Where is the US economy headed?

Full stop. Why would the gov't force employers to offer healthcare plans? Especially when a public, non-profit plan is available, not tied to employment?

Cycloptichorn

The government would force employers to offer healthcare plans because that is the only way they can appear to be good guys while taking full control of 16% of the nation's economy. They can't just declare private insurance null and void. They have to convince the gullible that the people will still be in charge while they take your choices away from you.

Oh I know that isn't being advertised as an intention, but you just see what happens to any company trying to reduce healthcare benefits to its union employees. And even if they don't FORCE companies to provide healthcare plans to employees, they'll tax them as if they do. And if we are REQUIRED to have health insurance will you pay much more for a private plan than the government one?

See this:
http://spectator.org/archives/2009/06/17/how-obamacare-will-change-your

Won't most employers simply give their employees options (I realize that this may not be possible for small businesses, but hopefully it will be)

I can choose from 4 different health care providers for my health insurance through my employer. Some cost more, some cost less. I imagine that a public option will simply be another check box on my annual form I fill out.

So, yeah. You have no evidence that they plan on doing this or even WANT to do this; you are just asserting that they will do this. There is no language in the current legislation re: forcing employers to offer health care to anyone.
I have seen no indication that this will happen whatsoever, so I'm afraid I'm going to have to call bullshit on that.

And if you think about it, it doesn't even make sense at all. If you're introducing an affordable public plan which isn't linked to employment, why force employers to give insurance at all? It's counter-productive to the whole idea.

Whatever right-wing sites you are getting your info from aren't thinking this through very well... your problem is that you are assuming the most nefarious of intentions and then trying to construct a logical chain to support that. This is rarely reflective of reality.

Cycloptichorn

But if the cheapest 'option' is the government plan, how does private insurance compete? I am on Medicare because it is the cheapest way for me to have health insurance. It costs you a bundle for me to have Medicare though, and there are more of my generation and fewer of yours year after year so it will cost you more and more - or - the government will have to deny healthcare to me more and more. Because the government has taken over healthcare for the elderly, private insurance for senior citizens is way out of reach for all but the very wealthy. So we have no choice.

Once the government takes over healthcare for YOUR generation as well, private insurors will not be able to compete with that either. So they'll cater to the very wealthy if they stay in business at all and you will have no choice other than the government plan.

The sites I am consulting ARE thinking this through very carefully. It appears that the sites YOU are consulting are true fanatical loyal worshippers who refuse to look at any possible negatives.

I suggest that smart people will look very carefully at those negatives--both the possible ones and the real ones already there--before they buy into this.

To se that evidence, you simply have to look at examples in the US.
The solutions to problems here in Morganfield ( a community of 6000 people), wont neccessarily work in NYC, simply because of the amount of people involved.

And solutions that work in NYC wont work here, for the same reason.
Every community,every country, and every govt have problems that do not have "one size fits all" solutions.

The conservatives must use words like "force" to make their point, but there is nothing in the planning stages that even suggests such a thing.

All they know how to do is fear-mongering. Have you heard any good suggestions from the same people who are complaining about the health plan that isn't even settled yet?

Fear, fear, fear and more fear; that's the only message from them.

It might be that federal run healthcare has missed its moment.

When it was introduced here the population had much lower life expectancies, were less hypochondriacal and treatments were, in general, fairly crude and relatively inexpensive. Now a war is developing about allocations of resources between lobby groups for each illness.

Costs are spiralling and no politician dare call for a halt. Theoretically, with life support machines, bionic implants and whatnot there must be the possibilty that the whole budget becomes used up in keeping older and older people alive for longer and longer. Especially when they have stopped smoking, drinking and eating saturated fat.

And the administration will want to share in the bonanza.

I think you are too late by about 50 years. And you haven't got a Bevan to bang his fist on the table and shout "Just ******* do it!!". Wartime ministers were used to that sort of thing.

You would have "debates". So then expert debaters add another layer to the mounting pile with the equipment suppliers. builders and pharmaceutical companies. Oh and TV advertising battle grounds plucking at your heartstrings.

Have I missed anybody out? I apologise.

To give you a flavour we had a case here about two weeks back. It was finally decided after years of wrangling that a small number( about 1,000 I think) of elderly patients were to be allowed to use a certain very expensive drug which only "could" alleviate their distressing symptoms which we had been shown during the campaign. These patients were shown on the News welcoming this decision as one might expect.

When they had had their say a nurse came on complaining that she had 30 infants a month die in her hospital for want, she said, of sufficient resources to care for them properly.

A few years ago a nurse was found guilty of murdering some elderly patients in her care and her defence was that she was freeing up beds. A doctor was convicted of a much larger number and offered no defence.

It's a nightmare. I have no suggestions.

Thank you Spendi. I believe you are speaking from the heart. I hope there are enough who are not yet so brainwashed and conditioned to socialist ideas who will read and understand what you are saying. We need to hear from those who love their government run healthcare of course and also those who don't. Those of us who have dug for facts instead of propaganda know there is much to be learned from the experience of those who are living it. I probably don't have enough time left on Earth to care for myself all that much, although I do wish to retain quality of life for the hours or days or years that I have left. I would like to think that would not be taken away from anybody just because they were old or gravely ill or too young to plead for their lives.

Spendius--This is from the New York Times. Is this true and commonplace? If so, every woman in America should read this story:
Jonathan Player for The New York Times


By SARAH LYALL
Published: February 21, 2008
LONDON " Created 60 years ago as a cornerstone of the British welfare state, the National Health Service is devoted to the principle of free medical care for everyone. But recently it has been wrestling with a problem its founders never anticipated: how to handle patients with complex illnesses who want to pay for parts of their treatment while receiving the rest free from the health service.




Jonathan Player for The New York Times
Debbie Hirst with her husband, Ian, on the beach at Carbis Bay in Cornwall, England.
Although the government is reluctant to discuss the issue, hopscotching back and forth between private and public care has long been standard here for those who can afford it. But a few recent cases have exposed fundamental contradictions between policy and practice in the system, and tested its founding philosophy to its very limits.

One such case was Debbie Hirst’s. Her breast cancer had metastasized, and the health service would not provide her with Avastin, a drug that is widely used in the United States and Europe to keep such cancers at bay. So, with her oncologist’s support, she decided last year to try to pay the $120,000 cost herself, while continuing with the rest of her publicly financed treatment.

By December, she had raised $20,000 and was preparing to sell her house to raise more. But then the government, which had tacitly allowed such arrangements before, put its foot down. Mrs. Hirst heard the news from her doctor.

“He looked at me and said: ‘I’m so sorry, Debbie. I’ve had my wrists slapped from the people upstairs, and I can no longer offer you that service,’ ” Mrs. Hirst said in an interview.

“I said, ‘Where does that leave me?’ He said, ‘If you pay for Avastin, you’ll have to pay for everything’ ” " in other words, for all her cancer treatment, far more than she could afford.

Officials said that allowing Mrs. Hirst and others like her to pay for extra drugs to supplement government care would violate the philosophy of the health service by giving richer patients an unfair advantage over poorer ones.

Patients “cannot, in one episode of treatment, be treated on the N.H.S. and then allowed, as part of the same episode and the same treatment, to pay money for more drugs,” the health secretary, Alan Johnson, told Parliament.

“That way lies the end of the founding principles of the N.H.S.,” Mr. Johnson said.

But Mrs. Hirst, 57, whose cancer was diagnosed in 1999, went to the news media, and so did other patients in similar situations. And it became clear that theirs were not isolated cases.

In fact, patients, doctors and officials across the health care system widely acknowledge that patients suffering from every imaginable complaint regularly pay for some parts of their treatment while receiving the rest free.

“Of course it’s going on in the N.H.S. all the time, but a lot of it is hidden " it’s not explicit,” said Dr. Paul Charlson, a general practitioner in Yorkshire and a member of Doctors for Reform, a group that is highly critical of the health service. Last year, he was a co-author of a paper laying out examples of how patients with the initiative and the money dip in and out of the system, in effect buying upgrades to their basic free medical care.

“People swap from public to private sector all the time, and they’re topping up for virtually everything,” Dr. Charlson said in an interview. For instance, he said, a patient put on a five-month waiting list to see an orthopedic surgeon may pay $250 for a private consultation, and then switch back to the health service for the actual operation from the same doctor.

“Or they’ll buy an M.R.I. scan because the wait is so long, and then take the results back to the N.H.S.,” Dr. Charlson said.

In his paper, he also wrote about a 46-year-old woman with breast cancer who paid $250 for a second opinion when the health service refused to provide her with one; an elderly man who spent thousands of dollars on a new hearing aid instead of enduring a yearlong wait on the health service; and a 29-year-old woman who, with her doctor’s blessing, bought a three-month supply of Tarceva, a drug to treat pancreatic cancer, for more than $6,000 on the Internet because she could not get it through the N.H.S.

Asked why these were different from cases like Mrs. Hirst’s, a spokeswoman for the health service said no officials were available to comment.

In any case, the rules about private co-payments, as they are called, in cancer care are contradictory and hard to understand, said Nigel Edwards, the director of policy for the N.H.S. Confederation, which represents hospitals and other health care providers. “I’ve had conflicting advice from different lawyers,” he said, “but it does seem like a violation of natural justice to say that either you don’t get the drug you want, or you have to pay for all your treatment.”

Apparently they are thinking it through so carefully, they are inventing new things which aren't even being proposed, and then arguing against THOSE ideas.

Not very productive.

Cycloptichorn

Health care must be rationed, it is just like anything else, if we can have all we want then we will always want more. The goal is to allow everyone to be REASONABLY healthy without bankrupting the society.

Do Patients in Other Countries Have Better Access to Care?


Britain has only one-fourth as many CT scanners per capita as the U.S., and one-third as many MRI scanners. The rate at which the British provide coronary-bypass surgery or angioplasty to heart patients is only one-fourth the U.S. rate, and hip replacements are only two-thirds the U.S. rate. The rate for treating kidney failure (dialysis or transplant) is five times higher in the U.S. for patients between the ages of 45 and 84, and nine times higher for patients 85 years or older.

Overall, nearly 1.8 million Britons are waiting for hospital or outpatient treatments at any given time. In 2002"2004, dialysis patients waited an average of 16 days for permanent blood-vessel access in the U.S., 20 days in Europe, and 62 days in Canada. In 2000, Norwegian patients waited an average of 133 days for hip replacement, 63 days for cataract surgery, 160 days for a knee replacement, and 46 days for bypass surgery after being approved for treatment. Short waits for cataract surgery produce better outcomes, prompt coronary-artery bypass reduces mortality, and rapid hip replacement reduces disability and death. Studies show that only 5 percent of Americans wait more than four months for surgery, compared with 23 percent of Australians, 26 percent of New Zealanders, 27 percent of Canadians, and 36 percent of Britons

What point are you trying to make here?

Cycloptichorn

a ct scanner cost $2+ mil, a MRI machine $3+ mil before a single patient uses it, and given the upkeep and skilled staff needed for ongoing operations the operating costs are huge. America has far to many of these expensive machines, and does far too many scans. it is part of how we get to spending so much money for so little health care.

That's only part of the problem. If you have read the article I posted earlier on this thread, the issues that needs to be addressed are a) very high administrative costs, b) waste and fraud, c) millions of Americans without health insurance, and d) the escalating cost of health care.

The conservatives "no" is not a solution.

Hawkeye-I agree. If you note my last two posts, you will learn two things.

l. That single payer leads to the abominations of a woman with terminal breast cancer being unable to get the medicine she needs because of the idiotic rules laid out by socialistic single payer systems like the British System.

2. That despite the fact that the US does not have a single payer system there are more MRI facilities and Scanners in the US than there are in the Socialistic British System.

You are indeed correct that when you make all medical interventions available to everyone, even it those medical interventions are elective and not really necessary, you are setting up a system in which shortages will recur and waiting lines will be ubiqutious and frequent.

True, but don't forget the drug racket. We spent $95 billion for prescriptions in 99, $180 billion in 2003, and I think that I saw a figure around $250 billion for 07. Talk about inflation!!! In comparison Canada is under $20 billion right now. We can't afford that, and Obama's saying the drug companies will rebate $80 billion to medicare over the next 10 years does not substantially change a thing.

It is clear that, according to the Congressional Budget Office's analysis of Senator Kennedy's health care proposal that not only would the proposal cost more than one trillion over ten years, thirty seven million Americans still would not have health insurance.