That is, quite possibly, the single best excuse I've ever heard for not responding to something. Ever.

It is funny that the marcel kid is at the signing, but the new healthcare bill does not cover children with pre-existing symptoms.

Edit: statement retracted: I got suspicious of certain items in the bill I read and realized I had, in fact read the wrong bill. I'm working on tracking down the correct bill and will comment after I find it.

Edit of my edit: So, it turns out that pre-existing condition exclusions are indeed prohibited under the new bill. Division I Subdivision A Title I Subtitle B Section 111 prohibits it to be specific. Therefore, jdp's claim is, in fact, false.

I caught a case of the capacitor plague. The damages are still being tallied, but a motherboard was killed and two CPUs orphaned.</tangent>

The first video is an anticorporate rant dressed up as HCR propaganda. It points out nearly all of the problems in the health insurance ecosystem, but fails to mention even a single problem with Medicare. And then, of course, there's the "fire insurance" strawman.

The second video is more of a vague summary of the subject, but if you look closely there are signs throughout that it was made by an insurance company.

The FireDogLake article suggests that the new law won't actually change things much, but will, on average, cost more for the same coverage.

And finally, the Center for American Progress article is a list of talking points I'll touch on later.

So now that I'm an Instant Expert(tm) on health care reform, what do I think needs to be done?

It seems to me that the root of all these problems is that health insurance isn't a market; it's a bunch of monopolistic fiefdoms. Each company chooses one provider, and all its employees use that. If I don't like how my insurance company treats me, I'm stuck with them anyway. Hence, the solution is clear: make it so that employees can change insurance companies without having to change employers (or the herculean task of changing their employer's insurance company), and change employers without having to change insurance companies.

What would be necessary to do this? A ban on pre-existing condition exclusions, first and foremost. There also needs to be a way to choose a health insurer independently of what one's employer would choose.

As much as I wish it were so, I'm not so naive as to think that most people would pay for health insurance out of pocket. People are just too short-sightedly greedy. So that means a direct free market's out. We could force them, by law, to carry coverage, like we do with car insurance, but I have ethical issues with a state absolutely requiring anything of its citizens, so I'd have to be dragged kicking and screaming to that idea. Insurance exchanges, if done right, might garner most of the benefits of a free market without leaving large numbers of people uninsured-by-choice. Market effects, if allowed to operate, will result in less rescission (and lesser consequences on the rescissed), generally lower out-of-pocket expenses, and lower overhead costs.

Care needs to be taken, though, to make sure that the standard of care and advancement of medicine don't suffer in the process. A lot of doctors, when it comes down to it, went into medicine for the money. The higher-paying their specialty is, the more likely this is true. It helps nobody's health if the next generation of oncologists, heart surgeons, and neurosurgeons become stockbrokers instead. It's no accident, either, that the country with the highest healthcare spending is also the country where most drugs are developed. Finding a chemical or combination of chemicals that will enter a system as complex as the human body, fix the thing that's wrong with it, and then either find its way out or get turned into benign chemicals without doing anything dangerous elsewhere in the body is a long, difficult, and expensive process. Combine that with the finiteness of patents, and pharmaceutical companies have only 10-15 years of the drug on the market to pay back the development costs of that drug, plus covering the expenses of projects that never produce a viable drug. If they can't, the company dies. For a single company, that's the natural order of things, and should be left as is. But if it happens to an entire industry due to the introduction of price controls, then that strangles the market and the main path for the advancement of medicine dies with it.

Not quite -- Medicare is different in that it doesn't require the participants to _purchase_ anything.

The reason most people get insurance via employment is because employers began receiving tax breaks for offering health insurance in the late 40s (they may still now I am not certain). This was only the second instance of government interference however, because part of the New Deal included granting Blue Cross or Shield or Halberd or whatever non-profit tax exempt status. This allowed them to offer then ridiculous benefits*, such as paying for doctor visits and medication while undercutting their "profitable" competitors

I have already listed my arguments against banning pre-existing conditions exclusion in a previous post. I would flesh it thusly. The banning of a practice that is present in all other forms of insurance would make the health insurance system a governmentally spawned abomination which would require constant reworking (read taking greater control) by the government in order to continue.

The current bill does little about actually fixing the rising costs of healthcare, and it only seems concerned with getting everyone insurance.

Costs come from two main factors.
First, everyone who actually pays for their treatment also ends up paying (in higher costs) for all the poor, illegal immigrants, those with Medicare and Medicaid, and those who could but choose not to pay for their own insurance, in short all people who rarely reimburse the hospital fully.
Second, Medical Malpractice insurance is pretty expensive from frivolous lawsuits and excessive penalties brought from the Courts, so Tort reform (absent in the bill) would be a simple and relatively cheap method of reducing costs.
Another thing which results in higher costs is that so many people do not pay out of pocket for their healthcare, it is handled by the insurance company. Thus there is no immediate incentive for them to shop around and potentially find cheaper treatment.

Do I need to talk about how State and Municipal insurance mandates create an artificially smaller market? I'd rather not do it again. The constitutional questions are replete in the legislation, but that has not stopped anything before, at least in this century.


*Before the 1930s health care was simple, there was almost no government interference, and you purchased health insurance like car insurance, in case of an accident. You payed out of pocket for doctor visits for things like the sniffles. (much like you pay for an oil change and a tune up for your car) This is the System I believe is best.

Another interesting link. This one probably has more propaganda than any other link in this thread, but there are some valid points underneath. (This excludes the associations between Obama and Hitler, as there's a rather large jump from health care reform to evil dictatorship. If some of the other things mentioned in the article come up, though, it won't be nearly as large of a jump. Anyway, 'tis for your reading pleasure, don't yell at me for being a radical, being as I've already said it's propaganda laden. Wow. This parenthetical is the largest bit of the post. Nice.)

The insurance company has two interests:
1. Making a profit
2. Keeping people healthy
Unfortunately, now, insurance companies are doing whatever necessary to reach the first goal, even if it makes the second goal nearly impossible.
The people need the second goal
However, a government-run healthcare organization, or non-profit private insurance organizations would eliminate the first goal altogether and focus on the second goal

We are the only developed, industrialized country which has not (until now) decided that health care is a basic right. The WHO has ranked our system 37th in all. 37th. We can do better than that.

Also, about the bill:
Health reform puts American families and small business owners in control of their own health care.

It makes insurance more affordable by providing the largest middle class tax cut for health care in history, reducing premium costs for tens of millions of families and small business owners who are priced out of coverage today. This helps over 32 million Americans afford health care who do not get it today – and makes coverage more affordable for many more. Under the plan, 95% of Americans will be insured.
It sets up a new competitive health insurance market giving tens of millions of Americans the same choices of insurance that members of Congress will have.
It brings greater accountability to health care by laying out commonsense rules of the road to keep premiums down and prevent insurance industry abuses and denial of care.
It will end discrimination against Americans with pre-existing conditions.
It puts our budget and economy on a more stable path by reducing the deficit by more than $100 billion over the next ten years – and more than $1 trillion over the second decade – by cutting government overspending and reining in waste, fraud and abuse.

Being faced with a fine if you don't have insurance doesn't match that claim.



Really? Mind if I borrow your time machine for a moment? I want to go kill Hitler, I figure that might be a little more productive than going into the future to see the results of a just-passed bill.

Of course, all of this is theoretical, otherwise we can make no claims as to whether it will save us or cost us money in the long term.

I am glad that this debate has risen beyond "SOSHULISM IS EVUL!" and other baseless rhetoric.

They never had that second goal, the goal of profit requires the second however, no one goes into business to provide a service, they do it to profit, which they can only do by convincing people that they would rather have a service than cash.

The WHO used all sorts of factors to calculate that rating, including unrelated things like military casualties and homicide deaths. UN agencies also are primarily political organizations which seek to advance a very specific set of beliefs with poor regard for truth. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change anyone? With things like cancer-survival rates or Heart disease deaths America's system ranks on the high end of the spectrum.

Finally, healthcare is not a right. It is a service or product like any other. Services can only be provided by others, saying it is a right is saying you have the right to enslave others to provide it to you. Anything the government can give to you is not a right, it is an entitlement program.

On the budget, the CBO may be more accurate than the White House, but they still always manage to be rather optimistic in their numbers. They did not predict Social Security to be losing money for another decade at least, rather than this year.