California: 59% health premium hike March 1

1. We have a large citizen contingent of Democrats, Republicans, and Tea Partiers who despise the private health care companies.

2. We have people who want the Federal government to help them with health care insurance.

3. We have a very popular health insurance, Medicare, for those 65 and over. Popular with Democrats, Republicans and Tea Partiers. Very well established (financially sound is a different problem).


For the life of me I cannot understand why they all did not just want Medicare extended to all ages!!???

Why did Obama/Pelosi/Reid not extend Medicare instead of having someone write this God-awful monstrosity of a system that leaves the private insurance companies in the catbird seat and gathers more policy holders for them!!??? It would have been much easier to get through and there would have been much less opposition.

JohnBFisher wrote:Yes, I understand that. However, that has NOTHING to do with the new healthcare laws. In fact, the effort to provide an alternative (and competition) to the current system - a public option - was defeated by the insurance industry puppets - the Republican party. They refused to have any competition to the existing system.

No, the people of this great country soundly defeated the possibility of a public option this past November because they are smart enough to see through that Bull Shit. They do not want some bureaucrat sitting in a small cubical in a big building in Washington D.C. deciding if they can get their hemorrhoids fixed or not.

roster wrote:For the life of me I cannot understand why they all did not just want Medicare extended to all ages!!???

Then you should have voted for Dennis Kucinich:
http://articles.cnn.com/2010-03-17/poli ... M:POLITICS

Do you really think this would have been easier to get this through congress???

jmelby wrote:

roster wrote:For the life of me I cannot understand why they all did not just want Medicare extended to all ages!!???

Then you should have voted for Dennis Kucinich:
http://articles.cnn.com/2010-03-17/poli ... M:POLITICS
Do you really think this would have been easier to get this through congress???

Yes, you have to be joking, Rooster. Can you imagine 60 votes in the Senate for pure socialized medicine? Even the public option, which is to say, even the opportunity to select the government as your health insurer, had to be purged from the bill in order for it to pass by the skin of its teeth. Given what the health insurance industry spent to oppose the act we have, what would it have done to avoid being legislated out of existence? No, Medicare for all was not even a remote possibility.

We will see how those who love Medicare like the impact of the new "competitve" bidding process. They awarded contracts to some medical equipment suppliers that don't even handle the material/equipment they are supposed to be distributing.

Chances are your current DME will go out of business. You won't be able to get the S9 Autoset because the reimbursements won't be enough to cover it. Technological innovation will stagnate due to the lack of a profit motivator.

Bottom line.....repeal Obamacare or we will have only a public option left which will bankrupt the United States. At then end of the day we needed tort reform more than anything else. Insurance premiums account for more than 50% of medical fees. Second, allow for interstate health insurance. Third, create an insurance pool for individuals where they can get group rates.

The U.S. is not a socialist country. These type of policies have destroyed other countries economies and now they are laughing at us as we follow their example.

mbkjad wrote:Bottom line.....repeal Obamacare or we will have only a public option left which will bankrupt the United States. At then end of the day we needed tort reform more than anything else. Insurance premiums account for more than 50% of medical fees. Second, allow for interstate health insurance. Third, create an insurance pool for individuals where they can get group rates.

1. The PPACA does not contain a public option, so it doesn't make sense to say that unless we repeal it we will have only a public option left.

2. I believe in tort reform. I work for medical malpractice insurers and spend a significant amount of my time evaluating and paying malpractice claims. If I ruled the world, there are a lot of changes I would make to improve the fairness and efficiency of the medical tort system. However, malpractice premiums are only a tiny percentage of health costs. The Congressional Budget Office studied this in detail in 2004 and updated its research in 2009 at the request of Senator Hatch. This can be found at http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=10641 under the title, CBO's Analysis of the Effects of Proposals to Limit Costs Related to Medical Malpractice ("Tort Reform"), October 9, 2009. Malpractice premiums aren't anywhere close to 50 percent of fees:

CBO estimates that the direct costs that providers will incur in 2009 for medical malpractice liability – which consist of malpractice insurance premiums together with settlements, awards, and administrative costs not covered by insurance – will total approximately $35 billion, or about 2 percent of total health care expenditures.

Tort reform at the federal level could reduce that $35 billion but not eliminate it. Many states already have excellent medical tort reform, including large states like California, Ohio, and Texas. These states still face malpractice costs, and since tort reform already exists there the job is partially done, reducing the additional benefit reform at the federal level could provide. Tort reform simply isn't the solution to medical costs because malpractice costs are such a small part of the whole. Moreover, although there have been times in the past when malpractice costs skyrocketed, they have been steady recently. Here in Illinois, where I live, the biggest physician insurer, ISMIE, announced that it was keeping its rates flat for the fourth consecutive year. Some of the companies whose claims I audit have been reducing their rates. Claim frequency has been stable or dropping for several years in most of the country. Average severity is mixed, up some places and stable in others, but there is no strong upward trend at present.

3. The claim that allowing companies to sell health insurance across state lines will bring down prices is a complete canard. The big companies like Aetna, Cigna, Humana, UnitedHealth, and WellPoint have branches or subsidiaries everywhere. Go, for example, to the Aetna site at http://healthinsurance.aetna.com/ for a quote on an individual policy. The dropdown list that starts you off lets you select any state.

It is important to remember, too, that health insurance isn't like life insurance, for example, where all the insurer has to do is write a check if the policyholder dies. One of the main things a health insurer is selling is its market power and negotiating clout with the local providers. We have all seen the huge difference in medical bills between the nominal rate and what insurers have negotiated. To do that, insurers need a local presence and enough policyholders to be worth giving a discount. If I'm the only person in Chicago who bought insurance from Joe's Health of Tacoma, when I actually need care I'm going to have trouble finding a hospital or physician who will accept my Joe's card. One reason states require health insurers to submit to local regulation is make sure that they have a sufficient network of local providers that coverage isn't illusory.

4. Insurance pools where individuals can get group rates are a problem if there is no mandate requiring everyone to have insurance (see jmelby's posts). Group insurance only works because it is incidental to whatever brings the group together – usually employment – and therefore the group can be presumed to contain a fair cross section. A group formed only to purchase health insurance, if open to anyone, will disproportionately attract those who are already sick, thereby becoming a high-risk pool. One of the first things the PPACA did is to create a Pre-existing Condition Insurance Program (PCIP) to address the issue of those who already have medical problems until the full system of insurance exchanges goes into effect in 2014. Some states already had high-risk pools that offered reasonable plans but many did not. There is information (including state-by-state details) at http://pcip.gov and http://www.healthcare.gov/law/provisions/preexisting. Repeal the act and people with pre-existing conditions in states that have no plan for them will once again be out of luck.

kempo wrote:They do not want some bureaucrat sitting in a small cubical in a big building in Washington D.C. deciding if they can get their hemorrhoids fixed or not.

I take it they would rather have some corporate lackey sitting in a cubicle in a marble & glass palace deciding if they can get their hemorrhoids fixed, especially since that lackey quite likely will get a bonus at the end of the year for every dollar in medical expenditures he keeps his company from having to pay out. No question about it, a profit driven employee will more likely approve expenditure for care than would a fixed salary employee whose possible bonus is influenced by customer letters of thanks.

This is the same type of government organization that you want to trust your medical care to????

Anne Applebaum
HOMELAND SECURITY HASN'T MADE US SAFER

Hardly anyone has seriously scrutinized either the priorities or the spending patterns of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its junior partner, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), since their hurried creation in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Sure, they get criticized plenty. But year in, year out, they continue to grow faster and cost more -- presumably because Americans think they are being protected from terrorism by all that spending. Yet there is no evidence whatsoever that the agencies are making Americans any safer.

DHS serves only one clear purpose: to provide unimaginable bonanzas for favored congressional districts around the United States, most of which face no statistically significant security threat at all. One thinks of the $436,504 that the Blackfeet Nation of Montana received in fiscal 2010 "to help strengthen the nation against risks associated with potential terrorist attacks"; the $1,000,000 that the village of Poynette, Wisconsin (pop. 2,266) received in fiscal 2009 for an "emergency operations center"; or the $67,000 worth of surveillance equipment purchased by Marin County, California, and discovered, still in its original packaging, four years later. And indeed, every U.S. state, no matter how landlocked or underpopulated, receives, by law, a fixed percentage of homeland security spending every year.

As for the TSA, I am not aware of a single bomber or bomb plot stopped by its time-wasting procedures. In fact, TSA screeners consistently fail to spot the majority of fake "bombs" and bomb parts the agency periodically plants to test their skills. In Los Angeles, whose airport was targeted by the "millennium plot" on New Year's 2000, screeners failed some 75 percent of these tests.


Terrorists have been stopped since 2001 and plots prevented, but always by other means. After the Nigerian "underwear bomber" of Christmas Day 2009 was foiled, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano claimed "the system worked" -- but the bomber was caught by a passenger, not the feds. Richard Reid, the 2001 shoe bomber, was undone by an alert stewardess who smelled something funny. The 2006 Heathrow Airport plot was uncovered by an intelligence tip. Al Qaeda's recent attempt to explode cargo planes was caught by a human intelligence source, not an X-ray machine. Yet the TSA responds to these events by placing restrictions on shoes, liquids, and now perhaps printer cartridges.

Given this reality -- and given that 9/11 was, above all, a massive intelligence failure -- wouldn't we be safer if the vast budgets of TSA and its partners around the world were diverted away from confiscating nail scissors and toward creating better information systems and better intelligence? Imagine if security officers in Amsterdam had been made aware of the warnings the underwear bomber's father gave to the U.S. Embassy in Abuja. Or, for that matter, if consular officers had prevented him from receiving a visa in the first place.

Better still, DHS could be broken up into its component parts, with special funding and planning carried out at the federal level only for cities and buildings that are actually at risk of terrorist attack. Here is the truth: New York City requires a lot more homeland security spending, per capita, than Poynette. Here is the even starker truth: Poynette needs no homeland security spending at all. The events of 9/11 did not prove that the United States needs to spend more on local police forces and fire brigades; they proved that Americans need to learn how to make better use of the information they have and apply it with speed and efficiency.

Anne Applebaum is a columnist for the Washington Post and Slate.

What a shame for the great citizens of this wonderful land that we tolerate such mismanagement of our resources!

Now we are even asking them to take over our health care.

idamtnboy wrote:

kempo wrote:They do not want some bureaucrat sitting in a small cubical in a big building in Washington D.C. deciding if they can get their hemorrhoids fixed or not.

I take it they would rather have some corporate lackey sitting in a cubicle in a marble & glass palace deciding if they can get their hemorrhoids fixed, especially since that lackey quite likely will get a bonus at the end of the year for every dollar in medical expenditures he keeps his company from having to pay out. No question about it, a profit driven employee will more likely approve expenditure for care than would a fixed salary employee whose possible bonus is influenced by customer letters of thanks.

You think that government bureaucrat will be easy to deal with? Have you ever dealt with the IRS? It will be the same way and the Obama Care plans on hiring 17,000 new IRS agents to over see this BS.

I agree with the majority of the voters on this.

kempo wrote:

idamtnboy wrote:

kempo wrote:They do not want some bureaucrat sitting in a small cubical in a big building in Washington D.C. deciding if they can get their hemorrhoids fixed or not.

I take it they would rather have some corporate lackey sitting in a cubicle in a marble & glass palace deciding if they can get their hemorrhoids fixed, especially since that lackey quite likely will get a bonus at the end of the year for every dollar in medical expenditures he keeps his company from having to pay out. No question about it, a profit driven employee will more likely approve expenditure for care than would a fixed salary employee whose possible bonus is influenced by customer letters of thanks.

You think that government bureaucrat will be easy to deal with? Have you ever dealt with the IRS? It will be the same way and the Obama Care plans on hiring 17,000 new IRS agents to over see this BS.

I don't mind healthy debate on the merits of this legislation, but I wish people would deal with it at it is, not some straw man bill of their imagination. Let's look at the case of the bureaucrat and the hemorrhoids. First, there is nothing in the act that even conceivably lets anyone tell you whether you can get your hemorrhoids fixed. Anyone can get any medical care he wants and can pay for. The act has no restrictions on access to medical care. The only question is whether someone else is going to pay for getting those hemorrhoids fixed. As far as paying for the hemorrhoids, for better or for worse, it will still be the corporate lackey, not the government bureaucrat. The individual and small business insurance exchanges created by the act provide access only to private insurance, as there is no public option. Finally, the only plausible reason I can think of why an insurance company might exclude coverage for hemorrhoids is as a pre-existing condition; and, since the PPACA prohibits the exclusion of coverage for pre-existing conditions, our asses should be safer than ever.

PST wrote:... since the PPACA prohibits the exclusion of coverage for pre-existing conditions, our asses should be safer than ever ...

And as folks with a chronic disorder, we should be VERY concerned about this. It's all too likely that without such legislation, we would see insurance companies claiming that *anything* we have wrong with us is due to that pre-existing condition.

PST wrote:but I wish people would deal with it at it is, not some straw man bill of their imagination.

Agree, but the Bill O'Reilly-Glenn Beck-Sean Hannity crowd has found this to be a very effective technique in casting FUD about the health care reform, haven't they?

Guess what? It appears that the new health care laws are actually working. Forbes magazine has the following article:

http://blogs.forbes.com/rickungar/2011/ ... obamacare/

And Forbes is not the left most leaning publication out there. They are just as surprised as everyone that more small businesses are offering more healthcare to their employees ... because the law works. It provides a tax benefit to employers. And most small businesses WANT to provide adequate benefits, but could not due to the cost. The new law helps provide a tax benefit that offsets the cost.

Dang! I hate it when the facts disagree with me!

Another thought on the Evils of Obamacare:

LinkC wrote:And they're OFF...

Y'all wait til I get settled in with a beer and some pretzels!

LinkC, If I could have a beer (or a caffeinated beverage) I'd join you on the couch with some popcorn to watch the entertainment.