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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (134189)	3/30/2001 1:27:49 AM
From: greenspirit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Well said Neo! Right on the money. Tone deaf indeed!

To: Neocon who wrote (134189)	3/30/2001 9:25:36 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 769667

The "crisis" of the uninsured was largely manufactured You make an important point about the uninsured, which I want to emphasize. We won't ever be able to have a sensible discussion about health care until everyone understands that the objective is health care, not health insurance. Insurance is just one way to accomplish the objective, not the objective. Best I can tell from what I read, just about everyone seems to think that the lack of universal health insurance is THE problem. We can't solve a problem if we can't even frame it correctly. Karen

To: Neocon who wrote (134189)	3/30/2001 4:44:00 PM
From: Johannes Pilch	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

But more than that, if one wants to reduce costs somewhat, the proposal to establish Medical Accounts similar to IRAs, with a certain amount for ordinary care deposited in pre- tax dollars, and the carrying of various forms of catastrophic insurance, would be a good way to go. Eyuup. That could work, but even this sort of plan will take a bit of discipline. "Health accounts" will make us more directly responsible for paying healthcare costs, and vast numbers of us will simply exhaust whatever meager dollar amounts (relative to cost) we are able to put in those accounts. Let’s face it, medical care is essentially a product like any other, and its costs will not be reduced until its demand is reduced-- whatever arrangements we fashion. It seems to me we need to consider ways we as a society might better work to decrease healthcare demand. Perhaps we could, for example, plan our communities to better facilitate exercise as part of daily living and not as an abstraction of life. Surely it is a broad approach, but it points to the root of the problem. If we continue to ignore the problem's root, then I don't see how any of the healthcare proposals commonly mentioned could do much better than our current system in the face of escalating healthcare demand.

To: Neocon who wrote (134189)	3/30/2001 4:52:19 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769667

The "crisis" of the uninsured was largely manufactured Neocon, I think you're averting your eyes from the true state of affairs. The bulk of the uninsured are the working poor, who chose not to be insured because they need to eat. Medicaid only covers the extremely poor. Some of the uninsured are young people who chose not be insured, that's true. So who pays when they get sick or get in a car wreck? For many years, the answer was cost-shifting; those who had insurance overpaid to pay for the uninsured. With the rise of the HMOs, that no longer worked and hospitals are now going broke by the boatload, and squeezing money out of patient care, which is why we have an acute nursing shortage. I recently saw an article in the WSJ that suggested the reader might want to consider hiring a private duty nurse if they had to be hospitalized. All very well if you can afford an extra $50/hr x 7 x 24. an obligation on the part of emergency rooms not to turn away acute cases, and those in public hospitals not to turn away the chronic Are you joking? The public hospitals are trying not to go broke any faster than they need to. Just try getting uninsured treatment for some chronic non life-threatening condition; you'll wait for days and be brushed off with minimal treatment. That's why treatable cancers are a death sentence for the uninsured poor; they don't go to the doctor until they keel over, and by then it's generally too late. No legislative proposal that's been passed or is under discussion does more than nibble at the edges of the problem. It won't begin to shift until access to basic health care is available to all citizens, rich and poor, healthy and sick. Large insurance pools are a necessity to spread the costs of the sick. It would also help to blast health insurance apart from employers and make the consumer the customer, but it won't solve all the problems since health care doesn't really work like other free markets -- when you need it, you're in a bad position to shop around. I think Hawaii's example should be studied more closely (why has it hardly been mentioned?); they have state-mandated coverage and lower than average per capita health care costs. I agree that Hillary and Ira Magaziner were politically tone deaf. But I do think that the 250 million dollars (that's a lot!) spent on Harry and Louise ads were instrumental in sinking the development of any compromise legislation.