• porcelain said on Oct 27, 2009....

  I am twenty-one years old and cannot get insurance because of a corrective back surgery I got when I was fifteen. I also have asthma and got another operation on my neck when I was sixteen. Although Obamacare is meant to help people like me, I have little faith in it. I am not in favor, but the public option will be my only option. There has to be a better way...
  

• sheltercrow said on Oct 28, 2009....

  Curm: you make a statement that on it's face seems true but the details get in the way.
  
  
  'having a government cover your health care means that you won't have to rely on your employer providing it for you'
  
  
  It is true that 'you won't have to rely on your employer providing it for you.'
  
  But it is also try that you will have to rely on the same private insurance companies that 'your employer' used because it is they who will be contracted to supply the public option. The 'public option' is 'public' in name only as it will simple be another plan offered by the same private insurance companies.
  
  See here, here and here.

• sheltercrow said on Oct 28, 2009....

  Curm: 'What you wind up getting is a completely different story' is quite true.
  
  'Whether...they will be happy with whatever is implemented.'
  
  My guess is that it will resemble what we currently have. The good and the bad. So if you're happy with private insurance then the public option, supplied by these private insurance companies, is for you. Ironic isn't it. But that is lobbying is for.

• sheltercrow said on Oct 28, 2009....

  But that is what lobbying is for.
  
  Ouch.
  

• travelr712 said on Oct 28, 2009....

  the real problem i have with this whole issue is the fact that everyone will be forced by law to get health insurance the way we are now forced to get car insurance if we own a car. but there won't even be that 'i don't own a car' type option, EVERY american will be required by federal law to obtain health insurance, or their wages will basically be garnished and a plan will be provided for them. i can barely afford automobile insurance, and i don't use it, i just pay for it because other people drive like idiots. i don't use health care, but i'll have to pay for other people's treatments so that the costs are 'spread out' over the entire populace and not concentrated in certain areas. this supposedly will bring costs down. i expect the reverse will happen and it will become more like medicare currently is where it is a multi-billion dollar industry now to defraud the government system.

• curmudgeon said on Oct 28, 2009....

  travelr - You hit it on the head. Spreading the costs around does not lower the actual price tag, it just brings more people into the payment process.
  
  What might make health care more affordable to people all across the economic spectrum is to have more health care professionals in more locations - why not graduate more doctors, train more nurses, facilitate the creation of new centers for care etc?
  

• travelr712 said on Oct 28, 2009....

  well that would probably bring down the wages of health care professionals the same way saturation of workers brought down the wages of IT professionals curm, but it's not just wages and lack of workers that's the problem here, the procedures themselves are way too expensive, more expensive than they're worth, and with that sort of system, it goes on for awhile and then all at once it crashes, just like the financials did last year. in my town, two hospitals have been buying up all the smaller facilities for the last dozen or so years until they built themselves into huge health networks. the one i was doing the project for is building a.. get this.. two million square foot facility on the north side of town. now you tell me, where does a non-profit hospital network get the money to do such a thing in this economy? if they have that much money, it just proves that they don't need to charge as much as they do.

  it really is a multi-faceted problem, part is the insurance companies, part is the rampant fraud in medicare, v.a. and private sectors, part of it is lack of workers, part of it is overcharging. i was at first encouraged that the o. admin wanted to tackle this problem. but when i heard that the bill itself is 1100 pages, i thought about hippa and sox and how much regulation that industry is already under, and adding more regulation isn't going to solve the problem. in fact, lessening the number of papers each worker and patient needs to deal with would substantially reduce costs. but what else can be done?

• javadewd said on Oct 28, 2009....

  I went without health care for over ten years. If it wasn't for my blushing bride, I never would have decided to go back to a doctor. When I did, they dubbed me diabetic. Funny, ever since she became pregnant I stopped taking  the stupid metformin and I feel ten times better than before. Oh, well. If the only option is the public option, I'd rather go without... That is unless they'll penalize me and/or my business. My wife (center-left) works across the river in another state and is pissed to high hell that she's going to lose her Cadillac-level health care because she's a nurse to boot. So far we have her off of two of the six meds she was on when we met. After the baby arrives, we hope to drop the rest. She's not fed up with the system. She's fed up with government meddling in the system.

• curmudgeon said on Oct 29, 2009....

  you two make good points - how do you lessen the cost of a service if you have to spend more money making sure you are in compliance with 1100 new pages of regulations?
  
  and then of course is the criticism of taxing "cadillac" plans which makes no sense. People simply will not opt to take these plans, and the government will lose an entire revenue stream for their new entitlements.
  
  the thing about hospitals is that they do provide steady work on a variety of economic levels. Of course, if Americans actually succeed in taking better care of themselves - myself included - well that just might kill a whole lot of hospital jobs!
  

• javadewd said on Oct 29, 2009....

  Unfortunately what good does it do to work with the sick when you can't afford health insurance yourself... And you're in the medical field! See? That's just retarded. Now if I was Michelle Obama making six figures for doing nothing at a medical center, then I'd just shrug and ask what everybody's problem was...

• sheltercrow said on Oct 30, 2009....

  The Idea was to provide a right for health care for all citizens. What we got was a mandate for private health insurance for all citizens. The 1990 page bill actually signs away our right to health care, unless you're independently wealthy, to a private health insurance industry.

• curmudgeon said on Oct 31, 2009....

  "The Idea was to provide a right for health care for all citizens."
  
  Perhaps you are using the word citizens generically for people living in the US, but as far as I know even non-citizens are entitled to health care (via hospital emergency rooms) in this country.
  
  If the new "right" is a "right" to a primary care physician, specialists, pharmaceuticals, medical devices and so on administered by the government, my guess is that one would have to be independently wealthy to enjoy adequate health care. The rest of us would be relegated to a system akin to the public schools, which nationally have about a 40% dropout rate.
  
  You might not like private companies profiting from supplying life-saving treatments, but somehow I doubt the government will be any better at it.
  
  And please do not bring up medicare. The only reason that system "works" is because I pay for services I cannot access until I'm of qualifying age. I could pay hundreds of thousands of dollars into this system, get hit by a bus on my 62nd birthday and my family gets nothing. This is both unfair and sustainable, especially once retirees outnumber the workers who support them. Fuck the liberal government and its redistributionist schemes.
  

• sheltercrow said on Oct 31, 2009....

  'hospital emergency rooms' provide emergency care not health care. And 'loss rates' are not 'use percentages.' The national dropout rate is only around 4% by the way. I can see this conversation is at an end since you delve into fantasy. Yes? Later or maybe not.
  

• javadewd said on Oct 31, 2009....

  Shit. What did the human race ever do before health care? Whiskey, a pick-axe and a leather strap anybody...?

• curmudgeon said on Oct 31, 2009....

  http://edlabor.house.gov/newsroom/2009/05/high-school-dropout-crisis-thr.shtml
  
  "Nationwide, 7,000 students drop out every day and only about 70 percent of students graduate from high school with a regular high school diploma. Two thousand high schools in the U.S. produce more than half of all dropouts and a recent study suggests that in the 50 largest cities, only 53 percent of students graduate on time."
  
  I grant that I am off the mark, but my 40% dropout rate is closer to the 30% mark listed above than your claim of 4%.
  
  The point is that everyone gets treated, Shelter, whether they can pay or not, whether they are citizens or not. Perhaps you define "health care" differently.
  
  "Loss rates" indicate a level of performance that if applied to the American health care system would probably be considered unacceptable by most people.
  

• sheltercrow said on Nov 01, 2009....

  Your link is bad. http://edlabor.house.gov/newsroom/2009/05/high-school-dropout-crisis-thr.shtml should work.
  
  You have to look at the actual statistics from the US Department of Education.
  
  National Center For Educational Statistics: Dropout Rates in the United States: 2000
  
  Table B1 page 49. Event dropout rate, Status dropout rate and Completion rate. 4.8%, 10.9% and 86.5%.
  
  Event Dropout Rate: 'earning a high school diploma or receiving an alternative credential such as a GED.'
  
  Status Dropout Rate: 'out of school but lacking a high school credential.'
  
  High School Dropout and Completion Rates in the United States: 2007
  
  Table 1, Page 24, Event Dropout Rate: 3.5%
  Table 6, Page 32, Status Dropout Rate: 8.7%
  Table 9, Page 35, Status completion rates: 89%
  
  I believe the figure cited in the press release was this one.
  
  Table 12, Page 38, Averaged freshman graduation rate: 73.2%
  
  Page 21 NOTE: The averaged freshman graduation rate (AFGR) is an estimate of the percentage of an entering freshman class graduating in 4 years. For 2005–06, it equals the total number of diploma recipients in 2005–06 divided by the average membership of the 8th-grade class in 2001–02, the 9th-grade class in 2002–03, and the 10th-grade class in 2003–04. See table 12 in this report for more information about these state rates.
  
  SOURCE: Stillwell, R., and Hoffman, L. (2009).
  

• sheltercrow said on Nov 01, 2009....

  Since when does getting treated in an emergency room qualify as health care?
  
  health care definition - medical
  
  The prevention, treatment, and management of illness and the preservation of mental and physical well-being through the services offered by the medical and allied health professions.
  
  health care
  
  The prevention, treatment, and management of illness and the preservation of mental and physical well-being through the services offered by the medical and allied health professions.

• sheltercrow said on Nov 01, 2009....

  To repeat: 'loss rates' are not 'use percentages.'

• sheltercrow said on Nov 01, 2009....

  Lastly...
  
  Before you get stuck lets look at the 73.2% averaged freshman graduation rate. 100%-73.2%=26.8% drop out rate for a time period of four years. 26.8%/4=6.7%.
  
  The average dropout rate per year, in high school, is 6.7%.

• javadewd said on Nov 01, 2009....

  Hey, has anybody seen the barrage of shelterchow's cut and paste posts?
  
  No?
  
  Didn't think so... The same can be said about many a reader. I think the guy who is posting the Koran chapter by chapter here on SoulCast gets more hits!
  

• curmudgeon said on Nov 01, 2009....

  Shelter - you are basically arguing that if 26.8% of this year's high school freshmen will not make it to graduation four years from now, well that's ok because the yearly average is only 6.7%?
  
  Try this argument - four years from now 26.8% of patients die because they're on a waiting list for government-approved treatments under a single-payer system. Well that's ok because the loss rate year over year is just 6.7%.
  
  Get it now?
  

• sheltercrow said on Nov 01, 2009....

  I merely point out your inability to form a coherent argument. You pulled that 40% drop-out rate from who know where. Then the 30% from an article without checking how they came up with that figure. And then used a bogus analogy that a drop-out rate somehow is the same as a usage rate.
  
  Try this out - four years from now 0% of patients die because there is no waiting list for government-approved treatments under a single-payer system.
  
  Why? Because there is no single-payer system to derive these percentages.
  
  Got it?

• curmudgeon said on Nov 02, 2009....

  I do not remember arguing that usage and drop outs were the same thing. I was talking about performance of the system with the public school analogy.
  
  I will make it as plain as I can - yes, students here have a "right" to a "free" education, but the system as it is has an unacceptably high dropout rate. You are free to peddle government propaganda if you like, but nearly 30% even over a four year period is pretty darn bad. If "free" healthcare means that 30% of patients die waiting for diagnosis and/or treatment, is that a system we really prefer over the existing one?
  
  Please go back to posting useless links under your fifteen alts if you cannot understand me this time.
  

• sheltercrow said on Nov 02, 2009....

  To compare the high-school dropout rate to patients waiting for treatment is nonsensical. Which is the real point.
  
  Why do students dropout? Certainly not for the same reasons that someone might wait for treatment. The comparison has no valid justification.
  
  I will leave you to your Borg collective and bother you no more.

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