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Politics : GOPwinger Lies/Distortions/Omissions/Perversions of Truth -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (143414)	10/26/2008 6:56:29 PM
From: geode00	Respond to of 173976

I agree with you on end of life. There is an enormous amount of money spent on measures to extend life at the end but not enough leeway to provide good drugs for pain and suffering...it doesn't make any sense but it is puritanical. The Medicare population is the oldest, sickest and in need of the most care. Young people are cheap. If we spread Medicare around to include a younger population and a larger population, costs can come down. If people no longer need to worry about pre existing conditions not being covered by private insurers, we can go to a full disclosure database...that won't happen IMO with the system we have today because the risks are too high. ====I don't think there is one solution but many. For example, we should cut out the routine medical exam and offer things like blood pressure testing more widely and cheaply. The routine medical exam costs quite a bit but doesn't appear to be detailed enough to find much. We also need more doctors spread out through the country which means more spaces in medical schools and cheaper tuition for deserving students. pnhp.org Proposal of the Physicians' Working Group for Single-Payer National Health Insurance Executive Summary The United States spends more than twice as much on health care as the average of other developed nations, all of which boast universal coverage. Yet over 39 million Americans have no health insurance whatsoever, and most others are underinsured, in the sense that they lack adequate coverage for all contingencies (e.g., long-term care and prescription drug costs). Why is the U. S. so different? The short answer is that we alone treat health care as a commodity distributed according to the ability to pay, rather than as a social service to be distributed according to medical need. In our market-driven system, investor-owned firms compete not so much by increasing quality or lowering costs, but by avoiding unprofitable patients and shifting costs back to patients or to other payers. This creates the paradox of a health care system based on avoiding the sick. It generates huge administrative costs, which, along with profits, divert resources from clinical care to the demands of business. In addition, burgeoning satellite businesses, such as consulting firms and marketing companies, consume an increasing fraction of the health care dollar. We endorse a fundamental change in America’s health care - the creation of a comprehensive National Health Insurance (NHI) Program. Such a program - which in essence would be an expanded and improved version of Medicare - would cover every American for all necessary medical care. Most hospitals and clinics would remain privately owned and operated, receiving a budget from the NHI to cover all operating costs. Investor-owned facilities would be converted to not-for-profit status, and their former owners compensated for past investments. Physicians could continue to practice on a fee-for-service basis, or receive salaries from group practices, hospitals or clinics. A National Health Insurance Program would save at least $150 billion annually by eliminating the high overhead and profits of the private, investor-owned insurance industry and reducing spending for marketing and other satellite services. Doctors and hospitals would be freed from the concomitant burdens and expenses of paperwork created by having to deal with multiple insurers with different rules - often rules designed to avoid payment. During the transition to an NHI, the savings on administration and profits would fully offset the costs of expanded and improved coverage. NHI would make it possible to set and enforce overall spending limits for the health care system, slowing cost growth over the long run. A National Health Insurance Program is the only affordable option for universal, comprehensive coverage. Under the current system, expanding access to health care inevitably means increasing costs, and reducing costs inevitably means limiting access. But an NHI could both expand access and reduce costs. It would squeeze out bureaucratic waste and eliminate the perverse incentives that threaten the quality of care and the ethical foundations of medicine.