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

To: SilentZ who wrote (630461)	10/4/2011 11:46:11 PM
From: i-node	1 Recommendation Respond to of 1579681

>> Providers can pretty much charge whatever they want, as long as they don't raise prices so quickly that the frog (us) notices that the water's boiling. They can charge whatever they want, but they cannot collect whatever they want. Obviously, another subject you don't know anything about. Coronary Artery Dilation (PTCA) (CPT=92982) is billed here typically at $3,000. Medicare pays: $579. Repair of arterial blockage (35474) normally bills at about $1,100 -- they can collect $379. Medicaids are worse than that. A retired patient over 65, that's what they get. Period, end of story.

To: SilentZ who wrote (630461)	10/5/2011 10:46:27 AM
From: bentway	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1579681

"What happens to the person who has to retire in a downturn of the stock market?" The stock market hasn't moved in the aggregate since Bush was first sworn in. If you'd bought an index fund then, you'd have made NOTHING in 11 years. With the newly defined economy, where global corporations profits are considered the "economy", while tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs, likely forever, to cheaper foreigners and robots, our traditional metrics no longer measure the health of any American's "economy". The jobs the transnational corporations create are no longer here, or for humans. The question government SHOULD be answering is, how will these people, who's numbers increase daily, survive?

To: SilentZ who wrote (630461)	10/5/2011 12:27:59 PM
From: Brumar89	Respond to of 1579681

People don't liquidate all their investments at the moment of retirement. What happens to the person who has to retire in a downturn of the stock market?

To: SilentZ who wrote (630461)	10/5/2011 12:48:07 PM
From: i-node	1 Recommendation Respond to of 1579681

>> Nearly 60% of bankruptcies in the United States today are at least partially due to medical conditions. Another liberal lie. When a bankruptcy petition is filed ALL debts must be listed. It is not surprising that most contain SOME medical debt. But when the petition shows 100K in credit cards and 5k in medical debt you can't (as the Harvard study bogusly did) reasonably conclude that medical conditions had a damned thing to do with it.

To: SilentZ who wrote (630461)	10/5/2011 2:44:31 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1579681

Z, > I certainly do understand what it means. But if you have a heart attack, are you going to shop around for a heart surgeon? You're begging the question, i.e. you still haven't explained why costs are going up. Obviously demand for health care is inelastic. You don't have to repeat yourself. But what if there are too many heart surgeons around in a particular area? (Sounds very unlikely, but let's assume for the moment that this is true.) Unless those surgeons fix prices, they're going to compete for patients. And those patients (or their insurance providers) will go straight for the one offering the best deal. Now that's what would happen in a free market scenario. But for obvious reasons, we don't subject health care to the dynamics of a free market. So now what happens? Prices are controlled, the supply of heart surgeons in a given area is limited thanks to the "system," and costs are passed onto the deepest pockets, whether it be insurance or the government. When you understand this, it's no wonder that the cost of health care is skyrocketing. Funny thing how the free market works. Even when you try to insulate health care from it, it always comes around to bite you in the butt. Tenchusatsu