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Talullahhound
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Interesting Commentary
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Date:
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11/16/2009 1:15:58 PM
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on Health Care. This was in Sunday's Birmingham News.
URL: http://blog.al.com/birmingham-news-commentary/2009/11/very_best_care_in_the_world_is.html
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| Name: |
Summer Lover
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Interesting Commentary
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Date:
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11/16/2009 1:40:31 PM
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And of great concern to all of us who have followed the healthcare debate. She makes the very good point that when you have group coverage through your place of employment, your employer covers - much of the time - a very substantial part of your premiums. My wife's employer sends a statement out each year that shows what they paid for benefits, and the health insurance costs are enough to kill smaller or low margin businesses. Healthcare is expensive, and for anyone to provide insurance to everyone, you will have a majority of the people who contribute far more than they would ever use. Whether it is public or private, the numbers just will not be "fair". The taxpayers can pay FAR more in taxes to a Government agency that is as efficient as uh.... the Government; or FAR more in premiums to a private company that may or may not be run efficiently, these will be our choices to get close to "universal coverage".
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| Name: |
Talullahhound
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| Subject: |
Interesting Commentary
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Date:
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11/16/2009 5:20:47 PM
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What I thought was interesting was how a single person can go from having the coverage they need to being in serious trouble in a few years. It made me stop and think.
I'm not optimistic about anything I've heard about the Health care bill. I suspect it will fall short of helping those that really need the help, while the costs will continue to mount.
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MartiniMan
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Interesting Commentary
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Date:
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11/16/2009 5:44:08 PM
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I sympathize with her plight but she made a very bad decision not to find a job where she would be eligible for group health insurance. She would not have been denied coverage.
Also, if we had sensible insurance reform she would not be stuck only with those insurers that are licensed in Alabama. She would be able to buy her health insurance across state lines and might be able to join coops that once again use the power of large groups to avoid denial.
If she thinks having the government decide whether she gets her drug or not is going to be the solution to all her problems she needs to do a little more research. She will find that she will have zero alternatives and when some bureaucrat decides she is too old or the treatment doesn't meet their cost-benefit analysis. Where will she go then? To whom will she turn? She will have no alternatives but to live with their decision...or in this case die with it.
Her plight is truly heartbreaking but when she makes her appeal for a government solution I can only say she is barking up the wrong tree.
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water_watcher
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A potential solution
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Date:
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11/17/2009 6:57:36 AM
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The one thing that seems to be a major flaw in both the scocialist proposal and what the republicans offer as alternatives is the need to separate health insurance from the employer.
You do not get your car insurance or homeowners insurance from your employer.
I realize that historically that has been a "benefit" an employer would offer and many have used benefits over time to attract the best talent, but also keep an employee locked or think twice before theyleave to go to a competitor.
A much better option would be to allow employees select and purchase their own insurance ... get out of the group insurance concepts which favors the largest employers and penalizes small employers or forces them in to the disasterous "government option".
Employers could easily provide a health insurance credit. Government could require insurance companies to offer 3 to 5 "standard" insurance packages that they could design and mandate no one can be turned down for these packages.
The insurance companies would price and compete on the standard packages ... then offer their own hybrid packages to allow them to differentiate between competitors provided the hybrid policies at least include the standard coverage.
We do not need the type bill that is floating in congress ... and we definitely do not need a "government option". In our society, government should not run anything that competes with free enterprise. That is down right nuts.
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| Name: |
Talullahhound
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| Subject: |
A potential solution
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Date:
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11/17/2009 11:08:51 AM
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You are right. I think in the past when the majority of people stayed with one company for their entire career, it made sense for people to get health care as part of their benefits -- but since careers may now involve numerous employers and periods of self employment, making it part of one's job benefit doesn't really make a lot of sense.
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| Name: |
Talullahhound
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| Subject: |
Interesting Commentary
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Date:
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11/17/2009 11:12:20 AM
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I don't believe that the government option will solve her problems either.
I don't believe in a government option.
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| Name: |
Barneget
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Interesting Commentary
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Date:
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11/17/2009 6:53:34 PM
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The House Bill includes $600 BILLION over 10 years to address racial and cultural disparities.
From Politico, 2 weeks ago...... At that time, copied all but the link, and not registered so I can't get into the archives.
Caucuses address racial disparities
By: Nia-Malika Henderson
November 2, 2009 04:55 AM EST
After years of falling short, Del. Donna Christensen (D-Virgin Islands) and the House’s three minority caucuses finally achieved success in adding to the House reform bill billions in federal aid to fix racial disparities in health care.
But that was the easy part.
Now Christensen knows they will have to fight to protect the funding in a bruising House-Senate conference, where negotiators will be looking to trim every dollar they can to keep costs down. And the Senate bills, in particular the Finance Committee version, are far less generous in fixing disparities than is the House bill.
On Thursday, Christensen picked up an ally — President Barack Obama — who told the caucuses in a White House meeting that he’ll back some items they’re seeking in the final bill and that he wanted to review others.
“We have the provisions in the bill, and we are continuing to work on members of the Senate to have them understand how important it is,” said Christensen, co-chairwoman of the Health and Wellness Task Force for the Congressional Black Caucus.
“We are concerned, but we figure if we have the president to weigh in on our side, they have a better chance of staying in, and we have asked the president as we go through conference to weigh in on the side of health equity.”
“There are initiatives that are in the House bill, like work force issues, linguistic competence, cultural training and the collection of data, that are points of worry in making it into final [legislation],” said Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), who is co-chairman of the Progressive Caucus and a member of the Hispanic Congressional Caucus. “It worries me a lot that the Senate is giving it minimal priority.”
The quest to correct racial disparities in health care — differences in the level and quality of treatment between whites and minorities — hasn’t been a focus of the health reform debate. But advocates are hoping to use the nearly trillion-dollar effort to remake the U.S. health care system to fix some of the inequities, by sending billions in federal aid to boost community hospitals, local clinics and other programs.
Obama himself hasn’t made fixing the disparities a major feature of his health reform pitch, speaking about it mainly in front of minority audiences, in speeches to the NAACP and a Congressional Black Caucus dinner. The White House convened a conference on fixing racial disparities last summer featuring health reform czar Nancy-Ann DeParle and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. And on Monday, Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett will host an online health care chat about how the legislation affects minority communities.
Advocates point out that any broad-based effort to expand affordability and access to health insurance through either a public plan or greater competition with the private sector will help all Americans. But they say there are specific obstacles to care in some communities — everything from cultural and language barriers to a lack of high-quality facilities — that need to be addressed.
An HHS report earlier this year found that blacks, Hispanics and Asians are less likely to have access to health care. Minorities get preventive treatment and managed care less often than do whites and suffer higher death rates from diseases like breast cancer, colon cancer and diabetes.
In addition, more than a quarter of blacks and half of Hispanics don’t have a regular doctor, resulting in more visits to the emergency room.
Now advocates see good news and bad news in the reform bills making their way through Congress.
In the House bill and Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee bill, advocates see an array of community-based programs, data collection, language training and diversity initiatives that they say will go a long way toward closing racial, ethnic, gender and regional health care gaps.
The House bill released Thursday calls for a $12 billion increase over the next five years in funding for community health centers and $1.1 billion to fund a national prevention strategy, with reducing health care disparities as a major focus, as well as grants for health empowerment zones. The bill also includes millions of dollars in grants for community health workers in underserved communities and programs for reducing infant mortality and for starting school-based health care clinics.
Yet, the Senate Finance Committee bill has few provisions for addressing health care disparities. It doesn’t include funding for cultural and linguistic competency for providers, an approach to care that health care advocates think is key to delivering quality health care, or a specific fund for collecting and analyzing disparity data.
And according to a study by Community Catalyst, a national health care advocacy group, the finance bill could require low-income people to pay more than the other bills would because of a more limited expansion of Medicaid.
So making sure funding to fix health care disparities — estimated to cost almost $60 billion a year by a recent study — survives the budget ax will be a matter of concern when a handpicked conference committee hashes out the details of a final bill in coming weeks.
“Doing nothing to address health inequities is expensive. And given that people of color are a growing share of the U.S. population, it’s imperative — both for the nation’s health and economic growth — that we prioritize eliminating health inequities,” said Brian Smedley, vice president and director of the Health Policy Institute at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.
More recently, the administration has focused on health care as a women’s issue, and the White House said that Obama understands that addressing inequities is part and parcel of reform.
“The president has made it clear that he is committed to making it easier to identify health care disparities, and with the health insurance reform, we will work to close them. It is a step that is long overdue,” said Linda Douglass, a White House spokeswoman. “The president understands that underserved communities need more quality care, more primary care and more preventive services, and that is a part of all the bills.”
Douglass declined to go into specifics about provisions that Obama supports. One provision — including American territories in a proposed health exchange in which the public would shop for insurance — got backing from the White House, Christensen said, which she interpreted as a sign that Obama is willing to put some muscle behind other key provisions.
Congressional members and advocates who pushed for addressing health care disparities are jockeying for a voice and a vote in the conference committee that produces the final bill, which will be decided by party leaders on each side.
“In the House, communities are reflected in the members. Who is on the Senate side who can do that?” said Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.), chairman of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. He added that the caucuses are asking Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to take up the fight for the funding in the upcoming conference.
“We are talking to him and told him that the health disparities should be recognized, and he said he understood,” Honda sa
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| Name: |
Talullahhound
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| Subject: |
Interesting Commentary
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Date:
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11/18/2009 8:13:50 AM
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I love it when they try to correct all of societal ills in one swoop. This is why they never get anything done. Because they "load on".
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