Health care reform and OSA

I, for one, got BETTER health care back in the 60s and 70s. Doctors even had TIME to spend w/their patients. They could have a nice office in a nice area, pay off their education loans, live a nice lifestyle, only needed ONE nurse/receptionist to run the office ..... and were more satisfied w/the "work" and their profession.

Slinky wrote:I, for one, got BETTER health care back in the 60s and 70s. Doctors even had TIME to spend w/their patients. They could have a nice office in a nice area, pay off their education loans, live a nice lifestyle, only needed ONE nurse/receptionist to run the office ..... and were more satisfied w/the "work" and their profession.

... and then our government got involved with Medicare and Medicaid and insurance regulation.

... and then our government got involved with Medicare and Medicaid and insurance regulation.

MONEY, MONEY is the issue for you. Why regulate something, if it could keep prices lower, and make it affordable for everybody. As long as Rooster has it, who cares about anybody else. What a fake!

I just got back from a job and got on here,and to my surprise I see that this thread has seemed to have touched a nerve with many people. There have been alot of interesting views brought up concerning healthcare in this country and yet no one really knows what is to come for OSA sufferers within the new Healthcare Reform Bill,if it passes.
Infighting wont make things any easier for those who have to struggle with DME's or doctors who are overwhelmed or just dont care. It seems as if many in the healthcare profession dont take OSA and its effects seriously so I am curious if the new Bill will change that or if it will get worse. If it gets worse then Lord help us,but if it does make a change for the better then that is a good thing.
I for one am just a little apprehensive about this Bill and I am not a fan of this administration. I fully understand why others are just as apprehensive as I am because alot of this talk does carry "socialist" undertones and we can see how history has proven what a flawed system it is,on its own. Does this imply that socialism is akin to Healthcare Reform in this country? I dont know,but something does need to be done.

Wulfman wrote:

PST wrote:I've heard this doubletalk about frontloading and backloading several times, but I don't understand what it means.[/b] Not only does the CBO say that the Senate bill will reduce the 2010-2019 deficit by $130 billion, it says in the same report that it expects the bill to reduce the deficit even more during the next ten years, 2020-2029. Therefore I don't see how the purported savings for 2010-2019 could come from a dirty trick that puts the benefits up front and the cost at the end. The fact that some early versions of the bill were budget busters just means that the proponents reacted to criticism and made their bill better. That's what they're supposed to do. I believe you expressed doubt at one point that a decent piece of legislation could be produced in the time this has been in preparation, but it has been the better part of a year now. That time and effort has yielded an improved bill that is now better than revenue neutral. I believe the CBO, but even if you don't, it should be clear that the CBO is not saying that the bills now before the Senate or the House will wreck the country financially.

What it means is that IF the proposed legislation comes into being, they're going to tax the Hell out of everybody for about 4 or 5 years until the "benefits" finally start to kick in in 2013 (or later).
The other thing is that they "hid" several hundred billion (didn't count it - "took it off the table" - in the figures they gave the CBO) so it would look APPEAR to "save" any money.

I looked at the CBO's report on the Senate bill. In the years prior to 2013, net revenue increases are under $10 billion each year; moreover, if you just count the years 2013 to 2019, the bill still results in an estimated deficit reduction of $90 billion.

I just don't understand what this business about "hiding" hundreds of billions of dollars means. You say they didn't count it in the figures they gave the CBO. I thought the CBO's job was to make its own estimate of costs. It doesn't just accept some numbers "they" give it.

Bearcat42 wrote:I for one am just a little apprehensive about this Bill and I am not a fan of this administration. I fully understand why others are just as apprehensive as I am because alot of this talk does carry "socialist" undertones and we can see how history has proven what a flawed system it is,on its own. Does this imply that socialism is akin to Healthcare Reform in this country? I dont know,but something does need to be done.

I think the bill does a good job of repairing the current system and keeping as much of private insurance as possible, consistent with the goal of making sure everyone can get coverage without fear of becoming uninsurable if they come down with a serious disease. It is much less radical than its opponents make it out to be. But even some of the most important opponents of socialism have thought that health care was an exceptional service in which government involvement could be justified. There cannot have been many economists more critical of socialism than Friedrich von Hayek, who argued, in The Road to Serfdom, that all forms of collectivism tend towards tyranny. Yet he said in Chapter 9:

Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision. Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance – where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks – the case for the state's helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong … Wherever communal action can mitigate disasters against which the individual can neither attempt to guard himself nor make the provision for the consequences, such communal action should undoubtedly be taken."

We are lucky modern medicine can do as much as it can, but one consequence is that most people really have no practical way to protect themselves against the risk of becoming uninsurable by virtue of a serious chronic condition. Therefore, even the most prudent, unless truly wealthy, cannot fully make provisions against the future need for costly medical care.

Even Milton Friedman once proposed providing every family in the United States with a major medical policy with a high deductible that would cover catastrophic illness. See http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/3459466.html. I will freely admit that what he proposed was much, much different from the current bill, which he would not have liked at all. Still, it was universal medical insurance he was talking about, and Friedman was no more a socialist than Hayek was.

Finally, for anyone who is worried that consequences of healthcare reform will be so catastrophic that the United States will never recover, I would offer an observation from the greatest free market economist of them all. Adam Smith famously wrote to a friend who, after the Battle of Saratoga, lamented that the rebellion in the colonies would be the ruin of Britain. "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation," he said. If I'm wrong and the other guys are right, it is still silly to think one misstep, even a big one, is enough to irrevocably injure this great country.