What's So Great About Private Health Insurance?

[Amskeptic]

My wife was giving me the cliff notes version of an article in Rolling Stone re: The Baucus Plan (hey, it was a road trip and we needed entertainment). The author thinks he's the health care devil, bought and paid for by the current system. Thoughts (or has this already been covered?)?

The Baucus Plan is weakened by the effort to forge consensus with those who have already declared their desire to torpedo it for political posturing.
The deletion of the public option is an act of utter Congressional cowardice.

Did you hear that moron with the "Keep Government Hands Off My Medicare!" sign at that motley Glenn Beck promoted protest in Washington?

The Self-Conratulatory Stupidity of our cable show entertainers has unmoored The Village Idiots.

Colin

[dtrumbo]

"Keep Government Hands Off My Medicare!"

That's damn funny! In the words of the hilarious comedian Bill Engvall, "Here's your sign!".

[BellePlaine]

The Baucus Plan is weakened by the effort to forge consensus with those who have already declared their desire to torpedo it for political posturing.
The deletion of the public option is an act of utter Congressional cowardice.


Colin

So what is your opinion here, besides Baucus is compromising and cowardly? Regarding the public option, is it essential? If so, then wouldn't the public option without a single payer system for all (i.e. you can still keep your private insurance) be just as weakened as the co-op plan?

[glasseye]

Anybody see Bill Clinton on Jon Stewart last night? (09/09/17)

He said that:

1) America spends 50% more on health care than any other nation. I believe it was 17% of GNP. Canada is next at just over 10%.

2) America's health care outcomes were no better than those in any other "developed" nation, and were in fact worse than in some countries.

3) America is the only "developed" nation that didn't care for (insure) ALL of it's citizens.

Not very encouraging statistics, doubters.

[BellePlaine]

Hey glasseye,

So how do you like your government health care in Canada? Can you buy private insurance and if so how does it work in conjunction with the government plan?

[pj]

I bet these 150 Canadians would disagree with Mr. Clinton and Glasseye.
One can also see stories of premature Canadian babies being born in Bellingham, WA and Whitefish Montana and across the northern tier of states. There are Canadian children alive today, because of this "substandard care," I bet their parents thank God for their neighbor's sharing of such substandard care.


I googled for stories and articles looking for Americans who crossed over for life saving care, but I can't find any.

LISA PRIEST

From Saturday's Globe and Mail Last updated on Monday, Mar. 30, 2009 02:47PM EDT

More than 150 critically ill Canadians – many with life-threatening cerebral hemorrhages – have been rushed to the United States since the spring of 2006 because they could not obtain intensive-care beds here.

Before patients with bleeding in or outside the brain have been whisked through U.S. operating-room doors, some have languished for as long as eight hours in Canadian emergency wards while health-care workers scrambled to locate care.

The waits, in some instances, have had devastating consequences.

“There have been very serious health-care problems that have arisen in neurosurgical patients because of the lack of ability to attain timely transport to expert neurosurgical centres in Ontario,” said R. Loch Macdonald, chief of the division of neurosurgery at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto. Those problems, he said, include “brain injury or brain damage that could have been prevented by earlier treatment.”

Ontario has the worst problem, though it is not alone.

The rest of the article can be found here.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/article661794.ece

[Manfred]

I bet these 150 Canadians would disagree with Mr. Clinton and Glasseye.
One can also see stories of premature Canadian babies being born in Bellingham, WA and Whitefish Montana and across the northern tier of states. There are Canadian children alive today, because of this "substandard care," I bet their parents thank God for their neighbor's sharing of such substandard care.


I googled for stories and articles looking for Americans who crossed over for life saving care, but I can't find any.

LISA PRIEST

From Saturday's Globe and Mail Last updated on Monday, Mar. 30, 2009 02:47PM EDT

More than 150 critically ill Canadians – many with life-threatening cerebral hemorrhages – have been rushed to the United States since the spring of 2006 because they could not obtain intensive-care beds here.

Before patients with bleeding in or outside the brain have been whisked through U.S. operating-room doors, some have languished for as long as eight hours in Canadian emergency wards while health-care workers scrambled to locate care.

The waits, in some instances, have had devastating consequences.

“There have been very serious health-care problems that have arisen in neurosurgical patients because of the lack of ability to attain timely transport to expert neurosurgical centres in Ontario,” said R. Loch Macdonald, chief of the division of neurosurgery at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto. Those problems, he said, include “brain injury or brain damage that could have been prevented by earlier treatment.”

Ontario has the worst problem, though it is not alone.

The rest of the article can be found here.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/article661794.ece

If this bill passes, our healthcare won't look anything like Canada's healthcare. Most of the bill are reforms, which everyone agrees on. And we will have a public option for people who want it. It is not a take over of healthcare. This type of healtcare is already offered to members for congress. What is wrong with that?

So everyone that is not down with the public option can go get real healthcare. Seems like insurance companies will still be doing a lot of business from all the hootin and hollerin that is going on.

[BellePlaine]

If this bill passes, our healthcare won't look anything like Canada's healthcare. Most of the bill are reforms, which everyone agrees on. And we will have a public option for people who want it. It is not a take over of healthcare. This type of healtcare is already offered to members for congress. What is wrong with that?

I'm not trying to flush out horror stories of Canadian or French government run health care and then draw conclusions to what it will be like in America. That's already been covered. Instead, I'm just trying to see how these countries cope with the mix of both private and public plans. Canadians can buy private insurance, right? Twinfalls has already said that the French can buy private insurance. So, is Obama correct that the public option would make my private provider more honest? (Never mind that my provider is already non-profit), will these private providers somehow be forced to cut profits and waste in order to compete with the public plan? Isn't that what we are being told? So I'd like to know from other countries if this is true? How expensive is private insurance in these countries? And as a follow-up question, does it create divisions of classes between those that have to wait in line and those who don't?

[glasseye]

Hey glasseye,

So how do you like your government health care in Canada? Can you buy private insurance and if so how does it work in conjunction with the government plan?

I can't compare it to other countries' systems since I have no experience of them. I have no complaints about the care I've had so far - 63 years.

Of course you can buy additional insurance if you want it. Dental, for instance is not covered by our national system.

I don't have additional insurance, other than coverage for out-of-country excursions.

[chitwnvw]

Dental, for instance is not covered by our national system.

Dental, even though I pay and have insurance by that name, doesn't seem to be covered in the US either.

[RussellK]

Dental, for instance is not covered by our national system.

Dental, even though I pay and have insurance by that name, doesn't seem to be covered in the US either.

I have it and they cover the routine stuff okay but pricey stuff like crowns and bridges not so much.

[glasseye]

Here's a link to a NYT article on the Canadian Medicare system. Read the comments, too.

http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/ ... ad-canada/


I'll post a relevant item soon on my recent experience with Canadian Medicare. I think I'm gonna call it "My Favourite Body Part"

[chitwnvw]

Dental, for instance is not covered by our national system.

Dental, even though I pay and have insurance by that name, doesn't seem to be covered in the US either.

I have it and they cover the routine stuff okay but pricey stuff like crowns and bridges not so much.

Exactly. They cover what you could pay out of pocket, cleanings, fillings, and the expensive stuff, bridges, implant, braces, does come out of your pocket.

[ruckman101]

Too many specialists. Not enough general practitioners.


neal

[chitwnvw]

Alexander Cockburn's column in The Nation:

Welcome to the National Asylum
by Alexander Cockburn


Was there ever a society so saturated with lunacy as ours? One expects
modulated nuttiness from the better element, particularly those

inhabiting the corporate and legislative spheres. But these days
insanity is pervasive, spreading through all classes and walks of life.
For years we have been treated to pinstriped fugitives from the asylum
like Pete Peterson urging the nation into ruin by slashing the deficit;
but on September 12 in Washington by tens of thousands were the
sans-culottes screaming for fiscal propriety as though channeling the
ruinous orthodoxies of Montagu Norman or Andrew Mellon. Many among these
Glenn Beck legions were surely one stroke or tumor away from financial
ruin yet were still ready to tear any advocates of publicly funded
health insurance into tiny pieces as though they were hawking The
Communist Manifesto at a revival meeting. Inspiring, was it not, to
see such self-abnegation on the part of so many people prepared to die
in the name of free enterprise!

Many of the Glenn Beckers are "birthers" too, making delusional forays
into the supposedly dubious documentation of Barack Obama's delivery in
a hospital in Hawaii. Sometimes I think the White House should knock
these surmises on the head by releasing all relevant documents and
testimonies. But of course this would merely throw napalm on the flames.
Once, when writing some caustic remarks about the occupants of another
ward in the national asylum, the 9/11 Truthers, I suggested that the
"missing people" on the plane that hit the Pentagon had been kidnapped
at an earlier stage in the operation and flown to an air base in
Louisiana--the very same air base where George Bush briefly touched down
in his erratic flight from Florida on September 11, 2001. George Bush
then personally executed the captives.

It was a satirical sally. But I swiftly received serious letters from
people vexed by the lack of detail. Where had Bush shot them? With what
type of weapon? A summary burst from a machine gun? Or a .22 bullet
behind the ear?

For all too many on the left, the so-called 9/11 conspiracy remains the
magic key. If it can be turned, then history at its present impasse will
be unlocked and we can move on. For those on the racist right, aghast at
the reality of a black man (actually half-white, half-black) in the
White House, the magic key to reversing this unpleasing development is
Obama's allegedly fake Hawaiian birth certificate. Their suppositions
and claims shift, but the essence is always the same: he's alien. He has
no right to be president. And as with the Truthers, the provision of
evidence rebutting their claims is merely fuel piled on the bonfire of
their insanity.

Now move from the nuttiness of his detractors to the madness of Great
Ones, in this case President Obama. His rhetoric is decorous, but the
delusions are just as ripe and far more lethal than those of the Glenn
Beck demonstrators under his window. How is one supposed to rate the
rationality of a person who wins the White House in large measure
because of popular outrage at the disastrous war in Iraq and who then
instantly ratchets up another war in Afghanistan--an enterprise for
whose utter futility history both ancient and modern offers copious
testimonies?

From time to time one meets a madman in a shopping mall or at a bus stop
who approaches one with discreet confidences about his mother, the queen
of England, or about the messages beamed through the fillings in his
teeth that warn him of CIA surveillance from the plane flying 30,000
feet above his head. It's an effort of will to remind oneself that this
is a person in disheveled mental condition and that it would be unwise
to be drawn into protracted discussion of royal lineage tracked through
the Almanach de Gotha, or to peer into jaws suddenly opened for one's
inspection. Similarly, with Obama, he advances ridiculous propositions
with nutty aplomb, as when he claimed in his speech to Congress on
September 9 that his healthcare plan was deficit-neutral. Why does he
expose himself thus to well-merited derision? Is it that Obama simply
cannot bear to displease anyone--unless they are in faraway places like
Afghanistan?

Indeed, the president reached the apex of lunatic effrontery when he
caused the assembled legislators to leap to their feet in stormy
applause by pledging that "I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to
our deficits." This is the same president, these are the same
legislators, who are committing billions in red ink for the war in
Afghanistan and the continued US presence in Iraq.

The 1970s are back, or so claims People magazine. I can see why.
It's nostalgia for the last sane decade in American political life, when
people assayed the state of the nation amid the embers of the '60s and
of the Vietnam War and elected politicians who passed some admirable
laws. It seemed America might totter into the warm sunlight of sanity.
It was Ronald Reagan who truly credentialed nutdom, setting the national
thermostat at max degrees F, for Fantasy. The Republican Party is now
entirely populated by mad people. Walk through the Congress and watch
them babble and throw excrement at the walls. Then survey the "good"
inmates mustered in the Democratic aisles, led by a president who at
least once in the last campaign invoked Reagan as a positive force.
They're less rambunctious but just as lethal, perhaps more so, in their
depredations.

People start to go collectively crazy when they know that all the exits
from our present state into the world of constructive reason are locked.
Just think--a president elected on a huge wave of popular hope, unable
to twist a single arm in his own party; unlikely even to pass financial
reform amid the greatest wave of public hatred of Wall Street since the
'30s; trying to pass off as healthcare "reform" a gift to the insurance
industry of 30 million new customers, to be required by law to pony up
insurance premiums and then be cheated. Doesn't that make you crazy too?