Yakkstr

Obamacare Is Not The Problem

 

When I comment on posts about Obamacare, I suppose I should say something more on topic [it is just hard for me to resist slamming the Democrat's most stupid choice for president since Jimmy (the teeth) Carter -- Obama].

The reason fixing healthcare is so hard is because INSURANCE is the problem, not Obamacare or lack of Obamacare. Having insurance to fix a car wreck or replace a stolen car, or replace your home when it burns or gets flooded, is about fixing THINGS not humans. Fixing or replacing THINGS is a finite proposition and it does not involve loss of life or anything that important. Car or home insurance makes perfect sense and the THINGS being replaced can be replaced at a pretty reasonable price.

However, health insurance is a losing proposition. It could cost millions of dollars to fix a person, which is the very reason we hear talk of "death panels". I have personally know people who probably ran up over $100,000 in costs and then died anyway.

This is a modern problem that most of us did not have to deal with 50 years ago because the technology, the advances in healthcare were simply not available. (Please do not get hung up on the exact number of years ago. You know what I mean.) Great grandma just got old, coughed a lot, and died with her dozen children and their familys around her and caring for her. Nowadays, granny goes to a nursing home and eventually ends up at the hospital with tubes and machines hooked up to her, struggling to keep her alive another day or two, or maybe a month while the doctor and hospital bills pile up for the poor survivors, those one or two children who have to reconcile her debt.

Obamacare will not solve this problem no more than insurance solved the problem. Insurance just gave doctors and hospitals a blank check to do "whatever it takes" to keep granny alive. (BTW, grandpa probably quickly of lung cancer, kidney failure, a heart attack, or a stroke from all that hard work and hard living, so we will not worry about him here.)

Obamacare is just going to increase the size of the blank check ... or will it? When you think Obamacare (a government-run healthcare system) out to its logical conclusion, you see that covering just anyone will cost a whole hell of a lot of money. Ask Canada or England. Oh, everyone might get to see a doctor for the simple things, what we now do with a $25 copay and insurance. Even that will get more difficult because EVERYONE will be able to take their kid in if they sniffle or have a runny nose. The doctor's waiting room will soon look like a trip to the DMV or a trip to Walmart. We can only hope that every doctor's receptionist speaks Spanish or it WILL take all day.

And why do you think rich people from Canada or many other places come here to get their REAL healthcare? Because they can or because they have to? What happens when our healthcare here is no better than theirs? You can bet they our healthcare system is going to sink to the lowest common denominator.

Pretty soon, private hospitals will not be able to contend with all the government red tape. Sooner than you might think, we will only have government-run regional hospitals (think VA hospital). All doctors will have to work for the government because there will be no alternative, and there WILL be death panels.

Oh, you can call them whatever you want, but we all know that sooner or later healthcare will have to be rationed. Money will no longer decide who gets care and who does not. Let me clarify. How much money we have will no longer matter. It will be like trying to trade gold for food in the end times. Buy gold if you like, but you cannot eat it. Someone or a group of people will have to decide how much we (The People) are willing to pay to keep someone elses granny alive for that extra week or month or year.

Like it or not, a capitalistic system is the only way to maintain a healthy healthcare system. It is not the perfect solution, but it is the only solution. A government-run healthcare system will just be another government-run fiasco that is called a healthcare system. Some will probably be going to places like Mexico just to get immediate care even if it stinks.

I think we all know, deep down, that Obamacare is a sham and a bad thing. It is just that liberal, Democrats, and Blacks would rather drink poison than admit that Obama is a jackass who does not know his ass from a hole in the ground. Blacks especially would follow Obama and march over the side of a cliff just because he is supposedly Black. I know this sounds racist, but not nearly as racist as following someone simply because they are your race -- that is racist.

Obamacare is not likely to be repealed, but it is likely to be strangled until what little life it has runs out of it. That is, we can hope the Republicans have the intestinal fortitude to crush this pile of crap before it gets any further. We can also hope that Blacks will wake up and start thinking about our country instead of some jackass who is expoiting a drop or two of Black blood.

If it was up to me, the Republicans would read the Obamacare bill on the House floor in addition to the Constitution. If we are not willing to sit and listen to this 2000 plus page pile of crap, why should it be allowed to continue? For that matter, every bill they pass should have to be read on C-SPAN before they vote on it.


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sean_renaud said over 1 year ago ...

Canada, France and England pay less tax money than we currently do. So everything you've said is based on bullshit. The rest of your entire argument is built on a silly notion like that rich Canadians fly down here. That's not exactly true. More like freak Canaidans with freak problem come down here because a nation of 300 million has more facilities than one of 30 million. . .oh and Canada's health care system pays for them come here when necessary plane ticket and all.

Fine read it on the floor. Not like you'd understand it anyway. May as well read technical specs of an atomic carrier.

reckoner said over 1 year ago ...

I don't have time to read your whole post, but I agree with your first 3 paragraphs. Healthcare is a fundamentally different type of problem. I have to point out that they tried to address this with end of life counseling and the right went bananas with their "death panel" talk. The truth is, as you say, a lot of people get really expensive care then die anyway. Not only they, but often times that expensive care is painful, and requires them to live in the hospital, where they eventually die. People that opt out of this, and instead spend their final days at home often have a more fulfilling and meaningful end of life. Too bad political rhetoric got in the way of beginning to talk about this problem.

This is true of both sides. When the other side attempts to deal with a hard problem we see a chance to score political points. I'm certainly guilty of doing this from time to time, and we have to stop doing this on both sides and try to deal with these hard problems. We won't agree sometimes about the right way to solve it, but if we let go of the political theatre I think we can get some solutions.

alienated said over 1 year ago ...
Sean, do you honestly think Obamacare is going to improve the healthcare system in America? 
sean_renaud said over 1 year ago ...

A little. Not nearly as much as it should have. Silly centrist didn't fight for single payer and without single payer it kinda falls to shit. But at least we got the minor victory of insurance companies aren't for profit death panels and kids barely on their feet (and likely hopefully in school) can stay on their parents health insurance. But no it's far from anything genuinely constructive. The Right was damned efficient in doing their jobs as Conservatives and conserving the status quo.

reckoner said over 1 year ago ...

insurance companies can no longer deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions. They now have to spend something like 80% of the money they take from you on healthcare for you, insurance companies can no longer kick you out once you get sick, etc, etc

These are all improvements.

d6fer said over 1 year ago ...

reck....I really don't understand why you wouldn't be for HSA accounts....it takes the insurance company partly out of the equation.

They really are great....I can build my account up with tax free dollars....every penny of it is mine....for my healthcare....that is the epitome of efficiency....I don't have to send my buck to Washington, for it to come back to me in the form of a nickel's worth of coverage.

sean_renaud said over 1 year ago ...

But that's not what happening D6. What's happening is you send a nickel to Washington and get hundreds of thousands back or are you not catching how much it costs to keep you alive?

d6fer said over 1 year ago ...

hmmmmm......all I know is I still have to pay an enormous amount of money if I want to go to the doctor or hospital.....somehow I find it hard to believe that all of the tax money that is being collected is coming back to little ol' me!

reckoner said over 1 year ago ...

I'm not opposed to HSAs, but I don't think they solve the problems we have in our healthcare system.

alienated said over 1 year ago ...
The day will come when you long for insurance companies instead of government-run healthcare.
Mark my words.
d6fer said over 1 year ago ...

boy....deja vous! Are we having the same conversation on 2 or 3 different posts?

  1. HSAs (with high deductible insurance)

  2. Fix Illegal Immigration (as much as possible)

  3. Tort reform

  4. Allow cross state line competition

All of this will result in something much better than we have had, and much better than Obamacare......then if it needs tweaking...do it.

reckoner said over 1 year ago ...

your proposal doesn't stop the cause of the majority of bankruptcies in this country, health care costs. It doesn't provide coverage for the millions that dont' have it. IT doesn't stop insurance companies from denying you for a pre-existing condition. It doesn't stop them from kicking you off once you get sick.

sean_renaud said over 1 year ago ...

Tort reform wouldn't do much, cross state line competition is BIG GOVERNMENT solution not small government.

d6fer said over 1 year ago ...

It's a start.....could you add to it and come up with something you could get behind?

reckoner said over 1 year ago ...

healthcare is one of the few things I don't think markets are good at. I think the best approach is medicare for all.

The profit motive is great at getting people to figure out how to make more money. The easiest way to do that as an insurance company is to deny people care that have already paid you money. As a doctor it's to do a lot of tests and procedures that likely aren't going to find anything, etc, etc. And the big difference is that the customer is not in a good position to "shop around" as you like to say.

"doc, I've got this lump on my neck what should I do."

"Well, first we need to do full blood work, then do a transectomy of the lower fibula, then get an MRI of the haploid region at the scanning center. It could be lupus order two or multiple lobotomania in which case we'll try the xibrom drops."

"doc, how much does that cost"

"well, here's 30 pages of line items, the total is $4k"

"man, I really want to check out this lump, but let me think about it. Maybe I'll come back next year when the new model is out"

Let's be really honest, as consumers we aren't even very good at far less important things. My A/C broke two summers ago. I don't know anything about them and it was 100 degrees so I went with the only place that could come out that day. He replaced a fuse and left. It blew again the next day. He came back out and put it another. Blew again. He came back and told me I needed a new A/C. I didn't think so, so I called another two places and had them come out. To come out it cost me about $100 each. One of them tried to sell me a new A/C too, the other said that mine should last a few more years at least. I went with them and they said the first guy was putting the wrong fuses, they replaced it with the right one and did some other maintenance and it worked fine for another year, then it blew out again and I got a new one.

I think I got really lucky with that one guy that didn't try to sell me a new unit. Truly lucky, there are over 100 A/C shops close to me. It was probably much more likely that if I had picked a different place they would have tried to sell me a new unit too.

How exactly am I supposed to figure out if an A/C tech is good or not? One way is to pay to have a few come out, but that's expensive, and still could result in bad luck. A lot of the libertarian rhetoric is based on the idea that we can accurately judge the value of what is being sold to us, but the truth is that we really can't a lot of times, and that's with the unimportant stuf like an A/C.

Imagine if instead it was your health on the line, the emotions involved in that alone make it really hard to evaluated options. Let alone the fact that time is often very important.

In short I truly doubt that markets lead to optimal solutions in healthcare.

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