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

To: Alighieri who wrote (875177)

7/25/2015 12:00:03 PM

From: Broken_Clock

Respond to of 1583466

Guess you missed tejek's post yesterday. He's as dumb as you are. How is dumping the eve increasing cost onto the individual with stagnant wages a good thing?

why are you supporting Romneycare?

+++

To: tejek who wrote (875096)	7/25/2015 5:10:41 AM
From: Broken_Clock	of 875178

"That’s a remarkable break from decades of health-care prices outpacing inflation, but consumers shouldering a greater share of their medical costs may not notice the difference." "Patients don’t notice the lower prices Medicare pays. And more insurance companies and employers are nudging people toward high-deductible health plans that shift risk onto consumers in exchange for lower premiums. Even if the price of going to the doctor hasn’t gone up much in the past five years, a lot of people are paying a bigger portion of the bill." above from your link. You do this on a regular basis. It seems you're limited to the headline then the details just fly right by your brain. As I pointed our several years ago, the ACA is designed to shift the cost of healthcare as well as health insurance squarely onto the middle class and poor. In other words, Romneycare, a Republican contrivance which is in essence more corporate welfare with less actual healthcare. This is why Stanford hospital is now a service center for the entire northern Cal geographic area. 2,500/day to the ER because the typical OBummercare poor person can't afford the deductible, can't get a primary care physician, etc. The ER person told me the know Stanford won't refuse them so they come to the ER and stay until the main cause of their visit is cared for. Stanford being Stanford, the cost is immense. Of course the patient is essentially bankrupt after leaving.

To: Alighieri who wrote (875177)

7/25/2015 12:01:24 PM

From: Broken_Clock

Respond to of 1583466

To: SiouxPal who wrote (875115)	7/25/2015 5:35:35 AM
From: Broken_Clock	of 875179

awesome track record for Obummer….Clinton more of the same ++ Published on Friday, July 24, 2015 by Common Dreams Healthcare 'Oligopoly Wave' Continues As Anthem Gobbles Cigna Human rights campaigners say mega consolidation will erode healthcare access and hike prices, illustrating deep problems with for-profit model by Sarah Lazare, staff writer 38 Comments Anthem's $54.2 billion purchase of Cigna is the largest merger the U.S. health insurance industry has ever seen. (Photo: Michael Conroy/Associated Press) The health insurance giant Anthem announced Friday that it is buying its behemoth rival Cigna for $54.2 billion, launching the largest such merger the country has ever seen and reducing the number of major U.S. insurers to a paltry three. Analysts and human rights campaigners warn that the move is poised to further slash access to healthcare and hike prices across the country, illustrating the problems with the for-profit model in terms of delivering vital services. The mega deal comes less than a month after insurance giant Aetna acquired Humana for $37 billion, part of a nationwide push to consolidate in what the Wall Street Journal referred to earlier this year as an " oligopoly wave." The Anthem and Cigna merger is expected to be finalized in 2016, after which the joint company will provide coverage for at least 53 million people. Numerous studies show that insurance mergers lead to higher premiums, including a 2012 analysis of a 1999 merger between Aetna and Prudential, as well as a report released in February which showed having more, not less, insurers in the insurance marketplace established by the Affordable Care Act leads to lower premiums. Moreover, the mergers are taking place in a country that already has a dismal record with providing real care. A report (pdf) released last year by the Commonwealth Fund finds that the U.S. healthcare system is already the most expensive in the world yet delivers the worse care among 11 industrialized nations. Cait Vaughan, a Healthcare Is a Human Right organizer with the Southern Maine Workers' Center, told Common Dreams that Friday's merger underscores the fact that the Affordable Care Act model "is still a for-profit system that is not determined by our needs, but determined by the desires and profit margins of huge conglomerates." Image from Maryland health care justice march in October 2013. (Photo: United Workers/flickr/cc) Vaughan emphasized that, in today's "medical industrial complex," people are made "incredibly wealthy off of us being sick and limiting very basic access to healthcare while increasingly shrinking our ability to make choices." During a presidential campaign cycle where we are "hearing a lot about how rich people control policy and elections," Vaughan said that it is vital to talk about the control of the wealthy over one of the most basic human rights: healthcare. Dr. David Himmelstein, co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program, toldCommon Dreams that the wave of mergers will turn insurance giants into "essential monopolies" that make a significant profit from public tax dollars. "Much of their revenue comes from the government that pays hundreds of billions annually in premiums for private 'Medicare Advantage' plans, Medicaid managed care plans, and much of the premiums for the private plans bought on [ACA] insurance exchanges," said Himmelstein. "Much of this money is wasted; Anthem and Cigna have overhead that’s nearly tenfold higher than traditional Medicare." Human rights campaigners say that public dollars should not be used to enrich these giant companies, but rather, should go towards a universal, single-payer healthcare system in which the profit motive is cut out of the equation, and everyone is included. But Brian Quinn, a law professor at Boston College, told the Washington Post that the frenzy of mergers could signal that the country is moving in the opposite direction: "It's a little ironic I suppose that—over time—we may find ourselves moving towards a single payer healthcare system, but rather than it being government run, it may well be a small number of private, highly-regulated insurance companies." But analysts say that these companies, in fact, are not "highly regulated" at all. "Just this month, the insurers' lobbying group hired as their new CEO Marilyn Tavenner, who as head of Medicare and Medicaid was responsible for regulating them until this spring," said Himmelstein. "These monopolies are lightly regulated, and have used their enormous financial and political clout to avoid real oversight." This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

To: Alighieri who wrote (875177)

7/25/2015 12:54:53 PM

From: i-node

Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1583466

Al, you need to read the introduction to the report, notably the following two paragraphs which provide context for the entire report:

"The Board assumes that the various cost-reduction measures the most important of which
are the reductions in the annual payment rate updates for most categories of Medicare providers by the growth in economy-wide private nonfarm business multifactor productivity
will occur as the ACA requires. The Trustees believe that this outcome is achievable if
health care providers are able to realize productivity improvements at a faster rate than experienced historically.

However, if the health sector cannot transition to more efficient models of care delivery and
achieve productivity increases commensurate with economy-wide productivity, and if the provider reimbursement rates paid by commercial insurers continue to follow the same negotiated process used to date, then the availability and quality of health care received by Medicare beneficiaries would, under current law, fall over time relative to that received by those with private health insurance."

As you can readily see, the trustees said NOTHING like your excerpt, and in fact, they said ONLY if assumptions which would appear to be unlikely to be fulfilled were, in fact, fulfilled, might this happen.

The critical phrase is:

" . . .and if the provider reimbursement rates paid by commercial insurers continue to follow the same negotiated process used to date, then the availability and quality of health care received by Medicare beneficiaries would, under current law, fall over time relative to that received by those with private health insurance."

That is, over time, Medicare recipients will get lower quality care. Which they will. Because government is lopping off payments arbitrarily.

As a young accounting student I learned, "Never read financial statements without reading the footnotes, because that's where the interesting stuff can be found." The interesting stuff in the Trustee's Report is ALWAYS found in the Introduction and Summary.