Ezra Klein: You Have No Idea What Health Costs

[ehrnst]

If You Did, You Might Just Want Real Reform

<snip>
The most important health-care document released this week was not Sen. Max Baucus's Healthy Future Act. It was the Kaiser Family Foundation's 2009 Employer Benefits Survey.

While the proposal by Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, outlines a direction for policy, the survey, which polls employers about health benefits to assemble a detailed look at the actual cost of health care, fits it squarely in our pocketbooks.

The truth is we all pay, and much more than we recognize, for health care. </snip>

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/19/AR2009091900112.html

[sui generis]

1. We're all so fucking confused

we want healthcare, we want insurance reform, we want healthcare reform, we want no new taxes, we want no additional budget requirement, we have no idea what we want.

50 million people don't have access to healthcare. Let's solve this one first, by itself. Of those 50 million people not everyone will require access to healthcare in the first 12 months of the program. Let's talk real numbers instead of bullshit scare numbers.

Primary Health Care insurance is a corrupt for profit-institution who has it's hand so far up our electorates ass you can see how many fingers they're holding up, and that includes both parties. Primary Health Care insurers need to be removed from the political equation; they believe they have a greater right to profit than you have to breathe.

Government does not compete using collective bargaining for price management. This bill insists we pay private insurers enough to guarantee their profits, shamelessly. Have we lost our damn mind? Is this the best we could do? It's shameful.

Your employer has a right to see and share your health care records with any "business affiliate". Nothing changes under Baucus. You still sign away your rights to privacy as soon as you sign your job application, including what amounts to a waiver of HIPAA. We still enshrine health discrimination in our business process, and adding fines and mandates does nothing to change this sick component of the business world.

P.S. HIPAA has only ever successfully prosecuted in something like 4 cases since its inception, with tens of thousands of cases filed.

The Baucus plan is deeply, deeply flawed, and a conciliatory, idiotic proposal. We NEED to make healthcare global, and taxed, not insured. Fine, keep insurance as the "private option", but make the "public option" our mainstay, instead of flipping it around.

Who cares if health care insurers collapse. Saving them is like trying to save the grandfather clock when godzilla is chasing all the villagers down the street. If you stop to save the grandfather clock, you will die, for something that doesn't need saving and doesn't compare to human health. Insurance company health should not be an issue in health care reform.

If all the healthy people we're insuring privately are paying public option "taxes" the healthcare program can't operate at a deficit, and won't require risk pool congregation or "premiums". Choose your deductions and exemptions on your W-4.

The insurance companies are the ones that need to adjust, not our expectations of healthcare.

That would be real leadership but Obama is a mush mouth and Baucus is a corporate tool, and even if it miraculously passes will be a resounding disaster for our party in the first year. Why can't our people be smarter?

[xchrom]

2. ...

:applause:

[AmericaForgotus]

4. Yes!

I am so with you there! Medical care should NOT be for Profit!

[stray cat]

3. we want everything but others to pay instead of ourselves