When Senator Jeff Merkley ended his town meeting at Summit High School, I was standing with the microphone man waiting to be the next speaker. In the last five years I have had over $300,000 in medical bills, largely because I was a passenger in a head-on collision that broke my bones in 27 places. Along with Medicare I pay $150 a month for supplemental insurance, and these two paid for everything. I have no co-pays and a minimal deductible every year. I have always been able to choose my doctors and any tests I wanted. How can health insurance get any better than this? My only complaint is that Medicare doesn’t pay medical providers enough.
Medicare receives 2 to 3% for overhead, while private insurance companies receive 20 – 30%, because “overhead” includes profit. I do not understand why anyone should receive a profit from our illnesses and injuries. The only sensible healthcare reform is Single Payer, which essentially puts everyone on Medicare. Why would anyone rather have whatever insurance they have now?
Don Schuman
This article appears in Sep 10-16, 2009.
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So your solution is to put more people in a system that we cannot afford now. Lets see, the system is out of control so we will add 250 million people and see how that improves things.
“The financial difficulties facing Social Security and Medicare pose serious challenges. For Social Security, the reform options are relatively well understood but the choices are difficult. Medicare is a bigger challenge. Its cost growth can be contained without sacrificing quality of care only if health care cost growth more generally is contained. But despite the difficulties – indeed, because of the difficulties – it is essential that action be taken soon, particularly to control health care costs.” (2009 Trustees Report)
Hurrah for Single Payer. It’s the only moral choice and it is the choice that has been made by almost every civilized country on the planet. The U.S. is unique in its outrageously dog-eat-dog lunatic system that says that one person’s misfortune should be another person’s road to wealth, that the sicker society gets the greater the GDP will be, that it is not a total perversion to incent private insurance companies to find ways to screw their clientรจle in every way possible.
The problem with the discourteous teapartyer-birther-deather type idiots in this nation is that they simply have no working ability to deal with facts and very much prefer to exist in a fantasyland of group delusion about health care and so much else.
While it didn’t happen at Sen. Jeff Merkley’s townhalls recently, I did see Rep. Jim Moran take the time at a townhall in Virginia spend about half an hour discussing all the myths, lies, delusions and disinformation being spread by frauds ranging from Glenn Beck to Dick Armey to the lobbyists for the health care profiteers. It’s a heartbreaking thing to watch my fellow citizens being such contemptible idiots and willing dupes for the corporate fat cats who love to get the fools riled up about abortion, hajis, socialism and anything that will distract the middle class from noticing that they are being skinned alive by the corporate elite in this country. I don’t blame the elites for being criminals. They’ve always been that way. I do blame the people for become a delusional rabble who have no idea whatsoever how to protect themselves and their children from the depredations of the malefactors of great wealth and their cunning schemes to drain the wealth of this nation into their own pockets.
Since medicare today does not pay for dental, and numerous other health aspects, and it is going broke, how can one expect a “single payor” plan to work when these health aspects are added to the program?
Obama said last night that his plan would not add one dime to the deficit, and that no money would be taken from Medicare. The CBO has said it would add trillions to the deficit, and the White House website says that $622 Billion dollars would be taken from Medicare to pay for the program.
Then there is the claim that ending waste, and fraud, would pay for the program. If that be the case, why is this waste, and fraud, not being ended now to save Medicare?
Then there is the flap over illegals getting on the program. While it does say that illegals will not be allowed on the program, there is no verification process in the bill. Republicans did attempt to hae E-verify included in the bill, however, Democrats blocked its passage. Kind of like “don’t ask, don’t tell”.
Nothing being said has the ring of truth to it.