Healthcare: The Tipping Point

[System_1]

For the same reason other people post news threads and don’t really say much: to invite discussion on the topic.

If you’ll notice, when I posted the thread about the early word about tax rates on distilled spirits possibly going up (where the quoted section comes from), I was referring to my even earlier thread on the tobacco increase, where I’d tried to get people to realize that taxes on other things deemed unhealthy by the government would be increased or levied.

After all the responses that stated simply ‘this doesn’t affect me, so why should I care?’ in the first thread especially, or even so far as ‘good! Tax that to death!’, I figure that since drinking is ‘more acceptable’ to the crowd here, some warning was due. I’ll freely admit to a little bit of gloating, since my average alcohol consumption rate is approximately one beer a month (see: ‘this doesn’t affect me’).

I’m torn, though, about where discussion of the protester in St. Louis that was assaulted by SEIU members at a town hall should be, though. My thinking is that since it’s part of the HR3200 protests, this would be the place. Of course, what makes it noteworthy is that all the town halls up until now that were protested at remained peaceful until this group started showing up as well.

Don’t you mean SIUE - the bastard half-brother of SIUC?

[Ho0v-Man]

How about this? The govt just forces insurance companies to pay what they’re charged and regulate when they can deny claims. Hospital prices are regulated to actually charge what something is worth.

My friend didn’t have insurance and had an emergency appendectomy. I think they charged him $18,000. If he’d had insurance, he probably would have had a $300 co-pay and insurance would have paid about a $1000. $18,000 is a scary bill, but is $1,300? Yeah it sucks, but if there was a payment plan option most people would be fine w/ 50-100 bucks a month until they paid it off. These numbers aren’t exact, but you get my point.

Who knows who the original bad guy is in the doctor vs insurance company battle is. Let’s go back to when insurance comes on the scene and one of two scenarios arose. Either Dr Greed said " If this so-called ‘insurance company’ pays for whatever I do, then why don’t I charge more and do more and make more money?" He told all his Dr buddies and they all did the same. Insurance started getting the bill and said “We’re only paying this much of this bc you’re just taking advantage of the system.” And then the doctors raised the rates more and it went back and forth until it became the system we loathe today.

On the other end it could have went like this. The insurance company didn’t like having to actually cover the full costs of what doctors were billing them and then decided to give them slightly less. Doctors said "I’ll just charge more so I can make off the people w/ insurance what I make off the ones w/o. And that cycle just repeated itself.

What’s really sad is that w/o the presence of insurance companies none of this stuff would cost that much. I work in a hospital and honestly when you just break it down to what insurance ACTUALLY PAYS it’s usually about as bad as getting your car fixed. But since those loops I just described exist, having you’re blood drawn costs that much to the uninsured.

[thurst]

i see what you’re saying…but realistically if someone could afford to pay $50-100/month then they’d have insurance

[Ho0v-Man]

Plenty pay about $300 a month. And keep in mind that’s until the bill is paid, not indefinitely.

[RoninChaos]

For the same reason other people post news threads and don’t really say much: to invite discussion on the topic.

If you’ll notice, when I posted the thread about the early word about tax rates on distilled spirits possibly going up (where the quoted section comes from), I was referring to my even earlier thread on the tobacco increase, where I’d tried to get people to realize that taxes on other things deemed unhealthy by the government would be increased or levied.

After all the responses that stated simply ‘this doesn’t affect me, so why should I care?’ in the first thread especially, or even so far as ‘good! Tax that to death!’, I figure that since drinking is ‘more acceptable’ to the crowd here, some warning was due. I’ll freely admit to a little bit of gloating, since my average alcohol consumption rate is approximately one beer a month (see: ‘this doesn’t affect me’).

I’m torn, though, about where discussion of the protester in St. Louis that was assaulted by SEIU members at a town hall should be, though. My thinking is that since it’s part of the HR3200 protests, this would be the place. Of course, what makes it noteworthy is that all the town halls up until now that were protested at remained peaceful until this group started showing up as well.

You didn’t answer my question. At least not truthfully. You said to incite discussion but you’re not doing that. You haven’t discussed ANYTHING. And I don’t think you’re interested in discussion. People have replied asking you to prove things and you haven’t done that. You’re posting up bullshit that you’re obviously regurgitating because we know you’re anti government.

You mentioned something about Obama, and how Bush would have been lynched if he asked people to spy on one another, which is what the patriot act was all about. Somebody pointed that out and you didn’t reply.

Running Uppercut went at you, insulted you, and still said some stuff you could have countered if you were interested in that, but you weren’t.

P. Gorath did the same thing, and specifically stated you were being misleading, you didn’t post any polls, but you referenced them, etc. You’re doing the same thing that you’ve done in all the other threads. You post up something, and then you can’t really back up anything you say.

The reason why people like RU said you’re just regurgitating people like Glenn Beck is because you haven’t been able to back up any of the claims that you’ve made. You can say that people won’t care, or react a certain way, etc and that’s fine. The thing you’re not realizing is that people think you’re a fucking idiot BECAUSE of the fact that you aren’t able to back up what you’re preaching, which is EXACTLY why it sounds like you’re just being a mouth piece for stupid pundits like Glen Beck.

You’re not stupid so I’m sure you can see why people connect the dots like that.

[Tiberious]

I’m also not going to allow people to try to shoot things down based on the tiniest of details. If I were to list several pools, and happen to mistakenly switch two of them (for instance one was 47-51 and the other was 48-49), I’d hear ‘lol u just making that up’.

I can say, though, Quinnipiac has numbers showing that the people don’t like what Obama has to offer, and a columnist at the Wall Street Journal sees how pushing as hard on this will hurt the rest of his term.

Edited to add: Even compared to Bush, Obama’s approval numbers are in the dumps. This article, citing CNN’s most recent poll, tells the tale.

Further, regarding the unrest at the recent town hall meetings, it’s funny just how everything before the Service Employees International Union started showing up, they were peaceful (if loud). The same day that these thugs show up, they turn violent.

[Tiberious]

You didn’t answer my question. At least not truthfully. You said to incite discussion but you’re not doing that. You haven’t discussed ANYTHING. And I don’t think you’re interested in discussion. People have replied asking you to prove things and you haven’t done that. You’re posting up bullshit that you’re obviously regurgitating because we know you’re anti government.

Wrong. I am anti-large government. The Constitution spells out just what limits to the federal government are, and yet time and time again, the federal government ignores it.

You mentioned something about Obama, and how Bush would have been lynched if he asked people to spy on one another, which is what the patriot act was all about. Somebody pointed that out and you didn’t reply.

Bush’s PATRIOT Act didn’t have a direct tipster line to the White House intended to crush dissent, either.

Running Uppercut went at you, insulted you, and still said some stuff you could have countered if you were interested in that, but you weren’t.

Then clearly you missed the post where I went point by point and did counter what he had to say. It’s either convenient or intentional.

P. Gorath did the same thing, and specifically stated you were being misleading, you didn’t post any polls, but you referenced them, etc. You’re doing the same thing that you’ve done in all the other threads. You post up something, and then you can’t really back up anything you say.

Read the post right before this one. Yes, the first lines where I talk about the tiny details. Making a typo won’t have people coming to me to clarify, but instead just say ‘that’s bullshit. You lied’, and making an edit, even to fix a typo will automatically trigger a ‘why’d he edit it?’ response, like I was trying to hide shit.

The reason why people like RU said you’re just regurgitating people like Glenn Beck is because you haven’t been able to back up any of the claims that you’ve made. You can say that people won’t care, or react a certain way, etc and that’s fine. The thing you’re not realizing is that people think you’re a fucking idiot BECAUSE of the fact that you aren’t able to back up what you’re preaching, which is EXACTLY why it sounds like you’re just being a mouth piece for stupid pundits like Glen Beck.

Again, you missed the posts where I point at the bill’s own text and distill how those sections would be abused.

[spudlyff8fan]

This thread is stupid.

::goes back to the Do You Wipe thread::

[Tiberious]

If the evidence hasn’t been mounting already, I submit to you quotes straight from Dr. Ezekial Emanuel, now chief healthcare policy advisor to President Obama (and if the surname sounds familiar, it should. He’s also Rahm’s brother):

From The Lancet, January 31st, 2009: Principles for Allocation of Scarce Medical Interventions:

Strict youngest-first allocation directs scarce resources predominantly to infants. This approach seems incorrect. The death of a 20-year-old woman is intuitively worse than that of a 2-month-old girl, even though the baby has had less life. The 20-year-old has a much more developed personality than the infant, and has drawn upon the investment of others to begin as-yet-unfulfilled projects.

Consideration of the importance of complete lives also supports modifying the youngest-first principle by prioritising adolescents and young adults over infants (figure). Adolescents have received substantial education and parental care, investments that will be wasted without a complete life. Infants, by contrast, have not yet received these investments. Similarly, adolescence brings with it a developed personality capable of forming and valuing long-term plans whose fulfilment requires a complete life. As the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin argues, ?It is terrible when an infant dies, but worse, most people think, when a three-year-old child dies and worse still when an adolescent does?; this argument is supported by empirical surveys.

When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated (figure).

A young person with a poor prognosis has had few life-years but lacks the potential to live a complete life. Considering prognosis forestalls the concern that disproportionately large amounts of resources will be directed to young people with poor prognoses.

Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years.

Ultimately, the complete lives system does not create ?classes of Untermenschen whose lives and well being are deemed not worth spending money on?, but rather empowers us to decide fairly whom to save when genuine scarcity makes saving everyone impossible.

From Hastings Center Report, November-December, 1996: Where Civic Republicanism and Deliberative Democracy Meet:

This civic republican or deliberative democratic conception of the good provides both procedural and substantive insights for developing a just allocation
of health care resources. Procedurally, it suggests the need for public forums to deliberate about which health services should be considered basic and should be socially guaranteed. Substantively, it suggests services that promote the continuation of the polity?those that ensure healthy future generations, ensure development of practical reasoning skills, and ensure full and active participation by citizens in public deliberations?are to be socially guaranteed as basic. Conversely, services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia. A less obvious example is guaranteeing neuropsychological services to ensure children with learning disabilities can read and learn to reason.

From the New England Journal of Medicine, July 16th, 1998: What Are the Potential Cost Savings from Legalizing Physician-Assisted Suicide?:

There is a widespread perception that the United States spends an excessive amount on high-technology health care for dying patients. Many commentators note that 27 to 30 percent of the Medicare budget is spent on the 5 percent of Medicare patients who die each year. They also note that the expenditures increase exponentially as death approaches, so that the last month of life accounts for 30 to 40 percent of the medical care expenditures in the last year of life. To many, savings from reduced use of expensive technological interventions at the end of life are both necessary and desirable.

Many have linked the effort to reduce the high cost of death with the legalization of physician-assisted suicide. One commentator observed: “Managed care and managed death [through physician-assisted suicide] are less expensive than fee-for-service care and extended survival. Less expensive is better.” Some of the amicus curiae briefs submitted to the Supreme Court expressed the same logic: “Decreasing availability and increasing expense in health care and the uncertain impact of managed care may intensify pressure to choose physician-assisted suicide” and “the cost effectiveness of hastened death is as undeniable as gravity. The earlier a patient dies, the less costly is his or her care.” Indeed, the Supreme Court noted the potential for cost-saving motives to influence the legalization and use of physician-assisted suicide, speculating that “if physician-assisted suicide were permitted, many might resort to it to spare their families the substantial financial burden of end-of-life health care costs.”

Although the cost savings to the United States and most managed-care plans are likely to be small, it is important to recognize that the savings to specific terminally ill patients and their families could be substantial. For many patients and their families, especially but not exclusively those without health insurance, the costs of terminal care may result in large out-of-pocket expenses. Nevertheless, as compared with the average American, the terminally ill are less likely to be uninsured, since more than two thirds of decedents are Medicare beneficiaries over 65 years of age. The poorest dying patients are likely to be Medicaid beneficiaries. Extrapolating from the Medicare data, one can calculate that a typical uninsured patient, by dying one month earlier by means of physician-assisted suicide, might save his or her family $10,000 in health care costs, having already spent as much as $20,000 in that year. Some patients using intensive medical services may incur considerably higher health care costs.

Drawing on data from the Netherlands on the use of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide and on available U.S. data on costs at the end of life, this analysis explores the degree to which the legalization of physician-assisted suicide might reduce health care costs. The most reasonable estimate is a savings of $627 million, less than 0.07 percent of total health care expenditures.

Why is all of this important? Because this man’s opinions will be influential as to how the public healthcare system would work in this nation.

[System_1]

This thread is stupid.

::goes back to the Do You Wipe thread::

Do you wipe: 3rd strike, innit?

Or were there others before 2007 that I am unaware of?

[Tiberious]

Hmm… does this sound like astroturfing and suppression of free speech to you?

Collect signs and leaflets that are not provided by you or your organization. Another way to limit protesters ability to hijack your event is to confiscate signs or leaflets that they may bring into the venue from outside.

Taking signs and leaflets away from protesters sounds alot like an attempt to squelch peoples’ First Amendment rights to me.

[goodm0urning]

Hmm… does this sound like astroturfing and suppression of free speech to you?

Taking signs and leaflets away from protesters sounds alot like an attempt to squelch peoples’ First Amendment rights to me.

Which might be relevant if it were the government, rather than an unabashedly lefty activist campaign.

[Vampire_Saviour]

Not that any of this matters. Every fucking member of the American Medical Association, Department of the Treasury, and person with a college education in any affected field agrees that it’s a stupid idea.

?

The AMA is supporting Obama’s plan. The same goes for almost every physician group.

[spudlyff8fan]

?

The AMA is supporting Obama’s plan. The same goes for almost every physician group.

Uhh…

No.

Link me to a more-recent story if they changed their tune since then.

[sebastr]

spudlyff8fan:
Would you care to teach the rest of the class how 1 out of 700 dollars becomes 0.014%? I am terribly sorry for not being able to do math, so I was hoping you could enlighten me as to the arithmetics of the problem.

[Vampire_Saviour]

Uhh…

No.

Link me to a more-recent story if they changed their tune since then.

http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/news/news/ama-supports-hr-3200.shtml

[spudlyff8fan]

spudlyff8fan:
Would you care to teach the rest of the class how 1 out of 700 dollars becomes 0.014%? I am terribly sorry for not being able to do math, so I was hoping you could enlighten me as to the arithmetics of the problem.

One out of seven hundred is 1/700.

1/700=0.00142~~~~

Two is 20% of ten. You can see this as…

2/10=0.2=20%

Shifting the decimal point accordingly makes it 0.014%.

RC, if you could, could you please ban sebastr for actually making me explain 3rd grade math to him?

http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/news/news/ama-supports-hr-3200.shtml

Ok.

In that case the flaws of the current plan are made apparent by the opposition of just the financial and economic sectors of America, rather than the financial, medical and economic sectors.

[Tiberious]

I’d done a bit of looking around and found a site called Timely Medical Alternatives. It’s a Canadian company that helps get patients on the mandatory public system up there to private practitioners for procedures that they’re just waiting for in the system. It’s even credited with bringing Canadian patients to the US for life-saving treatments that, had they waited on Canada’s official public system, would have killed them.

Lindsay McCreith of Ontario is even willing to take his fight to the Supreme Court for the brain tumor he had removed in Buffalo, NY. Shirley Healey from British Columbia was bumped twice after already waiting for months to have a blocked artery repaired. Her own doctor told her that it was urgent. By the time she was treated in Washington state, the mesenteric artery (near the pancreas) was 99% blocked (100% is fatal).

Is this really the system we want here in the United States?

[Yin]

One out of seven hundred is 1/700.

1/700=0.00142~~~~

Two is 20% of ten. You can see this as…

2/10=0.2=20%

Shifting the decimal point accordingly makes it 0.014%.

RC, if you could, could you please ban sebastr for actually making me explain 3rd grade math to him?

Now, I can’t do math for shit since back when I started art school (really, I used to be good but that time is long gone)…
But this thing: http://www.csgnetwork.com/csgpercent.html

Says 1 out of 700 is 0.142857, unless I misunderstood how to use it or the question or whatever.

0.2 -> 20 shifts the decimal two steps forward.
0.0014 -> 0.014 only shifts once.

[spudlyff8fan]

Now, I can’t do math for shit since back when I started art school (really, I used to be good but that time is long gone)…
But this thing: http://www.csgnetwork.com/csgpercent.html

Says 1 out of 700 is 0.142857, unless I misunderstood how to use it or the question or whatever.

0.2 -> 20 shifts the decimal two steps forward.
0.0014 -> 0.014 only shifts once.

Ok. Let’s just go with me being wrong.

There are way better things we could derail this thread with than elementary math. We could talk about what Pearl Jam’s best song is (Even Flow), we could talk about whether or not you think Anderson Silva was disrespectful to Forrest Griffin last night (he wasn’t), or we could talk about whether or not EA has redeemed themselves yet for 2004-2007 (they have).