who win's at this game?
Guess what's happening in Nashville tonight? (hint: it ain't a Hee Haw reunion show, but one might not notice on first glance...).
It's a convention of the Tea Party movement. I wish I'd known, I would've stocked up on t-shirts and Bigfoot masks.
Guess who the keynote speaker is? (hint: not Minnie Pearl or Bigfoot).
Yep, the big talking point herself, the next leader of the GOP, (after the Rushmeister), the lady for who the FOX network is constructing a custom TV studio in her living room, former Governor and Vice Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin!
My guess is she will leave the rifle at home. (I wonder what Todd is hittin' in the background there...?).
This must be a great time to be a political operative, so many flames to fan, so much ready fuel to throw on the fire, so many issues that are not altogether clear to anyone save the lobbyists that will eventually decide them, then buy the votes to back themselves up, like Country Joe McDonald noted at Woodstock, it must be like heaven man.
While the crackpots are stroking their eh, ego's in Nashville, the party of the left is trying to put together a strategy to push through a healthcare plan that nearly nobody, (save 58 or so Senators) wants, while the party on the right does anything and everything to obstruct and block even a bathroom break. By most indicators, a clear majority of the country wants a significant reform of the health care system, where are the voices of the people?
Can nobody come up with an alternative? As much as I think that the Pelosi-Reid plan sucks, (and it does), and as much as I dislike the plan and hope that it is significantly carved down, I like the action that they are taking a lot better than the action that the GOP or any sensible moderate or independent is not taking.
So, who wins?
posted by eccentric recluse at 4:42 PM
12 Comments:
Who wins ? Mostly nobody, because the cost of HC (and consequently the cost of insurance)remains too high, and will get higher. Therein lies the problem, and the problem in the idea that the solution is how to pay for it, as opposed to how to make it less expensive.
The "moral" argument is that nobody should go broke just because they get sick. Just like nobody should go broke, just because they have a car accident. THAT is what insurance is for. Somehow, health insurance evolved into a pay-all deal. That's as goofy as thinking that you call up Allstate to pay for brakes and tires.
Back to who wins.. I guess it's they guy who knew from day one of adulthood that health-care was as important, and expensive, as housing.. and made providing it for himself and family a priority in both how he educated himself and worked.. and how he spent (didn't spend) money along the way. It really wasn't fair to ask him to dilute his HC, and make it more expensive, in order to provide it for everyone. He's already doing something like that by suffering deflated property values, and a near depression, in the wake of government mandated mortgages for people who couldn't afford them. These "winners" make up the bulk of the Tea Party BTW. They work hard for what they have, and are tired of political elitists redistributing not only their work, but the work of their granchildren.
On that note: The gaggle of crooks who've appointed themselves the reformers; have us staring at a point where fully 50% of collected taxes will barely pay the interest on the debt.. with no sign of slowing down.. This whole worry is moot.. we're more than broke.
And............
Gore, Edwards, Biden, Palin...
Pick you yardstick (character, trustworthiness, honesty, integrity).. choose a task. I'd certainly NOT have Palin as my last choice from that list of goofy, creepy, moronic, disgraceful, recent/potential Veeps.
I agree that we are pretty much broke, but we are not arguing the same thing here. I don't disrespect the Tea Party members, (for the most part), but I don't have much use for that which purports to lead them, (can you tell?). If this was an arena just down the road, we would be seeing Jim Bakker, but that is just an opinion.
The winner here is not the health care provider or consumer, but the administrator that provides nothing but the funnel through which money flows, and, through which between 30 and 40% is lost. They provide nothing, they simply consume, in medical terms, like the leeches of old, applied to pull toxins from the soul, they pull cash from the system, but add damn little value. Real reform will begin with a shakeout and some regulation, (yeah I know, but the industry also receives much in the way of largess in the way of tax breaks, grants and assistance from government in the name of the public good, they can pay something back by playing on a well defined field). When we know what we are dealing with, I predict, (again, just an opinion), that the uninsured gap will narrow somewhat, and the real need for a fix will be more evident.
So there.
I would. Yes, they are all creeps. Most of them can spell. My sense of her is that she would be a mouthpiece for somebody else. That certainly wouldn't be a first, (can you say 'Dubya'?), but I don't like it a bit.
Be sure.. I was not defending insurance companies.. I was defending the majority of people who don't wanna trade insurance, for government entitlement. That would be like forcing private schools out of business, because many people can't afford them.
The funny thing ignored, is that if we did go to some sort of universal health-care, we'd loose the subsidizing. Private insurance might very well siphon 30%, but they pick up the slack where the government only pays 50 cents on the insurance dollar. Who'd pick up the difference ? And how ?
Again.. the government's role in fixing this, is to make the market more friendly.. NOT to just take it over. If anything, we need to start scaling back things like Medicare and Medicade for mathematical reasons... else it aint gonna matter... our economy will shut down.
As for Palin.. I don't want her anywhere near an important political office.. but I'd rather have her, than the likes of those other, worthless wastes of oxygen. My point was the gratuitous abuse she takes, compared to them. Gore's schemes have done incredible damage, beyond the obvious, into degrading public trust in the scientific community. Biden is a posterchild for just how dumbfoundingly inept a politician can be.. Edwards' is a horrible person, by any standard.
I am not sure what you mean about "government pays 50 cents on the insurance dollar"?
I do agree that governments role is to make the market more friendly, I would redefine that by saying consumer friendly. That does mean regulation and that is a dirty word to some people, but everybody is going to have to give on this.
I comfort myself at times by remembering that the USA led the world in the healthcare and standard of living arena's in a regulated environment, then we decided to let the marketplace control things and now we have some pretty big cracks. One does not necessarily follow the other, but one does feed off the other's excesses or lack of vision.
I mean that some doctors are refusing to take Medicare patients, because it pays them as little as 50% of what private insurance pays.
Regulation, yes.. as in what already exists (standards that have to be met).. and add to that a public utility type of oversight on providers.
You've got the other aspect backwards. The market USED to take care of things, and now that's gone. People never stop to think about costs (nor do providers).. everyone just lets the insuring entity pick up the bill. What do you suppose would happen to the quality/availability/cost, of automobiles; if between the government, and insurers,, everybody just went to the dealership every couple of years, and drove off in car ? Auto manufactures and dealers would have their product bought and paid for, before it was even assembled. And how much less likely would the consumer be to take care of that car, and try to get as much use out of it as possible ? That's the fatal flaw in entitling people. Medicare was as doomed from the start, as would be a program that says at a certain age, you just "get" a new car every couple of years. It would no doubt be popular for a while, but would drag the whole auto industry down into what health care is now.
Honest, feasible, long-term reform cannot be anything other than reversing the entitlement aspects.. NOT increasing, and expanding them. The fixes proposed and pending today, would only ease the problems for a while.. then the bill comes due.
Some doctors DO refuse to take medicare patients, but there are not too damn many insurers that pay twice as much as Medicare/Medicaid across the board. In my community, (a metropolitan area of about 2 million), the doctors that don't accept Medicare don't accept insurance period, and focus on elective or non-emergency procedures, (say, a bypass when a stint would be prescribed) and cater to those who can afford to pay cash at the door.
Since you brought it up, in a free economy, an artisan ought to be able to charge what he or she wants to charge, but should stick to it. The price schedule should not change according to who you are. If Joe Insured walks in with a hemorrhoid, the charge for the procedure is $X, (no matter who pays), if Joe Uninsured walks in with the same condition, the charge is $2X. If the difference between the two patients was race the outcry would be heard across the country and the situation resolved in about a minute.
In terms of regulatory oversight of utilities, in my state, it doesn't exist anymore, it has been removed, by law, in favor of the competitive market.
Huh?
I cannot get power, or water, or phones, from anybody but my local monopoly, and they no longer answer to the state regulating board, in terms of grade of service or rates. They are required to file rate increases with the state in a timely fashion, prior to the month that they will take effect, and that usually means by the 27th or 28th of the month prior to the new rates.
On the issue of outages or poor performance, well, they say, they just do what they can do....
The area that the excel in is appearing before the legislature, (and in some cases, Congress), for tax relief and special consideration and subsidies for infrastructure maintenance.
One might think that they were an NFL franchise....
That is what I mean by regulation...
The artisan charging his fee, no matter the customer, brings up the discussion about a time when the HC system was considered wonderful, and functional. Office visits, routine care, even house-calls were amounts that a family paid out of pocket. It was an expected expense. And the doc had leeway to be open-minded for special circumstances.. because he wasn't paying upwards of a quater-million per year for malpractice insurance (good segue for tort-reform).
And then, for major procedures and hospital stays.. a patient merely paid a percentage of his income. My father told me that 10% was the norm for his father. No individual patient, nor situation was forced into a rigid price system.. but overall, it worked out. Docs and hospitals did just fine, and nobody went broke because they needed a by-pass.
Enter the free-market killing, guaranteed payment. First in the form of private insurance, and then driven to the problem we see now, by Medicare/Medicade. Assuring that a product is already paid for, drives the prices out of control, and the quality down. And when one of those payers is a government... fraud and waste are inevitable, and they just accelerate the destruction of the market.
Again.. the problem is not HOW to pay for HC, but how to reduce the cost. Increasing the entitlement side of it, will just make it more expensive, and drive quality further down. The average Joe will be worse off after they figure out how to fund what is pretty much an expansion of Medicare. He (or his employer) might not have to fork larger insurance premiums.. but they will pay for it (and then some) via taxation, and an even LARGER government.
Medicare was a temporary, feel-good thing. It never had a sustainable future. We've known that since the day it was enacted. All it did was dramatically increase the role of government. Instead of Medicare.. a simple law that required ALL providers to supply care and goods to those over a certain age, for free, would have been much better. The cost-shifting to those under that age would have been much more sustainable, than what we have now. And would have held prices down, where Medicare almost forces them higher.
THEN, if a person chooses to insure himself (and protect that 10% of his income), that's between him and the insurer. This leaves the one area where the government steps in. Everyone pays a small tax to fund catostrophic situations (cancer, cripling injuries, and the related, long-term care). Periodic adjustments to that program might include means-tested co-pays.
Sorry.. I went off on a tangent..
ANYway.. these are the types of reform that won't even see the negotiations, even be considered (especially tort-reform), by the curren cast of loons running congress.
I agree, we probably won't see this kind of thing mentioned, but, these are the things that are left in my letters, (not e-mails) to my Senators and Congressman, (after I edit the expletives and diatribes, I usually have a nice, short three paragraph missive)...
Just wanted to comment on your choice of background music and applaud its surely coincidental juxtaposition with the subject matter at hand.
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