WAY O/T-Health

I just want your opinion on this statment. I've seen a statement like it on here quite a while ago.(got poofed of course)-"Health care is like a new vehicle, you only deserve it if you can afford it." Please do not mention politics, socialized one payer systems, and no name calling. Just a simple yes or no answer and a quick explanation. I've started a simliar thread before but never saw many replies cause it was poofed rather quickly. I would just like a civilized thread/discussion on this topic. It is something that everyone will have to deal with, so it's not completely OT, and I'm sure some people have gotten hurt while working/playing with their tractors/equipment.

I could be retired and only playing on the farm or in the workshop. But I work to pay for health ins., As my wife is self employed day care provider. Plus we are both too young for Social Security or Medicare

I am self employed, and believe we need someone to help us.

I believe that all working people should be able to afford basic health care. I also believe if someone is too lazy to work, they should be able to afford nothing. Health care is increasingly more expensive and those of use who pay our own way also pay for those who refuse to work.

I think the biggest issue is the difference between health care and health insurance. With health insurance, just like with your car you pick your level of coverage and pay for it accordingly. With health care, it is implied you can walk in anytime for any reason and not have to pony up much of anything. Personally I prefer health insurance, but the plan we are on is pretty much mandated healthcare.

Health care costs have risen faster than general inflation. We can discuss the reasons why, including the majority of Americans have health care and participate in the health care market with someone else footing the bill. Another factor is medical care requires education, another commodity whose cost has increased at a rate far greater than general inflation (30 years after my graduation from college one credit hour costs two and a half times what I paid for a 12 credit hour term) Third the cost of malpractice suits and the cost of the insurances the Doctor and practice must purchase and as we all know insurance companies make a profit, especially on products people can't do with out. Finally more and more your Doctor is an employee at a practice owned by a corporation that again makes money. To control medical cost we need tort reform, initiatives to control the cost of an medical education and taxing the cost of employer provided health care or the services it provides so the consumer has some responsibility in controlling healthcare costs. And OR making people pay additional amounts of money on their health care plans for unhealthy life still choices like smoking, drug & alcohol abuse and obesity. I'll admit on the last point I'd have to pay a "fat" tax.

we should all have the right to the best health care in the world no mater what you do whther you are the ceo or the guy that cleans the craper

It is a tough call. My wife and I pay about half of our social security check toward medicare ins, (yes it is not free), gap insurance, drug plan ins and then the co-pay. I work part time self employed repairing tractors to help but actually we are spending what I call her burial set aside to keep up. Don't know where it will end. But, I still don't think it should be something that is just given to everyone. Some one has to pay for it , there ain't no Santa Claus like they say.

Very well stated. You are 100 per cent right on. The sad thing is that the major items like tort reform or a simplified payer system would cost the government very little cash. the chances of congress doing this is zero.

All good answers so far, and I have to agree with all of them. I believe we all deserve the best health care available, but it needs to be at a cost that everyone can afford. While i understand the whole "cost of doing business for doctors" is high because of malpractoce insurance, etc, etc, etc, etc, I just think that for a doctor to be riding around in a $100,000 car while the people that built his car, his office building, his $500,000 house, his furniture, his vacation condo in where ever, are just about all too broke to drive a VW and live in a trailer park, is just plain wrong..........Of course I could say the same about lawyers. Especially since by definition, by law, etc, etc the legal system is supposed to be equal for all regardless of wether they can afford a lawyer or not....That said, I'm here to tell you it's not........

Two things.

Do you have any idea what it costs to become a doctor? I do. My youngest wants to be one. The cost of school is staggering. Also it takes a large portion of one's life just in studying.

Part of the increased cost of health care/insurance is the use of unnecessary services. I just went through this with my elderly mother. She really just needed to be kept confortable because of her advanced age/condition. But they were always wanting to run more and more tests that would not change the outcome. They still ran noninvasive tests that only confirmed that there was nothing more that could be done. So why run them in the first place?

slim

Very spirited discussion and I hope it doesn't get poofed! I pay about 1/3 of my cost through my employer and I think thats a fair amount. Its available to me, It covers my needs, and it sort of motivates me to be healthy. wink. What I don't like is what my sister an RN in a large hospital cardiac wing tells me. All day long she deals with fat lazy people that leave after 4 days of care and go to Mcdonalds. What burns me is that the "working" man pays for everything. Lets bring back Workfare instead of welfare.

My son went to college to be a lawyer. Would not accept financial help from us, said he was going to do it on his own. Made us proud that he had been raised to pay his way. Took 10 years to pay his student loans off. Works long hours every week, I don't begrudge him for the money he makes now. He paid his dues.

I think the statement of ..." you only deserve it if you can afford it" implies that it has to somehow be earned, and if you don't make enough money to afford healthcare (and you do not have input in setting the price/ goods/ service), you are out of luck.
Having said that, I do have "state insurance" as a municipal employee. All was well until cancer, a little over 5 1/2 yrs ago. Chemo and MD Anderson ate and still eats my lunch (had very rare cancer, about 1 in 1.000.000. I am still paying every month, about 23% of my take-home, plus have 10s of thousands not addressed in a payment plan. And relatively, I have god insurance. That is also my share after insurance pays. If it were not for my wife's salary and a small side business , we would be looking at selling assets.
So how does someone determine what a person deserves when it comes to insurance? What does someone deserve to make after going to college for 8-10 yrs? What should a drug-maker receive for their invented product? What is fair, what is just, what is too much? I don't have the answer without getting into politics, capitalism, and government involvement. Maybe someone else does....
Ralph in Oklahoma, survivor: 5 yrs, 8 months and zero days.

magpeine - why should we work to pay for you to play? you are not old enough to retire on the government. Are you complaing about taking care of yourself instead of someone else paying your bills?
bejohnson - does this bold statement apply to food, shelter? Why not? only the best for the basic necessities, right? FOR FREE! It is a right?
Have the Canadians weight in on this. Free health care up there from the government. I hear from provides there that about half of Canadians BUY private helath insurance because the free stuff is not so great. is nothing good that is cheap. The US will have to come to grips with health care rationing.

I think you are talking about coming to grips with some being able to afford to get treated, to get better. Others just have to face the fact that they will stay ill or die.
Health care rationing implies that there is a shortage of healthcare, which we do not have in this country. We do have problems with people being able to afford the services that they need and that are readily available for a price.

Rationing means by government decree - you are too old to have a kidney transplant. If you choose to spend you resources on that you can, but the government won't be paying. That's what the government programs around the world do to control costs. That, or they delay it so long that ou die before you get treated. There is no free lunch.

Wisbaker,

Would you add the problematic obesity? Perhaps I shouldn"t cast the first stone....anyone overweight would be on their own... especially when the definition is in the hands of whom......

D.

Not a good comparison between a new car and health care.

If I walk into a car dealership and say I need a new Cadillac, but I don't have any money and no proof I can pay for it and I won't even tell my real name, the dealer will show me the door. But I can go into an emergency room and get treatment under the same circumstances.

A car dealer will tell me up front what a new Caddy will cost, right down to the penny if he's honest. When you get treatment for a medical condition, it's very rare that you have any idea what the total bill will be, and the various tacked-on charges would make the most disreputable car dealer blush.

I was covered by insurance at work for 45 years, and I paid for a share of the cost. If you really think about it I paid all of it as part of my compensation package(as do we all who are covered at work). I worked 4 years longer to continue to get covereage instead of retiring. And if I wanted a Cadillac plan, I would have had to pay even more. Some of the cost of insurance goes to cover those who have none, and get health care anyway. I don't want to be heartless, but getting something without working for it decreases its value. AND HEALTH CARE IS NO DIFFERENT!!.

I hate to even reply to this, but if you look at what wiki says on this.(I know, not a good source of info) It says that the US governemnt spends $3,426/citizen/year, 4th highest in the world. The way I look at it, atleast Canadians get something for spending that money, Americans spend more than us and get NOTHING. It may not be the best system, but I don"t know any Canadians that claim it is. Most important is that a heart attack isn"t going to put me $250,000 in debt. Any small thing can cost you $10,000 in no time at all. Because people can"t control themselves,(not talking about you) I don"t really want to start comparing systems, just want to deal with the fundamentals of it.

My parents doctor and his doctor wife just quit their practice this week, here in the U.S. and are moving to Canada to practice. He says he could no longer work within the US system. I don't know if it matters but they are both Polish Immigrants.

Let's ad another dimension to our discussion, hopefully we don't get to close to the "poof" line. As you can see from my user name I'm in Wisconsin, a state that is currently going through a bitter recall election for our governor and any nnalert State Senator that didn't stand a recall election last summer. One of our current governor's campaign promises was to make state employees pay a share of both their retirement and healthcare insurance costs (their "fair share" sound familiar?). During the election I did not support our governor because I thought his campaign promises were naive and failed to show a reasonable understanding of the collective bargaining and binding arbitration process as they currently exist in Wisconsin. Last spring he made good on his campaign promises, State employees now have to pay less than 20% of their health insurance costs and the state retirement system reverts back to it's original structure where the employee pays 1/2 the cost or 5.5% of their wages. To insure these changes won't be changed during the next union contract or granted back to the employees in binding arbitration they also limited collective bargaining rights for state and municipal employees to wages only. One of the dirty little secrets that has come out is School districts are saving millions of dollars on their health insurance, not so much on the employees contribution but more on their ability to shop for coverage, you see the teacher's unions negotiated that school districts HAD to use the teachers' union plan. The school district in our county seat bid out their healthcare coverage without any changes in the coverage provided to the employees they were able to save $1,000,000 a year, a school district south of Green Bay reports they saved around $3,000,000 again without any change in the benefits provided, same coverage, same deductibles. Here is the clincher, the state teacher's union is one of the largest contributors to election campaigns for Democratic candidates, some of this money is "overage" or surplus or profits from their medical plan. The reader's digest version- I pay taxes so school employees can have health care (fair) they bargain so the school district can only use an insurance provider their union owns, the profits from their (tax free?)insurance operation are used to support the campaigns of candidates that for the last 15 years have only been from one party. So "healthcare" costs are to high, but our process allows "healthcare" dollars to be turned into money to fund the campaigns of officials that oversee the union members and negotiate their wage and benefit packages. Conservative estimate are that Wisconsin School Districts saved between 8 and 10 million dollars in health insurance cost last year by simply being allowed to bid the coverage out and select the lower cost provider without changing the actual coverage or deductibles. To put it back on topic a lot of our healthcare dollar is spent on costs that don't really have anything to do with healthcare. Our politicians can't afford to "be against healthcare" some folks have figured out how to get a percentage of those unlimited healthcare dollars for their own non-healthcare use.

I"m not really sure what insurance you"re talking about because there really isn"t any way you can go in and pay if you pay into the system, and you"d be paying for the same care anyways. If you want "better" service, you"d have to go south of the border for it. In that sense, it is good for the US to have private health care for those that may want it. My understanding is that the system is private practice up here and reimbursed by the government. A doctor has to work to make money, they don"t simply get a salary and have the government pay for upkeep of the building, etc., unless they"re the employee of a practice owner? I do know that some people buy insurance for dental, eye care, prescriptions, etc. which are not covered by OHIP. (Ontario) They may be covered in other provinces. That stuff is just like down there, prices are stupid, and visits are kept to a minimum for those on all but the loosest budgets, or with insurance. Canadians do know a bit how American sytle private practice works due to these not being covered.

(quoted from post at 18:24:22 05/06/12) I"m not really sure what insurance you"re talking about because there really isn"t any way you can go in and pay if you pay into the system, and you"d be paying for the same care anyways. If you want "better" service, you"d have to go south of the border for it. In that sense, it is good for the US to have private health care for those that may want it. My understanding is that the system is private practice up here and reimbursed by the government. A doctor has to work to make money, they don"t simply get a salary and have the government pay for upkeep of the building, etc., unless they"re the employee of a practice owner? I do know that some people buy insurance for dental, eye care, prescriptions, etc. which are not covered by OHIP. (Ontario) They may be covered in other provinces. That stuff is just like down there, prices are stupid, and visits are kept to a minimum for those on all but the loosest budgets, or with insurance. Canadians do know a bit how American sytle private practice works due to these not being covered.

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My source was a physical therapist. He said PT is not covered by the national program. So wait in line to get a knee replacement or rotator cuff repair but have to pay for the PT out of pocket, or have private insurance to pay for it.

Also, my understanding is that Canadians pay a lot more in taxes than the US. There is no free lunch.

My two cents.

1. Heathcare is not a right. If it is, then doctors are not entitled to the fruits of their own labor. How many farmers would keep farming if folks could just walk out into the field and take what they need? People need food the same as they need a doctor.

2. Prices are incredibly high for medical treatment, but I often wonder if they are connect to the cost. I had $30,000 worth of test done. Insurance would only cover $6000. I ended up paying only $600. How can the doctor provide $30,000 worth of service for $6600 and write off the rest and keep the doors opens? The answer is, the price isn't the same for everyone. Those with more resources (insurance, cash, etc.) pay more than those with fewer. Require all prices to be posted and simplify the billing. It seems to work at the dentist. I always know what it will cost in advance.

What's the answer? Honestly, I've wondered what it would look like if instead of requiring insurance, simply banning insurance. Everyone pays for what they use. Doctors sure wouldn't be charging what they charge, because very few could pay for it. $10,000 to deliver a baby? No thanks, I'll shop around.

(quoted from post at 20:58:37 05/06/12) My two cents.

1. Heathcare is not a right. If it is, then doctors are not entitled to the fruits of their own labor. How many farmers would keep farming if folks could just walk out into the field and take what they need? People need food the same as they need a doctor.

2. Prices are incredibly high for medical treatment, but I often wonder if they are connect to the cost. I had $30,000 worth of test done. Insurance would only cover $6000. I ended up paying only $600. How can the doctor provide $30,000 worth of service for $6600 and write off the rest and keep the doors opens? The answer is, the price isn't the same for everyone. Those with more resources (insurance, cash, etc.) pay more than those with fewer. Require all prices to be posted and simplify the billing. It seems to work at the dentist. I always know what it will cost in advance.

What's the answer? Honestly, I've wondered what it would look like if instead of requiring insurance, simply banning insurance. Everyone pays for what they use. Doctors sure wouldn't be charging what they charge, because very few could pay for it. $10,000 to deliver a baby? No thanks, I'll shop around.

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I think very few would choose to pay for it. Rather buy new cars, build bigger house, etc. They certainly would not save money for when they get sick. If doctors got paid a lot less the quality of health care would drop like crazy. The best and brightest are attracted to medicine. If the financial incentive is removed they would do something else. If working at Jiffy Lube paid the same, why would someone torture themselves like medical students do?