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I can see this working in the short term for people who are mostly healthy. But what about the person who is uninsurable with cancer? Or needs kidney dialysis for the rest of his life at several hundred thousand dollars yearly?

Qliance customers pay $99 to join, then a flat monthly rate of $39 to $119, depending on age and level of service. Patients can quit without notice and no one is rejected for pre-existing conditions.
Patients must go to outside brokers and qualify medically to buy catastrophic care. One broker said a 30-year-old could expect to pay $133 per month for such care, and a 60-year-old nearly $400, plus substantial deductibles.
I guess I don't understand what this clinic is covering. The first quote says no one is rejected for medical conditions, but then three lines down it states that patients must get catastrophic care elsewhere. Where is the line between what's covered at the clinic and what's considered catastrophic?
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I don't think it's the #1 problem, but it's a huge, huge problem.The question is, how do we go forward and build a better system?As is standard, you take the high-flying ideological position, whereby

UnitedHealth, which processes 60 billion health care transactions a year, argued in June that better use of technology would save $332 billion annually, with some going to physicians.
I like the whole article, particularly this point. I was listening to an interview with a harvard business professor yesterday who was talking about actual health care reforms. His main point was that what we're calling health care reform right now won't do anything to improve anyone's health or the level of care they get, it will just subsidize an ineffecient system with money that doesn't exist. He likened it to the advances in computing, where as technology has improved to make computing extremely decentralized, actual care can advance along this model.His contention is that there are tons of diseases which are extremely easily diagnosable and treatable in a PCP's office, but the hospitals are still used to treat them. The technology exists to do so much in a more efficient manner than it's being done right now. The more care you move out of the crowded, complicated hospitals, the more overhead you remove from the system, and the lower costs get. He and a few of his peers wrote a book which is quickly becoming basically a textbook for the private sector businesses trying to improve the system for themselves. I need to look it up and link it here, as well as buy myself a copy. I think it was called prescription for innovation or something similar.
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I can see this working in the short term for people who are mostly healthy. But what about the person who is uninsurable with cancer? Or needs kidney dialysis for the rest of his life at several hundred thousand dollars yearly? I guess I don't understand what this clinic is covering. The first quote says no one is rejected for medical conditions, but then three lines down it states that patients must get catastrophic care elsewhere. Where is the line between what's covered at the clinic and what's considered catastrophic?
Yeah - there is obviously a line drawn somewhere so the fact that they don't reject people with pre-existing conditions has a big asterisk - it would have to be if they wanted to stay in business.
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Yeah - there is obviously a line drawn somewhere so the fact that they don't reject people with pre-existing conditions has a big asterisk - it would have to be if they wanted to stay in business.
And then we still have chronically sick people who can't get access to quality medical care. One part of the problem with our healthcare system.That's what the point is here, that nothing obamanation wants to do with healthcare is going to do any good.
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Here's a good point of view on the healthcare debate. Ignore the 'lib' in the headline.Libertarians Do Care About Patientsby Anthony RandazzoFriday night, at a 4th of July-eve BBQ, I got mixed up in a health care debate as can tend to happen at social events in the greater Washington DC area. At one point a truly undecided individual stopped and asked me point blank, "Assuming you're right about the ineffectiveness of universal health care, are libertarians just comfortable with people being uninsured and dying in America?"It's a valid question, particularly because classical liberals tend to fall into the Party of No on this issue. But, like my reasoning for getting rid of minimum wage laws and decriminalizing prostitution, I'm opposed to a single payer system for health care (and anything that resembles it) because I think people are better off with out it. I don't want to see life or the quality of life rationed by Uncle Sam because I actually do care about people, American and otherwise.Minimum wage suppresses wages in some areas and increases unemployment elsewhere, laws against prostitution push the age old practice into the shadows and black market, putting women in serious danger without legal recourse to fight violence and pimps, universal health care forces the government to ration treatment and pick winners and losers in terms of who gets what medical treatments.The Wall Street Journal makes my case better than I did at the BBQ last week. The British National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) was established in the 1990s to "ensure that every treatment, operation, or medicine used is the proven best. It will root out under-performing doctors and useless treatments, spreading best practices everywhere." If that sounds a lot like Comparative Effectiveness Research—you're right. But as the Journal puts it: What NICE has become in practice is a rationing board. As health costs have exploded in Britain as in most developed countries, NICE has become the heavy that reduces spending by limiting the treatments that 61 million citizens are allowed to receive.Rationing is expected, given that even government has limited (at some point) resources and can't provide treatment to everyone for everything all the time. Like the case of Debby Smith, even the president can't promise the Public Option insurance company will have the funds to cover everyone's liver cancer. Could we really expect the government to pay for the removal of everyone's brain tumors, all the appendectomies, and each wisdom tooth extraction? That's not how it works in the "successful" systems of Canada and Britain; that's not how it would work here.Instead, the government winds up picking winners and losers, and we've seen how well that works out in the economy. How does it do this? The Journal runs down a nice list of examples, but two stand out: * In 2008, NICE ruled that certain drugs like Sutent that help terminally ill kidney-cancer patients are too expensive, running around $50,000 After the ruling, Peter Littlejohns, NICE's clinical and public health director, noted that "there is a limited pot of money," that the drugs were of "marginal benefit at quite often an extreme cost," and the money might be better spent elsewhere. Is this a decision government bureaucrats in Washington should decide? * In 2007, NICE restricted access to two drugs for macular degeneration, which leads to blindness. The drug Macugen was completely banned, while the other drug, Lucentis, was limited to about one in five sufferers. "Even then, the drug was only approved for use in one eye, meaning those lucky enough to get it would still go blind in the other." NICE director Andrew Dillon explained at the time, "When treatments are very expensive, we have to use them where they give the most benefit to patients." Perfectly logical reasoning, but again, who should have the power to make this choice?There are others, including the rejection of a drug for rheumatoid arthritis, limiting use of Alzheimer's drugs, and banning medicines for myeloma and sclerosis. Ultimately, it comes down to what the value of life is. How much does it cost to extend the quality or actuality of one's life? Who decides whether person A should get the last treatment of a medicine or person B? The number the British health care system has come up with is $22,000 per six months: NICE currently holds that, except in unusual cases, Britain cannot afford to spend more than about $22,000 to extend a life by six months. Why $22,000? It seems to be arbitrary, calculated mainly based on how much the government wants to spend on health care. That figure has remained fairly constant since NICE was established and doesn't adjust for either overall or medical inflation.Is a year of your life worth more than the monthly mortgage payment on a high rise midtown Manhattan apartment? I favor choice in the medical field because I believe that if rationing need be done, it shouldn't be arbitrarily decided by those who don't know what they are doing in Washington. It is not the politician's fault, they can't know better. No one can fully know what the best rationing of care should be, who should be saved and who shouldn't.Again, I don't want to see life or the quality of life rationed by Uncle Sam because I do care about people.

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EG is close, but there are a lot of things the government can do about healthcare. They mostly involve removing the bureaucratic obstacles to competition at both the state and federal level. I'm sure I've discussed them in this thread already, but the short list is get rid of the AMA's monopoly on service, reform or privatize the FDA, and reform state insurance laws.
how would your privatize an agency like the FDA?
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how would your privatize an agency like the FDA?
You get rid of all federal power to determine what an individual can put in their body. Then you turn the FDA into an information agency, rather than a regulatory agency. Then you sell it to private bidders, and open it up to competition.
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Baucus: Lawmakers $320 billion short for health care plan * Story Highlights * Montana Democrat all options for raising taxes to cover shortage remain on the table * One of those options include taxing employer-provided health benefits * Other ideas: Raising taxes on sugary drinks, alcohol; a surtax on the wealthy * Max Baucus is chairman of the Senate Finance CommitteeBy Ted BarrettCNN Congressional ProducerWASHINGTON (CNN) -- After huddling Wednesday with Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee, Chairman Max Baucus told reporters that lawmakers still need to come up with $320 billion over the coming decade in taxes to pay for the health care plan. The remaining cost of the bill would be paid for through savings in Medicare, Medicaid and other programs.All options for raising taxes remain on the table, the Montana Democrat said, including taxing employer-provided health benefits, though that provision appears to lack significant Democratic support.Sen. Kent Conrad, D-North Dakota, who has been involved in negotiations on the bill, said senators are talking about raising the tax exemption on those benefits to $25,000 for a family.Raising that exemption level is aimed at softening Democratic criticism of the proposal because it means only people with high-value health benefits -- so-called Cadillac plans -- would have to pay the new tax.Doing so would raise $90 billion over 10 years, Conrad said, leaving negotiators $230 billion to raise through other taxes. Conrad and Baucus wouldn't specify which additional tax hikes are gaining favor among lawmakers but said everything -- from raising taxes on sugary drinks and alcohol to a surtax on the wealthy -- remains on the table."It's always difficult to raise taxes -- always, always, always," Baucus said. "But we gotta pay for this bill."Also Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid met with key Senate Republicans to help smooth negotiations on the complex bill.Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, told the Nevada Democrat that negotiators need more time to write the bill and shouldn't be forced to meet a goal set by Democratic leaders to have the bill off the Senate floor by August 7.Reid told the lawmakers he would be "flexible" on the time frame, but that he still wants to try to have the bill done by that date, a Reid aide said.
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Seems to me I heard something today on CNBC that Baucus was talking about going with a co-op plan instead of a government run one. I might have heard wrong though. Even though Baucus tends to be one of the more conservative Democrats in the Senate, he still has to please his party boss to some extent.

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Seems to me I heard something today on CNBC that Baucus was talking about going with a co-op plan instead of a government run one. I might have heard wrong though. Even though Baucus tends to be one of the more conservative Democrats in the Senate, he still has to please his party boss to some extent.
google 'baucus health plan'http://www.heritage.org/research/healthcare/wm2132.cfm
...Among the key proposals in the Baucus document is a health exchange. While the idea of an exchange generates broad interest and support among a wide range of policymakers, Baucus--like President-elect Obama--proposes a national exchange rather than encouraging a variety of state exchanges that would reflect local conditions and stimulate state creativity in designing better access to private health insurance. While it is true that a national system of exchanges can achieve a well-functioning health insurance market across the U.S., it would be wise to let states propose the best ways of realizing those objectives.Within his national exchange, Baucus also proposes letting a new public plan "similar to Medicare" compete with private health plans. This approach is fraught with difficulty and danger, because the federal government would then "own" a plan in the competition while also setting the rules for that competition. Who can doubt that the rules would be rigged in favor of the Medicare-style public plan?Con't at link
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John Stossel: More Health Insurance is Not the AnswerWhen someone else pays, costs always go upHealth care "reformers" keep talking about getting us more health insurance. Then they talk about cutting costs. This is contradictory nonsense.Insurance, whether private or a government Ponzi scheme like Medicare, means third parties pay the bills. When someone else pays, costs always go up.Imagine if you had grocery insurance. You wouldn't care how much food cost. Why shop around? If someone else were paying 80 percent, you'd buy the most expensive cuts of meat. Prices would skyrocket.That's what health insurance does to medical care. Patients rarely even ask what anything costs. Doctors often don't know. Often nobody even gives a damn. Patients rarely ask, "Is that MRI really necessary? Is there a cheaper place?" We consume without thinking.By contrast, in areas of medicine where most patients pay their own way, service gets better, while prices fall.Take plastic surgery and Lasik eye surgery: Because patients shop around and compare prices, doctors work hard to win their business. They often give customers their cell-phone numbers. Service keeps increasing, but prices don't. "In every other field of medicine, the price is going up faster than consumer prices in general," says John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis. "But the price of Lasik surgery, on average, has gone down by 30 percent."This shouldn't be a surprise. What holds costs down is patients acting like consumers, looking out for themselves in a competitive market. Providers fight to win business by keeping costs down and quality up.Yet politicians keep telling us the solution is more insurance. And they mean insurance not just for catastrophic diseases that could bankrupt us but also for routine treatments.The politicians are so oblivious to reality that they are on course to make things worse. Obama would force every business to either give workers health insurance or pay a fine into the public system. Why is that something we should want employers to do? Premiums come out of our salaries, but insurers are accountable to our bosses, not to us.Why not just have a free market where people can buy whatever kind of health insurance they want? Competition would then bring prices down.Obama and his Senate allies would limit competition by requiring insurers to cover everyone for the same "fair" price. No "cherry picking," the president says. No charging healthy people less.They call this "community rating," and it sounds fair. No more cruel "discrimination" against people who have a preexisting condition, obese people or smokers. But such simple-minded one-size-fits-all rules take from insurance companies their best price-dampening tool: Risk-based pricing encourages people to take better care of themselves, just as car-insurance companies reward good drivers. With one-size pricing your car-insurance company must give the town drunk the same deal it gives you.Insane, but the health-insurance industry is playing along. Insurers say that if government forces everyone to have insurance, they will accept all customers regardless of preexisting illnesses.They also offered to stop charging higher premiums to sick people. They're even giving up on gender differences.Sen. John Kerry huffed, "The disparity between women and men in the individual insurance market is just plain wrong, and it has to change." The president of the industry trade group, Karen M. Ignagni, agreed that disparities "should be eliminated."Give me a break.Women pay more than men for health insurance for good reason. Despite being healthier than men, they incur higher costs because they go to doctors more often, and they take more medicine. Kerry is pandering. I don't recall him demanding that men be protected from higher life-insurance and auto-insurance premiums."Community rating" hides the cost of health care. It's as destructive as ordering fire insurance companies to charge identical premiums for wood frame and stone houses. Universal health insurance with "no discrimination" pricing will make health care costs rise even faster.When politicians interfere with free markets, unintended consequences harm everyone, except the companies that lobby hard enough to protect themselves.Is it too much to expect our rulers to understand this?

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Budget umpire: Health care bills would raise costsWASHINGTON – Democrats' health care bills won't meet President Barack Obama's goal of slowing the ruinous rise of medical costs, Congress' budget umpire warned on Thursday, giving weight to critics who say the legislation could break the bank.The sobering assessment from Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf came as House Democrats pushed to pass a partisan bill through committees, while in the Senate a small group of lawmakers continued to seek a deal that could win support from both political parties.Senators involved in the bipartisan talks said Thursday evening they are making solid progress toward a compromise they claimed would hold down costs, addressing the budgetary concerns. But it could take more time to work out difficult issues. And that means that Obama's timetable for floor votes in the House and Senate before August would slip."I think it would be prudent of the president to be patient and allow us the opportunity to work," said Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, one of the lawmakers involved in talks led by Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont."I don't think we should be bound by a timetable that isn't realistic," said Snowe, adding that a Senate vote in September would still allow time to finish the legislation this fall.Baucus said he's "quite confident" that the group is "making a lot of progress" and would be ready fairly soon.From the beginning of the health care debate, Obama has insisted that any overhaul must "bend the curve" of rapidly rising costs that threaten to swamp the budgets of government, businesses and families.Asked by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., if the evolving legislation would bend the cost curve, the budget director responded that — as things stand now — "the curve is being raised."Explained Elmendorf: "In the legislation that has been reported, we do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount. And on the contrary, the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health care costs."Even if the legislation doesn't add to the federal deficit over the next years, Elmendorf said costs over the long run would keep rising at an unsustainable pace.Part of the reason is that Obama and most Democrats have refused to accept a tax on high-cost health insurance plans as part of the overhaul. There's wide agreement among economists that such a tax would give businesses and individuals an incentive to become thriftier consumers of health care. Finance Chairman Baucus said Thursday that Obama's position isn't helping matters.White House officials played down the significance of the budget director's assessment, calling it premature. "At the end of the day, we'll have significant cost controls," presidential adviser David Axelrod told The Associated Press.Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said the budget director's warning should be "a wake-up call," adding, "instead of rushing through one expensive proposal after another, we should take the time we need to get things right."For the fourth straight day, Obama used a public forum — a political rally for New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine — to argue for health care overhaul, saying, "It affects the stability of our entire economy."Despite the flashing yellow light from the budget office, the House pushed ahead Thursday.On the heels of the Senate health committee's approval Wednesday of a plan to provide coverage to the uninsured, three House committees shifted into action on their version of the legislation. The Democratic bills also call for the creation of a government-sponsored insurance plan to compete with private coverage, although they differ on the details.House Democrats won a coveted endorsement of their legislation from the American Medical Association, saying the bill "includes a broad range of provisions that are key to effective, comprehensive health system reform. The insurance industry said it opposes key elements of the bill, saying a government plan "will cause millions of patients to lose their current coverage."The House Education and Labor Committee approved an amendment to speed up access to health insurance for people with preexisting medical conditions. The bill as written would have stopped insurance companies from denying coverage because of such conditions, starting in 2013. The panel agreed Thursday to move up the date for group plans to six months after the bill takes effect.The tax-writing Ways and Means Committee also was working on a piece of the legislation, which seeks to provide coverage to nearly all Americans by subsidizing the poor and penalizing individuals and employers who don't purchase health insurance. It would boost taxes on high-income people and slow Medicare and Medicaid payments to providers.Majority Democrats on both committees turned back GOP efforts to strip key provisions from the bill, rejecting Republican amendments to delete a new government-run benefits plan and eliminate requirements on employers to provide health coverage, among other things.A third House committee, Energy and Commerce, also was considering the measure Thursday, but the road was expected to be rougher there. A group of fiscally conservative House Democrats called the Blue Dogs holds more than a half dozen seats on the committee — enough to block approval — and is opposing the bill over costs and other issues.Rep. Mike Ross, D-Ark., chairman of the Blue Dogs' health care task force, said the group would need to see significant changes to protect small businesses and rural providers and contain costs before it could sign on. "We cannot support the current bill," he said.Obama was doing all he could to encourage Congress to act. He met Thursday morning with two potential Senate swing votes, Sens. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine. On Wednesday, he met with a group of Senate Republicans in the White House in search of a bipartisan compromise and appeared in the Rose Garden for the latest in a series of public appeals to Congress to move legislation this summer.In another ad campaign backing the president's goal, Harry and Louise — the television couple who helped sink a health care overhaul in the 1990s — are returning to the small screen, this time in support of revamping the health system.___
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/16/us/16hospital.html?hp
To help close a growing deficit, the Democratic-controlled Legislature eliminated coverage for some 30,000 legal immigrants in the new state budget. Gov. Deval Patrick, a Democrat, is seeking to restore about half of the $130 million cut, but lawmakers have expressed reluctance, saying that doing so would require cuts to other important programs.
This will happen at the national level after Obamacare is passed. And it won't be at 30k it'll be more like 30 million. If we weren't at a billion dollar deficit and 11.5 billion dollar debt this might be a good idea. Another big problem with this healthcare plan is that there's not going to be a private health care to help cheapen the health care for the federal level. So this will force tax rates to sky rocket for all levels. It'll cost a lot more than a trillion dollars to support free health care for hundreds of millions of people. It's not a terrible idea to have universal health care. It would be stupid to try it at this point with this plan with this economy.
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Listened to a health insurance commercial the other day. It's sell point was along the lines of this: What good is the best insurance in the world if you can't afford the premiums? To me, that pretty much sums up the #1 problem with the current healthcare ideas floating around in congress. Even if they are good ideas(and I am in no way suggesting they are), I don't see how we can afford them, especially in the current economic situation. There is simply no way to pay for a huge increase in government without a significant increase in taxes. I don't see how making people pay higher taxes to pay less for health insurance really fixes anything.

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Listened to a health insurance commercial the other day. It's sell point was along the lines of this: What good is the best insurance in the world if you can't afford the premiums? To me, that pretty much sums up the #1 problem with the current healthcare ideas floating around in congress. Even if they are good ideas(and I am in no way suggesting they are), I don't see how we can afford them, especially in the current economic situation. There is simply no way to pay for a huge increase in government without a significant increase in taxes. I don't see how making people pay higher taxes to pay less for health insurance really fixes anything.
It doesn't. According to reports the bill they want to pass isn't really even a health care bill as much as a tax The healthcare part may not be put in for a few years if it is funded well enough.
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The Goverment is so good at running everything... I cant wait to see how efficiently the run health care. Our prayers have been answered

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O'S BROKEN PROMISES By BETSY MCCAUGHEY July 17, 2009 -- PRESIDENT Obama promises that "if you like your health plan, you can keep it," even after he reforms our health-care system. That's untrue. The bills now before Congress would force you to switch to a managed-care plan with limits on your access to specialists and tests. Two main bills are being rushed through Congress with the goal of combining them into a finished product by August. Under either, a new government bureaucracy will select health plans that it considers in your best interest, and you will have to enroll in one of these "qualified plans." If you now get your plan through work, your employer has a five-year "grace period" to switch you into a qualified plan. If you buy your own insurance, you'll have less time. And as soon as anything changes in your contract -- such as a change in copays or deductibles, which many insurers change every year -- you'll have to move into a qualified plan instead (House bill, p. 16-17). When you file your taxes, if you can't prove to the IRS that you are in a qualified plan, you'll be fined thousands of dollars -- as much as the average cost of a health plan for your family size -- and then automatically enrolled in a randomly selected plan (House bill, p. 167-168). It's one thing to require that people getting government assistance tolerate managed care, but the legislation limits you to a managed-care plan even if you and your employer are footing the bill (Senate bill, p. 57-58). The goal is to reduce everyone's consumption of health care and to ensure that people have the same health-care experience, regardless of ability to pay. Nowhere does the legislation say how much health plans will cost, but a family of four is eligible for some government assistance until their household income reaches $88,000 (House bill, p. 137). If you earn more than that, you'll have to pay the cost no matter how high it goes. The price tag for this legislation is a whopping $1.04 trillion to $1.6 trillion (Congressional Budget Office estimates). Half of the tab comes from tax increases on individuals earning $280,000 or more, and these new taxes will double in 2012 unless savings exceed predicted costs (House bill, p. 199). The rest of the cost is paid for by cutting seniors' health benefits under Medicare. There's plenty of waste in Medicare, but the Congressional Budget Office estimates only 1 percent of the savings under the legislation will be from curbing waste, fraud and abuse. That means the rest will likely come from reducing what patients get. One troubling provision of the House bill compels seniors to submit to a counseling session every five years (and more often if they become sick or go into a nursing home) about alternatives for end-of-life care (House bill, p. 425-430). The sessions cover highly sensitive matters such as whether to receive antibiotics and "the use of artificially administered nutrition and hydration." This mandate invites abuse, and seniors could easily be pushed to refuse care. Do we really want government involved in such deeply personal issues? Shockingly, only a portion of the money accumulated from slashing senior benefits and raising taxes goes to pay for covering the uninsured. The Senate bill allocates huge sums to "community transformation grants," home visits for expectant families, services for migrant workers -- and the creation of dozens of new government councils, programs and advisory boards slipped into the last 500 pages. The most recent ABC News/Washington Post poll (June 21) finds that 83 percent of Americans are very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with the quality of their health care, and 81 percent are similarly satisfied with their health insurance. They have good reason to be. If you're diagnosed with cancer, you have a better chance of surviving it in the United States than anywhere else, according to the Concord Five Continent Study. And the World Health Organization ranked the United States No. 1 out of 191 countries for being responsive to patients' needs, including providing timely treatments and a choice of doctors. Congress should pursue less radical ways to cover the uninsured. We have too much to lose with this legislation. Betsy McCaughey is founder of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths and a former lieutenant governor of New York. betsy@hospitalinfection.org

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http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10409House Democrats are scrambling to come up with tax increases or other means of paying for their $1.2 trillion medical insurance plan. Yet the legislation they're trying to cram through Congress is even costlier than they'd have you believe. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the House Democrats' legislation would spend $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years. Yet that cost estimate is based on a tried-and-true budget gimmick that members of Congress use to hide how much of your money they want to spend. In reality, the Democrats' health care bill is at least 50% more expensive than the $1.2 trillion estimate suggests. President Obama and his fellow partisans want the federal government to guarantee medical insurance coverage to all Americans. According to estimates by the left-leaning Urban Institute, providing health insurance to all of the uninsured would cost just under $2 trillion over the next 10 years. .author_pub2 a { float:right; margin: 10px 0 8px 8px; display:block; height: 142px; width: 110px; background: url(/people/pub_photos/cannon.jpg) no-repeat -110px 0; } .author_pub2a a { float:right; margin: 10px 0 8px 8px; display:block; height: 142px; width: 110px; background: url(/people/pub_photos/cannon.jpg) no-repeat 0 0; } And that's a minimum. Since any conceivable change would end up subsidizing some people who already have coverage, the cost would be a good bit higher. So how can congressional Democrats claim their health care plan would cover all — or even most — of the uninsured for just $1.2 trillion? Easy — they're hiding the cost. When budgeting how it will spend your money, Congress looks out across a 10-year budget window. The current budget window runs from 2010 to 2019. A standard trick for making new government programs appear less expensive is to have them take effect not in the first year, but later in the budget window. If Congress launches a $100 million program in year one, its 10-year cost will be $1 billion. If Congress launches the program in year six, the 10-year cost is just $500 million. Delaying implementation just cut the cost of the program in half, right? Not quite. The program would still cost taxpayers $100 million per year. That budgetary gimmick lets Congress appear thrifty. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., acting chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, recently said he was "very confident we can meet the president's goal of having a fully-paid-for 10-year program on health care right around $1 trillion." Of course he can! Covering the uninsured costs $2 trillion? Heck, we'll do it for half that price! That's exactly what House Democrats have done with their medical plan. Of the $1.2 trillion that the Congressional Budget Office estimates the legislation would cost between now and 2019, Democrats would spend only $200 billion in the first five years, but $1 trillion — more than 80% of the total — in the second five years. The Senate Democrats' medical plan includes new government spending that wouldn't even ramp up until beyond the 10-year window. If we assume the House Democrats' plan would take effect immediately, the 10-year price tag rises to more than $1.7 trillion. That's still shy of $2 trillion, because they're not actually covering everybody, and some of the spending is off the books. Yet this demonstrates that the full cost of the legislation is at least 50% higher than the Democrats would have you believe. Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, testified last week before the Senate Budget Committee. "In the legislation that has been reported," he said, "we do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount and, on the contrary, the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health care costs." Indeed, Democrats aren't reforming anything. They're just throwing more money at a broken health care sector. And they'd prefer you not know how much.
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As I look around the internet, I see a lot of people still believe that this bill just provides for a parallel competitive government plan that allows you to still keep your own private plan. Obama keeps repeating it, but that is just the Big Lie Technique.Here is where Obama is lying about this not being single payer. This is from H.R.3200, easily available at thomas.gov. Early on, in section 102, it has a section specifying the conditions under which you can still get private coverage -- that is, coverage not approved by a government committee. After explaining that this only applies to policies purchased before the bill goes into effect, here is some of the text:

" (2) LIMITATION ON CHANGES IN TERMS OR CONDITIONS- Subject to paragraph (3) and except as required by law, the issuer does not change any of its terms or conditions, including benefits and cost-sharing, from those in effect as of the day before the first day of Y1."
What this means is that, if a new procedure is invented, and your insurer wants to include it in your coverage, you lose your coverage and have to move to a government-approved plan, even if the government approved plan does NOT provide that coverage. Furthermore, if the cost of your coverage changes in response to, oh, the coming Obama inflation, you also lose your private coverage.A little further on:
" (A) IN GENERAL- The Commissioner shall establish a grace period whereby, for plan years beginning after the end of the 5-year period beginning with Y1, an employment-based health plan in operation as of the day before the first day of Y1 must meet the same requirements as apply to a qualified health benefits plan under section 101, including the essential benefit package requirement under section 121."
What this means is that after 5 years, you have to be on a government-approved plan. You are no longer allowed to buy private insurance that meets your personal needs perfectly if "the commissioner" -- an unelected bureaucrat -- doesn't think that it is good enough for you, even if you, your family, your employer, and your doctor are perfectly happy with it.Obama is using the Big Lie Technique -- if you repeat a big enough lie often enough, people will believe it. Fortunately, we live in an internet age and such lies are easily debunked.If you like your coverage, you should oppose this bill, because it WILL be taken away from you in 5 years or less.
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Is there anyone here that is okay with the healthcare bill in it's current form?Anyone?
I am afraid to answer for fear of being reported to fag@whitehouse.gov - bring out the gimp
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