This is getting very silly. The price of gas in this country follows the WORLD price of crude oil pretty well with some lag and of course, adjustments for things like a national/world recession.
Do you really think Obama has the power to raise the price of gas? How did he do that?
Rick
A friend was in Vietnam when he needed a crown replaced. He had it done for $50! If you needed that much work it would have been well worth it to go overseas to get it done.
In fact, I understand there is a booming business in Chennai India in doing all sorts of medical surgeries such as hip replacements. The stats on the quality of care does not significantly differ from here in the US and insurance companies will pay the bills 100% rather than having deductibles and copays. They also pay for the trip and accommodations until you can return home.
Rick
SPELL!!
The costs will show up on every statement you receive from the insurance company and the doctor or facility. So nothing will be hidden.
The important part is that once everyone is covered by insurance now one can say, "the uninsured are driving up the cost of medical care for the rest of us." That is what I mean by making the true costs visible.
Doctors run the medical system as a business for their benefit. They are in charge of most medical facilities, the AMA, the schools that produce (or better put limit production of) more doctors and have a heavy hand in insurance companies and government regulation of the industry. Of course they don't want the quality of care in this country to suffer, but that is secondary to their own profit.
Once we are all covered by insurance and all are getting the proper medical care we all need, then we can start to focus on making the care itself affordable. Certainly other countries have figured it out, but here we are manipulated to believing we have the best care and should not mess with something that works. The reality is that it isn't the best for those who can even get it and many just don't get it at all.
Rick
She was still the lowest priced doctor I could find. But later she had a family crisis and I felt the quality of care was declining so I went elsewhere.
That's what I'm trying to do. I want doctors to treat it as a commodity and compete on price just like any other commodity.
What that comment really of any value? BTW, it doesn't like "commoditized" either but doesn't offer any useful alternatives. But I got your point. That's the important part.
Rick
What is BNP ?
sorry, GNP, Gross national product
-Lasse
Wow! Did you come up with that all by yourself, Capt. Obvious? BTW, with the worldwide recession, oil prices should be *DOWN*.
By choking off present and future supply. Oil is extremely elastic.
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=20
That works for singular operations / surgeries. It does not work so well for an outpatient situation spread over several visits. Even going to Mexico likely would have saved money but would cost too much of my time and hassle.
?-/
Medicare
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Learn the point of disspelling.
=20
Bwahahahaha. I have never seen a comprehensive bill nor the final = payment even when i had serious surgeries (except for my implants). I still have no idea just what any lab test really costs. If you are getting that information treasure it, better still publish it, for the rest of us who don't get the costs.
=20
=20
Bwahahaha. The basic stuff may be partly covered, but when are the working poor going to get to go to the clinic? Bankers hours, remember? How many will face maybe losing their job because of no paid sick leave and worse?
You certainly have not thought this trough very well.
?-)
of
Damn, that is just plain nasty. Could be an iterative loop as well. =20
?-//
No increase this year. With the rebate I got from Blue Shield, last years increase amounted to 5%.
Needless to say I nearly needed to use my health insurance when I got a rebate. I never thought that day would come.
ses for the last 3 years.
Lucky.
Note: they won't blame increases on Obamacare, generally. Sebilius already sent a letter telling insurers she'd bankrupt anyone who did.
The rebate is actually bad--that's the insurer disgorging reserves, as required under the unAffordable Care Act, but which previously provided security against claims / a guarantee of the insurer's solvency.
-- Cheers, James Arthur
With guaranteed issue, we're all mostly better off gaming the system. The penalty is a lot cheaper than buying Obamacarp, for individuals and employers alike. It's the perfect opportunity to make others pay your fare, and the law encourages it.
Those certainly are the talking points. Mostly wrong, but popular.
-- Cheers, James Arthur
I'm not sure what you are saying, but I think you are suggesting that you would be better off paying the penalty for not having insurance and getting insurance if and when you need it. In reality this is a very dangerous thing to try. There are any number of illnesses that are very serious and need immediate treatment. You don't get insurance at the drop of a hat. It takes weeks or even months to get signed up. In the meantime you could be paying out of pocket for very expensive treatments.
Still, that is a choice.
Just saying an argument is wrong is not of much value. Care to actually contribute something substantive rather than just, "no, that's wrong"?
Rick
=20
You clearly do not understand what talking points are about. They basically are: setting up "straw dogs" pretending that they are the oppositions "points"; knocking them down to "show" that your "program" is better (brushing off that those same "straw dogs" usually apply equally = to discredit your program); then proclaim that your "program" is thus necessary.
Go get some brain rinse.
?-)
e
Yes, that's what I'm saying. It's cheaper for individuals not to buy it, and for employers to not provide insurance.
Under Obamacare's free-lunch theory--which is what Obamacare is-- insurers can't refuse you, the gov't promises to provide coverage to employees that are dumped, so individuals can and should game it, and employers too.
And they will.
yhe
Oh pooh. What good would Obamacare be if you had to wait months and months and perish first? Do you really propose that Kathleen Sebelius would let insurers effectively avoid the guaranteed-issue mandate by ignoring pre-existing life-threatening conditions? That pretty would pretty well gut the whole pretext for forcing Obamacare on everyone, wouldn't it?.
e yWe've beat it to death here in sed, with loads of references. Maybe it's your task to support your argument before making it?
The truth is that uninformed people have been told that all sorts of manipulated numbers--such as our life expectancy at birth, or the World Health Organization's ranking of how socialized America's medicine is--are proxies for health care quality, without understanding that these are /not/ proxies for quality.
When you examine actual outcomes for actual medical conditions, America's medical care is superb, better even for our poor than for other countries' better off, despite the disparities that exist in every country.
~~~
Obamacare's based on the premise that mandating more services to more people can be made cheaper by federal decree, and hundreds of billions annually in federal subsidies. Only the people who don't understand it believe in it.
One of their mechanisms for "savings" is to simply declare Medicare reimbursement rates will be half or so--substantially lower than Medicaid's, eventually. Ta-da!
It's not cheaper, you can't keep your policy, you can't keep your doctor, and 2/3rds of America will quickly lose their current coverage, the coverage they liked, that Obama said they can keep.
It's happening already. miso's insurer's rates have been skyrocketing, even if not for him personally, yet. And employers are starting to realize they'll have to dump people in droves to survive.
That is until he pulled out his powerpoint showing how funding Obamacare will cut his--and likely their--profits in half overnight. With simple math the small business folks understood, he spelled out that their only choice is to slash employee hours so they aren't eligible for company-paid health care or stop offering insurance and pay the $2,000 per employee fine."
"I haven't met a thinking person who believes it can work." --Sen. Bob Corker
-- Cheers, James Arthur
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