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Health Care Rant

Why is it that we have health care problems in this country?

Our medical equipment is among the best in the world. Our doctors are well qualified.
So what is the problem?

Everything about the medical system is ridiculously expensive. So expensive that is not affordable by many, many people in this country. Of course, many doctors and hospitals DO see patients who cannot afford to pay. This raises the cost for everybody, though it does show high ethical conduct on the part of the providers.

Enter medical insurance...

 If there were no such thing as medical insurance, we would have to pay for health care on our own. Obviously, this could be devastating where catastrophic illnesses or injuries are involved. There is another side, however. Since we would be forced to pay for everything, the cost of the service could not escalate beyond what was payable by the average person. In other words, the same service would cost a heck of a lot less. Pharmaceutical drugs may still cost quite a bit, BUT that cost would be limited by what the users were able to pay. The same would go for testing, etc. When things got serious, however, a family's savings could be wiped out. Insurance enters the picture for exactly this type of scenario. And as soon as this happens:

- the insurer needs to make money
- costs are no longer limited by the ability to pay

At this point, the supplier is free to increase prices to get a piece of the profit being made by the insurer.  Insurance prices rise. The supplier again increases prices to get a piece of the profit. Insurance prices rise. And again... And again... Sooner or later, we reach the state where the insurance (as opposed to the actual health care in the initial example) is no longer affordable. The actual costs of care are beyond reality. We've passed this point in this country. Now, we've reached the stage where the suppliers are making up conditions to go with their drugs. Restless Leg Syndrome... C'mon. I don't know who in congress pushed for the television ads but they don't help.

Enter malpractice insurance...

 I often wonder about medical malpractice insurance. Does the payment of a premium give a doctor more of right to commit malpractice? There is no doubt that this sort of insurance increases the amount of possible payouts in suits involving malpractice. Obviously, this increases the cost of healthcare for everyone. The only beneficiaries of such a product are the insurers, lawyers, doctors who commit enough of a malpractice to be sued, and the victims of such. Did I mention lawyers?

I recently learned of a doctor who spends only the minimum required time in the hospital to maintain his license. He does this to keep his malpractice insurance rates down.

Postal Lapse

How are you guys doing? I haven't written much at all lately as you can see. Frankly, I just burned myself out clicking and clicking to build Entrecard points. I just got tired of the whole thing. My guess is that the same thing happens to many other bloggers. To be fair to Entrecard, I'd also been using LinkReferral. Both of these systems are good, I just got sucked in to the idea of building points quickly. I'd reached the point where I was spending far more time clicking than on sites for the heck of it than I was writing/reading/commenting. This then lead me to throw things together for the blog in minutes time and, of course, my posts suffered. Watching my posts go downhill along with the endless clicking finally led me to just stop. I think I'm going to get back into it with occassional posts only when I really have something to say. Anyway, if your here, reading, after my lapse, thanks a lot. :-)

Candidate Square Off #2

John McCain did a good job debating last night. Barrack Obama did better. Senator McCain was able to show how very much he cares about this country in very broad terms while Senator Obama was much more detailed in his answers. And if keeping your cool has anything to do with it, Obama wins every time. As expected, Senator McCain provided solid answers relative to the military and foreign policy questions.

One of the most interesting exchanges from my point of view dealt with the prioritization of spending. Moderator, Tom Brokaw asked the candidates to prioritize health, energy, and entitlements. This was a question that I'd been hoping to hear. Senator McCain said simply that we can do all three. From my perspective, this was big time evasion. Senator Obama, who had the advantage of answering last in this instance, gave his priorities and his reasoning behind them. Frankly, Senator Obama really surprised me here.

Brokaw: We've run out of time. We have this one-minute discussion period going on here.

There are new economic realities out there that everyone in this hall and across this country understands that there are going to have to be some choices made. Health policies, energy policies, and entitlement reform, what are going to be your priorities in what order? Which of those will be your highest priority your first year in office and which will follow in sequence?

Sen. McCain?

McCain: The three priorities were health...

Brokaw: The three -- health care, energy, and entitlement reform: Social Security and Medicare. In what order would you put them in terms of priorities?

McCain: I think you can work on all three at once, Tom. I think it's very important that reform our entitlement programs.

My friends, we are not going to be able to provide the same benefit for present-day workers that we are going -- that present-day retirees have today. We're going to have to sit down across the table, Republican and Democrat, as we did in 1983 between Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill.

I know how to do that. I have a clear record of reaching across the aisle, whether it be Joe Lieberman or Russ Feingold or Ted Kennedy or others. That's my clear record.

We can work on nuclear power plants. Build a whole bunch of them, create millions of new jobs. We have to have all of the above, alternative fuels, wind, tide, solar, natural gas, clean coal technology. All of these things we can do as Americans and we can take on this mission and we can overcome it.

My friends, some of this $700 billion ends up in the hands of terrorist organizations.

As far as health care is concerned, obviously, everyone is struggling to make sure that they can afford their premiums and that they can have affordable and available health care. That's the next issue.

But we can do them all at once. There's no -- and we have to do them all at once. All three you mentioned are compelling national security requirements.

Brokaw: I'm trying to play by the rules that you all established. One minute for discussion.

Sen. Obama, if you would give us your list of priorities, there are some real questions about whether everything can be done at once.

Obama: We're going to have to prioritize, just like a family has to prioritize. Now, I've listed the things that I think have to be at the top of the list.

Energy we have to deal with today, because you're paying $3.80 here in Nashville for gasoline, and it could go up. And it's a strain on your family budget, but it's also bad for our national security, because countries like Russia and Venezuela and, you know, in some cases, countries like Iran, are benefiting from higher oil prices.

So we've got to deal with that right away. That's why I've called for an investment of $15 billion a year over 10 years. Our goal should be, in 10 year's time, we are free of dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

And we can do it. Now, when JFK said we're going to the Moon in 10 years, nobody was sure how to do it, but we understood that, if the American people make a decision to do something, it gets done. So that would be priority number one.

Health care is priority number two, because that broken health care system is bad not only for families, but it's making our businesses less competitive.

And, number three, we've got to deal with education so that our young people are competitive in a global economy.

But just one point I want to make, Tom. Sen. McCain mentioned looking at our records. We do need to look at our records.

Sen. McCain likes to talk about earmarks a lot. And that's important. I want to go line by line through every item in the federal budget and eliminate programs that don't work and make sure that those that do work, work better and cheaper.

But understand this: We also have to look at where some of our tax revenues are going. So when Sen. McCain proposes a $300 billion tax cut, a continuation not only of the Bush tax cuts, but an additional $200 billion that he's going to give to big corporations, including big oil companies, $4 billion worth, that's money out of the system.

And so we've got to prioritize both our spending side and our tax policies to make sure that they're working for you. That's what I'm going to do as president of the United States.

Economic Debate

While I wouldn't wish this crisis on any country, I'm relieved to see that we are not the only ones with a major problem on our hands. Along with the Europeans, the Chinese and other Asian banks are being hit hard. According to the Associated Press, Shanghai Pudong Development Bank fell by 10%, while China Bank lost 4.9%.

With this in mind, the presidential debate is going to provide some very interesting viewing. Senator McCain is going to have some serious work cut out for him when his judgment relative to Charles Keating and Lincoln Financial comes up. It is fairly widely known that John McCain was tied to Lincon's failure. Here is a video recently added to Senator Obama's website.

I was hoping to get some verification on this video over at factcheck.org but it was not available.

Bailout Secrets

We've all heard the phrase, 'follow the money'. I was just made aware of some money in need of a following. Do you think that you are mad at your elected leaders now? Read this exerpt from the nonpartisan Center For Responsive Politics:

"Members of the House of Representatives who supported bailing out the financial sector with $700 billion in taxpayer money have received 51 percent more in campaign contributions from the finance, insurance and real estate sector in their congressional careers than those who opposed the emergency legislation, the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics calculated following the 228-205 vote on Monday that defeated the House bill."

Now, how do these leaders expect to gain any kind of credibility when, as a matter of record, leaders who've received the most money from the failing industry, have voted to bail them out to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars (which they don't have in the first place)? You might say that no votes were actually bought here and the numbers were averages over time and on and on but here is one thing that you cannot dispute: The finance industry influenced the voting on this bailout bill with money. Is that misleading? If I walked up to some guy on the street and said only that, it would be misleading. With some added context, it is no longer misleading and yet, still true.

* I was made aware of this sickening fact by JR at Reconstituion 2.0 and immediately decided that I'd do everything in my power to spread it around. On that note, please check out the full story here and be sure to tell anybody who might care.

Health Care Questions For Debate

 I received an email this morning (from WebMD) asking for health care questions to be posed during the October 7 presidential debate. WebMD has been working with the Commission on Presidential Debates to gather questions. They have an area for submissions on their site (in blog format) and many interesting questions have already been put forward.

Here are a couple that I plan to add:

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First, this great quotation (which I've used before):

“The market functions wonderfully when we want to sell more cereals, cosmetics, cars, computers, or any other consumer product. Unfortunately, it does not work in health care, where the goal should hardly be selling more heart bypass operations. Instead, the goal should be to prevent disease and illness. But the money is in the treatment – not prevention – so the market and good care are at odds.”

- Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele

I would extend that by saying drugs that combat symptoms on a recurring basis bring in money on a recurring basis while those that cure a condition outright simply do not. Now, if you, as a businessman, are going to invest your own cash, which drugs do you invest in? The answer is obvious and as such, so is the problem.

I would like to hear both candidates address this issue...

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Let's talk about health insurance, the lack of which has been a major topic of late. We have a situation where many of us cannot afford insurance. Why? The insurance is too expensive. Why is the insurance so expensive? To pay for the spiraling cost of the care.
Now, if you have a bunch of people who can't afford insurance. Well, how do you go about making it affordable? You will need to lower the price, at least in some segments of the population. If you lower the price, the insurance companies will then have less money to pay for the care, at which point there is not much incentive to be in the insurance business. When this issue is clouded further by doctors who need to protect themselves from lawsuits and the grossly high price of pharmaceuticals, the problem seems almost unmanageable.

My question here is simply how or where do we begin to address this, especially in the wake of this economic meltdown? (for either or both candidates)

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If you have your own questions you can visit WebMD and add them to their list. (or you can simply leave them here and I'll do it for you :-)

Palin Couric SNL Parody

If any of you have not seen this parody of Katie Couric's (Amy Poehler)  interview with Sarah Palin (Tina Fey), I strongly recommend watching it here and now. It is very, very, funny.

Free Market? Yeah, That

There latest proposal for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout has been agreed too, tentatively. Many economists say the deal is necessary to continue the flow of credit in this country. (blah blah) I'm pissed off and many others feel the same. We've been seriously let down by those leaders who DID (not 'should have', DID) know what was going on and made a decision not to do something about it. I'd like to smack some people in the head. This phrase, "should have known" is a farce used to lessen the damage to reputations. So...

With the initial, angry, statement out of the way, I question the role credit plays in our society as a whole. There is no doubt that the simple availability of credit drives up prices for everyone. It is simple, if company A wants to sell a product, they can sell it for a higher price if customer B has a line of credit. Because so many customers do use credit, the concept permeates many areas of our lives. Schooling, housing, transportation, stereo equipment, even clothing or shoes, pocket books, brief cases, essentially anything that you can put on a credit card costs more because credit allows a retailer to extract a higher price. A price that might be out of the question if the customer were unable to borrow.

Unfortunately, we can't just live without credit. Few of us would be able to save for a house and going beyond high school would become increasingly rare. Would small businesses be able to survive at all? The problem begins when credit becomes to too easy to obtain. This is just what happened during this latest crisis. People who could not afford a house using standard credit calculations, were enticed with extra credit, sometimes in their full view, sometimes not, to purchase what they could not afford. Customers should have known better. Lenders DID know better. This practice drove up the price of housing. The mortgages from these over priced homes were then pooled and sold as separate products called Mortgage Backed Securities. (your initial mortgage provider would still process your payments)

Mortgage backed securities are everywhere. They're in your pension and your 401k. Investors, be they individuals, banks or whoever, are screwed. Or should be. That's the nature of the game. This is where our government let us down. They saw these problems coming and they all know it. And they let it come to this. I'd look toward a management system with better decision making skills (and processes) before laying down $700 billion. Frankly, most citizens are pissed off, at least those who give a damn. I don't think it has hit many of our younger folks yet as things still seem to be taken for granted. One way or another, that is going to change. If they do actually pass this thing, I don't want to here a [expletive deleted] word about socialism from the Republicans for 10 years.

Please feel free to improve my understanding of the issue. Thanks

What About Health Care?

Will a dollar buy more than a piece of bubble gum this time next year? Politicians sometimes resort to fear tactics but right about now, Joe Politician is just as afraid as Joe Citizen. An inside view of the economic crisis has the president and Congress actually working together on something. But...

Does their plan address the enormous amount of medical debt carried in this country?

A few weeks back, Suzanne, my friend and roommate, had to go to the emergency room with severe stomach pains. After staying overnight and having some tests done, the doctor gave her the okay to return home. Tests showed everything working well and the diagnosis was a form of food poisoning. Simple enough. The bill was sixteen thousand dollars.

Somewhere along the line, we've developed a health care bubble that I've not heard a word about during these woeful economic talks. Being that Suzanne has no insurance, she now owes over $16,000 to our local hospital. I'm not here to make a case for Suzanne. I'm here to say that this is a debt that will likely never be paid. So, who owns this debt? The hospital? Maybe they have already sold it to some firm searching for a future government bailout. Universal health care anyone?

Many of the inflated costs are aimed at the insurance companies. The price of insurance rises to cover these costs. The uninsured are then completely screwed.  Of course, this does not stop them from showing up at the emergency room and incurring more unaffordable debt. This drives the prices up further. And so on...

The Revolution by Ron Paul

I'm not sure if it was before or after I singed into Amazon a couple of weeks ago that I decided to purchase Ron Paul's 'The Revolution'. I don't know if it was due to my lack of confidence in both our current candidates or that I just wanted to gain another perspective for myself. Often, I'm a bit snobbish in the books that I read, paying only for what I think is going to improve, or at least advance, my own thought processes. As it turned out, 'The Revolution' met all of my criteria. Wow, what a book...

 Central to this (very compact) book was the fiscal soundness of this country. A fair portion was aimed at ending the huge (and growing) dependence on our government. You could look at this statement and say that it is simply blasting the Democrats or even the Republicans of today but that would be an incomplete view. Throughout the world there are entire nations that have become dependent upon the United States for various forms of support. You might include with that the 700 military bases that we maintain in 130 countries. Now that's a world police force.

Most people realize that earmarks are costing taxpayers a fair chunk of change. New to me was the idea that they can be used to support incumbency. Essentially, they work by throwing home town voters a bone in order to increase reelection chances. Bills filled with earmarks also come with much less clarity about them and allow argument over the validity the actual votes. A legislator dealing with an issue unpopular with constituents might insert an earmark, again, to keep the home town voters happy. This distorts the voting record.

All of the ideas in the book were deeply felt and very well thought out. As for my own views, I need some digestion time as the concepts might easily be considered radical in the context of what we are used to. As the book presents a view of the government the way it was designed to function, I would recommend it to everybody of voting, if not reading, age.

* For the record, I don't think that Ron Paul is presidential material. The ability to get your point across is very important and I think that he did a poor job of doing so during the Republican debates. In no way does this diminish the value of this book.

** It's ironic that while I was writing this post, Senator McCain actually stated publicly that the fundamentals of the economy are strong. If he believes this, then, maybe he is a little out of touch. If he doesn't...