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Originally Posted by The_Jazz
Fire coverage and police coverage only deal with the immediate problem - the fire itself or the actual crime. Insurance, whether it be fire, liability or health, reimburses (theoretically) the insured for their loss from whatever peril they suffered from. Firefighters will not restore your home. Policemen will not fix your car if a thief drives it into a lake. This just isn't apples and oranges - this is apples and the number i. Health coverage pays for your healthcare costs. Homeowners insurance pays for your possessions if they are damaged or stolen. Fire and police departments have nothing to do with this arguement.
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...dealing with the immediate problem, like emergency medical care? Let's say that I get shot in the leg and I have no insurance. The cop gets the bad guy, and I do what? I try to get it out myself and get an infection? I go to a free clinic and compete in line with the 45 million other uninsured people?
What if just emergency care were covered in a social program like fire and police? It's dealing with the immediate problem, which seems more than comparable to fire crime (firemen prevent the fire from getting worse, doctors prevent the wound from getting worse; firemen put out the fire, doctors clean and stitch the wound).
I'm wondering if you could sit down with a man that works two jobs and still can't afford health coverage and tell him, "You're SOL."
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Originally Posted by The_Jazz
Doctors are making less, but the reason for that has to do more with rising malpractice premiums, competition in the medical field and the application of simple economics to the equation (i.e., there's no need for a doctor to pull your ingrown toenail when a physicians assistant can do it for much cheaper) than a nefarious plot by the insurance industry. Whereas I twice had doctors work on my inflamed toe due to a nasty ingrown nail in the 90's, when it happened again 2 years ago, the nurse practioner took care of it and did a great job. My doctor spent 5 minutes checking her work and then went off to do something else. He didn't have a nurse practioner/physicians assistant 10 years ago.
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Oh comon. Let's leave the 'nefarious' language where it belongs: in threads about Bush.
Do you have statistical information available to you on this? I think it'd be really helpful. I know most doctors are against socialized medicine (and a lot of that has to do with the fact that they believe they'll be making a lot less and seeing a lot more patients, which is a big fat myth).
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Originally Posted by The_Jazz
New technologies cost more than I think you realize. The cutting edge machines can run into the millions of dollars now, but I'll conceed the point for the moment since it's not a huge part of my equation. Administration is another large cost, but no more so than in the past, even with HIPPA.
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I'm aware that the cost of these technologies is astronomical, but it was astronomical in the 80s and 90s, too. Expensive technology is hardly something new, and I have no information that tells me that technology now has become more expensive relative to inflation. A million dollar machine in the 80s may have a counterpart ( better replacement replacement) now, but it's basically the same when you adjust for inflation, according to my cardiologist.
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Originally Posted by The_Jazz
Malpractice insurance varies greatly from doctor to doctor. Some (usually general practicioners) buy it individually. Most buy it through a group or hospital. Malpractice coverage skyrocketed a few years ago for a few reasons, one of the chief ones being that some new models came out showing that claims were beginning to skyrocket. Illinois's largest malpratice carrier is a mutual (meaning it's owned by its insureds), and they had to charge a significant increase in order to stay solvent. The reason for the model changes came from the number of new malpractice claims out there as well as the higher verdict amounts. Many lawyers found some easy targets in the medical community, particularly among doctors with addiction problems. Whether the doctor did anything wrong or not started to become less relevant since a cocaine problem basically demonized the defendant from the start.
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I wonder if the better thing might be ceilings on malpractice suits imposed by the government. No one needs $15b because a doctor did his best but still couldn't save someone. I know a lot of doctors make mistakes, and it's important that the victims be taken care of, but what can a million dollars do for someone who's finger was put back on wrong?
I imagine this might be something we agree on. I'll have to check and see how malpractice is handled in France.
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Originally Posted by The_Jazz
will, I'm a liability broker. You're lucky that I know all the big words that I do. I can't fix anything because it's not something I have any hands-on knowledge about; ask me about fixing the 3rd party liability system and I can offer opinions until I'm blue in the face.
That qualifier firmly in place, I will venture to say that some of the uninsured are just dumb. I can't be any nicer than that because if you have the ability to buy health coverage and chose not to, I find that to be a completely selfish and frankly moronic decision. You may be young and healthy today, but that doesn't mean that a Flying Elvis isn't going to come hurtling out of the sky and break your pelvis or that you won't develop drug resistant TB because jackoff thought it was ok to fly internationally on your flight to Buenos Aires.
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I understand what you're saying, but I still can't bring myself to think that 45 million Americans don't buy insurance because they just don't feel like it. As a matter of fact, I'd guess that most of them can't afford it or have been denied. I feel deeply for them because, had it not been for positive circumstance, I would have been one who was not insured because my preexisting condition. If I hadn't been able to get a few scholarships, I'd be dirt poor. It's that small twist of fate that separates me from these 45 million. If you can't think of their situation, think of yours. Imagine if somehow you weren't able to afford medical care and something, god forbid, were to happen to you or your family. I would want a system in place that can deal with anything you can throw at it whether you're Bill Gates or a bum.
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Originally Posted by The_Jazz
That's not the position of the majority of uninsureds, however. For those who can't afford the coverage for whatever reason, I think that there needs to be an amalgom of forced placement and public subsidies. I imagine it working where the state pays the majority of the premium with the individual contributing what they can, possibly on a sliding scale. That doesn't work for the truly desititute, and I don't have a quick and easy solution for those.
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Single payer, sorta.
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Originally Posted by powerclown
Off your meds again, host?
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MM was right in Bowling, and that could have prevented the Virginia Tech shootings. MM was right about the Iraq War.
MM is right about this, there is a problem.