In article ,
bud-- wrote:


So conservatives are prone to believe incredibly stupid ideas like
"death panels"?
Death panels exist and have for years. Heck, look at Oregon's Medicaid
program. They are the poster children for "good" health care rationing.
They have a certain amount of money to spend, a list of priorities and
when the money is gone it is gone. Whenever an Oregon health reporter
gets lazy and wants an easy tear jerker, they go find a cancer patient.
If you don't have above a certain likelihood that you will survive five
years, you don't get the treatment. Then the Oregon reporters note that
the Evil Pharmaceutical companies step in and give the person treatment.


The founding fathers never intended we have an air force or regulate the
airwaves.
Air force I might give you. It can be argued the only thing that they
called for was a standing Navy. Of course, the other side is that they
did not specifically ban and did give the Commander in Chief wide
latitude on purpose. Regulation of airwaves is a bogus argument (no
matter who makes it) since again, there was quite a bit of lattitude in
allowed under the Interstate Commerce Clause.


Probably not many people know that insuring preexisting conditions
requires a major change, like everyone having insurance.
No, it doesn't. You could have just as easily set things up as they
are now with groups. If you have insurance (or had within a certain
period) you are covered immediately. If not, then it gets sticky, but
seems at least as good a way to cover people.
Actually in MA under their current program, there is a line of studies
showing that people are coming into and out of the program as needed.
Seems that enforcement in real life is not viable.


Or that uninsured people still get health care - at emergency rooms.
Often more expensive than ordinary care would have been, and generally
paid for by others in medical costs. Estimates I have heard are
$1000/year for the rest of us. It is one of the reasons to try to insure
everyone.
Yet there are a long line of studies (from at least the mid-80s) that
show people with regular insurance use the ERs just as much, if not more
in some series, as those without insurance or with MCaid. The main thing
with ERs is open later so they don't have to miss work.



The health care bill is still substantially free market. There is no
"public option".

And the free market has worked so well up to now.
What we have now is not even remotely related to free
markets. First of all, as has been shown by the Annual Health Care
Expenditures study (put out by the Office of Actuary of Medicare but
covering everything.. BTW: The new is due out in a couple of weeks), you
don't pay all that much of the costs. Over the last 20 or so years, this
study has shown that less than 20% of all healthcare costs come from
pocket (and that includes the out-of-pocket expense of the premiums).
Nothing that is subsidized oer 80% by someone else is remotely free
market. Add in the fact that payor of services (your company or federal
programs) is divorced from the user of services (you and me) and makes
the problems even worse. Which, is further exacerbated by the fact that
since the subsidy is so heavy, we over consume to "not leave anything on
the table" at the end of year. There are more reasons why I keep saying
we should actually TRY free markets before we shut down. Lord knows,
there is nothing remotely resembling a free market in what we see, now.


Wouldn't have happened if the republicans had not required a 60% vote
to make anything happen.

Revisionist history yet again. The Dems major problems were within
their party. They couldn't get enough Dems to vote for it. They had an
absolute, filibuster-proof majority for most of the first two years and
couldn't get it through. The buying of the Dem Senators was to get the
Dems to vote for it, not because of anything the GOP was doing.




The only practical way you can eliminate "preexisting conditions" is for
everyone to have insurance.
See above. Unless you are going to send the IRS guys out to bring in
people and talk some sense into them, the everyone having insurance is
just a pipedream. MA shows us that.




Does the CBO know how much can be saved by innovation? NO.
So they make estimates. It is what the CBO does.
Interesting studies suggest that the CBO doesn't do all that good of
a job estimating. Back at least as far as the original MCare which was
past 10 year spending within 6 years.


You can put more money into catching crooks. (More money for catching
tax frauds would also make more money than it costs.)
The FBI was given enough money a few years ago to hire a bunch of agents
specifically tasked to MCare Fraud. Not a lot of good luck so far. This
is one of those things that the politicians have been chasing since at
least the mid-70s with little or no long term success. Too much money
floating around not to be syphoned off. This failure is pretty much
bipartisan.


Even with whatever fraud there is, most people would say medicare is a
good program with low overhead. The "public option" would be similar to
medicare. If medicare is so bad why did republicans oppose the "public
option"? Obviously the public option shouldn't be able to compete with
free markets.
Another untruth. There is a myth floating around that Mcare has this
really small number for administration. This is taking the part that
Mcare spends on its own staff, Congressional workers, some research and
looking over the shoulders of the Fiscal Intermediaries (FI). The FI
(EDS, the Blues, etc) are the ones that do the heavy lifting of actually
paying and processing claims and doing most of the reports. If you
factor in what the FIs are paid, the low overhead largely goes away.

--
"Even I realized that money was to politicians what the ecalyptus tree is to koala bears: food, water, shelter and something to crap on."
---PJ O'Rourke