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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (12719)	12/25/2009 12:34:18 PM
From: Lane3	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

The simple truth is that with 300M or more residents, government facilities for proper evaluation of these issues cannot handle the workload while delivering a reasonable quality of care. Because they involve a significant expenditure of time to judge each case. I don't know what you're talking about. I'm not at all sure you know what you're talking about. <g> You seem to be envisioning an array of government workers evaluating everyone's colonoscopies and mammograms. Is that what you're doing? Right now we have an assortment of insurance companies setting up protocols like what you described for things like colonoscopies, most of which are paid automatically, and making determinations on individual situations that vary from the protocols based on whether or not the doctor used the right words to describe the necessity for an exception. We also have federal contractors doing the same thing for myriad Medicare, Medicaid, etc. patients. That's the status quo. So now we add this new legislation. How does that change things? Well, we will have ten or twenty thousand more folks covered. Some of them will be via insurance companies and some via the federal contractors. Where's the workload? Sure, both insurance companies and contractors have to staff up a bit, maybe ten percent. They have years to do it. What is it about that that has you all exercised? I don't accept that all 90 year-olds are unworthy of expensive treatments due to their age, or even most of them. What makes you think that the Medicare protocols will change? Right now Medicare pays for knee replacements and doesn't pay for physicals or shingles vaccinations. Are you expecting them to revise those protocols? If so, why? If not, what's your problem?