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Beware the mad DR OBAMA wants to socialize medicine and make us pay 250:000 pasaquas for a bottle of asperin

Things are getting interesting.

After the last election I'd kind of given up on America. Hm-m-m-m, maybe not. Considering that Seattle is the new center for the Lavender Mafia on the left coast, this is mighty impressive.

I am from Canada and can tell you if you like to stand in line for months for something you can, in the US, have in days go for socialized anything.
My country has gone to shit from the likes of Tommy 'the commie' Douglas the father of socialized medicine. DON'T LET IT HAPPEN TO YOU!!!
My free health care costs $7200 a year, I WANT MY MONEY BACK.

Ok, so what is your solution to the healthcare problem? We already have socialized health care. A good friend of mine had a 'pre-existing condition', so health insurance was far more expensive than he could afford. When he had a stroke, less than two weeks in the hospital cost him more than $100,000. Guess who will end up paying the bill? He can't, so the cost gets handed down to you.

Not if we all refuse to pay other peoples bills!

So what healthcare problem do we have, then? Everybody is getting what they need, and it's being paid for. The costs of such rare occurrences are spread, which is the purpose of insurance in the first place.

Just how are insurance companies supposed to respond to pre-existing conditions? Cover them with no additional cost? Why would anyone pay into an insurance plan until something was wrong? That would be like taking out auto insurance, then saying, oh, by the way, I wrecked my car yesterday, whatchagonnadoaboutit?

We have an absolute plentitude of healthcare options now, and competition keeps costs down YES DOWN while driving service. Wait until it's "free", you've never seen something get scarce so fast. Plus, it'll be run by the same people that run the post office and license branch! Doubleplusgood!

People need to get on a plan and stay with it, rather than buy that plasma TV or whatever. It's been part of employment benefits for so long that people presume it should be, but that's not to be assumed. It's all a matter of taking responsibility for yourself, and government is INCAPABLE of doing that right.

Is socialized corpse disposal better than socialized healthcare?

My solution, ditch the outdated office model for routine health care with a retail model; like Lenscrafters. Allow consumers to tailor health insurance policies to their needs without state mandates. And most importantly, cap and socialize punitive damages in malpractice suits. Cap punitive damages at $500K and put them into a pool to fund care for their indigent, instead of ambulance-chasing lawyers.

Have Government assistance available for catastrophic events, but make people pay for their own routine care. (Car insurance covers crashes, not oil changes. Why should medical insurance be different.) Exempt preventable illnesses ... AIDS, idiots who ride motorcycles without helmets and get brain injuries... from public care.

Toughest part -- Re-evaluate palliative care ... instead of extraordinary measures .... for treating the terminally ill. Instead of spending hundreds of thousands to prolong a miserable life for months or weeks, give the patient the option of being made comfortable while nature takes its course.

Wow you guys are horrible people.

44883, if you can't produce a compelling counter-argument, bug off.

I actually went through a form of socialized health care while in BCT and AIT *since military receive their own free health care*. One of the problems we had were "sick-call rangers."

Basically, these were privates who didn't want to work, and went to sickcall(the doctor's office) solely to get out off the day's training events or to get a profile(a note from the doctor saying they couldn't do certain types of physical exercise.)

Sick call rangers added to the line, slowed things down, and made the drill Sargents even less sympathetic then they already were. In short, they made things worse for the people who actually were sick. I'm thinking that if trips to sick call cost, we would've had a lot less sick call rangers.

Anyway, the moral of the story is:If it's free, LOTS of people will take advantage of it.

Conservativeteen:

Another piece of advice or two, it's free so you get your money's worth.

1) Once you get to a unit, look after 'Doc' (medic). Doc will look after you, and beyond the obvious.

2) When you have to go to sick call, if you have a chance to be seen by an SF medic or SF PA, do it. Non-SF medical staff are good, but the guys w/ an SF background seemed to be just a notch better for most stuff.

3) You have already learned about slugs and profile p******s. Don't forget that.

4) Have fun, particularly when yesterday was the easy day.

COUGH,COUGH,HACK,HACK,AAACCCHHHOOOO SQUAWK SQUAWK SQUAWK KKKAAAHHHAAACCCKKK

I have an idea for the healthcare issue.

Allow the cost of health care premiums to be written off your taxes just like an IRA. So if you made $45K a year and paid $5K a year in healthcare premiums, you'd be taxed on $40K. That could be quite a significant tax cut. So if you were a family of four paying $1000 a month for healthcare coverage, you'd deducted $12K off of your taxes.

The insurance companies would win as they'd more money in their coffers to pay any catastrophic care and not bill good old Uncle Sam.

That way you can buy what coverage you like and go to what doctor you like. And for those who can't wait until the end of the year the amount you spend on your healthcare each month is deducted from your wages (if you're working for an employer). Your employer could send the money EFT (via payroll withdrawal) to the health care agency.

This way the employer is not stuck with the tab, I can buy what insurance I can afford, less visits to the ER and healthcare savings by those getting preventative care rather than having a huge hospital bill for an illness that could have been detected earlier.

I think V the K's plan is best, because the reason insurance health care is so expensive is that isn't suited to paying for common and recurring expenses, but for rare and unexpected expenses. In the days before widespread "universal" insurance coverage. Most people could afford to pay for routine health care out of pocket because the socialized aspects of HMOs/PPOs hadn't driven the base costs through the roof. Now we're in a death spiral because you can't afford to pay out of pocket and insurance drives up the cost and government thinks the answer to the crisis is MORE socialization!

But what is it that really makes it so expensive?

There's the lawsuit lottery, encouraged by the likes of John Edwards but possible only because people have gotten greedy.

That leads to the preemptive use of some very expensive procedures, just to make sure every possibility is covered.

Then there are the regulations which have been piled on over the years by these socializers, each ostensibly for our benefit, but intended to push things a little farther off balance, until we can be convinced that what we have doesn't work. From there it's not too far to saying the only way out is single-payer.

I think it's gotten expensive in large part because these people wanted it to and have been picking at it for decades to make it happen.

They weren't able to do it in one go back in the 60's, they hadn't broken it badly enough by 93, now they just think they're powerful enough it doesn't matter.

My plan covers that, too, by capping and socializing punitive damages. And as a bonus, there will be fewer ambulance chasers like John Edwards building giant hideous houses.

No doubt our litigious culture plays a role in higher medical prices, too, Mr. Evilwrench, but the market forces of HMOs and PPOs operating as mini-monopolies doesn't help either. Imagine how much more competitive providers would have to be under a retail model where they must satisfy individual patients than a model where they simply have to statisfy a few major insurance companies. It would be glorious!

Nice to see that conservatives are stepping up the plate a lot more in terms of demonstrations, and especially since they're doing so in peaceful, organized manners (Especially when compared to the crude, riotous brutes caling themselves "Professional activists" or some other such term which make up the majority of the liberal protestors).

You guys really think the pro-single-payer group is the one with money and unions behind it? The rich, the doctors, the insurance companies, and the medical lobbyists all support the status quo, and throw massive amounts of money into it; the only people who would be benefited by single-payer are the poor and middle-class who only need one big accident or sudden medical problem to push them into financial trouble that takes years and years to recover from. If you think this protest wasn't astroturfed...ponder just how much the right-wing media's been talking about it and advertising it for free.