70% is an outrageously incorrect ammount. Medicare and social security are/will be the greatest drags on our economy. Ask yourself why we need mediicare when each state can tax all they want to provide the services needed by their citizens. Some states have high sales tax, some low. Some have high, low or NO income tax. High or low property tax. Each state can find the combination of taxes to raise the money needed to provide services. Or federal government is there to protect the states. States have to balance their budgets by law usually and they cut services they cannot pay for more than the fed obviously. Why should welfare nanny states like California drag the rest of down disproportionate to their population?
i don't think 70% is incorrect. that includes nasa, all the secret branches, special funding and more but it is that much
"Exercise restraint and discipline, only responding to posts from legit customers and those with constructive positive intent, you will find that the handgrenades explode harmlessly. You have many satisfied customers who are happy to have the parts you've made. My suggestion to you is keep making good parts, keep getting more customers, take care of them and let them speak for you."
you know, healthcare is a serious hot button issue for me. I'm not sure what the answer is, but we are in desperate need of reform in one way or another. I don't think that socialized medicine is it, nor do I have any faith in leaving my fate or anybody else's up to bean counters. the system as it is just doesn't work unless you are an illegal alien. there is entirely to much corruption on the parts of the doctors, hospitals,pharmecutical(sp) companies and insurance companies. let me share my story.I'll try to keep it brief.
A few years ago I blew out my back and neck in an unfortunate accident where I ended up being crushed by an excursion. Yes a Ford. Anyway I had to have surgery and made a full recovery, but I picked up an infection from the hospital. Some of you may have heard of a little bug called MRSA. Nasty little fugger it is. well at the time you could only find this "superbug" in hospitals. so I was treated, but not properly and it became a chronic ailment. I had insurance at the time so it realy wasn't a big deal right? wrong.
a couple of years go by and I change jobs so there was a lapse in my coverage(because nobody can afford cobra). during that time this infection took hold in a very nasty way from a small scrape on my knee. within 12 hours of small abrasion I was hospitalized with no insurance.
two days. . . . $12,000.00.
I sat in the emergency room for 12 hours waiting to be admitted. actual time in room was 36 hours. the emergency room NURSES(this is important) cleaned my wound and gave me IV antibiotics slapped a bandage on and called it good. the next 36 hours I saw one doctor for literally about 45 seconds, got three more bags of antibiotics and one bandage change.(by the nurses)
I was sent home with a perscription for a fairly common oral antibiotic and another not so common. the script was for 20 pills $1500.00. whuuuuuuut? turns out this stuff can be bought in Mexico, Canada, the UK and most other countries for the equivalent of about $10.00. so here is what I was billed for
Doctors 3
infectious disease specialist 1
pathologist (?)
nurses (fair) 2
bed (fair)
room (fair?) . . . 2 rooms two days. . . wait a minute?
drugs (fair)
supplies (fair)
surgeries 2 huh?
skin graft 1 WTF?!
wheel chair (this one cracks me up) $500.00 I guess the two minute mandatory ride out of the place was in a formula one wheel chair the rents for 250 bones a minute.
I can go on and on but like I said I'll try to keep it somewhat brief. long story short I didn't have 9 out of 10 of the things that I was billed for. I've been fighting this hospital for going on 5 years now about this matter because I refuse to pay for things that were not provided. so the Monday after Christmass I have to go to court because they are suing me for the unpaid medical bills.
but wait there's more.
just recently I had a little skin cancer removed from my eyebrow. no big deal right? well the surgery wasn't, and I have insurance so you'd think that all would be peachy. well it's not. having been through this before I scanned my bills; which of course have generic descriptions, just to make sure they're legit. I request an Itemized bill for about three weeks and then two more weeks go by and I get one.
surgery right brow upper (fair)
pathologist (fair this time)
anesthesia (fair)
surgery nose (WHUUUUUUUUUT????????)
skin graft/neck/ nose placement (are these people high)
so my long winded point is it's to easy for the doctors to commit fraud against the insurance companies. it's easy for the insurance companies to deny claims. and it's easy for the drug companies to jack prices to ridiculous levels.
it's not easy for anybody to afford healthcare in the state that in now. and there is no profit in a cure. So regulation of some sort is in order as well as taking profit out of the industry. a persons health shouldn't ride on whether somebody is going to make a buck off of it. end rant.
thats shitty deal to say the least. I'm not sure if you came across in my opinion as you were blaming the hospital for the staph infection, perhaps it's my interpretation. The unfortunate truth is that since hospitals see the most sick people in our population it goes hand in hand that it will be the place to pick up the nastiest bugs. There is little to nothing that can be done to prevent these bugs from being transmitted(bar reducing our use of antibiotics irresponsibly which is creating selective pressures for their survival), many workers in the hospitals become healthy carriers of these bugs as they become a small part of their normal flora which is a great way to inoculate just about anything. anyways. hope you are getting better and the infection is clearing up!
i don't think 70% is incorrect. that includes nasa, all the secret branches, special funding and more but it is that much
It's just not true, dude. You can look these things up, ya know. This year we spent around 20% on defense, including the wars. We spend twice that on just the three biggest entitlement programs (SS, Medicare, Medicaid).
Although it would be nice if we spent a lot less, defense spending is not bankrupting us. Entitlement programs and interest payments are, and it's about to get a lot worse.
thats shitty deal to say the least. I'm not sure if you came across in my opinion as you were blaming the hospital for the staph infection, perhaps it's my interpretation. The unfortunate truth is that since hospitals see the most sick people in our population it goes hand in hand that it will be the place to pick up the nastiest bugs. There is little to nothing that can be done to prevent these bugs from being transmitted(bar reducing our use of antibiotics irresponsibly which is creating selective pressures for their survival), many workers in the hospitals become healthy carriers of these bugs as they become a small part of their normal flora which is a great way to inoculate just about anything. anyways. hope you are getting better and the infection is clearing up!
no I realize why and how, and that's an acceptable risk. my frustration lies in the fact that they refused to treat me properly the first time around. or the fact that they were unwilling to diagnose it as what it was in order to spare their reputation. then were unwilling to even discuss my incorrect bills.
Desparate SP2, get yer verbage right my good man, I believe the current moniker is "overseas contingencies", NOT "the war on terror", THAT would imply that we are AT WAR with people who want to KILL US....... We don't want to offend Al Queda now do we?
Semper Fi!
-Rocky-
You are right. Sorry about that.
I find it good many are not questioning the healthcare issue itself but are asking the real answer "can we afford any of this?". Many of us would like to own a nice fishing boat, an Aston Martin or a beautiful villa in the Caribbeans but we cannot so we shut our mouths and do without.
People are seemingly waking up to the idea that if you want to have more from your government you need to be ready to give up much more: governments are inefficient and wasteful by nature and so they need much more resources than the private sector to give a return. That's just the way it is, there's no way to change that.
Also there seems to be a growing concern over mounting expenditures all over the world: how long can we keep this up? To finance a growing government budget there are only three possible ways: increase taxation, increase deficit spending or have a strongly growing economy.
Most economists, even on the left side of the spectrum agree we have more or less reached the upper level of taxation. Increasing taxes would mean losing even more ground to the Asians and scare even more people into moving factories and laboratories to the Far East, Switzerland or whatever. Deficit spending has been tried and found not only wanting but potentially very dangerous: all eyes are on Japan and its monster debt which failed to stimulate growth and is an enormous ticking timebomb ready to explode. That leaves economic growth alone: since government spending failed to stimulate a healthy and continuous economic growth other ways must be found. Cutting taxes would be a good start but that should be matched with cutting expenditures: there's no way out. Cutting expenditures means cutting benefits to foreign dictators living on US and EU aids, cutting military budgets and generally less pie for all of those accustomed to an overgenerous regime willing to give something for next to nothing. Every single politician even the dumbest one know this. Problem is cutting "benefits" is never popular among voters...
There are five primary reasons why sickcare (a.k.a. "healthcare") costs will bankrupt the nation as they spiral ever higher:
1. Sickcare costs are rising three times faster than the underlying economy, and have done so regardless of goods times or bad, or which party is in political power. This is unsustainable; sickcare will soon consume 20% of the GDP, on its way to 30%.
2. The sickcare system diverts ever greater sums of national income to a handful of cartels, in essence diverting trillions of dollars away from preventive medicine and public health and into for-profit private hands.
3. The "fee for service" model creates perverse incentives for phony billing, fraud, needless tests and procedures and sky-high charges for generic items, i.e. the $100 aspirin and the $2,000 "recovery room" (patient sits in a chair for a few minutes. I know about this because my 80-year old Mom was recently billed over $13,000 for a one-hour out-patient procedure on her toe; the bill paid by Medicare included this absurd "recovery room" charge, among other insane fees. Of course no one complained; the procedure was "free.")
4. The "employer-pays" model distances the end user (patient) from the actual costs and eliminates the only sustainable limit on spiraling costs, competition. When services appear "free" then they are naturally abused. When the consumer has no knowledge of the actual costs and no real choice on where to spend their money, then responsibility goes out the window along with competition. 5. As small businesses are burdened with these skyrocketing sickcare costs, they either stop hiring or are crushed out of business. The nation's economy is thus destroyed from within by the uncontrolled costs of sickcare which funnels ever-larger sums to private cartels even as the nation's health continues declining.
A few years ago the Canadian government reached an agreement with the patent drug developers to allow generic versions of their drugs to the public. For over 25 years pharmacists have been able to substitute generic drugs for "name brand". i.e. Diazapam instead of Valium.
We all know if takes millions of dollars to develop new drugs and the agreement included a mechanism to compensate the drug developers for their investment. Not sure of the other details of the agreement (name vs generic) but everyone seems content and the system seems to work.
no I realize why and how, and that's an acceptable risk. my frustration lies in the fact that they refused to treat me properly the first time around. or the fact that they were unwilling to diagnose it as what it was in order to spare their reputation. then were unwilling to even discuss my incorrect bills.
the real problem in all of this is that true capitalism hasn't had an honest shot at solving our problmes for several hundred years..... since back when the US was actually folowing it's constitution to a T. Given a chance it would solve many pricing problems that govts have caused under the current "capitalist" pseudonym.
The drug market is a perfect case of "political economy".
Manufacturers spend large sums developing new drugs and the associated industrial processes: vaccines are the best case. They are very expensive to develop and even more to manufacture: developing a "generic version" is nigh on impossible. That's why Big Pharma in recent years has "put the pedal to the metal" and tried to exploit every single health scare to sell enormous stocks of vaccines to compliant governments. It's not about consumers' healthcare (ie people asking for a vaccine because they are genuinely concerned about their health) but about convincing governments they "need" your product. Modern governments are addicted to spending, they won't turn down any occasion to "pump money into the economy".
Also failed/ineffective drugs would be weeded out of the market or used much more parsimoniously. Take acid pump inhibitors, so widely prescribed by doctors worldwide. They do cause a wide array of side effects, a few of them long lasting (yes, I was prescribed one of those things in the past) and more often than not they aren't really needed for more than a couple of months if they are needed at all. Yet they are prescribed like candies, especially when people can have the State or insurance forking the bill.
Subsidizing a thing means selling it at below market prices; selling it below market prices means it will be misused, generating all sorts of problems.
And that's it.
Last edited by DesperateSP2; 01-01-2010 at 02:06 PM.
The drug market is a perfect case of "political economy".
Manufacturers spend large sums developing new drugs and the associated industrial processes: vaccines are the best case. They are very expensive to develop and even more to manufacture: developing a "generic version" is nigh on impossible. That's why Big Pharma in recent years has "put the pedal to the metal" and tried to exploit every single health scare to sell enormous stocks of vaccines to compliant governments. It's not about consumers' healthcare (ie people asking for a vaccine because they are genuinely concerned about their health) but about convincing governments they "need" your product. Modern governments are addicted to spending, they won't turn down any occasion to "pump money into the economy".
Also failed/ineffective drugs would be weeded out of the market or used much more parsimoniously. Take acid pump inhibitors, so widely prescribed by doctors worldwide. They do cause a wide array of side effects, a few of them long lasting (yes, I was prescribed one of those things in the past) and more often than not they aren't really needed for more than a couple of months if they are needed at all. Yet they are prescribed like candies, especially when people can have the State or insurance forking the bill.
Subsidizing a thing means selling it at below market prices; selling it below market prices means it will be misused, generating all sorts of problems.
And that's it.
I fookin' HATE it when I have to agree with a fookin' socialist, but my good man, I concur.
-Rocky-
__________________
ROCKYMT
Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat."
Hey son, we agreed to keep THAT part o the down low................
-Rocky-
__________________
ROCKYMT
Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat."
I love Jack. Gee, this must mean that CNN is not liberal. See, I knew I was right.
__________________ "...let us not ignore the truth among ourselves, that we are the aggressors and they defend themselves. The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down."
David Ben-Gurion (the father of Israel) "When fascism comes to America it will be draped in a flag and holding a cross." Sinclair Lewis I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands. One nation, indivisible, with liberty, and justice for all.
Well for years i have and never will trust "Doctors"!!! in that I mean the ones that spend a cold (their demeanor) few seconds barely hearing what you have to say and leaving you with a couple of hundred dollars bill!!!
Here is one of my Horror stories with Health care, I was 20 and I went out and partied on a Saturday night, the next morning was the usual hangover but when I would lay down on the couch I would feel nauseous and would run and throw up!!! Every time I would lay down the same result!!!! So I went to the local emergency room and told the doctor my mother thinks I have appendicitis (because my older brother had it 20+years before) so the doctor examines me, I have tenderness in my lower right abdomen, they take blood and do other tests......Doctor comes back and says I do not have it and gives me amoxicillin and sends me home!!
That night at about 11:30 I get some sharp pain down there and go and try to relax in a glider, I end up passing out from the pain, and wake up a few hours later. I felt a lot better just had a small bit of pain in my lower abs, I was helping a friend cut down logs for the next week and still had this nagging pain so I go to my local doctor and tell her the tale!!! I have never seen someone loose the colr of their skin so fast as she did!! She takes some blood and says she will be right back, she comes back after a few minutes and tells me I do have it and I will be in surgery at 3:30, it was 2:45 at that time!!!!
I meet with the surgeon and he tells me he has done over 5000 of these and it takes him 20-25 minutes tops. So I was like whatever lets do this. I wake up with a huge tube down my nose pumping my stomach, a nice IV in my arm and I have no stitches!!!! I have a six inch gash in my stomach and a drain tube from the wound!!! The doctor comes in and tells me he could not tell what was what inside me and it was completely destroyed like a bomb went off!!! I needed to have the wound heal from the inside out and could not have the wound stitched up until it healed up. I spent 5 days without stitches and a total of 9 days for something I told that piece of crap Doctor what was wrong!!!
I sued him for malpractice and was awarded 10000!! for 9 days that should have been 3!!! I feel like I got screwed, so when people talk about frivolous lawsuits, not all are and they do DESERVE PUNISHMENT!!!!!! The only reason I am here to rant to you is because I was a little chubby back then and the fat contained it, otherwise I would not be able to piss some of you and plenty of drivers off!!!
I have a couple of other stories and have only one medical practitioner I trust, because he is honest and does his job well. The funny thing is is he is my Chiropractor!!!! Sorry to rant so long but it still burns me this joke of a doctor can practice medicine!!!!
Hey a quick question for you guys, What do you call a doctor who barely struggles through medical school and gets C's and D's???
__________________
"Your out of your element Donnie"
You know...they are Doctors...not some separate species that is perfect and all-knowing. They're not going to be perfect every time and they're not going to know what is exactly wrong every time. For all the "nightmare" cases, there are probably double or triple the success stories. As if this Obama care bill will take care of any problems that stem from doctor errors.
Sounds like we already have socialized medicine...
Confirmation of how broken the system is...
I was listening to a local radio show yesterday and the spokesman for one of our local non-profit (Cox Health) hospitals was on. The subject was the waste caused by people w/o insurance using emergency rooms as doctor clinics. Spokesman said that for every dollar billed by the hospital, only 38 cents are ever paid. His comment was that their prices could be 62% lower if everyone paid what they were billed or had insurance, and he admitted that their only choice is to increase fees for everyone that can pay. Since my wonderful health plan through my employer has to use Cox, this means myself and UnitedHealthCare are is paying two and a half times more than it should if everyone paid. very frustrating.
Another story:
A companion story also proves frustratinig. A co-worker's daughter was in a car accident a few weeks ago, minor injuries for her but she had to go to the emergency room for stitches. No insurance, no job, sh*tbox car.
Her dad was concerned that she might have to declare bankruptcy when the hospital comes after her. Her response, and if this doesn't illustrate how broken the system is I don't know what does, was this "But dad how can they come after me, they just stitched me up and sent me out? I didn't have to show my SS card or even verify my address. They have no idea who I even am."
So let me get this straight. An injured young woman comes in looking like she doesn't have insurance and is poor, so they just patch her up and send her on her way. And I and my employer get to pay for it. The hospital apparently has no incentive to even try to go after their money. Instead they just pile more costs on to those that can pay more easily.
Conclusions:
Sounds like we are already have a form of socialized medicine. My rising rates (and lowered raises to pay for the employers portion) are to thank for this system.
My first reaction in most instances would be "screw them, everyone who can pay should just stop paying also". Unlike taking on a mortgage, avoiding paying sales tax by buying online, or never considering a Harley because they're idiots...you sometimes really need someone to remove your gall bladder perform an agioplasty to avoid an unfortunate case of death. So everyone with insurance or the character to pay their bills will continue to get screwed.
I'm not sure it can get worse. Different maybe, but not worse.
whuuuuuuut? turns out this stuff can be bought in Mexico, Canada, the UK and most other countries for the equivalent of about $10.00. so here is what I was billed for
We don't want to offend Al Queda now do we?
Linear Mode
