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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (394401)	6/26/2008 6:24:31 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1579753

JF, > No, it's government run insurance. With the government becoming the sole customer of health care, or the largest customer by far, what's to prevent the government from basically dictating terms to the health-care industry? Tenchusatsu

To: Road Walker who wrote (394401)	6/27/2008 12:52:58 AM
From: i-node	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1579753

Government-run health insurance isn't government-run health care? No, it's government run insurance. If you understood anything at all about our health care system (it has been clear from the outset that you do not) you would know that you cannot separate the "health care system" from the "health insurance system". If you have "government run insurance", you will have "government run health care". It cannot function any other way. The payors control the process. They decide who gets paid how much for each CPT. They decide the circumstances under which a provider will be paid for a given procedure. They decide what records must be kept and for how long. They decide how long you have to file a claim, and what documentation that claim is required to have. They decide whether a particular procedure is warranted for a given diagnosis, and whether a surgeon who performs a bilateral procedure gets paid once or twice. They decide if a patient who requires both a Colonoscopy and an EGD gets them both on the same day or will have to make to trips. And they decide what labwork a patient can receive in a given set of circumstances. They decide how long a patient can stay in the hospital, and in many instances whether they can be admitted at all (in the case of my dying mother, she was refused admission for 8 hours awaiting a physician who wasn't afraid to make the call). Again, I don't expect you to comprehend this, because you have shown you know absolutely nothing about the subject. But there is no practical difference between the single government payer system you have described and the government-run health care of Canada. Furthermore, the Canadian disaster is proof that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Clearly, these people believed they were doing the right things when they did it -- but it has turned out to be a train wreck. Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that damned near every one of you liberals have pointed to the Canadian system as some kind of "model" on which a US system might be based. Maybe you didn't, but there were several on this thread who did -- including MM for sure, and I believe a few others.