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Tech In the Hot Seat For Oct. 1st Obamacare Launch
bednarz writes "In four days, the health insurance marketplaces mandated by the Obama administration's Affordable Care Act are scheduled to open for business. Yet even before the sites launch, problems are emerging. Final security testing of the federal data hub isn't slated to happen until Sept. 30, one day before the rollout. Lawmakers have raised significant concerns about the ability of the system to protect personal health records and other private information. 'Lots and lots of late nights and weekends as people get ready for go-live,' says Patrick Howard, who leads Deloitte Consulting's public sector state health care practice."
I was under the impression that "Obamacare" is one of the first things that's going to be axed as soon as the USA gets its next Republican president... which is inevitable at some point in the future, given a two-party system.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
How many times have you guys been told by a project manager that QA testing starts on Wednesday and Go-Live is on Friday? I had a meeting once where a manager said we needed to improve our planning so we weren't constantly doing bug fixing on Thursday and Friday morning, and was willing to put in place so many new procedures, workflows, and documentation but never give more time between the start of QA and product roll-out.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
First you have to just adopt the technology, before we can see if it will work...
Sad pandas to you if you are unaware of the tragic quote that spawned this.
Yes, there is a point to this.
It may well be a long time before the Republicans have enough votes to get a repeal through the Senate. The way Demographics are headed, the Republican party of today will have to evolve significantly to stay relevant beyond this decade. And what Republicans fear about Obamacare more than anything else is that once it's implemented, people will decide that they like it, making it impossible for them to repeal it (much like Medicare and Social Security).
The Republicans can only get rid of it if it is unsuccessful, which is why they tried so hard to get rid of it before it was enacted. Even so, repealing it would take a Republican president and simple majority in both the house and senate, which is much harder.
Luckily for the Republicans they will always be able to find some metrics that show that it was a failure. Health care premiums will continue to rise no matter what until we serious talk about rationing care, so any health care plan written by either party will always leave room for complaints.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
if by "evolve" you mean "lean further libertarian instead of continuing to be basically the laziest Democrats ever", I agree with that part.
As far as the "decide that they like it" part, I'd say it will be more along the lines of "dislike it but fear the disappearance of what few scraps it throws them"
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
. . . the same wonks that gave us so many failed DMV systems haven't found work in this sector too.
Laziest democrats? Nixon was a socialist compared to todays republicans. If they leaned any further right they would fall over.
Barry Goldwater was a prophet. The religious right now owns the Republican party.
. Lawmakers have raised significant concerns about the ability of the system to protect personal health records and other private information.
Would that be the same lawmakers that authorized the handling of our sensitive personal health records by people making pennies on the dollar in foreign countries... because hospitals asked them to disregard HIPPA safeguards to save a few bucks?
'Lots and lots of late nights and weekends as people get ready for go-live,' says Patrick Howard, who leads Deloitte Consulting's public sector state health care practice."
Wait, rolling out national access to one of the most complex databases ever designed, with multi-tiered access controls, and peering with tens of thousands of providers, in realtime... isn't easy? Shit, why not just hire some more 14 year old kids? They seem to know how these computer whatcha-things work. Can't be any harder than Youtubing the Facebooks.
Let's be serious for a minute -- the launch can't possibly go as badly as the Republican's last major foray into IT -- Romney's campaign. I mean, their competitor to Obama's data analytics software didn't just explode on the launchpad, it actually fired itself into the ground as it did so. So the idea that Obama might pull off another big data project while they're still trying to figure out where the off button is on the internet, is probably a bit frightening to them. And that's really all it's about. Have you seen the scare advertisements on TV? I mean, creepy guys dressed as Uncle Sam putting on lubed blue gloves and making a mockery of what is undeniably the best medicine in the world (once you're sick, that is, and as long as you can afford it)... they're going all out on this.
So yeah, big surprise they're predicting the end of life as we know it, asteroid smashing into Earth, total extinction of the human race kind of doomsday predictions over the launch. But truthfully, here's what's going to happen; It's going to work. Sortof. There's going to be spotty and random problems, many caused by humans, because whenever you launch a new, complex piece of software, the interaction of so many untrained people in an uncontrolled environment (read: "It worked fine in the lab!") is going to cause unmitigated stress and support headaches until people get used to the software... and the software gets used to them. And by used to them, I mean patched. Probably quite a bit. It's the classic support bathtub curve: High initial support costs, followed by a rapid falloff, a long period of stability, and then rising costs again as the product ages and reaches EOL.
This is IT Management 101. Nobody should be surprised when things go haywire... but it'll be haywire in the "Y2K" sort of way: A few newsworthy problems (that'll inevitably be blown well out of proportion), but mostly... it'll work. It'll be lagged, and people will be frustrated, but it'll work.
And no matter how badly it goes... it's still better than the alternative, which is for some people literally dying in place, due to a lack of access to health care. Even if it set every 20,000th's applicant on fire, it'd be better than what we have now.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I'm neither going to defend Nixon nor today's GOP. Neither deserves the defence. The few that deserve defence are the ones the GOP "leadership" (if you want to call it that) already hate.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
The idea of having affordable health care as opposed to being told sorry but you must just go die someplace as quietly as possible does tend to make it more than likely it will succeed. In year's time this will be old news and the GOPTP will be whining about something else, looking for another hostage to take to get their agenda passed.
Federal IT contracting also has the kickbacks and other BS that put's lot's of PHB's in the way of getting work done.
Relevant cartoon
voting for freeshit over freedom.
congrats liberals. your communist takeover is almost complete.
and then then some should do a sick kids sick out on the capitol steps and tell the kids don't get and in jail under cruel and unusual punishment and others laws they must give you medical care or you can just go to the ER.
Well tell that PM that new procedures are more time over all and more man power if you are getting done / ready for finale / RC QA testing just days before go live.
The democrats really have no idea how mad they've made some people. This thing is intolerable. And I and those I support in politics will go for pretty much whatever option is open to frustrate or destroy it.
Understand... this will not be worth it for the democrats. They've stuck their foot into something that has grown larger and more involved and enflamed more passions then they could comprehend.
Their reactions throughout have been "so what" "what's the big deal"... they don't get it.
Every trick in the book is on the table with this thing. By hook, crook, nail, and claw... this thing is going down or it will be so horribly scrambled that the democrats will wish it did die.
Politically, the republicans were completely sidelined for this thing. Utterly emasculated. To survive as a political organization, the republicans need to so thoroughly annihilate this move that the democrats for generations to come remember it.
Anything less and we transition to a one party system.
Let me opt out and we have peace. That's all we've ever wanted in this venture. Let people vote with their feet. If its such a great program you wont' need to force people to join it. If you do need to force people then its not actually a great program you irredeemable lying aholes.
Doubtless I'm going to get some snarky replies from some democrats. That's fine. Game on, stooges.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
There, fixed that for you!
And remember. The more you depend on government, the more control they have over your life. Soon, we will all be enslaved to the "machine".
Life is not for the lazy.
For all of those if us concerned about the privacy/sanctity of our medical information, it doesn't exist *now*. If you are treated under any private health insurance plan, all of the diagnoses and treatments are fed into a database (http://www.mib.com/facts_about_mib.html) that all the insurance companies share to protect themselves against people applying for insurance and "forgetting" about a pre-existing condition. Next time you have a few minutes, pull out the mice-type on your health insurance plan and read up on how they can collect and share that information.
I was under the impression that "Obamacare" is one of the first things that's going to be axed as soon as the USA gets its next Republican president... which is inevitable at some point in the future, given a two-party system.
Not at all clear-- the president can neither pass nor repeal legislation. Even a Republican president would have to work through Congress to do so, and unless both chambers are also Republican, this may be difficult.
In any case, though, the reason that Republicans are trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act so urgently is that they believe that once it is in place, people will like it so much that it will be impossible to repeal. So if this is true, then no.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
What do you mean by demographics? The Us population is getting older, which is traditionally more Republican demographics. Oh, you mean the huge influx of Latinos. Right, I understand now. Only, in their own countries Latinos tend to elect fairly conservative governments so once the Democrat deception regarding the immigration issue stops working, things might change.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
>> Lots and lots of late nights and weekends as people get ready for go-live
Translation: "We've been sandbagging hours with folks in India and newbies right out of college for months. Now we may need to actually pull some of our senior guys off sales and deep-end pissed-off customer calls and see if they remember how to program again."
Too bad for you 0bamacare's shaping up to be anything but affordable. Even that is assuming they can crunch the numbers, which isn't a valid assumption either.
On an anecdotal note, my employer switched from a PPO plan to an HMO plan to keep its costs somewhat under control. You have the option to stay in a PPOish plan, but it now costs about 4x what we had previously been paying. I switched to this plan to keep access to its better network in case my wife had to quit working and go onto my plan; her oncologist is available through the PPOish plan, but not the HMO. (She's since passed away. :-( Now that it's just me, I might suck it up and switch to the HMO to save some money. So much for "if you like your insurance, you can keep your insurance.")
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
As for the second part, people in this country don't get turned away because they're poor, they get medicare or medicaid (depending on age).
Some do. Some don't. Some have too much money for medicaid, but not enough to pay for a big hospital bill. Some charge hospital bills on their credit cards, and then go bankrupt when they can't pay them (sticking you and me with the bill). Some can't get credit cards, and use the Emergency Room for health care. Some just die.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/09/17/us-usa-healthcare-deaths-idUSTRE58G6W520090917
"Reuters) - Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year -- one every 12 minutes -- in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found in an analysis released on Thursday."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
So you think because it has "affordable" in the name, that it actually is affordable. Don't you know of the tradition of that bills in congress are given names that are exactly opposite of the bill's effects?
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Religious right most definitely does not own the Republican party. It has moved more to the right fiscally, but it has become less religious.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Republicans are divided on that point.....half (like Ted Cruz) think it is crucial to get rid of it before it starts. The other half thinks it's so bad that they should just let it happen and people will see how bad it is.
There is reason to believe that there is truth in both points of view.
The security testing mentioned, do you think they will stop just because it goes live?
Or will they have a constant, dedicated intrusion detection/prevention team?
Why would you even want to opt out? You'll have to explain that to me as it sounds like a really dumb idea.
Well tell that PM that new procedures are more time over all and more man power if you are getting done / ready for finale / RC QA testing just days before go live.
Oh that is cute, thinking that a PM with such ridiculous opinions can be reasoned with. Many people did try, but eventually it was only fixed when higher level management got fed up and fired the PMs in question.
But now that I work as a consultant, I find these kinds of PMs all over the place. Luckily now it is easier to just not work with these kinds of people, or at least keep racking up billable hours fixing the problems caused by their ridiculousness.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Before clicking on any health care related article in Forbes, you need to ask yourself "am I about to read something written by Avik Roy?" If so, just stop. He spews crap. Now, I have not actually clicked on your link yet, but I am about to. And we will see if my powers of prediction are at all accurate.
I hear ya there, man! We need
-Freedom from medical-induced bankruptcy.
-Freedom from high premiums.
-Freedom to start companies without worrying about medical insurance.
-Freedom to take a job at small companies that don't offer insurance.
I can't help but think of the movie Braveheart though with Mel Gibson (or was it Mel Brooks?) at the end yelling "freedom!" The movie was and is so bad that my wife and I giggled all the way through and burst out laughing when it got to that scene. Talk about schmaltzy! I can't believe that dreck won best picture.
And remember. The more you depend on other people, the more control other people have over your life. Soon, we will all be more dependent on each other.
FTFY. Government by the people, for the people, right?
I didn't catch the fish I ate at lunch, which was gotten commercially, but I didn't have to wonder if it was safe to eat, which the government inspectors deal with. And I took the metro, which the government runs. And when I walked home late at night in the dark I didn't have to worry about getting robbed or worse, because of the police being around. God, it really sucks to have to deal with other people, huh?
In Canada:
A married couple with no children pay, on average, $11,381 in government healthcare premiums.
Those premiums cover 70% of healthcare costs.
The other 30% of costs are paid out of pocket.
89% of the time, the time for an appointment is less than 90 days.
11%of the time, you have to wait more than 3 months.
For any doctor other than a GP, the average wait time is longer than 30 days.
Patients are not permitted to pay for faster service.
Patients are not permitted to pay for higher quality care.
Patients may pay for services not covered by the government program.
In the US, costs are similar, but slightly higher. Wait times are measured in hours, not weeks. If you're not satisfied with one doctor, you can get a second opinion from another doctor.
The US system is of course not perfect. It does have (had?) a lot of advantages over the Canadian system.
That's right and I want:
- Freedom from having to pay my mortgage ... [insert any expense]
- Freedom from making payments on my car
- Freedom from paying for my groceries (single payer groceries!)
- Freedom from paying
Just need to vote for other people to pay for it and I'll be all set.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Before you believe anything dcherryholmes says, be warned: he spews crap.
Hmm, ok so I tried your style of arguing and it doesn't work for me. I think I'll stick to arguing the merits of the issue instead of launching preemptive personal attacks.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
The government figures say a married couple with no children pay on average $11,381 in government healthcare premiums, and pay $3,414 for medication and other expenses.
Adding those two official numbers, that's $14,795 per year, or $1,232.94 per month for two people.
It wasn't an argument, it was an observation. Feel free to disregard it if his brand of propaganda scratches your itch.
A married couple with no children pay, on average, $11,381 in government healthcare premiums.
Wow, that's basically the same as the US. I didn't realize it was so high.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I don't think they necessarily feel the fear of being unable to repeal it in the future. I think they're only using it as the current scare tactic to get votes. If it gets entrenched then they'll get another topic to get the fan base worked up over.
These "freedoms" and more are available... but they come at a price.
For instance? No problem...
The county where I live offers an anus-puckering discount on poor families wanting to buy a home (imagine this - being offered a decent home in a neighborhood full of $250k homes for a mere $27k at 0% interest. No, that's not a typo.) Only thing is, the county gets to stop by and make sure you're still poor during the 5-year 'mortgage' period, else the rates and total price rises accordingly. Oh, and CPS gets to check in on your kids any time they want, among other governmental visits that would otherwise demand a warrant.
Groceries? No problem, present an appropriate sob story and proof that you lack income, and most states will lavish you with an EBT card. 'course, unless you get creative about how you dodge it, there's an approved list of foods you can and cannot buy.
Car payments? Well, most metro areas do subsidize free mass transit if you make less than a certain income level... but really - it's mass transit. That means you're stuck with living within walking distance of it, and no further.
How does this relate to healthcare? Well, there are folks already demanding that people be forced to wear health activity monitors if they want that subsidized health-care... but you're forced to buy the subsidized plan if you cannot otherwise afford it on your own, so guess what happens if you have the misfortune to be impoverished? Yup - the government now owns your health.
Long story short, the "freedom"s are there, but the dependencies and (IMHO) conditions you subject yourself to in order to receive them are, well... about to become rather dehumanizing.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Where do these numbers come from?
The US spends more on health care as a portion of GDP than pretty much any other industrialized country on the planet. Ponder that as you denigrate a public system and pump your fists for the US "model".
All I know is that I didn't go bankrupt even when faced with my wife's serious cancer and my own concurrent lay off.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
What website are you looking at? Specifically.... this does not correspond with anything that I've read for BC, Alberta, or Ontario.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
"The reason we pay so much for health care is because the recipient doesn't know and/or doesn't care how much it costs, namely because they don't pay for it. Likewise, they don't shop around."
Oh, when was that? 1981?
In actual fact, in the USA, average people are FAR more exposed personally to the extreme costs of medical care and yet the total spending and, of course, PRICES, are much higher in the USA than any other nation. As is the compensation of the managers of medical care institutions.
Why is that?
Why is the solution, as always, AMP UP THE PAIN! (and some how let the market fix it despite not fixing anything for 40 years). And why does this always seem to apply to the poorest?
Go ahead, repeal actual, Federalized socialized medicine (Medicare) first.
Unfortunately, Slashdot doesn't provide a " -1: Commenter is an idiot option", so I'll have to try to provide you with a clue. Brace yourself.
We are not discussing health insurance, and the ACA does not provide for it. The ACA is about health care coverage, and that is different.
Insurance is intended to protect against unforeseen or rare events, not expected costs. Auto insurance covers against collisions and theft, but it doesn't provide payouts for oil changes, tune-ups, tire rotation, etc. Homeowner's insurance will pay to repair or rebuild your home in the event of fire or disaster, but does not cover costs associated with maintaining the property or structure.
Actual heath insurance would cover serious injury or illness but would not cover regular doctor visits, routine check-ups, most medications and so forth. But that we don't have health insurance, we have a sorta-kinda-halfassed subsidy program for heath care we mistakenly refer to as insurance. And it is price opaque. In other words, you do not see the actual amount of the subsidy. You have no idea what the true cost of service is.
And that is the problem AlphaWolf was talking about. If it was obvious up front that you would be charged twelve dollars for a generic aspirin, no one would pay. If you knew that you were going to be billed 175 bucks for waiting an hour and than having a fifteen minute chat with a doctor, no one would go. Health care coverage hides cost and distorts the market, driving prices up.
Imagine that auto insurance worked the same way as so-called heath insurance. When you needed an oil change, you would take your car to an approved facility, hand over your insurance card, pay a co-pay and then get a paper saying 'paid by insurance'. With no dollar amount. An oil change might cost a hundred dollars. And why not? If you only pay the co-pay, what do you care if your insurance company gets bilked? It's not your money, after all.
Yup - the government now owns your activity
FTFY yes, they own your health in your example but that's less scary to most people than owning your activity (slavery)
To take some specific examples in the English-speaking world, in Australia, the local conservatives did manage to repeal it the first time around. The second time around, they didn't get back into government for thirteen years until they promised to keep it, and they've never seriously tried repealing it since despite long periods in power. In the UK, even that hero of the right, Margaret Thatcher, left the NHS alone. The overwhelming evidence is that once universal health care systems are introduced, they are enormously popular.
So, yeah, drag this one out into a political fight to the death. It's unlikely, but possible, you'll knock it off. But if your lot continues with this crap for too long once it's in place, you will consign yourself to electoral irrelevance; even the ridiculous malapportionment and gerrymandering that goes on in the US won't be enough to save them.
In the medium term, I won't be terribly sad at that; while sensible health care reform will ensure that millions of your fellow citizens have healthier, longer lives, it doesn't affect me directly. But a couple of your party's other insanities, particularly its delusions on climate science, do. And if you do manage to consign yourself to complete electoral irrelevance for a few terms, the United States will be able to act effectively on climate change.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
That's just too bad. Oh, a real bummer.
Government by the people, for the people, right?
No. No one forced you to eat that fish, take the metro, or walk home at night. But the individual mandate does attempt to force you to have a peculiar sort of health insurance. And willy nilly increasing our dependencies on each other doesn't work, if the other parties don't deliver or you can't afford to participate even with subsidies.
I'll take freedom from mortgage and foreclosure fraud.
And freedom from contaminated food.
Freedom from a few other things too.
98.2% of oddly precise numbers without sources can be disregarded as bullshit.
(that non-partisan analysis group dems love to cite) said (just last week) that Obamacare will bankrupt the country. Social Security and Medicare are indeed good examples where the Democrats lied about the costs, demographics, levels of regulation, etc as they jammed a new program through... then the program had such a massive displacing effect in the markets that it destroyed all alternatives, then the middle class got hooked on it (because the alternatives were destroyed) but then the costs ballooned (exactly as Republicans had predicted/feared) and the federal government is being destroyed by it. During Obama's 5 years in office, the national debt has gone from $10 Trillion to $17 Trillion and it will cross the $20 trillion line by the time he leaves office (Obama alone will have doubled the national debt). The national debt does NOT even include all the promised future Social Security and Medicare outlays... the REAL debt is aver $100 Trillion... there's not enough money on EARTH to repay that. This house of cards needs to be reigned-in QUICKLY or there will be a currency crisis and a global economic collapse followed by unheard-of misery that will make pre-WWII Weimar Germany look positively happy sometime within the lifetime of most Slashdotters.
All the blind faith of left-wing Obamabots cannot defy the laws of economics; this is NOT sustainable. The single most basic law of economics says that unsustainable spending will not be sustained.
Once everybody is hooked on Obamacare (NOT because it is wonderful, but because the alternatives will be intentionally destroyed by it) everybody will owe their very lives to federal government bureaucrats and when the money runs out those bureaucrats will decide who lives and who dies. This has long been the openly-stated goal of the progressive movement since the start of the 20th century and it's something Obama himself slipped-up and admitted in a campaign event last year (he said that older people were going to have to be told to go home and take pain pills instead of getting surgeries to fix the underlying problems).
Wow. You are so packed full of lies and propaganda it is just pathetic. Do you even know the difference between a lie and the truth?
Not using the American Health Care system much I see.
Not buying your own health care policy that you actually use either.
Your theoretical 70/30 ratio in the U.S. is not accurate because you don't know what services cost. Ever. Until you get the bill and the insurance company has decided what they will/will not cover.
I'm not permitted to pay for faster service either.
Wait times vary, and I'm thinking you are using the curse of averages to make your point seem to have some truthiness.
How would I know what's higher quality care? The American health care consumer has no way to know what constitutes higher quality care.
Nevermind the fact the U.S. health care takes the biggest chunk of GDP with a shrinking health care pool of consumers and returns a population less healthy than many Western nations. Just pretending that one away eh?
You must be too young to have 1st-hand experience in this bit of history.
First, Nixon was very far to the left in the Republican party (he implemented wage & price controls and created the EPA while hugging Communist China and trying to make nuclear arms deals with Russia that favored the Russians) but he got the support of the GOP base because [1] he had a history of fierce anti-communist action earlier in his career and [2] in each election cycle he cozied up to the social conservative base... not very hard to do given that BOTH parties used to be primarily Christian, with Democrats having somewhat higher penetration onto the Jewish communities. NOBODY in national politics back then would publicly embrace ANYTHING homo-, or drug-, or abortion- or athist-related.
Barry Goldwater was not a prophet, nor was he a conservative... the man was very Ron Paul in his views (i.e. a Libertarian) though not the same in his public persona. Barry had the strong support of a certain political block in his earlier races, and when they came back to him years later to beg him to run for president as a standard-bearer for conservatives within the Republican party he felt morally obliged to do it... which is why he ran that race (and his lack of desire to actually win was probably part of the problem with that campaign). The young conservatives at that time begged Barry to run because the establishment GOP was pushing the usual Rinos (not called that back then) like Mitt Romney's dad and the Rockefellers, none of whom were for smaller, constitutional government.
The modern GOP is FAR to the left of the GOP of 1980 (many modern Republicans have gone Libertarian on social issues like abortion, gay stuff, and half the current Republicans in the senate just voted to fund Obamacare...) you just think the GOP has moved right because the modern Democrats have moved so far left so fast that the gap between parties has grown very wide. Just 8 years ago, EVERY Democrat running for President was opposed to "gay marriage"... Democrat President Bill Clinton signed DOMA and "Don't Ask Don't Tell" military policies. During the 1980s Democrats used to scream and hollar and stomp about deficits and they repeatedly demanded Reagan negotiate with them on debt cieling limits... now they yell that the limits do not matter and they are printing money faster than anybody in history ever has...
Interesting, the only source for these "government figures" appears to be a whitepaper by the Fraser Institute...
It's a misleading number. It comes from this study by the Fraser Institute. Basically, they said "the government spends X% of it's income on health care, therefore we can take X% of each citizen's tax bill as the amount that they paid for health care". This is perfectly reasonable on its own, but the GP cherry-picked the number for a married couple with no kids because they have the highest tax bill. This makes Canadian health care costs seem higher than they truly are.
If you do an apples to apples comparison, the Canadians have a clear advantage.
Single adult: $3780 in Canada, $5884 in US
Family of four: $11320 in Canada, $16351 in US
Canadian numbers are from the Fraser Institute study, US numbers are from this study by KFF.
Republican fairy tales.
My wife has been through several surgeries as well. I have health insurance through my employer that I pay about 300 dollars every two weeks for. I usually, due to her medical condition, spend about 4500 dollars out of pocket every year. It's a lot of money but it's better than losing my wife. We went through several doctors before we found what was wrong and frankly, if I was stuck with the idiots we started with she'd be dead. It's nice to pick and choose doctors as I've had to fire a few. The hard cold fact of the matter is that it costs a lot of money to keep people alive that would have died 100 years ago. I don't know about Canada's system, I only know the one I've been on for my 53 years and I know it's expensive but it works. The new one being foisted on us is pretty bad and likely to cost as much or more. I remember looking at the bastardized setup they cam up with and thinking that they might as well just socialize health care entirely. What they did has all the problems of both systems with none of the benefits. They passed it and now we're finding out what's in it.
Quite right. The number one thing they never explain is why premiums are going up. I read a story about something like this once. I think it was called either Chicken Little or The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
70% / 30% is the Canada number. In the US, government pays about 46%. Of course that's about to change.
Can't choose faster service? In my city of 160,000 people, there are three hospitals and at least one of them has a billboard advertising their average ER wait time for the month. At clinic I go to I can normally get in the same day. If I can't, I can choose to go to the walk in clinic near where I work.
As I said, the US system certainly isn't perfect. Compared to waiting weeks for an appointment in Canada, the US system certainly has some advantages. Some Canadians I know come to the US to get better care. Some Americans go to Canada to but cheaper prescriptions. Each has strengths and weaknesses. The wise thing to do is to try to combine the best of both. For example, if Canadian clinics could compete for patients by either being "zero cost" by charging the government rate or trying to offer better, speedier care to attract patients willing to pay an extra $25, that might work well. As is, Canadian clinics have no incentive to do the best they can. They get paid the same whether their doctors are awesome or if they're drunk.
Charlie Brown: Where did you get those numbers Lucy?
Lucy: I made them up!
Dude I hardly said anything about the US system, much less pumped my fist. I just provided the numbers for the Canadian system, which was being presented as "free" and some kind of paradise.
The US spends a LOT on healthcare, and changes are needed. When you're making major changes to a system that important and that complex, it's wise to CAREFULLY consider different options. Almost any change that helps solve some problems will also create new problems. Anything that has an effect also has a side effect.
In general, cheaper = lower quality, but we need to cut costs. That means we need to be careful. One way to reduce costs without reducing quality is to allow Texas consumers to ditch a crappy Texas insurance company and get a much better company from Arkansas. Right now, that's illegal. You can only buy insurance from a few companies in your home state. What do you think would happen if Maryland residents were only allowed to buy TVs made in Maryland, if it were illegal to buy from Samsung, Sony, LG, or any other major manufacturer? The reason Samsung keeps making their TBs better and cheaper is to compete with LG. Why not let insurance companies compete, have them try to EARN your business?
I'm not sure if this is still true, but one horror story about hmo's is that they have special extra protection against malpractice and lawsuits that the ppo's don't have.
go in for a procedure and they cut off the wrong thing? if its an hmo, good luck suing them!
that, alone, was enough to drive me away from the 'cost savings' of the hmo plans.
again, this may have changed, but I doubt it.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
republicans have been in a 'war on women' and 'war on poor people' for a while, now.
guess what: a lot of the US population is in those 2 groups.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
you are incorrect. if anything, the R's are more religious then ever before. they are doubling-down, in fact, on their 'core values'.
very few people really respect those core values once they see the light of day.
the jig is up. people see the R's for what they are. rich guys who want to keep the current power structure and, in fact, make things even more polarized.
if you heard the phrase 'american taliban', which of the 2 parties do you think more closely fits this description?
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I personally know Tea Partiers that have stated they are perfectly willing to suicide bomb federal buildings if UHC was ever implemented in the USA. We're a third world people living in a first world nation...
"You have to pass the bill to know what's in it." - Nancy Pelosi
And this representative from California was re-elected. Huh. Well as Ron White says "You can't fix stupid."
If you wanted to fix the US Healthcare system by making care affordable for all and allowing people with pre-existing conditions to get insured, then it wouldn't take 2700 pages of other crap that's in the legislative package. What we didn't get was:
1) No direct influence over rising expenditures for Medical Care. You have a system which doesn't abide by market forces and hospital administrators get paid millions of dollars in salaries and benefits. When you're seriously ill, you don't usually have the time to shop around so whatever they charge you (or your insurance) is what's charged. Sure, there's negotiations and maximums that insurance companies negotiate but that drives further business through insurance companies, forcing you to deal with them.
2) There was no discussion on tort reform so thousands of ambulance chasers can still sue the doctors and hospitals when your scars comes out a little bit strange. A big component to care is the necessary malpractice insurance which can cost upwards of $200,000 in some high cost states. Add that to office staff, paying the Nurse, the building costs and the medical coder to bill the insurance companies correctly and you can see easily why it costs a lot to see a doctor over a routine sniffle.
3) The Drug companies were let largely intact. There are a few costs they'll have to put up with but they're still expected to rake in Billions in profits under the ACA. Ask yourself why that pill you're taking is $5 and why, if it was allowed, you could get it for $.25. Sure the drug industry will claim that "these are inferior" but really it's a smokescreen.
4) The Single Payer system died. Nobody wanted to go against the big Insurance Firms and their lobbyists so we love big business in this country, so why not throw a few billion dollars their way. Well, they do now have to spend more on direct costs for Insurance which is good but allowing interstate competition and other market driven forces into the process would have been much better. That's what the exchanges are supposed to do but here we have the US Government trying to create markets rather than creating incentives with appropriate regulatory oversight for markets to flourish. Oh wait, considering the Financial Collapse, the Regulatory Process failed, so DC can't be trusted with that.
To be honest, you could have taken this 2700 pages, cut out the BS, the Pork like the "Exchanges" which Deloitte is now merrily feeding upon it seems and done away with it and had legislation that was no more than 10 pages long. Starting next year you'll hear more pigs in DC all lining up because the Feds have just blessed one industry with unlimited monopoly powers and you have to pay what they want to charge you. You have no choice, so invest in big Pharma, Hostpital chains and big medical concerns because they'll be raking it in even more.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
The fact that they're worried about privacy is rich. These are the same shitbags that are continuing to let the NSA violate everyone's privacy.
Yeah, no one wants to depend on a constant service that will barely change in relation to the private offerings in the same regard. This doesn't refer to ACA (which is just a money grab for insurance companies), but to ACTUAL government provided services, which have a long history of dependability in almost every country in the world where people care about what their government does beside pour money into private coffers.
Next you'll want to privatize police and firemen, so only those who can afford the ever increasing costs will have basic safety measures for their families. It is obvious that basic logic and mathematics has failed you (and you likely blame public schools, rather than your own failure to accept your own share of responsibility to understand the ideas that facts rely upon, as most right wingers do), and you would much rather put your faith in for-profit companies with a long, well-established history of fucking people over and never being accountable for anything, than in a system that you actually have a chance to control.
tl:dr; Stop pretending like you're a victim. Man up, and take responsibility for yourself, and contribute to the society that has provided you with the tools to be able to complain about the government freely from your armchair without actually having to do anything.
You obviously don't watch TV or talk to many Republicans :) They have gotten even more fiscally liberal (as if they ever weren't), and there are laws in some states that literally don't allow non-Christians to run for public office. Every southern state is running deeply in the red financially, and in Tennessee it is literally illegal for a non-Christian to hold office. I had to leave for that exact reason...
iow, your response presented no counter to his point. why are you wasting our time typing in stuff?
You might want to rethink the 'older people are more republican' thing, I'm pretty sure it's just a myth based more on generational differences than anything else.
so you think in a city with multiple hospital in canada one cannot chose to go to the ER with less wait time? That's pretty uninformed of you... in Canada _all_ hospitals are "in network" ( a concept that was new to me when I moved to the US ) whereas in the US, you better verify with your insurance because going to a "non-prefered" hospital might cost you dearly...
There are quite a few other mistakes in your posts about this. You think you know what you are talking about, but you really don't, sorry. I lived in both countries and yes there are pros and cons but many of your points are basically just flat out wrong.
and fuck all you liberals...
The HMO itself has legal protection but not the doctors who did the damage. You might be limited to arbitration depending on the language in the HMO and contract with the provider but that's another story altogether. Malpractice by the doctor is malpractice regardless of who provides the treatment.
HMO's were created by the federal government in order to tame the costs of Medicare which was created shortly before. It gave power to determined covered treatments to secretaries with little medical training or experience based on a "best practices" rule which the ACA is implementing too. With this power to override doctors who are actually seeing the patients, the HMO's were also exempted from law suits based on what they allowed to be covered. So if your doc says we need to perform this expensive experimental procedure that has a 50% success rate to save your leg and the HMO said no, we aren't covering that, cut it off, you can't sue the HMO for not allowing the procedure that could potentially save the leg. But that is the entire purpose of the HMO or Health Maintenance Organization, to control the costs of medical care.
Now it does get dicey when something is accepted practice or best practice now but the HMO hasn't updated their criteria and refuses to allow the procedure. Then a suit can happen to force them to cover it but you will not make any windfall profits from it.
Lol.. That's a real funny lie I hear all the time. There is no war on women or poor people. Its a difference in approach about certain things.
Poor people should get a hand up not a hand out. It is more expensive to get a job for the poor right now then it is to stay on welfare and milk the public tit. Of course welfare is the reason why minimum wage is being paid at almost every job in larger cities with large concentrations of poor people. It is the ultimate business subsidy where they do not have to pay their employees a living wage because the government will step in and make up the difference.
The so called war on women is little more then not wanting to use public funds taken from you and me to provide for someone's condoms and abortions.
It makes a good sound bite, it even makes lesser intelligent people believe it. But it is a lie.
Apparently, the new rule of law at least according to President Obama is that if the president doesn't like the law, he can choose not to enforce it. There is no law that says the administration can waive the employer mandate, and yet the mandate is waived. Similarly, the law saying that people have to buy insurance, or the Feds or states have to set up an exchange, or that people get subsidies. Apparently that is all now waive-able. Or maybe more damaging to ACA, the next president could choose to enforce it to the max and remove all the waivers.
The last time this topic came up, I predicted that the security would be half-assed (per the FISMA norm). (It may be the private sector norm too, but most of my experience is with government auditors.)
This also ignores the fact that we Americans already pay, through taxes or increased insurance premiums, for the care of people who are too poor to see a doctor but end up in the emergency room when something bad happens like a heart attack. For *LESS* actual dollars, Canada covers everyone. The only way the US system makes sense is if you assume that everyone in power has a vested interest (either financially or ideologically) in making private health always seem like the best idea, even when it clearly isn't.
In New York State, BC&BS of WNY charges just over $14k for ind & $40k family premiums for the lowest offerings. The basic HMO plan w/ these price tags, when you read the fine print, have 30-60+% co-pays for almost anything (drugs to test & procedure services.)
I personally know many people who have "employer health insurance" w/ these plans who can get prompt medical attention, but cannot cover the co-pays and other "hidden" exclusions (pre-existing included in that hidden group.) These people also have mandatory pay-in from their paycheck of $100-250/wk) for this "plan."
To get "reasonably complete" healthcare, a family of 4 breaks $60k / yr + 10-30% copays.
Being a healthy 50yo, I asked about "severe emergency" or "critical only" (ignoring long ter disability for the moment) ala cart style insurance selection and they literally laughed on the phone. All or nothing.
I effectively "cheat", by getting a DBA in a biz name for $35 and paying the (turns out $63k) fee and declaring it an expense on my taxes. Since my little biz doesn't show a profit, every third year I start a new one (DBA anyway) to stop the IRS 3 yr "make money counter" barrier they have created. Thus my fellow Americans are helping me pay the premiums. Of course, I (figuatively) starved the 1st year to get ahead of the game, but it all works well now.
Everyone in the entire Healthcare loop has a game to rape you. One must play the game to afford healthcare or you CAN'T afford it at the individual or family level.
If you are uneducated in the game, you lose. If you do not have a pretty significant job, you lose. What groups fall into those buckets?
Most people.
https://securews.bcbswny.com/web/content/WNYmember/get-coverage/individual-family-plans/HMO299or299pus.html
The devil is in the details of what your buying. Worst avail plan, BCBSWNY WNY~$1,100 / month for individual.
https://securews.bcbswny.com/web/content/WNYmember/get-coverage/individual-family-plans/HMO299or299pus.html
Further libertarian? WTF in any of the current Republican partty is "libertarian".
Watch this Heartland Institute video
While some defects are inevitable in a system of this complexity, the vast majority of them would have been identified earlier had more scientific software testing methods been applied.
Recently, for example, the following defect made the news and was one of the most widely-shared articles on the New York Times web site. Here’s what the article, Computer Snag Limits Insurance Penalties on Smokers said:
"A computer glitch involving the new health care law may mean that some smokers won’t bear the full brunt of tobacco-user penalties that would have made their premiums much higher — at least, not for next year.
The Obama administration has quietly notified insurers that a computer system problem will limit penalties that the law says the companies may charge smokers, The Associated Press reported Tuesday. A fix will take at least a year."
Anyone who is tempted to say "the answer it to test the system completely," bear in mind that there were ~ 41 quadrillion total possible scenarios that could have been executed to test the system. That would take 31 million years to execute those tests at 100 tests per second.
What other industries have known for a long time is that if you structure your experiments thoughtfully, you can learn a lot more effectively than poorly structured experiments. In the Obamacare software testing example that had 41 quadrillion possible tests, it is possible to create just 90 well-structured tests to test the system surprisingly thoroughly. Those 90 pairwise tests would have identified the bug that will take more than a year to fix. For the two of you who have read this far, we posted a blog post on this last week at: http://hexawise.com/2013/09/avoidable_obamacare_software_bug/
WTF? My health care costs were zero until I got married.
The war on the poor is obvious from the recent attack on food stamps. Your glib dismissal of those in need is a simple demonstration of the sort of mean spirit that pervades the Republicans these days. Regarding the war on women, look here, which gives a better list than I can amass on short notice.
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company -- Mark Twain
Groceries? No problem, present an appropriate sob story and proof that you lack income, and most states will lavish you with an EBT card. 'course, unless you get creative about how you dodge it, there's an approved list of foods you can and cannot buy.
There is no list of approved foods for EBT. If it's considered a food by any stretch of the imagination, you can buy it with EBT. I've personally used it to buy soda, candy, cookies, coffee, tea, and water. I also personally wish it didn't cover sugary foods, since I've been trying to kick the habit since watching "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" on YouTube some years ago and having since noticed that every weight gain correlates with a large intake of sugar, with large intakes of non-sugar foods (even high-fat foods) having virtually no effect. However, it's probably just as well that the government hasn't created an approved foods list, since most health agencies are still convinced that dietary fat is the evil, and so we'd be forced to buy foods with low fat, and so just about the only thing we'd be allowed to buy would be foods with all the fat removed and sugar added so that they still taste good. Better to have no rules than to have the wrong rules.
I also think they should allow people to use the money to buy cooking supplies. I happened to have a $200 stand mixer from before I got the EBT card which allows me to eat a steady diet of home-made pizzas which not only taste better than frozen pizza, but they cost less than $1 each. Since the EBT balance rolls over from month to month, I've accumulated about $400 of un-spent money on the card over the two years I've had it thanks to that mixer. However, most poor people probably don't have such luxuries and so are less able to prepare their own foods from scratch (it takes a lot of time if you don't have a lot of equipment, and poor people often have to work and stuff) but they could never the less eat healthier and save the government some money if they could just purchase some food processing equipment. At the very least, some sort of lending program would be a good idea, where you return the equipment when you no longer receive the benefits, perhaps just paying rent on the equipment from the balance of your EBT card. (Indeed, that may be necessary to keep some people from purchasing equipment and just selling it, but then they probably already do that with food anyway.)
Of course, another problem with EBT is that it's easy to spend more money than you actually need to. I noticed my balance start going down when a Dollar General store opened a few blocks away. I also developed a bad habit of eating more sugary foods since that's nearly the only kind of food they sell there. They don't even have yeast, a necessary ingredient in pizza dough, and there are no fresh fruits or vegetables or meat. I've since made it a point not to shop there since not only is the store not good for my health, but it isn't good for the government's budget. ...but of course, I'm sure there are poor people without easy access to someone else's car and so don't have the luxury of shopping at wal-mart. I pity those people.
You seem to misunderstand my statement. I refer to the few who are vilified by the GOP establishment, not the handful of people within the party who have been elected against the establishment's will.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
I don't know about you, but I certainly wouldn't lump them into either party. For all their stupid, partisan tricks, neither party is the "American Taliban".
In fact, I tend to hear it in reference to John Walker Lindh. Even the Wikipedia search for "American Taliban" links directly to him.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!