Tonight's Debate
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Tonight's Debate
| Tue, 10-07-2008 - 10:21pm |
is anyone watching the debate? What do you think so far? Who is 'winning'? They don't seem to be answering many audience questions.
| Tue, 10-07-2008 - 10:21pm |
is anyone watching the debate? What do you think so far? Who is 'winning'? They don't seem to be answering many audience questions.
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They will pay a *small tax* on that which is incentive for them to *offer* it at a reduced rate. Obama’s plan EXCEEDS McCains’ for the reasons I just wrote (no need to retype) and people will lose money under his plan as I just outlined – right now *health care* is a HUGE concern and his option is far better than McCain’s. You cannot get it all and this makes the most sense.
Not really answering my question .... why should it be the obligation of any private entity to pay for health insurance for anyone?
Just heard a funny line on Lou Dobbs .... it seems JM wants to give people free houses and BO wants to give them free health care.
*why do I need to pay the city of Los Angeles* $$ every 3 months to park on my own street?
Can I demand that I don't pay my parking and have my car towed away.
No. It won't. What you apparently don't realize is that the costs of that sort of person - whom I'm guessing you're hoping would somehow stay uninsured or have to figure it out somehow from their own pockets, etc - are already figured into the cost of care. Someone just a couple of posts ago was wondering why medical procedures cost so much in the US. And the answer - among other things - is that hospitals and doctors bill what they can to people (or, more precisely, to insurance companies) who can afford it, because they know that they will often be either having to take medicare or medicaid payments which are far below market value OR (and this is the largest part of it) treating the uninsured, whose ability to pay on their own is either low or nonexistent.
With 47 million people in this country uninsured, do you think those people simply don't get care? Because that's just not the case. They DO get care....but usually, since they can't actually PAY for the care out-of-pocket (since they lack insurance), they let conditions slide, often to the point of becoming emergencies, hoping that they'll just "go away" on their own. When those conditions (whatever they are) don't just "go away," but instead become acute or emergent, these people then head for the nearest county ER, where they will be treated by the most expensive, least effective (in terms of prevention) medical care in the country. And, because they can't pay, the county - and thus the taxpayers - are stuck with the bill, which is often many times more than it would have been to treat these same people with primary or preventive care before problems arose, or just afterwards.
Do you understand the concept of insurance, as it was originally intended? At its most basic, the idea is that if you take a large enough group, although the likelihood that a given catastrophic event (say, a rare disease or debilitating car accident requiring a lot of care) remains very low for each individual, the chances that SOMEONE in that large group will be unfortunate enough to experience it becomes a near-certainty. So the actuary's job is to figure out how many people out of __X__ will have such a thing happen to them...and what the average cost is to deal with it. Then, they split that cost over the entire group. The theory is that it's better to pay a small amount of money, along with everyone else, so that if you happen to be so unfortunate that you are that person with the catastrophic event, the money is there for YOU to use. And if you're lucky and nothing bad happens to you, then your small amount of money goes to the person who DOES need it because they're the one the catastrophe happened to.
If we agree that these people who get diagnosed with a serious condition are going to receive treatment anyway, often at many times the cost (because it's in an emergency room), then it doesn't add an enormous burden to the system if they can pay a premium and receive care. The insurance companies are supposed to factor that into their modeling. But, make no mistake about it, either way, we pay -- whether through premiums, or through increased taxes due to unrecovered costs for treating people "for free" at government expense.
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