By: bowline
There’s another motivator in all this that I don’t hear mentioned very often. I’m an employer, and one of the hardest parts of my job is finding and keeping good people. (Less so right now, but usually). If I was the source of their main health insurance, that would give me a lot more power to keep them working for me, especially if they had a pre-existing condition that would make it hard for them to get coverage somewhere else. (I can live without this.) As a result one of the biggest changes that a American government health insurance plan would bring is the transfer power from employers to employees.
By: words1
Health care companies are in the business of denying, not providing, health care, and most of their overhead comes from the back office needed to deny coverage and claims. Worse yet, from an aggregate social-cost perspective, each of those operations is duplicative. It’s as if every state had 10 privately-owned DMVs, each dependent for profit on registering only late-model cars owned by people with great driving records, and passing the cost of figuring out who’s a good bet to every driver. The health-insurance industry is a parasite in the most literal sense of the word. Correction: it’s actually several dozen parasites, all feeding on the same host. And here’s the best part, and one I’ve been dealing with for ten years: in many states, insurers can refuse to sell you an individual policy for any reason at all or for no reason. If you have Type II diabetes in Ohio and want an individual policy, you’re screwed. Uninsurable. Most doctors in Ohio don’t know this, but the insurance agents all do. Simply changing the law to mandate some kind of reasonably-priced coverage would make a huge difference to millions of people, but they won’t do it. That’s how greedy these bastards are.
By: dilettante
These people don’t think about what happens if poor people who serve their food, clean their bathrooms and kitchens at work, ring up the groceries when they shop, provide sex services they don’t admit to using, etc., get sick with hepatitis/flu/TB/syphilis/CMRSA and can’t get it diagnosed or treated properly. They don’t think it can really spread to them or to their kids. Let’s see if the swine flu really takes off this fall.
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By: hippybear
I’m certain flabdablet is meaning to make this point… but isn’t the more fair way to say this: “ours was eleven thousand billion, but Obama’s is two hundred and thirty billion”?
By: Kirth Gerson
MARCIA ANGELL: Well, he says, let Congress do it. In their wisdom, they’ll come out with something, and I will give you a few feel-good principles. And then we’ll wait and see what happens. Because he doesn’t want his fingerprints on it if it fails.So – oddly enough – in response to our courageous respectful President’s leadership, our courageous fully-owned-subsidiary-of-the-healthcare-industry Congress delivers legislation that further enriches said industry, at the expense of people who already cannot afford their product. People are dying, and this is how they all deal with it?
