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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Impristine who wrote (25037)	9/24/1998 12:13:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

>Why corporate salaries continue to rise?< Well, MY corporate salary has lagged inflation for about 5 years now!! My $.02 re money vs. humanity: An HMO is a corporation. It has two mandates: 1) Provide a specified service/product 2) Stay in the black while doing that Money will always be Top Dog in this equation unless Gov't comes in and says "profit no longer matters; you're a public, subsidy-driven venture now. Here are your new rules." Things will go from bad to worse unless/until there are gov't guidelines, hard ones, on what is proper care. Whether it's handled privately (by HMOs) or publicly (by Medicare or an expanded federal program) it will be extravagantly expensive. Or downright Draconian, especially for chronic care. The only other way out is for insurance plans to cover the services in question. Non-HMO plans. I doubt a middle-class family could afford such a plan however. I'd guess about $10K/year in premium oughtta do it.

To: Impristine who wrote (25037)	10/11/1998 1:50:00 AM
From: Grainne	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Impristine, I'm so sorry to hear that you are disfigured. Your soul is very interesting to mine, incidentally. I can't really write a very good poem about HMO's, or the larger mess that is our health system. My opinion is that in looking at macro trends, medical care has become very expensive because we all expect to live long lives with extensive intervention at the end. At the same time, since the technology exists to save younger and younger premature infants, we do that as well. If you have millions of dollars being spent on these babies, and expenses in the last few months of life of several hundred thousand dollars for people who are definitely dying anyway, something is going to have to give in the middle. Everyone wants the very best care, but doesn't want to spend the money it takes to provide that for OTHER people. It is an essential dichotomy. There certainly is an argument to be made for nationalizing health care, because the profits the HMO's are making are obscene. On the other hand, where nationalization has been tried, there are still lots of problems in terms of waiting several months for "elective" surgeries like hip replacements. This sounds benign in principle, but many people are so weakened generally after a long period of loss of mobility that they perish. HMO's are big business. Republicans like and protect big business, for the most part. It will be interesting to see how this turns out. Unfortunately, Clinton is so weakened at this point that he was utterly ineffective at getting HMO regulation through Congress. Where we may disagree is how much responsibility he himself bears for the situation he is in.

To: Impristine who wrote (25037)	10/11/1998 7:24:00 PM
From: James R. Barrett	Respond to of 108807

>>"It is not about reigning in the HMO's. the HMO's are already so powerful they have absolutely no checks and balances on their behavior when it comes to certain reasonable services. How inhumane does the system have to be before the HMO's will agree to part with, but a little of their money? In my opinion, it has progressed beyond an issue of money. It is an issue of what is important, and are we human?"<< That is EXACTLY what people were saying 15 years ago about doctors, hospitals and drug companies. Jim