dumped by their insurance companies. they wasted their money on exorbitant premiums for many years only to get the shove when they really need the insurance company to do the right thing by them instead of screwing them over. it CAN happen to you.
No they can't. That would be violating the terms of the contract AND US law.



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15 Nov 2010, 2:18 am

mcg wrote:
No they can't. That would be violating the terms of the contract AND US law.


so are you saying it has never happened to anybody at all, despite news reports otherwise?



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15 Nov 2010, 2:24 am

Unless you omitted a pre-existing condition on your application, that would be against the law.

There will be a collection of anecdotes showing weaknesses of any system. Insurance companies aren't perfect, but I still trust them more than the government (especially the US government).



number5
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15 Nov 2010, 9:13 am

mcg wrote:
Unless you omitted a pre-existing condition on your application, that would be against the law.



This is exactly how it's done. When a patient becomes sick with a serious illness, the insurance company digs deep to find any shred of evidence of some sort of pre-existing condition that they can claim the patient omitted, intentionally or not, in order to deem their contract invalid. Oh what's that, you had acne as a teenager and didn't mention it on your contract? Sorry, looks like we won't be paying for you radiation treatment.



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15 Nov 2010, 1:45 pm

number5 wrote:
And as far as the 'why should I have to pay for it' logic goes - you already do. Hospitals pass off their bad debt to you as a surcharge for the uninsured.

Wait, I thought you were saying the uninsured were paying for it by being forced to sell their homes? You can't have it both ways.

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Every time an uninsured patient goes to the ER for an infection that could have been easily and much more inexpensively treated by a primary care doc, you pay. When a cold unnecessarily turns into pneumonia due to lack of care, you pay. When a baby is born with severe developmental delays because the mom could not afford prenatal care, you pay (this neglect becomes quite expensive over the course of the child's life). I think you see where I'm going with this one.

Your beliefs don't match the numbers. The numbers say that only about 11.5% of medical expenses end up not being paid for - and that includes not only the people who aren't insured and don't pay for it for whatever reason, but also overcharges such as treatments or tests that the patient didn't give permission for and should never have been done.



psychohist
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15 Nov 2010, 1:56 pm

number5 wrote:
mcg wrote:
Unless you omitted a pre-existing condition on your application, that would be against the law.


This is exactly how it's done. When a patient becomes sick with a serious illness, the insurance company digs deep to find any shred of evidence of some sort of pre-existing condition that they can claim the patient omitted, intentionally or not, in order to deem their contract invalid. Oh what's that, you had acne as a teenager and didn't mention it on your contract? Sorry, looks like we won't be paying for you radiation treatment.

In most states as long as you maintain continuous insurance preexisting conditions are not an issue. It's only if you try to save money by dropping your health insurance in the expectation of picking it up only when you have a problem that preexisting conditions become an issue. And in fact, that kind of "free riding" is basically taking advantage of others and should be penalized. If you refuse to pay for insurance when you're healthy, you shouldn't expect to get money out of it when you become sick.

That, by the way, is the reason I have no sympathy for those who "lose their houses" because they had no insurance. If they could afford to own a house, they could afford to pay for insurance; if they decided health insurance was a lower priority for them than paying their mortgages off faster, then they can't complain when they have to face the consequences of their decision.

California, where most of the horror stories come from, is different in that you apparently have to maintain continuous insurance with the same insurance company to avoid issues with preexisting conditions. That makes things difficult in cases of employment changes. That's a problem with the wacky California insurance regulations, though, not with how insurance works in general.



psychohist
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15 Nov 2010, 2:00 pm

Inuyasha wrote:
I don't recall hearing of any recent terrorist attacks that were successful in Canada.

A list can be found at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_te ... _in_Canada

Most are not that recent, but then 9/11 wasn't all that recent, either.



number5
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15 Nov 2010, 4:47 pm

psychohist wrote:
number5 wrote:
mcg wrote:
Unless you omitted a pre-existing condition on your application, that would be against the law.


This is exactly how it's done. When a patient becomes sick with a serious illness, the insurance company digs deep to find any shred of evidence of some sort of pre-existing condition that they can claim the patient omitted, intentionally or not, in order to deem their contract invalid. Oh what's that, you had acne as a teenager and didn't mention it on your contract? Sorry, looks like we won't be paying for you radiation treatment.

In most states as long as you maintain continuous insurance preexisting conditions are not an issue. It's only if you try to save money by dropping your health insurance in the expectation of picking it up only when you have a problem that preexisting conditions become an issue. And in fact, that kind of "free riding" is basically taking advantage of others and should be penalized. If you refuse to pay for insurance when you're healthy, you shouldn't expect to get money out of it when you become sick.

That, by the way, is the reason I have no sympathy for those who "lose their houses" because they had no insurance. If they could afford to own a house, they could afford to pay for insurance; if they decided health insurance was a lower priority for them than paying their mortgages off faster, then they can't complain when they have to face the consequences of their decision.

California, where most of the horror stories come from, is different in that you apparently have to maintain continuous insurance with the same insurance company to avoid issues with preexisting conditions. That makes things difficult in cases of employment changes. That's a problem with the wacky California insurance regulations, though, not with how insurance works in general.


You've quite clearly never had any first hand experience with job loss or illness. How fortunate for you. For the rest of us who have been dealt a few bad cards here and there, I will continue to speak up.

I believe it fundamentally wrong to make a profit off of sick people. Not everything in life is best left up to the private sector. An insurance company is a business that exists for the sole purpose of profit. For a business to make a profit, it must increase revenue and cut costs. This equates to raising premiums and reducing payouts. This is in direct conflict with the best interest of the patient. As long as patient = consumer, the patient will always get the short end of the stick.

This conflict of interest is clearly recognized when it comes to the military, which is why we fully accept that it should be government run as opposed to being a private sector industry (see Blackwater). This is essentially why we have government in the first place, by the people for the people. The private sector offers us zero protection. It is best suited for consumer goods, not health care.