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In These Eight Midterms Races, Health and Medicine Are Front and Center (statnews.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: In Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah, voters will directly decide whether their states should expand their Medicaid programs. In Wisconsin, they could elect a candidate for governor who has pledged to sharply curtail drug prices. And across the country, Democratic congressional candidates are running on platforms highlighting their support for protecting insurance coverage for those with pre-existing conditions and lowering drug prices. Health care is on the ballot across the country, with issues ranging from medical marijuana to abortion rights to insurance coverage dominating the conversation.
Truth alert libs call the censor bots
When the economy is doing well, you attack the incumbent party on another issue. Unfortunately for the Democrats, they don't seem to have a coherent message or platform beyond "We're not Republicans."
The Republicans pulled this off in grand form in the mid-90's with the so-called "Contract With America." You say exactly what you are going to do, say how you are going to do, and why. This is kind of how the parliamentary system works. I'm somewhat shocked that nobody was able to repeat this. It seems politicians have gotten "slipperier" in recent times. Don't come out with any kind of platform or policy goals beyond vague "make health care affordable," or "bring back jobs!"
As dumb as "build a wall" is, it's at least a clearly defined policy position. What is the Democrat's policy position on immigration? Maintain DACA? DACA was a band-aid, not a fix.
Do any of these candidate propose anything that makes sense like expanding the market supply by building medical schools or rolling back some of the regulations that do nothing but block lower cost solutions? Or will they just continue with the tried and true "we'll regulate cost and then be surprised when the market doesn't comply with our fondly held wishes."
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
What is this? CNN?
with help of the Blue Dogs. The law was supposed to have a Public Option to put pressure on the insurance companies. It didn't. Meanwhile the law made phony plans with no coverage illegal. So people who were paying $50+/mo for basically nothing suddenly had to have insurance for pay the fine.
The GOP plays to win. They don't care what the outcome is for America. They just want to win. The means when Obama compromised he was being tricked. He's smart. He knew this. But people where dying, and he did the best he could. I'm not so naive to think I could have done better. Maybe Bernie could have if we'd voted for him instead of that Orange jerk. We may never know.
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sure, tackle the issues one at a time.... starting with cost. The lower your cost the more people will be able to have it.
stop tying health insurance to EMPLOYMENT. This is a SCAM. No other insurance on the planet works this way. If I hate my job, I dont have to worry about driving without insurance, or my house catching on fire and not being covered, as a result of this. With healthcare I may have to stick with a completely shitty place to work merely because I am currently using benefits (kids physical therapy or something similar) where changing jobs threatens this. This has existed since Nixon and its a tool that employers can use to stagnate wages and underpay employees. Employers are not even required to subsidize. They literally can charge the employee the full cost of coverage. So if employers want to continue to subsidize they can come up with a way that employers can direct deposit an amount directly to the premium.
limit the costs of procedures. Constantly you get an EOB that says medical billed some ridiculous price and that the insurance lowered it to some lower value. This value is generally based on reasonable acceptable amounts. A 8 min office visit does not need to cost $186, hell it shouln't even cost $45. Make the requirement that the facility or practice most present the same charge to uninsured as those with insurance. There are plenty of plans that suck that have $40 copays for an office visit. If you read your EOB you will see that the charges got reduced down to $48, meaning they only paid $8 anyway. By forcing the providers to charge everyone $48, even the uninsured are not paying much more than those with the shittiest insurances. These $4000 procedure discounted to $1500 come back in 'income losses' and claimed against their taxes.
limit the costs of malpractice and malpractice insurances - they constantly claim that those $4000 MRI bills (that are only $150 in europe) are padded with malpractice insurance and malpractice payouts and these crazy prices are to recover those expenses. Make class actions (the type where the class gets $50 while the lawfirm gets hundreds of millions) banned. Each malpractice should have its own case with its own determination of Tort and actual damages.
Require all medical fields to meet the requirements of 503(c) non-profit status. They must re-invest a percentage of their profits back into their mission statements. Allowing hospitals and medical facility to be for-profit is unethical. 503(c) can turn a profit, they just are limited in how much profit they can turn by making them re-invest in whatever their mission is such as new medical equipment or newer technologies and research.
Solve the cost issues FIRST... once these are stable, THEN start going over what services should or should not get serviced. Because with a stable and affordable cost structure in place. Does this earn me the right to complain?
I disagree. If lowering costs of both premiums and healthcost is successful, then you get a lot less push-back from the population. Who in their right mind would argue that. Once that gets stabilized, people will generally not make waves about changes if the net result doesnt affect their bottom line. You want to cover Lasik and found a way to do it without increasing my costs or premiums? knock yourself out. You can be a lot more effective at fixing things if you start from a strong economic position.
It wasnt until they drafted a nearly 1000 page bill and said 'you have to vote for it before we even let you read it' that really pissed people off. Nothing screams shady bullshit ripe with fraud and abuses than telling someone to vote for something they've never seen. "Trust us, we are from the government, we are here to help." Scariest words ever.
Mental health care in an outpatient setting is a lot cheaper than having people go in and out of jail because they either (a) can't deal with life well or (b) have an addiction issue.
And exactly what has the GOP done to improve healthcare in thie US?
How is your medical care the goverment's responsibility?
Noone said lower. If youre already accepting $48 from the insurance companies, then always bill $48 not $158 regardless. You might be surprised to learn the doctors are currently prohibited, via contract, from actually doing this right now. The insurance companies are the issue in the case of inflating non covered pricing. It helps the insurance company look like they are doing more than just payjng 20% of your bill. Do away will all of this fake numbers-game bullshit. Allow Doctors to offer pricing comparible to insurance allowed amounts. Prohibit doctors from listing extraneous âretailâ(TM) pricing in order to game taxes or gouge uninsured the same way they prohibit gouging gas prices or utility prices. This is the easiest part of the whole thing to solve. We already do this sort of thing for many other types of products.
What is this? It's "stuff that matters"
Many Americans are of the opinion that proper healthcare isn't something people should have to go bankrupt over. Only one party has even attempted to approach this issue in the last 2 decades that a majority of Americans very much care about. The other party simply wants to blindly move forward in a system that is clearly broken.
And by broken I mean spending twice or more per capita than any other first world country spends on its socialized medicine.
Sure what the Democrats have done so far is middling at best but it's still far better than business as usual for a failing system.
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when the phony baloney plans went away the kitchen sink approach was there to shore up profits from the insurance companies being forced to cover everyone, even the really sick.
See, insurance is wildly profitable when you don't have to insure high risk customers. And with modern big data you know exactly who's high risk. Plus with all that sweet, sweet data you can always find some "pre existing" condition (my personal fav is skin cancer. Ever had acne medication? Congrats, you've had treatment for cancerous skin lesions, no more cancer meds for you, pre-existing).
The actual solution is to expand the risk pool to the largest possible: everyone. In otherwords, medicare for all. But we've had our heads stuffed full of insurance industry propaganda. They spent billions making sure you think the way you do because if you ever figure out the truth they and their blood sucking parasitic business model are through. They're fighting for their lives, so they're gonna be real nasty about it.
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