And if you believe that...check what the date is today...
I tried to do a light-hearted personal blog entry today to spread a little more awareness of the plight of chronically ill folks like moi...but I have one of my migraines of doom today and wasn't able to research my downloaded images for copyright, so I am just praying that if I violated anyone's they will just ask me to remove it or credit them (which I would of course do immediately.) Struggling to live on disability, I can't afford a team of lawyers, but sometimes I feel like we all really NEED a team of our own.
I have to admit I am actually getting a bit depressed. I see articles in various papers attacking even the suggestion of adding a government option to health insurance for the under-65s...and frankly what would save my life, and everyone in the mess I'm in, would be to have Medicare for All, without the corporate America options sucking up the money.
Oh, I get the screams in my ear. People do NOT trust the government. I wish I could get them to calm down and listen to the points I want to make...that at least with government we do have representatives, even if they should be better ones, and we do have a vote...and if we were under one plan that had, say, a nasty flaw, enough of us screaming about it would effect change. OTOH, should we be trusting our lives to large corporations? Even after the recent revelations about what a poor steward of even the economy they has been? Where are our representatives there? And it is the major stockholders who have the vote. And we are divided and conquered with the patchwork system.
If I hear one more thing about "waiting lists", "rationing", etc. in Canada and Britain et. al., I am going to puke. We have waiting lists here. We have rationing here. I've experienced both. But our media can't run around and find out who is suffering under every plan...it is a lot easier to report where there is one government plan. And our media is owned by large corporations and those in power in large corporations seem to be friends with a lot of those who are in power in other large corporations! Lastly, with the bleeding of money that is pouring into our health care system, more spent per capita than any other country, we would have the Super Deluxe Luxury Health Care System if we paid the same as we do now but under a cost-efficient system.
I'm personally sickened by the annual number of deaths in the country of citizens who could not obtain health coverage in time to save their lives. I'm also tired of seeing so many people having to fight with their insurance companies, often during the rare time off from work they have that they would really like to spend with their kids or use to get some exercise or sleep (all good for health improvement) for the care they need at a cost they can afford...and, of course, they don't always win their battles.
"Competition" didn't really appear. The market is so skewed by so many things, first and foremost by insurance companies being permitted to exclude many applicants based on pre-existing conditions and getting to charge very high premiums to others in the same boat. Then I can only assume there must be barriers to entry, such as prohibitive start-up costs for competing firms....could YOU start a health insurance company? How would you beat down the approximately 35% of administrative costs compared to Medicare's approximately 4%? How would you manage to spend so much on lobbyists, media campaigns, pharmaceuticals at American prices, all of the people who fight the doctor's recommendations to try and get cheaper recommendations, all of the people who fight paying your medical pills to try and beat the doctors and/or you down into accepting less payment from them, your executive salaries and perqs, your dividends, your masses and masses of paperwork...and still have much left over to pay for actual health care?
And how easy would it be to get the funds together to compete with the plans out there? How would you accept pre-existing conditions for a reasonable premium when no one else does...all the expensive patients would flock to you and you only, and drown your business plan. Oh, and what if you accidentally invested in some toxic investments...? I've heard of corporations buying things like bad mortgage loans...oops.
Medicare is expensive for the taxpayers. One reason is that it covers guess who? the elderly and the disabled. The $$$$ population. The healthier folks who can pay premiums are left for the corporations to gather like lovely wildflowers while the taxpayer gets to pay for all of us weeds ;) Seems a tad unfair to me, but an awful lot of people are passionately wedded to "private is always better than government." Well. It wasn't for Lehman Bros.
And private-public partnerships? How can they work if campaigns get funded by the privates? Kind of weighs the power on their side...and you get an atrocity like Medicare Part D. I'm about $5 away now from the Doughnut Hole of Death. I'm pretty stressed out about it. Part D, the insurance plan brought to you by Dante's Inferno. Abandon Hope all ye who enter there. I am under 65 so no Medigap for me; dual eligible so moved to MPD w/out choice. SSDI has protection from unintended harm from COLAs but not my SSDI. No one seems to care. Few even understand the terminology or care to learn.
In space no one can hear you scream!