For several months I've been hearing about Rahm Emanuel's brother, Ezikiel, who is a physician. He has been promoting a voucher system which clearly (to me, anyway) seems designed to split America into two groups, the healthy and the sick. The healthy may be able to pay for high deductible care via a voucher, but that care falls into the trap that all consumer driven health care plans do, in that it does nothing to control costs except withhold care. SO, families end up trapped, theoretically paying for, but still unable to afford basic medical care. And the sick can't pay for insurance with the voucher, at all.
Why do we keep coming back to see politicians ditching the sickest?
One aspect of their approaches is particularly disturbing- In the bewilderness of plans- collective punishment of all members for sick people's costs seems to keep cropping up again and again. Without constant vigilance, "our" Dems are often reverting to acting just like the GOP in this respect. An unwillingness to make the profit mad insurance companies "optional" and America's health "mandatory" is at the root of this problem. To paraphrase an old anti-drug ad, living with the insurance companies and their demands is a bit like having a monkey on your back. And its NOT "cute".
A few months ago, I watched a great movie "The Experiment". The German film was a thought provoking dramatization of a real-life social science experiment done decades ago, the Stanford Prison Experiment.
The Stanford Prison Experiment and several similar experiments like it, showed psychologists and those who study the dynamics of groups how people - not criminals, everyday people, can be put into conditions that make them behave like animals to other people. Any health care system that America adopts needs to examine all of the implications of its structure to "insure" that we don't create a monster.
Instead, we choose, involuntarily, the insurance trap - as long as we preserve the insurance companies as our model of success. They are NOT successful, because they kill people needlessly. Because that's how they make a profit. And they must make a profit, under public option, vouchers, co-ops - all must make a profit on the backs of the sick.
As long as having healthcare depends on people purchasing insurance - the private default or the public "option", many people will fall through the cracks. Even with vouchers, many wont be able to afford adequate insurance, because the uncovered, or inadequately covered, doctors visits and prescription drugs they need will suck their income away.
THEY will do the math and see that even if they can afford one of the cheaper public options, say a high deductible catastrophic plan, the high co pays and deductibles will still act to prevent them from getting medical care when they need it.
Why can't you all do this calculation yourself, and see that if you get sick, these high deductible plans will suck away money you will need to buy drugs and instead, spend it on insuring hospitals AGAINST YOU. You may never need the insurance, but you do need ongoing doctors care so you can get prescriptions, even if nothing changes, thats the way it is, and you need to pay for prescriptions. So you will end up bankrupt.
Any plan that does not have a cap on uncovered costs FOR PEOPLE AT ALL INCOME LEVELS is wrong. Nomatter how it is structured.
You know the old saying "With friends like those, who needs enemies"? There is a very real danger of the government, in its attempt to solve the various problems that the insurance and healthcare industries, hospitals, and citizens are suffering from, may make the wrong tradeoffs and make many people's situations worse.
Obama and insurance companies seem particularly concerned about the huge number of uninsured people with no assets showing up in emergency rooms in a health crisis at hospitals, this is called the free rider problem-
Well, how do they get in that situation? They end up in a crisis because THEY CANT AFFORD TO GO TO THE DOCTOR AND THEY CAN'T AFFORD TO BUY DRUGS THEY NEED.
Single payer would address this problem- Obama's public bewilderness or Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel's vouchers would not, because the chronically ill could not buy comprehensive care they needed, only high deductible care and then they wont be able to afford to go to the doctor or buy drugs that would only be prescribed by doctors in those doctor visits. And, because of the ack of cost control, subsidies would not be able to cover most of those who needed the care the most, only the very poor. People would then become poor because of their lack of access to medical care. People who were managing fairly well would continue to fall into medical hell. With no help from this administration, only a sentence to more decades of hell.
Just because somebody makes 20 or 30 thousand dollars a year doesn't mean that they can afford the often thousands of dollars a month that insurance for them and their chronic illness would cost.
These are the people that single payer saves from death, Obama's confusing variety of plans all have a single common denominator, they punish the victims, not the perpetrators of the extortion.
Its about time we turn this situation around and stop rewarding the criminals and start solving problems in ways that we KNOW work.
How we can easily pay for health care for all!
Important: We would pay FAR LESS THAN WE ARE PAYING NOW!
This is from:
http://www.pnhp.org/...
"Won’t this raise my taxes?
Currently, about 60% of our health care system is financed by public money: federal and state taxes, property taxes and tax subsidies. These funds pay for Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, coverage for public employees (including police and teachers), elected officials, military personnel, etc. There are also hefty tax subsidies to employers to help pay for their employees’ health insurance. About 20% of health care is financed by all of us individually through out-of-pocket payments, such as co-pays, deductibles, the uninsured paying directly for care, people paying privately for premiums, etc. Private employers only pay 21% of health care costs. In all, it is a very "regressive" way to finance health care, in that the poor pay a much higher percentage of their income for health care than higher income individuals do.
A universal public system would be financed in the following way: The public funds already funneled to Medicare and Medicaid would be retained. The difference, or the gap between current public funding and what we would need for a universal health care system, would be financed by a payroll tax on employers (about 7%) and an income tax on individuals (about 2%). The payroll tax would replace all other employer expenses for employees’ health care, which would be eliminated. The income tax would take the place of all current insurance premiums, co-pays, deductibles, and other out-of-pocket payments. For the vast majority of people, a 2% income tax is less than what they now pay for insurance premiums and out-of-pocket payments such as co-pays and deductibles, particularly if a family member has a serious illness. It is also a fair and sustainable contribution.
Currently, 47 million people have no insurance and hundreds of thousands of people with insurance are bankrupted when they have an accident or illness. Employers who currently offer no health insurance would pay more, but those who currently offer coverage would, on average, pay less. For most large employers, a payroll tax in the 7% range would mean they would pay slightly less than they currently do (about 8.5%). No employer, moreover, would gain a competitive advantage because he had scrimped on employee health benefits. And health insurance would disappear from the bargaining table between employers and employees.
Of course, the biggest change would be that everyone would have the same comprehensive health coverage, including all medical, hospital, eye care, dental care, long-term care, and mental health services. Currently, many people and businesses are paying huge premiums for insurance so full of gaps like co-payments, deductibles and uncovered services that it would be almost worthless if they were to have a serious illness."