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

To: Lane3 who wrote (13393)	2/11/2010 7:49:53 AM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 42652

From Kaiser Health News: Larger, for-profit hospitals may be using too many feeding tubes on patients with advanced dementia without improving the quality of their care, a study finds, according to HealthDay News/Business Week. "Our results suggest that decisions about feeding tubes are more about which hospital you go to than a decision-making process that really elicits and supports patient choice," said the physician who led the study, which appears in today's Journal of the American Medical Association. "For-profit hospitals, along with facilities that had 310 beds or more and those that had the most use of intensive care during the last six months of a person's life, were more likely to use feeding tubes," HealthDay reports. One reason that feeding tubes tend to be overused in general is that the Medicaid and Medicare systems include conflicting incentives. Nursing homes that receive Medicaid reimbursements have an incentive to send patients to hospitals, where Medicare will reimburse their care, the physician-researcher said (Gardner, 2/9). ------------------- Some may see this as more death panels. Others may see it as a product of the incentive snarls that characterize our public systems. Some may see it as a manifestation of greed.

To: Lane3 who wrote (13393)	2/11/2010 8:36:14 AM
From: Road Walker	1 Recommendation Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 42652

But a near 40% increase in insurance premiums is pretty shocking. ------ It is. Do you know anything about what provoked it? Just what I heard on the radio... so I'm sorry no link. What they said was that with the worsening economy many young people are dropping their insurance at the same time that many sick or at risk people are doing anything they can to keep up with their premiums. So the risk pool is getting much worse and payouts increasing at the same time that premium revenue is decreasing. The model seems to be broken... the more they make the premiums less affordable the more worse the risk pool will get which means they have to raise premiums which makes the risk pool worse which ... ... ... ... ... Maybe the ObamaCare edict that everyone has to have insurance doesn't look so bad???