Some debate recap
The Democratic presidential candidates debated last night, and the 'pundits' said Hillary Clinton 'won' ... which is kinda funny to me, since they had already set up the narrative for her to 'win' ... but, whatever.
I thought this exchange regarding health care was my favorite ...
Hillary Clinton - "But when it came time to step up and decide whether or not he would support universal health care coverage, he chose not to do that. His plan would leave 15 million Americans out. That's about the population of Nevada, Iowa, South Carolina and New Hampshire."
Barack Obama's response - "The only difference between Senator Clinton's health care plan and mine is that she thinks the problem for people without health care is that nobody has mandated, forced them to get health care. That's not what I'm seeing around Nevada. What I see are people who would love to have health care. They desperately want it. But the problem is they can't afford it."
I thought this exchange regarding health care was my favorite ...
Hillary Clinton - "But when it came time to step up and decide whether or not he would support universal health care coverage, he chose not to do that. His plan would leave 15 million Americans out. That's about the population of Nevada, Iowa, South Carolina and New Hampshire."
Barack Obama's response - "The only difference between Senator Clinton's health care plan and mine is that she thinks the problem for people without health care is that nobody has mandated, forced them to get health care. That's not what I'm seeing around Nevada. What I see are people who would love to have health care. They desperately want it. But the problem is they can't afford it."
posted by Jmac at 10:33 AM
7 Comments:
Can they afford a cell phone? Cable? A car? If so, they shouldn't have the right to take money from responsible citizens to obtain healthcare. If you don't prioritize, you risk everything. Educate people about that, instead of keeping them suckling up to the government for the rest of their lives.
Health care is what you have when you are healthy.
I suppose what people are talking about is health care coverage. And what they're really talking about is getting someone else to pay their doctor bill and buy their medicine.
Personally, I'd like for someone to pay my mortgage and pick up my bar tab.
Maybe I should switch my party affiliation.
Lord knows it's an awesome idea for people to walk around with communicable diseases, infecting even those of us who have health care coverage...
Frankly, they can take my money to prevent that.
You can educate prioritizing all you want - and we should do that - but if a working family has little funds to allocate - or a pre-existing condition which needs treatment but results in higher coverage costs or a lack of coverage - then it's kinda moot, isn't it?
Of course, it's worth noting that a bulk of Obama's plan doesn't involved doling out large amounts of cash to folks but rather incentives and ways to modernize the health care industry to help reduce costs.
"Modernize the health care industry?"
What does that mean? That has to be a euphemism for something, but I'm not sufficiently well-versed in Government-speak to translate. Personally, I think it's one of those meaningless cliches that politicians toss out ("elimiante fraud and waste!" or--locally--"let's have a TDR program!") that don't really mean squat, but sound enough like actual ideas to deceive a significant percentage of the electorate.
OK, here's one specific example.
The vast majority of our prescriptions are written down on notepads. It costs money to buy these notepads. It costs money to buy these notepads that accomplish what could be accomplished via a digital system.
It's one example of an administrative cost that adds up on a large-scale that gets passed on to the consumer (patient and the patient's health insurance provider).
This isn't rocket science, and it ain't partisan. A lot of Republicans think it's kinda dumb to operate this way (Newt Gingrich was the one who first got talking about the high administrative costs at medical offices that could be reduced).
So we're going to mandate that doctor's offices not write their prescriptions on notepads?
I agree that there are inefficiencies in the way that doc offices are often run (there are inefficiencies in the way many businesses are run), but we all know the cliche about treating symptoms instead of the disease...
Why are so many doctors offices run in a grossly inefficient manner? It's for the same reason, pretty much, that government budgets allocate 400 dollars for toilet seats (or whatever). Because there is no market comeptition, or there is highly distorted market competition. Doctors offices send most of their bills to insurance companies. There is no motivation for patients to negotiate better prices (or even to know what the prices of the medical services they use even are), and there is no motivation for doctors to keep their prices reasonable b/c they aren't going to be held accountable . This is what happens in a third-party payer system. Why should I, Dr. Xon, allocate resources to purchasing and integrating digitial technology into my office procedure for writing prescriptions, when it will probably only save me a little in costs and I currently make up for those costs by putting them into my high bills anyway?
Insurance companies will try to question egregiously high rates, but there is only so much they can do in this regard.
And I'm not inviting us to a pity party for insurance companies, because they contribute in their own way to the problem. I'm just pointing out that, as usual, nationalized government answers end up being unavoidably politicized, and end up addressing obvious symptoms of a broken system while never addressing the root cause. Because attacking root causes of things almost never work, politically speaking, even if you were capable of seeing what the root cause was.
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