"Affordable" health care advocates explain this please.

stockingfull wrote:Jeff, you want to blame Ted Kennedy for the 1971 HMO legislation because he introduced the bill (did he?), instead of Nixon, who agreed to sign it. But, when it comes to Gramm-Leach-Bliley in 1999, it's Bill Clinton's fault for "happily" signing it, rather than Phil Gramm (R-Tex), Jim Leach (R-Iowa) and Thomas Bliley (R-Va), for creating it?

You can't have it both ways, my good man.

Who's the Tilt-a-whirl again?

jpete wrote:Democrats are all puppies and bunnies and sit at the right hand of Obama and all Republicans are serial killer pedophile racists.

Devil505 wrote:

jpete wrote:Democrats are all puppies and bunnies and sit at the right hand of Obama and all Republicans are serial killer pedophile racists.

Well...I'm glad to see you finally admit the truth!!

stockingfull wrote:Mike, that's one of the reasons why a public-private combined system can have benefits. Sure, the pvt insurers are worried about the big gov't buyer "crowding them out" initially -- and they should be, they've been abusing the buying power they've had for the last 15-20 yrs and have gotten quite fat in the process. Real competition would have fixed that but there hasn't been any; the insurers have covered each other and the pharma biz quite well, thank you very much.

But the pvt boys will be there to offer a choice in the future, in case any of the terrible "big brother" scenarios you fret about come to pass. And you'll be able to migrate relatively easily from one plan to another.

But private insurers have become experts at delay and denial too. So it's not like there's some "ideal system" out there now that we'll be taking a hammer to.

tvb wrote:The only folks paying the medical vendors full rate these days are the uninsured - those who are most likely to be able to least afford it.

The only way you are ever going to see a true free market approach is to eliminate all private insurance leaving each person to negotiate their own rates and favors and that not going to happen.

stockingfull wrote:Mike, I'm pretty sure the private sector will have the right to compete.

What they will no longer have is the control of the market and pricing that they now enjoy, because they'll be competing with the "public option" offered by the gov't.

We'll all get to see which works out to be the better deal.

stockingfull wrote:Yeah, bill, remember when it came out that one of the tobacco co's had been consulting with the Czechs or some other former iron curtain gov't on how much they'd save in retirement stipends if they didn't discourage smoking?

And you'd have to look a very long time in the tobacco industry to find a Democrat. So it sure looks like the old "shorter lives save money" thesis is being dusted off in the GOP, at least in Mike's corner of it.

U.S. policymakers are hoping to find ways to rein in soaring healthcare costs, and researchers said end-of-life care merits a close look.

The one in 20 Medicare patients who die each year use up almost one-third of expenditures by Medicare, the government health insurance program for the elderly and disabled.

One third of expenses in the last year of life are spent in the final month, according to the report, with aggressive treatments in the final month accounting for 80 percent of those costs.