Our delusional democracy gave us delusional prosperity and now we are likely to get delusional health care reform. Don't let President Obama and other politicians fool you. The corrupt political system still under the thrall of corporate interests is ready to enact a delusional and phony set of health care reforms that will not provide Americans what they want and need. Even worse, what is likely to be done will end up costing taxpayers yet more federal debt and do nothing to stop health care cost inflation. The nation would be better off with no phony reforms, because then there will be no hope for a very long time of obtaining true and beneficial reforms.
The real failure of the political system is its refusal to seriously pursue a single payer government system that would replace the dominant role of private health insurance companies. Virtually no Americans actually benefit from private health insurers because they pay too much for too little, or are locked out of health insurance altogether. Rather than fear a government system akin to Medicare, people should be shaking over the prospect of letting private health insurers continue their brutal treatment of them.
As both individuals and employers continue to pay more and more for lousy coverage and the heath insurance industry makes obscene profits, it is a tragedy that so many Americans have been brainwashed to fear a government single payer system that would leave intact private health providers. This has resulted from many years of propaganda ingeniously propagated by the health insurance industry to protect itself. Recently, a new investigative report by the staff of the Senate Commerce Committee provided still more information about the ugly behavior of this industry.
This is how millions of Americans have been financially raped by this industry. Consumers were forced to pay billions of dollars in medical bills that insurers should have paid. Insurers have systematically underpaid for so-called out-of-network care. It has been a scam as odorous as the giant Ponzi scheme pulled off by Bernie Madoff that has put him in prison for the rest of his life. More than 100 million Americans have plans that allow them to see doctors who are not part of their insurance network.
This is how it worked. When people go outside insurer's network of doctors and hospitals they have only been reimbursed for a fraction of what the insurance companies have decided as the usual and customary rates charged by medical providers. Just one big problem: Those cost numbers came from Ingenix Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of the big insurer UnitedHealth Group. Naturally, Ingenix had an incentive to produce bench marks that lowballed usual and customary rates and shifted costs from insurers to their customers, according to the report. To add insult to injury, Ingenix got all of its data from the same insurers that bought its benchmark information, the report said. Wait, as if that was all not bad enough, the report found that insurers that contributed data to Ingenix often "scrubbed" their data to remove high charges, and then Ingenix further manipulated the numbers, removing valid high charges from its calculations. All this was done to greatly reduce payments consumers received from their health insurance providers.
Now that this terrible practice has come to light, UnitedHealth has agreed to close the database and help fund a new one operated by a nonprofit group.
With ever rising premiums, higher deductibles and larger copays, what is desperately needed is a government single payer system that would allow private insurers to offer supplemental types of health insurance, as they do now with the Medicare system.
Many millions of Americans that contributed money to Obama's campaign and helped elect him president should be very, very angry. Obama picked up the phone last week to warn lefties and unions to watch their mouths and get with his fuzzy program on healthcare. He has mounted a campaign to suppress single-payer healthcare advocates, threatening not so subtly that there will be repercussions if unions and activists persist in harassing his fellow center-right Democrats. Shame on him. And shame on much of the population for not speaking up more loudly to demand a single payer system. What Obama is willing to settle for is not the kind of change in health care that we have been waiting for. Shame on him. And shame on us for not doing more to stop the corruption of the political system by corporate interests. Delusional reform is worse than no reform.
» left by unlawflcombatnt from California (104 days 16 hours ago.)
I generally agree with you Joel. I've suggested something along the same lines, that basically charges people in a given age range the average cost of care for people in that age range. It would use a Medicare re-imbursement schedule. It would charge those in the 60-65 age range a premium that covers the average individual cost of health care for everyone in that age range. The same would be true for each 5 year increment down. Clearly younger patients would pay less, as they require less health care. Such a plan would probably cost an individual in the 40-45 year-old range $3-5 thousand/year. The only subsidization (in the beginning) would be that the government would pay all the Adminstration costs. (About 2% of total costs for Medicare.) There would be a 20% co-pay, just like Medicare, but NO deductible (Deductibles make no sense from a Medical standpoint.). Clearly it would not be necessary to do anything for the over 65 y/o population, since they are already covered by Medicare. Private insurance would be allowed, but they'd have to compete with this government administered system.
» left by Richard Backus from Philippines (104 days 3 hours ago.)
All three prospective candidates (Hilllary included) proposed insurance-based health care programs. It was for Hillary, a final and fatal sign that she too was controlled by the money crowd. Look what it cost her. But Obama showed, in this case as well as in his campaign financing, that he too was catering to the same monied elite as well. Poor us. Of course single payer is the cheapest and best, but money controls all in good old US of A.
I am seeing on Searchwarp/writing sites some excellent articles on the health-care reform and this is one of them but I am still confused about the different types of proposed reforms. It appears that the experts all have their idea of what the reform should or should not be making it more challenging to wrap a mind around.
I have a question: will people who already have a particular type of insurance via their employers and/or other providers, be able to elect to keep said insurance with a new reform? I am thinking this is the fear of many Americans ~ they still want that freedom to pick and choose, especially in light of many people/retirees who have worked for upteen years qualifying for an excellent plan and it, perhaps, already being free or wll be free AND, perhaps, in their mind the best yet. If I have missed this particular view in your article, please forgive me as the whole matter of health reform is very complex. Thank you! Suzy
Dear Suzy: This topic really is terribly complex and confusing for many people. When it comes to that favorite American thing called "choice," I think we need to rethink its application to health insurance. Even people with relatively good health insurance, usually through an employer, have been facing ever rising copays and deductibles. Worse, should they lose their jobs they will face a nightmare, with little chance of getting really good insurance, especially with coverage of pre-existing conditions. Even worse, way over 50 million Americans either have no health insurance or very poor insurance. True health care reform would make available good health care insurance to everyone, and make it affordable. Like many others who have spent time examining this issue, I favor universal health insurance provided through the government; if this was done well it would offer something like Medicare (which I have) and private supplemental insurance (to cover what the government plan does not) would also be available (there is plenty of choice for supplemental Medicare insurance). The core problem is that the private health insurance industry sucks a huge fraction of the national spending on health care, which is why the US spends more per capita than any other nation, but without comparable health benefits.
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