From the Associated Press
That's fucking great. I had to create a new tag, because of this story: Obama Blows.
Showing posts with label Healthcare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Healthcare. Show all posts
Sunday, August 16, 2009
"White House appears ready to drop 'public option'"
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
No. I do not worship the Free Market God, for I have seen his frailties, and he is not a true God.
Now, from that weird break below to ramble briefly about sex, I return to the issue of healthcare that we can't seem to escape lately:
Please stop telling me how great the free market is at fixing things and creating the best systems possible. See, I work for a private company. And I see the bureaucracy, and the laziness, and the shit we get away with doing to customers and the crap we can pass off as a product to them. And guess what? We still have paying customers. Thousands of them. We still have customers because there's no real competition for us (broadband service in rural communities). The free market hasn't made competing with us look very profitable. And so our customers get what we give them, which isn't great. We could do better, but why would we when we are already making money? There's nothing magical about the profit motive, you see. The only thing unique about it compared to other motives is it usually, but not always, leads to profit. Sometimes it leads to failure. Much like political motive. Sometimes political motive creates a product that is successful from a political standpoint. Sometimes it fails. But neither motive is perfect. And when one has failed, I say, let's try another.
How did we get so delusional?
At what point does the discourse about healthcare in the mainstream media send me into a hair-pulling, teeth gnashing, fit of rage?
About the same time CNN uncritically says things like this to characterize the opponents of reform:
Specter remained calm most of the time, except when a woman asked if the bill meant a 74-year-old man with cancer would be written off by an overhauled health care system.
"Nobody 74 is going to be written off because they have cancer," he responded angrily. "That's a vicious, untrue rumor."
Is a news outlet no longer capable of then following up with comment on whether or not the bill allows for 74 year olds with cancer to be left to die?! Is it not a matter of fact or fiction? There is in fact a bill in public. There are in fact reporters capable of reading. Let's not leave this as a "here's what this side says, here's what that side says," issue if it isn't one. There's a truth here. Fucking write about it.
In particular, Republicans and some Democrats reject a government-funded public health insurance option, arguing it would lead to a government takeover of the health care system.No comment on whether a public option actually could elad to a government takeover, what they actually mean by a government takeover, whether these claims are legitimate or just political fuckery. That's just the end of the article.
I can't take much more of the healthcare debate. I imagine being politically conscious in the early 90s fight could've killed me.
p.s. If I hear one more person say they don't want the government taking away their healthcare OPTIONS I will freak the fuck out. WHAT OPTIONS DO YOU HAVE?! I've never had options. I was either lucky enough to have coverage or unlucky to not have coverage at every point in my life. It has always been completely out of my hands. And what's certain is that when I have had coverage, I haven't had any choices, no say in what that coverage is, in what it covers, in what my deductible is. It's either being paid for by someone or it's not and I have to live with it.
Options presented to you by a for-profit health insurance industry are not options. That's not freedom of choice.
Ok, ok. /rant
Monday, August 10, 2009
Staying in Bed with Big Pharma
Some free market this is. From Robert Reich at Salon:
Last week, after being reported in the Los Angeles Times, the White House confirmed it has promised Big Pharma that any healthcare legislation will bar the government from using its huge purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices. That's basically the same deal George W. Bush struck in getting the Medicare drug benefit, and it's proven a bonanza for the drug industry. A continuation will be an even larger bonanza, given all the boomers who will be enrolling in Medicare over the next decade. And it will be a gold mine if the deal extends to Medicaid, which will be expanded under most versions of the healthcare bills now emerging from Congress, and to any public option that might be included.
[...]I don't want to be puritanical about all this. Politics is a rough game in which means and ends often get mixed and melded. Perhaps the White House deal with Big Pharma is a necessary step to get anything resembling universal health insurance. But if that's the case, our democracy is in terrible shape. How soon until big industries and their Washington lobbyists have become so politically powerful that secret White House-industry deals like this are prerequisites to any important legislation? When will it become standard practice that such deals come with hundreds of millions of dollars of industry-sponsored TV advertising designed to persuade the public that the legislation is in the public's interest? (Any Democrats and progressives who might be reading this should ask themselves how they'll feel when a Republican White House cuts such deals to advance its own legislative priorities.)
We're on a precarious road -- and wherever it leads, it's not toward democracy.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Garrison Keillor on Healthcare and Civility
Via Salon. Here's an excerpt:
I think we've already been sold down the river...I only wish Obama and this congress could have served the six months previous to this in a way that would leave me at least a little surprised at what this healthcare reform is becoming. File healthcare under Tepid Democratic Hackery.In the past two weeks, I've attended two benefit concerts to raise money for musicians to pay their medical bills, and that is just ridiculous. Why should anyone, least of all a valuable contributing member of society, have to pass the hat to pay the doctor? But there I was, watching one of America's few true-blue cowboy singers hoist himself on crutches onto the stage to sing "The Old Chisholm Trail" as we put our twenties in the pot to pay for his pelvis, broken when a horse threw him. A cowboy singer can only afford the $10,000 deductible health plan and that means that he must sell Old Paint or become a charity case.
Meanwhile, a friend visiting London forgets to look to the right while crossing the street and gets whacked by a taxi and is scooped up and taken to the hospital with a broken leg where -- wait for it -- nobody ever asks him for an insurance card, they just go about doing what needs to be done. A civilized people, whatever you may think of the beer, that they treat a fallen American the same as if he were one of them.
Health insurance is the business that Congress is taking up this summer with the help of hundreds of high-paid lobbyists, many of them former congressmen or congressional staffers, all of them arguing for schemes that will be good for the pharmaceutical industry and the insurance companies and not necessarily good for the cowboy or the careless pedestrian. Reports the size of Sears catalogs will be circulated, and smart men and women smelling of citrus and sandalwood will argue persuasively and extensively for all points of view.
Our representatives will face pages and pages of statistics, acres of numerals, and even as they wander in the great fog of data and expertise, they will be at least as confused as the rest of us. Somehow out of this dance hall and sausage mill will come legislation that must stand the light of day, a miracle if it should happen, and then we shall see if the common good was served or if we have been sold down the river into the hands of cheats and scoundrels.
Friday, July 3, 2009
U.S. Unemployment Reaches 9.5 Percent
That's almost one in ten Americans who are unemployed. Nationally, another half a million jobs were cut in June. There really isn't anyone untouched by this recession. Anyone I speak to can list the people close to them who have lost their jobs, those who have taken pay cuts, those who have taken cuts to their benefits (That's me. I now have to pay half of my premium, which is really nothing compared to what people are facing when they lose their employer benefits altogether, but it does end up being a significant difference in your monthly take-home, and is even a greater difference for those who have to insure their partners and children in addition to themselves.)
This was the facebook status of a married friend of mine today:
14 applications and temporary insurance later, I've got my fingers crossed that we get accepted by at least one provider.
Pretty difficult to feel that glow of American pride this weekend when this country has failed us so thoroughly in providing basic healthcare to all of its citizens. Think how much less devastating this unemployment surge would be if we all had the comfort that we could have the care we needed, employed or not.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Fire engines and emergency rooms
If your house is on fire in the United States, firefighters come to put it out and save your life.
You don't receive any bills. You don't have to purchase a monthly fire protection service whose prices fluctuate according to market conditions and the demands of profitability.
You just get the service you need, when you need it. No red tape. No fees. No needless bureaucracy. Things are simple.
That's what happens if your house is on fire. But if you have a medical emergency, its a completely different story.
This is how things might go assuming you are not one of the 50 million Americans who has no health insurance at all. Imagine you break your arm and go to the emergency room. You get the immediate care you need and get released the next day. On your way out, you stop by a department of the hospital where you're to pay and fill out the appropriate insurance information (in the U.K., for example, such departments do not exist).
That wasn't so bad, right? I mean, even though you may be paying costly premiums, deductibles and co-pays, at least you're covered, right?
Until 5 months later you get a call from the hospital (or a debt collection agency paid by the hospital) demanding that you pay for your visit. You owe some ridiculous sum of money, they claim. Say, $10,000. "But I'm insured" you say to yourself. You check into things and find out that your insurance company doesn't want to cover the treatment because it was 'experimental' or because it derived from a 'pre-existing condition'. So they claim that they aren't going to pay. You press them, and they claim that they aren't going to budge.
Somehow, things get straightened out and it appears that the insurance company is going to pay for some of it. Whew. Glad that's over.
Until a year later you get a bill from the hospital demanding some smaller sum of cash that you still 'owe' them. It turns out, that the insurance company has refused to pay for 2 bandaids and a cotton swab totalling $100. The hospital, it seems, didn't send the bill in the correct format in the correct time window to the insurance company, so the insurnace company said they refuse to pay it. Since the insurance company is a huge, powerful, and attorney-fortified institution, the hospital has decided to pass the buck along to you. If the big insurance giant wont pay or will force a trial in order to cough up the cash for your bandaids, the hospital figures they might as well harass you to pay it. After all, you're not very scary and you aren't so likely to have a team of corporate atorneys at your disposal to dispatch such requests.
So the hopsital takes this outstanding balance that they're owed and sells it to a debt-collection shark. They sell it to the shark for 75% of what its 'worth', so the hospital recoups some of the cash they're owed and is absolved of having to deal with getting the money. So now you get calls from some shark demanding that you pay for the cotton swabs that your insurance company has refused to pay.
You complain to your insurance company that they should just pay this thing, but they don't listen. After persistent calling, faxing, letter-mailing, and emailing, they explain to you that they aren't paying because of 'company policy'. The company policy, after all, was drawn up in the interests of making the company maximally profitable. If you were to aggregate the amount of 'small sums' of this nature that they refuse to pay in a single year alone, it adds up to a decent chunk of money. This is how capitalist entreprises function: the bottom line is that they try to minimize costs and maximize returns.
Meanwhile you've got some jerk-off claiming that you haven't paid for cotton swabs used at a visit to the doctor that occured 3 years ago at a time when you were fully covered by what most people would consider "really good health coverage".
Invovled in this tragic comedy, are: two different health care providers (the hopsital and the contractors) who each have their own bone to pick with you, a massive insurance institution that is not 'on your side' but rather on the side of the investors who own the company, and a handful of seperate institutions that make their money by collecting debts and harassing people. If things get really bad, you can also throw your attorney and any other legal counsels fighting against you in a legal battle that might subsequently ensue, not to mention the court system, judges, etc.
Now in the United Kingdom health care works like fire departments work here.
When you get sick, you go to a hospital. You get the care you need. You leave feeling better. 3 years later you do not receive 5 different bills from 6 different bureaucracies. In fact, you never receive any goddamn bills. As a citizen and a taxpayer of the United Kingdom, you've already paid your dues. And what's more, whatever dues you did pay were proportional to how much money you made: the amount you pay for your health care isn't a 'one size fits all affair', but takes into account your ability to pay. It doesn't much matter whether you have a job when you go to the hospital, whether you're old and frequently ill, whether you are poor. You can come and get the health care you need all the same.
The United States Congress has been holding 'health care forums' recently in which they are claiming to be putting 'all options on the table' in considering ways to reform the unbelievably moronic health insurance system that the US currently has. But nothing remotely approximating the example above is being mentioned, let alone seriously considered.
The problem, after all, isn't that we have twelve different bloated bureacracies doing sixteen different tasks that have nothing to do with insuring people, but rather firguring out how not to insure the people that already paid for their insurance. The problem isn't that our system is inefficient and has too many different institutions doing the same thing poorly. The problem isnt that profiteers are in firm control of all the relevant institutions and run them according to the criteria of "let's make me as rich as possible". The problem isn't that these assholes made billions in profits last year while millions more Americans lost their insurnace coverage.
The problem, says Obama et. al, is just that 'health care costs are too high'. Right.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Bernie Sanders introduces Single Payer senate bill
via Healthcare-Now!: Read it here.
Of course, its Bernie Sanders, and its unlikely that much will come of it. Still... it can't hurt to have a single-payer bill on the table in some sense. If nothing else it's a rallying-point.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
On the Street: "We're moving in with my parents"
That's what a married, late-20s coworker of mine told me today. The reason? She and her husband have some hospital bills they have to pay off and they can't do it while they pay rent. And yeah, she gets full benefits through our employer, which includes relatively good health insurance.
Also...I hear there was some kind of important speech tonight? I'm glad healthcare is back on the docket, but just what does he mean when he says healthcare reform? He doesn't give us the faintest idea, and it really worries me they'll pass a few minor bills off as the first-year healthcare reform they promised.
p.s. I'm convinced that Bobby Jindal couldn't speak more obnoxiously if he tried. So.Condescending.And.Insincere. And is it just me, or does volcano monitoring sound like a fairly worthy investment?
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