Single Payer?

It used to be said that there were three professions that you didn’t go into in order to get rich. These three professions were: preacher, teacher, and doctor.

This was because supposedly the people who chose these career paths did so because they were called to them, not for the money.

In recent decades, preachers and doctors have removed themselves from that equation, with many in both professions choosing their profession for the sole purpose of getting rich. In too many cases, they haven't been interested in the well-being of their clientele, but rather in how much money they can make off of them.

If we go to the formula of everyone paying premiums to Medicare instead of Humana, Cigna, Aetna and the rest, then we will lose some of those doctors, due to the fact that they will no longer be able to make a fortune in the profession. In my opinion, those are people who shouldn't be doctors anyway, and I say "good riddance".

Considering that the insurance company lobby claims that over $100 billion a year is "minimal profits" and that the insurance industry spends over a million dollars a day on advertising, I would imagine that we could use some of those premium payments to fund the education of the many new doctors and nurses we seriously need.

Of course, medical schools will have to cease their elitist practice of limiting the number of med-school graduates that are allowed per year, but this might be a small price to pay.

I believe that, once the artificially low number of new doctors allowed and the astronomical cost of the education are removed as stumbling blocks, we will find that there are plenty of good, caring individuals who actually have the calling.

Deregulate Now

Government regulation of any type needs to go away. Our Federal government tells businessmen, the very people who create jobs, that money they could spend on creating new jobs must be spent on various things that curtail their abilities to create the jobs we, as Americans, depend on.

For instance, companies have to spend untold billions of dollars every year ensuring that their workers have a safe working environment. If they did not have to spend this money on frivolous safety measures, imagine how many more jobs they could create.

Imagine too, how much money businesses could save every year by not being forced to pay workers extra simply because they work more than 40 hours a week. Or, for that matter, a minimum wage. Workers around the world subsist on several dollars a day; we Americans are spoiled to the point that we insist on wages that will pay our bills. Get a second job people. Put your children to work to make ends meet. Whatever you have to do. Your insistence on making a so-called living wage hurts your employer’s ability to hire more workers, thus decreasing unemployment. Also consider that if Americans didn’t insist on such high wages, if our average pay was even less than what other countries have, we would have zero problems with illegal immigration.

And there is another one: why should a businessman have to pay into a pool that continues to pay a worker even after the business no longer needs his services? If wages were kept low enough to inspire hiring, then that worker could easily obtain another job, even after losing his previous one.

Who are we to tell the food industry that they have to spend a fortune on food safety? Without this unnecessary expenditure, they could lower the price of the foods that we buy; thus enabling them to not only make a better profit, but to hire more workers. How many thousands of tons of otherwise good, edible food is thrown out every day simply because it has reached some arbitrary expiration date, or been "contaminated" with some cleaning chemical or other innocuous substance?

What about the drug companies? How many millions of dollars do the pharmaceutical companies have to spend on needless testing of new drugs? If they didn’t have to spend this money, they could then hire even more workers to produce their drugs, thus, again, cutting unemployment. This would also have the effect of lowering drug costs.

The airline industry, already saddled with astronomical losses because of 9-11 and soaring oil prices, could save billions if they could do away with all these silly regulations about how often they have to perform maintenance on their fleets.

And don’t get me started on unions. The TWU is currently in "negotiations" with American Airlines simply because the executives at AA were given millions of dollars in bonuses while the workers themselves took pay cuts. So what? Those executives went to college for the very purpose of being able to have a job with such bonuses. If the airlines and other industries could crush their unions, they could save billions upon billions of dollars in wages and perqs. These savings would allow them to not only hire more workers, but also to pay bigger and better bonuses to their executives, ensuring that they have the best and the brightest at the top.

No Mandate for Private Services

I keep hearing folks say that it is unconstitutional for the United States Government to mandate that we, the American people, purchase the services of a private business. Several states’ Attorneys General have promised to sue the Federal Government if the insurance reform bill in front of the House of Representatives passes.

OK, I have a fix, at least for the mandate part. How about if we do not insist that everyone buy health insurance. How about if, instead, we say the following:

You, as an American Citizen, do not have to maintain Health Coverage on yourself. But if you opt to not carry coverage, and something happens to you, such as an unforeseen illness or injury, then you will be required to pay cash, up front, out of your own pocket or forgo any treatment for said illness or injury.

You see, right now, if you do not have coverage and something happens, you can go to a public hospital, get treatment, and simply not pay the bill. That debt then reverts to the rest of us, and our tax dollars pay for your treatment. You will have to be required to pay cash up front because we cannot take the chance that you will simply SAY that you will pay on an installment plan and then just disappear or allow your payments to lapse.

So you pay up front or you simply fix the problem yourself. That way we all can be sure that those of us who have insurance aren’t being double billed.

Oppose anything the Democrats Attempt

This is a letter I intend to send to the four people who allegedly represent me in Washington, D. C.:
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Senator John Cornyn, Representative Michael Burgess, and President Barack Obama.
I will blog this and any response (if there is any) at oakminde.blogspot.com
　
I use the word "you" to refer to the Republican Party because three of the four people are members of that institution.
　
　
I have noticed that most, if not all, of the Republican Party seems to be opposed to any kind of national health care system. You call it a government takeover, compare it to socialism, and in Washington, you simply refuse to participate in the proceedings or just block the proceedings. Since you are opposed so vehemently to any of the suggestions the Democrats have put forth, I would be extremely interested in being educated as to what your alternative ideas are. I feel certain that the status quo, allowing insurance company executives rake in multimillion-dollar salaries while denying care to their customers, is not your plan. Or is it? I have not yet heard a single intelligent proposal out of the Republican wing of government. All I hear, day in and day out, are complaints that the plan(s) the Democrats have put forth will not work.
Now let me give you an idea. I pay $6,000 a year in premiums to my insurance company, to cover myself, my wife, and my daughter. They pay their CEO 18 million dollars a year. They pay several highly placed executives close to that, I assume. They also pay enough in dividends to entice investors to park money in their stock. All the while denying care to customers. Since the highest paid government employee makes $450,000 a year, I have to assume that the head of Medicare makes considerably less than that. I think you will have a difficult time finding anyone that is currently covered by Medicare who would be willing to give it up, so I have to think that that system works.
I would never be described as the "brightest bulb in the pack" but it seems to me that if I give that $6,000 a year to Medicare instead of a for-profit insurance company, and everyone around does the same thing, we might just be able to make it work. I would even bet that it wouldn’t have to be all of the $6,000, so there might even be some savings on my end. Even if it is all of the $6,000, as long as there is not some insurance company flunky declining to cover the colonoscopy that my doctor thinks I need (as my insurance company did earlier this year), I will be happy. You can call it a tax increase if you feel like you have to, but in my book, I am already paying that tax to a private company.
Certainly there are things that need to be done to cut out waste and fraud in the system, but I think that can easily be taken care of once we have everyone adequately covered.
For sure, this idea will put a lot of insurance folks in need of a new career. I, for one, do not care if the multi-millionaire CEO of my insurance company suddenly has to go out and find a legitimate job.
I think that if we adopt this plan, and demand that Congress uses it for themselves as well, we can adequately cover every citizen of the United States and ensure that the coverage is fair and comprehensive.


As an afterthought, I also included Senator Bernie Sanders in the recipients. I hear him on the (liberal) Thom Hartmann show every Friday morning, and he seems to actually care about the American people. He supposedly does not accept campaign contributions from corporations, only from regular folks like you and me. I don't know if this is true or not, but I do know that he sounds intelligent and informed.

Health Care: Fixed!

How many people who have Medicare are willing to give it up? I don’t know the answer for sure, but my bet is not many, if any.

People on the "Right" like to argue that Medicare is going broke. It will be defunct in just a few years.

So here is my health care plan.

Reduce the age of eligibility for Medicare to 0. Or minus 9 months, if we are too stupid to figure that one out without it being in writing. The only requirement would now be that you are an American citizen.

Instead of paying thousands of dollars a year to private, for-profit insurance companies, everyone will now pay 1500 dollars a year into Medicare. This works out to about 35 dollars a week, less than half what I pay to my insurance company.

Sadly, insurance company executives will no longer be able to rake in multimillion-dollar salaries. Life sucks, find another way to make money. If the business I work for all of a sudden becomes unnecessary to society, no one is going to cry for me, I don't see any reason to cry for them.

My insurance company can cover me, pay their CEO 18 million dollars a year, pay several lower level executives multimillion-dollar salaries, and pay enough dividends to keep shareholders interested, based on the premiums of the people they "cover".

I have to assume that Medicare should be able to cover me on $1.5k a year, without having to pay out all those wasteful salaries and dividends. Once this is done, we can concentrate on weeding out the waste and fraud in the Medicare system.

My $1500 dollar per person price tag is just off the top of my head, and probably way high. I am sure there are folks that can figure out what the exact number needs to be. I would be happy with the 1.5k.

Bam, health care fixed and paid for.

Health care, some more.

There seems to be a lot of talk about insurance coverage portability. This talk comes from the same folks who are adamantly against any kind of single-payer coverage, let alone the so-called public option. I have to say, the idea of portability WITHOUT a single-payer plan is just smoke. If you work for a company that provides you with coverage from Humana, and you leave that job to work for a company that uses Humana, then should be able to reasonably expect to get some kind of portability. You don’t have it now. If the company you work for has 2000 employees and the company you move to only has 50, you will pay more for the same coverage, even though it is from the same company. They have some kind of convoluted explanation for why this is, but you have to live in a fantasy world to begin to believe it. If you, however, move to a company that uses Aetna for coverage, you cannot expect to be able to carry your same coverage with you. The two different insurance providers are not going to offer the same plans or the same prices. The only possible way we can remove the ties between our insurance coverage and our jobs is to go with a single-payer plan, like most of the rest of the industrialized world has.
Consider, also, that the only real way to provide health care fairly, as a right, is to do away with the for-profit health insurance companies. I know, that would put a lot of people out of business. But, I don't remember anyone crying when Texas Instruments invented the calculator and put numerous abacus companies out of business. How do we pay for it? I'm glad you asked. My family pays just over 5 thousand dollars a year to my health insurance provider. It then pays out dividends to its shareholders, 18 million dollars a year to its CEO, and who knows how much more to the rest of its executives. Far far more than any government worker makes, you can be sure. Then, to ensure that their bottom line is nice and healthy, they deny me services like the (apparently) recreational colonoscopy my doctor wanted me to have.
If we take that 5 grand a year and instead pay it to the federal health care plan, we can probably push a lot of that 5k back into my bank account. There are no government employees pulling down an 18 mil a year salary. Nor are there any making anywhere near what probably the top 20 execs at just my insurance company make.
If my insurance provider can make the kind of profit required to justify the salary of its top executives by charging me 5000 a year, then I have to assume that the government can provide me with coverage for far less. Of course, it would also require that they hire honest people to administer. Maybe I am living a fantasy, too.
Some will say that this reeks of socialism. Yes, it does. So do public schools and hospitals, police forces, fire departments, military, and any number of other benefits we have that most of us pay for and all of us use.

Get your own Health Insurance

It seems awful strange to me that the same people in the media who are gung-ho about spending billions of US tax dollars to obtain the freedom of the Iraqi people (people, by the way, who have never paid a dime in US tax) are the same people who are viciously against spending our tax dollars to ensure the health of every American. These same people are the ones who told all of us, back in 2002, that if we were not on board with the invasion of Iraq that we were un-American. That if we disagreed with President Dick Cheney’s plan to depose Saddam Hussein we were terrorist sympathizers, and possibly terrorists and traitors ourselves. I would like to remind everyone that on 9-11-2001, Iraq did not attack us.

I would also like to remind everyone that there are a lot of Americans with inadequate or zero health coverage. Either due to the fact that their employer does not offer it, or because they cannot afford what their employer offers. On top of that, there are uncounted people slogging through every day in a job they hate just so they can have health insurance. THAT’s gotta be good for your health.

Of course, one can go out on an individual basis and get insurance, but it is pricey. What I found was $644.00 a month for a family of three. The deductible is $2500.00 per person. That is the middle of the road one. You can get it for about fifty bucks a month cheaper if you want to jump that deductible up past ten grand. You can drop the deductible too, but the monthly payment begins to rival Bernard Madoff’s monthly rent.

I have also heard people say that you can go to the emergency room if you don’t have insurance. You certainly can. Let us look at my case. I had epididymitis. Don’t ask me what it is, I haven’t really a clue. It is definitely painful, in an area you do NOT want painful. At least if you are a guy. Which I am.

What it is not is life threatening. Or so they said, anyway. Seemed pretty threatening to me, considering where it was painful. Since that is the case, I could have gone to an ER and sat for three days while they got around to looking at me. Once they discovered that I had no insurance and was unable to pay, they would have sent me on my way. The only way an ER is bound to treat an uninsured person is if that person’s life is in imminent danger. And even at that, all they really HAVE to do is stabilize.

Funnier (strange, not ha-ha), I work with a guy who, in the last year, had a pacemaker installed, paid for by Medicare. He is staunchly against the government being involved in health care. It seems that there is not a lot of thinking going on there.

I have noticed that a lot of the folks against any kind of reform have what they believe to be good insurance. I say they believe to be because that may just be the case. A lot of people believe they have good coverage right up until the point they have to use it. Then that coverage becomes either stunted or nonexistent, depending on the provider’s policy of dumping undesirable patients.

By the way, I do have insurance, the previous example was just for example purposes. My doctor wanted me to have a couple of tests run to be certain of what was wrong with me. My insurance company refused, so my doctor went to plan b: throw various pharmaceuticals at it and hope one takes. Nice.

This for six thousand bucks a year.

At least it wasn't some government flunkie telling me no.

Representative Michael Burgess' Town Hall slip-up

On Saturday, August 15, 2009, Representative Michael Burgess, Republican from Texas, held a town hall meeting in Denton, Texas. It seems that it was mostly civil, with the usual shouting matches. What I saw, mostly, were a bunch of senior citizens (on Medicare, I would wager) protesting the idea of the rest of us getting any such kind of health coverage. What I also saw was a woman ask Mr. Burgess why the Republicans, when they were in charge, didn’t pass some kind of health care reform. His reply was long and sidestepping, as politician answers tend to be. But what stood out to me was one statement in particular.
Rep. Michael Burgess-"...The Republicans have, and I’m not supposed to talk about this, the leadership, my leadership doesn’t like it, But it’s easier to poke holes in someone else than it is to defend your own product. We actually have a bill, which I participated in writing and we worked late into the night and many nights late in the spring to find something that would be, uh, you can’t fight something with nothing, and we needed a bill..." Excuse me? I mean, we all know this, but to have someone in the party actually admit at a town hall meeting that the agenda is not to make a better bill, but simply to defeat one… well, that is just un-American. Or not, I don’t know.
"If we’re able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him," South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint said some weeks ago, about the President’s proposal for health care reform.
It seems to me that these guys are banking on their respective constituencies being too stupid to realize that they are not working for the people, but for their own, and corporate, gain.
So, given that maybe none of the bills being considered are the fix, maybe the Republicans should actually come up with something that will work. Or, would that be too much harder than simply poking holes in anyone else’s plan?
What is also interesting to me is that the "liberal" media has not covered this at all. I had to find this on Jon Stewart’s website. Local stations showed the question being asked, but cut away from the answer. CNN, who Rush Limbaugh often cites as the most liberal of the liberal, treated the exchange in the same manner. Apparently the media, who seem to have no problems covering (nonexistent) "death panels" or questions over our President’s citizenry, are afraid to show us exactly how the Republicans who supposedly represent us really think.

You can find the Michael Burgess exchange at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ue5S9ZFqv0

How to pay for health care

The more I hear people lament that any kind of health care reform is tantamount to socialism, the more it irks me to know that these same people will vehemently defend a corporation’s right to deduct expenses from their taxes. If Scroodapeep, Inc. decides that it needs 12 forklifts to operate its warehouse in New York, they get to write off half that cost as a business expense. That means that half that money, they do not pay taxes on. All because they have to have those forklifts in order to make their business run. Well, folks, I have to have a clothes to wear so that I may work. I also have to have a car in order to get to work. I have to have a license to drive that car. I also have to have gas, maintenance, safety and emissions inspections, registration and insurance in order to drive that car, to get me to work, so that I may earn a living. I cannot write off any of these expenses. That same corporation, if it chooses to supply health insurance to its employees, can write off that expense as well. If I, as a private citizen, have to provide my own health care, I cannot write off any of it. Why are we, the people, subsidizing large corporations in this way? I say, if your company needs a forklift (or 20) to operate, then maybe you should pay for them in full. If this means that you cannot make a profit, perhaps you do NOT actually need that forklift. Or any other piece of equipment, for that matter. It is seriously far less my job to buy your forklift than it is yours to help make sure I don’t have some communicable disease.
It is also funny to me that some of the same folks who will argue against a national health care plan on the basis that it will ration care, or that you will wait months for needed procedures, will also argue that ANYONE can go to an emergency room, regardless of their ability to pay, and wait months for needed procedures. Apparently this is a far more palatable solution.
A lot of these same folks will also argue that government run insurance will ration care. Apparently none of these guys has been sick lately. Sure, if you have insurance now, you can choose any doctor you want to. As long as he/she is on the approved list. You can have any procedure you need done. As long as you have met your exorbitant deductible and that procedure is on the approved list.
I seriously don’t have argument against those who believe that people who can afford health care deserve to be healthy while those who can’t don’t. I think that has something to do with being a sociopath. Fascist? Same thing?