IT'S TIME FOR UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE

FreeDuck wrote:

Speaking of what America is about, have you ever heard the phrase, "majority rule, minority rights"?

I prefer individual rights. I consider myself an individual, not part of a minority or a majority.

August 19, 2009

The (un)truth about health reform

Editor's note: U.S Rep. Roy Blunt also made the same claim about hip surgery to editors and editorial advisory board members at the News-Leader during a recent interview.

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Aug. 17, 2009:

As chairman of the House Republican Health Care Solutions Group, Rep. Roy Blunt, R-Springfield, knows a thing or two about health care. But some of what he knows just isn't true.

"I'm 59," Mr. Blunt said last week during a meeting with Post-Dispatch reporters and editors. "In either Canada or Great Britain, if I broke my hip, I couldn't get it replaced."

We fact-checked that. At least 63 percent of hip replacements performed in Canada last year and two-thirds of those done in England were on patients age 65 or older. More than 1,200 in Canada were done on people older than 85.

"I didn't just pull that number out of thin air," Mr. Blunt said in a subsequent interview. It came, he said, from testimony before the House Subcommittee on Health by "some people who are supposed to be experts on Canadian health care."

"I had been given that example. I was told that 59 is the cutoff," he said.

"I'm glad you pointed that out to me. I won't use that example any more."

Mr. Blunt is a sincere man. We have no doubt he'll keep his word. But he's not the only Republican leader who has his facts wrong about British and Canadian health care. And some of his colleagues are a bit less contrite.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, recently claimed that in England, Sen. Ted Kennedy would have been denied treatment for his brain cancer.

The English National Health Service has denied that claim. The head of a related health agency complained about "untrue or misinformed" comments. And the president of the British Medical Association decried such "jaw-droppingly untruthful attacks."

It shouldn't matter. None of the health reform plans being considered by Congress would create an English- or Canadian-style health system here. But opponents of reform sometimes are careless with the facts.

For example, Mr. Blunt was asked how long an uninsured American would wait for a hip replacement.

"If they go to the emergency room, I think they can get that done," he said.

Emergency rooms don't do hip replacements, which require both hospital care and weeks of rehabilitation. They do emergency surgery, necessary to save a life.

St. Louis hospitals offer discounts to patients who are poor and uninsured.

But patients often are asked to make substantial down payments before surgery; they don't hobble through the ER door and get them done for free.

In the same interview, Mr. Blunt minimized the number of people without health insurance in part by maximizing the number who are illegal immigrants.

"Ten to 12 million of them are in the country illegally. Everyone sort of agrees on that," Mr. Blunt said. It's a common refrain by opponents of reform.

In fact, the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation puts the number of uninsured who are immigrants both legal and illegal at about 9 million.

The National Institute for Health Care Management, another nonpartisan group, estimates that about 5.6 million illegal immigrants are among the 45.7 million people who were uninsured in 2007.

Mr. Blunt says his figure, which he later lowered to "about 8 million" is based on a Congressional Budget Office estimate.

Alas, that's not exactly what the CBO document says. It says 17 million people in America still would be uninsured 10 years from now if the House health reform bill is approved. About half of those people would be illegal immigrants.

Health care policy is complicated, no doubt about it. Not everyone understands it. But everyone, particularly responsible political leaders, at least should try to get the facts straight.

okie, Posting articles from FOX News is a waste of time; most of us, I'm sure, don't bother to read it, and it takes up cyberspace with junk - like your personal opinions that we tolerate to show how stupid you are!

It does say it all but not in the sense you intended. Medicare writes checks for all bills submitted to it, without ever doing any investigation on their origins. The FBI does fraud investigations, and their cost is covered in a different budget.

If you're going to do that, 3% overhead is too high, overhead should be zero - you can get a machine to do it automatically. The sheer dishonesty in this debate is staggering.

It does say it all but not in the sense you intended. Medicare writes checks for all bills submitted to it, without ever doing any investigation on their origins. The FBI does fraud investigations, and their cost is covered in a different budget.

If you're going to do that, 3% overhead is too high, overhead should be zero - you can get a machine to do it automatically. The sheer dishonesty in this debate is staggering.

Another one who knows 00.00 about finance and economics..... Free Duck, there's such a thing as overhead cost (the subject of the previous post, and of the linked article), then there's operating cost, then there's initial investment.

If that's clear, do you want to learn more, or are 3 cost categories all you can learn in one day?