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

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (500320)	8/1/2009 2:50:44 PM
From: Alighieri	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578444

but the point is that Medicare is far from efficient. What kind of inefficiencies are do you know of specifically and what are you looking for? I am telling you that it worked perfectly for us...and we made pretty extensive use of the system during the many years my father in law was ill. What first hand experience do you bring to the table that allows you to say what you say...I think you are parroting... Al

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (500320)	8/1/2009 3:04:47 PM
From: Alighieri	1 Recommendation Respond to of 1578444

What’s Not to Like? Reform? Why do we need health-care reform? Everything is just fine the way it is. Jul 31, 2009 Go ahead, shoot me. I like the status quo on health care in the United States. I've got health insurance and I don't give a damn about the 47 million suckers who don't. Obama and Congress must be stopped. No bill! I'm better off the way things are. I'm with that woman who wrote the president complaining about "socialized medicine" and added: "Now keep your hands off my Medicare." That's the spirit! Why should I be entitled to the same insurance that members of Congress get? Blue Dogs need a lot of medical attention to treat their blueness. I'm just a regular guy and definitely deserve less. Click here to find out more! I had cancer a few years ago. I like the fact that if I lose my job, I won't be able to get any insurance because of my illness. It reminds me of my homeowners' insurance, which gets canceled after a break-in. I like the choice I'd face if, God forbid, the cancer recurs—sell my house to pay for the hundreds of thousands of dollars in treatment, or die. That's what you call a "post-existing condition." I like the absence of catastrophic insurance today. It meant that my health-insurance plan (one of the better ones, by the way) only covered about 75 percent of the cost of my cutting-edge treatment. That's as it should be—face cancer and shell out huge amounts of money at the same time. Nice. I like the "lifetime limits" that many policies have today. Missed the fine print on that one, did you? It means that after you exceed a certain amount of reimbursement, you don't get anything more from the insurance company. That's fair. Speaking of fair, it seems fair to me that cost-cutting bureaucrats at the insurance companies—not doctors—decide what's reimbursable. After all, the insurance companies know best. Yes, the insurance company status quo rocks. I learned recently about something called the "loading fees" of insurance companies. That's how much of every health-care dollar gets spent by insurance companies on things other than the medical care—paperwork, marketing, profits, etc. According to a University of Minnesota study, up to 47 percent of all the money going into the health-insurance system is consumed in "loading fees." Even good insurance companies spend close to 30 percent on nonmedical stuff. Sweet. The good news is that the $8,000 a year per family that Americans pay for their employer-based health insurance is heading up! According to the Council of Economic Advisers, it will hit $25,000 per family by 2025. The sourpusses who want health-care reform say that's "unsustainable." Au contraire. And how could the supporters of these reform bills believe in anything as stupid as a "public option"? Do they really believe that the health-insurance cartel deserves a little competition to keep them honest? Back in the day, they had a word for competition. A bad word. They called it capitalism. FedEx versus the U.S. Postal Service, CNN versus PBS—just because it's government-backed doesn't mean you can't compete against it. If they believed in capitalism, the insurance companies would join the fray and compete. I'm glad they don't. I prefer the status quo, where the for-profit insurance companies suck at the teat of the federal government. Corporate welfare's what we've got, and it's a damn good system. Through a wonderful program called Medicare Advantage, the insurance companies receive hundreds of billions of dollars in fees to administer a program that the government is already running. Don't touch that baby. You'd be messing with the handiwork of some fine lobbyists. You know what part of the status quo I like best? It's a longstanding system for paying doctors called "fee for service." That's where doctors get paid for each procedure they perform, as if my auto dealer got paid separately for the steering wheel, brakes, and horn instead of for the car. Fee-for-service is why the medical care at that doc-in-a-box at my mall is so superior to the Mayo Clinic or Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where the doctors are on salary. Who would want to mess with that? OK, if you really press me, I'm for one change. It's the one that Republicans trot out to prove they're "reformers," too. We could save our whole system if we just capped malpractice awards. Two of our biggest states—California and Texas—did it a few years ago and nothing has changed there, but who cares? It sounds good. Click here to find out more! So tell your congressmen and senators when they're home for the summer recess that it's too soon to address this issue. We've only been debating it for 97 years, since Theodore Roosevelt put national health insurance in the Bull Moose Party platform of 1912. We've only had 745 congressional hearings on the subject (I made that number up, but it's got to be close). That's not enough! Let's study this problem more before we do anything about it. Did I say "problem"? Who said there was a problem? Not me. I like the status quo.

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (500320)	8/2/2009 9:54:25 AM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 1578444

Geithner: Lower deficit key to sustaining recovery By RICHARD LARDNER, Associated Press Writer Richard Lardner, Associated Press Writer 26 mins ago WASHINGTON – Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner says the U.S. must cut the annual federal budget deficit, now more than $1 trillion, for the economy to have a sustained recovery and he's not ruling out new taxes. He said the country needs to understand the Obama administration will do what's necessary. He did not detail how the government plans to shrink the deficit, though he said overhauling the health care system and lowering costs are essential. "When we have recovery established, led by the private sector, then we have to bring these deficits down very dramatically," he told ABC's "This Week" in an interview broadcast Sunday. "And that's going to require some very hard choices. And we're going to have to do that in a way that does not add unfairly to the burdens that the average American already faces." Geithner also said private economists generally expect to see growth later this year and unemployment to ease in the second half of next year. Any sustained recovery must rely on business investment and hiring, he said. Geithner said the administration will stick with its economic efforts until there a strong private sector-led recovery is in place. Geithner said the White House wants a health care bill that has broad support on Capitol Hill. But he said the decision of whether "to help shape this and be part of it" is up to lawmakers. "Or do they want this country . . . to go another several decades without doing what every other serious country has done. Which is to give their citizens access to basic quality of care," Geithner said. On revamping the financial sector, Geithner rejected Republican claims that the government is assuming too much control over Wall Street. The House passed a bill Friday prohibiting pay and bonus packages that encourage bankers and traders to take risks so big they could bring down the entire economy. Republican opponents of the legislation said the restrictions should apply only to banks that accept government aid. They criticized Democrats for creating government bureaucracies to make decisions better left to the private sector. "I think that really everybody understands that we cannot have our financial system go back to the practices that brought this economy to the brink of collapse," Geithner said. Geithner also said that extending unemployment benefits again is something the administration and Congress are going to "look very carefully at as the end of this year approaches."