Ok. GOP what is your solution to the healthcare crisis in the US? Do nothing?

Under virtually all medically-underwritten policies, a small percentage accounts for the preponderance of losses within the risk pool. Ask any actuary.

If the highest-cost demographic, the elderly, were suddenly consigned to the profiteering sector, the insurance cartel's rates would skyrocket and the system would collapse. The American taxpayer is currently subsidizing everyone covered by an employer's group policy - to the tune of $250 billion annually - and adding the elderly to that burden would be economically unsustainable.

 

That's just the typical bilgetwaddle of those alienated from Americans who have twice elected their President.

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research the Bush recession began in December 2007 - a significant contributing factor in Americans' refusing to continue with another GOP administration.

 

Of course. In the case of medical care, the elderly make up a far higher proportion of health care procedures and costs than their proportionate percentage of the population. I think one of sources I cited reported that 80% of health care costs go to folks in the last month of their lives.

Exactly. The ineffective private sector system would collapse. Medicare is much more cost effective at providing health care benefits. We should apply those savings to the system as a whole, not just those 65 and holder.

 

RW revisionist history. Let's remember just how great things were when Obama took office, shall we?


January 2009

Job loss: Worst in 34 years
Employers slashed 598,000 more jobs in January [2009] as unemployment rate climbed to 7.6%.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Employers slashed another 598,000 jobs off of U.S. payrolls in January, taking the unemployment rate up to 7.6%, according to the latest government reading on the nation's battered labor market.

The latest job loss is the worst since December 1974, and brings job losses to 1.8 million in just the last three months, or half of the 3.6 million jobs that have been lost since the beginning of 2008.

http://money.cnn.com/2009/02/06/news/economy/jobs_january/index.htm

Market players were also disappointed by reports that U.S. home prices fell 8.7% year-over-year in November, U.S. housing starts fell 15.5% in December, and weekly initial jobless claims rose 62,000 to 589,000.
http://www.businessweek.com/investor/content/jan2009/pi20090122_192905.htm

On Wednesday, the 30-stock Dow Jones industrial average finished with a loss of 248.42 points, or 2.94%, to 8,200[/B].

http://www.businessweek.com/investor/content/jan2009/pi20090114_103250.htm

598,000 Jobs Shed In Brutal January
Unemployment Hits 7.6% as Downturn Picks Up Steam

The need for progress on those fronts seemed more important than ever yesterday, as the Labor Department announced that conditions worsened more than expected last month. The nation's employers shed 598,000 jobs, the most since 1974, driving the unemployment rate to 7.6 percent from 7.2 percent. If the jobless rate keeps rising at the pace it has for the past two months, it will hit double digits in summer and reach its highest rate since the Great Depression by the fall.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/06/AR2009020601156.html

GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT: FOURTH QUARTER 2008 (PRELIMINARY)
[Real gross domestic product -- the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States -- decreased at an annual rate of 6.2 [later revised to 9.2] percent in the fourth quarter of 2008, (that is, from the third quarter to the fourth quarter), according to preliminary estimates released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/national/gdp/2009/pdf/gdp408p.pdf

Continued Unemployment Claims at Record High
In the week ending Jan. 24, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 588,000, an increase of 3,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 585,000.

http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/01/continued-unemployment-claims-at-record.html


Thank God those days are behind us.

 

Disagree with your opinion for reasons already stated.

I contended no such thing. I don't know if it's more cost efficient than our current system or not. The only way for you to prove such an assertion would be to compare the total amount of healthcare transactions covered by Medicare to the total number of transactions not covered by Medicare, relative to their total share of healthcare costs to see which is more efficient. You have yet to do that.

Disagree with your opinion for reasons already stated.

Disagree with your opinion. See above..

Post 250.

 

So you're not contending that Medicare is not more cost effective. Great.

So what were you contending when you wrote " ... a free market approach would be more cost effective"?

False. I've provided data and facts supporting the conclusion that at least 38% of medical procedures are applied to seniors. You've provided nothing to rebut it.

I see. Your one solitary cite to a "yahoo.com" article about Obamacare is "plenty of facts and data" proving your claim that "a free market approach would be more cost effective"; while my post with multiple citations to multiple sources establishing each fact I used supporting my argument is "speculation".

What a joke.

 

The voluntary "will nots" greatly outnumber the involuntary cannots."

 

Good point. We outta just let everyone over 65 who can't pay their own health care die. Same for the younger moochers than can't pay for health care.

That would solve a big part of our health care cost problem.

 

The entire post, most of which I didnt copy into this post, is based on shockingly poor transitive logic. For purposes of clarity, I have copied just these three statements to show how they seemingly contradict themself.

If 70% of healthcare spending is on the elderly, and total healthcare spending is 2.1 trillion, then overall spending on the elderly should be somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.5 trillion. If Medicare spending is only 373.6 billion, there is an obvious disconnect on whom is paying what for elderly healthcare. While I realize that the elderly have copays, prescription costs etc, and even some supplemental insurance that pays for the 20% that Medicare doesnt cover, but even taking that into account, something doesnt add up between these disparate statistics. If one were to take just those numbers and draw conclusions, one would conclude that therefore Medicare only covers 25% of the elderlys overall healthcare cost ( 383 billion divided by 1.5 trillion), and that clearly is NOT true.Which illustrates perfectly while you cant draw conclusions based on hand picked statistics compiled by different sources using differing methods. You only compound the inaccuracy further then by throwing in your "guess" that the proportion of hospital stays is equivalent to the proportion of total healthcare costs.

 

Rather than nationalizing RomneyCare as is happening, a gradual lowering of the Medicare eligibility age would have been the least disruptive approach to achieving universal coverage at lower cost. The $250 billion annual tax break subsidy to employers could be phased out and that revenue divided between Medicare funding and deficit reduction.

Eliminating the parasitic, special-interest middle man would be a formidable undertaking that would result in unemployment and would best be done gently.

 

In the USA it is a private health care industry...always has been. Government creates programs like Medicare and Medicaid in which they contract with the private health industry. And now Obamacare will force additional costs on the private health care industry as well as contract with private health care. Even if health care is run by government, it still must be profitable...because nothing is for free! And the reason they must earn profits is to have money to invest in research and technology and growth, etc. The goal of most health care professionals is to provide great care...

 

When are you going to share with us what the net profit margin was for the $2.5 trillion in sales?

You don't seem to understand that both insurance companies and medical facilities are in steep competition with each other. There is no profit or money conspiracy in medical care. All work performed for government programs is done with very deep reductions in payments.

An insurance company is not a death panel?? When you buy insurance you know exactly what you are paying for. You can buy more or less insurance based on how much you need or what you wish to pay. If you have insurance that does not cover kidney transplants, and you need one, then don't blame your insurance company.

You also don't understand the definition of 'crime' as it relates to public laws...

 

No, not within the current economic climate. The current economic condition prevents most people from being capable of providing the minimum standard care for themselves and their families. This is why we see continuous rises in the roles of public services. It's not because people won't, it's because people can't.

 

That doesn't mean it should be.

. So, it's not really a private health care industry then, is it?

Obamacare is a train wreck. You won't ever see me argue in support of Obamacare or really any federally controlled industry. Like education, I feel that health care should be publicly provided and funded and controlled at the state level.

No, it doesn't HAVE to be profitable in the sense that more dollars come out of the system than put into it. The value added benefit to a healthy society is reaped in higher productivity, less degenerative diseases, R&D that seeks to cure and prevent disease rather than profiting off of long term treatment, etc.

I support free markets in most industries. It just doesn't make sense in health care.

 

Health care is not a political party issue?

Private health care will cost Americans $2.5 trillion per year, while public health care for all Americans will cost $3 trillion per year. Who is going to pay the additional $500 billion? Whether it's 30 or 50 million uninsured, if they are given health care...who pays for this? In your silly example of people going bankrupt if they have an illness or car accident, the only way to avoid this is to have others pay the costs of that illness or car accident. What this amounts to is a redistribution of wealth, for a government program, in which 30-50 million uninsured will be subsidized by others. More and more government costs yet more and more Americans are paying zero federal income taxes...

 

We're a bankrupt nation...$16+ trillion in debt with $1 trillion deficits and most Americans refuse to pay higher taxes and medical care for ALL Americans simply is not manageable by government. Americans are spending $2.5 trillion per year on health care and 'supposedly' this does not include those 30-50 million Americans without health care. We already have Medicare and Medicaid which could have been expanded for others so creating Obamacare IMO will create even more unnecessary costs. And even with Obamacare, tens of millions of Americans still will not have health care...

 

That is a good point that I had reflected on a bit. Same point goes to the claim that 80% of the costs are in the last month. If you assume that Medicare picks up the bulk of the medical costs for the elderly and those in their last month of life, which would to me seem like a logical assumption, then Medicare expenditures would have to be a much higher portion of the overall overall health care costs than 18%.

I suspect, and what I initially thought they meant when I was researching the issue and came across the blurb, is that they are talking about the percentage of health care expenditures the average person incurs in life. In other words, the average person spends 70% of his or her total health care costs when they are elderly, and 80% of that on the last month of life. That would be congruent with the theme of the article (discussing how such a large portion of health care is expended in the last few days or weeks of life) and would make the data congruent with other data I've presented and read showing that a disproportionately high percentage of health care costs are spent on the elderly.

I acknowledged that I was extrapolating the relative portion of inpatient hospital stays to overall health care procedures. Dr. Righteousness raised the same point. I did it because so far, the only data I've been able to find on the relative amount of medical procedures done on seniors versus the rest of the population is what I presented. However, IMO this is a logical extrapolation and it would be reasonable to expect that the total amount of medical procedures on seniors compared to the rest of the population would be similar to the proportion of inpatient visits. I don't think any informed person would dispute that a disproportionately higher portion of overall health care procedures are done on seniors compared to other age groups.

I'd be interested in any data that shows a substantially different percentage, but so far, no one has presented anything, or even made a good argument as to why this would be a unreasonable extrapolation, for that matter.

If you have any data that sheds light on the issue, I'd like to see it. It is more difficult than I would have expected to find data on the proportional amount of medical procedures that go to seniors versus the rest of the population. I did find this, however:

Persons age 65 and older had more hospital stays than any other age group in 2003. While the elderly comprised about 12 percent of the U.S. population,* they accounted for one out of three hospital stays (13.2 million hospitalizations) and 43.6 percent of the national hospital bill—nearly $329 billion.
http://www.hcup-us.ahrq.gov/reports/statbriefs/sb6.pdf [2003]

The mean length of stay for patients 6 5 and older was 1.7 days longer and mean hospital charges were 46 percent higher than no n-elderly hospital stays, but there was no difference in mean charges per day.
http://www.hcup-us.ahrq.gov/reports/statbriefs/sb6.pdf

This was from a 2003 paper. The figures they discuss are in the ballpark and corroborate what I posted earlier. With a population where seniors are growing faster than other age groups, the one third figure for total hospital stays attributed to seniors in 2003 is consistent with the 38% of inpatient visits in 2006 reported in my initial post.

 

It's perfectly manageable to make Medicare available to all. All it takes is the political will.

- - - Updated - - -

Where are you getting those figures?

 

It's a 100% private health care industry. Government with Medicare and Medicaid is nothing but a consumer or client.

Government health care must be profitable in the sense that the costs of the program will be greater than the daily health care provided. Additional money is required for technology, growth, research, etc. SO...those profits you complain about in the private health industry must also exist in a public health care system...

- - - Updated - - -

Well...it takes lots of money that the government currently does not have and taxpayers refuse to provide.

Figures...do your homework...

 

You can't back you your assertions. Figures .... made up BS.

 

I wonder why they didn't sell it this way. Medicare is a system that provides relatively cost effective health care, it is very popular, and already has the bureaucracy and rules in place for its cost reimbursement system. It would seem to me to make much more sense, and be a much better sell, to simply take a popular, effective existing system, and make it more broadly applicable, rather than reinventing and entirely new system and bureaucracy.

 

I'm curious about your statement that Graham Leach Bliley "allowed banks to make loans to people that could not afford them." What part of the act is that? I've heard many critiques of Graham Leach Bliley from the online left, including this site, but it's usually in regards to the removal of the barrier between commercial and investment banks. If this is a new critique of the law I would like to hear more.

 

I'm not going to argue this because it's irrelevant, but the health care industry in the US is not a 100% free market industry. Believe what you want, but it's simply not.

The private insurance companies are recognizing record profits year over year to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. The non-profit insurers have reserves over 5 times they're required to have by regulatory rules. The money isn't being put back into the system as you suggest is necessary. Why do you think that is?

There are plenty of places the government can cut costs and reduce spending. The problem is the influence that the majority recipient, the corporate oligarchy, has over the government.

 

Thus, the highest cost in the world by far, care inferior to a number of nations with greater efficiency, and 50,000 uninsured whose medical bills are routinely dumped on the tax payer.

High time that ongoing disaster was improved upon. Definitely.

 

Is there anyone now doubly-subsidized under an employer group plan (by the $250 billion tax break given to employers for administering the plans, as well as by whatever percentage of their premium the employer pays) who would sacrifice his subsidies in the interests of creating a free-market system under which coverage becomes an individual's private responsibility?

Such an adjustment would further an employer's competitiveness in the global marketplace by freeing them of the economic burden and encourage entrepreneurial start-ups where the cost of a group health insurance plan would cease to be a barrier that discourages free enterprise.