ABC ..The President and health Care.

[goGopherBill]

Did you watch?
Do you Care?
What did you think?

Notice the media all over the SC governor?

Meanwhile the president and ABC gets over an hour to sell government health care.

My take..

PURE DEMOCRATIC BS.

1. The pres mentions MEDICARE and says CHANGE was slow to get that program started and DEBATE was against it.
TRUE ,, because the program is 1 TRILLION DOLLARS underfunded and abuses abound within the program.
GOVERNMENT CANNOT FUND THIS PROGRAM.

2. Obama talked about end of life scenarios at great lengths..all those white people getting hip replacements with terminal cancer.

NOT 1 question about .."so we should just quit giving care to the terminally ill cause it cost too much?"
GREAT DEMOCRATIC COMPASSION.

3. Not much talk about Government rules and regulations on the common folks THAT WILL BE IMPLEMENTED..
Think Tobacco tax on fast food...sugar food..anything that consumers don't think about...
You will have NO SAY.

4. NOT 1 word about all those poor uninsured inner city people that will now get everything for free.The ones that voted over 85% for him on promises to screw the rich and give to the POOR.
How will they help repay another ENTITLEMENT?


Enough is enough.
FREE everything..just to get ELECTED.

meanwhile just rip GOP on personal issues and go after PALIN and her kids.

GREAT DEMOCRATIC PARTY AT WORK.

meanwhile since R and others will want to know..


are you better off today than when BUSH was president?

Feel safer..?
does the world love us more?

is inflation tame...the wiretap program GONE?
The wars ended?

meanwhile the DEMS screw over the country with their money scandals while you sheep focus on an extramarital deal.
Burris keeps his job..ACORN gets to count AMERICA..BARNEY really gets a FREE RIDE ..BECAUSE HE IS GAY..DODD because he is DODD..

Murtha because he is MURTHA.


My sheep are smarter than democratic voters.

[hammer]

From Obama's viewpoint, the ABC show allowed him to present his health care ideas without any medical expert debating him one on one. Good idea if you can get away with it.

Obama's premise is that by expanding government control of health care we can bring down costs. Cost controls would come from things such as preventive care and adoption of electronic health records. Unfortunately, neither of these will lead to any significant reduction in spending according to the Congressional Budget Office.

What is buried deep in the proposed medical bills (Senate and House) are the use of a "Medical Advisory Council" and a "Federal Health Board" to both determine what medical products and services are essential benefits and compare similar medical treatments to steer reimbursement to lower-cost options. So what our government will do is turn to the familiar tool of all nationalized health care plans -- the regulation of access to drugs and medical services. Medicare's recent decisions to curtail use of virtual colonoscopies, specific wound healing devices, and branded asthma drugs provide ample evidence that reduction or delay of medical services is inevitable.

The use of controlling boards that make unpopular decisions on access and price isn't a new idea. It is the pervasive way that countries like Germany and France layer in bureaucracy to delay adoption of medical products and services, which ultimately lowers costs. France, for example, has its "Committee for the Evaluation of Medicines" and the "National Union of Sickness Insurance Funds", which regulate medical procedures and physician salaries.

So bottomline, if our goverment ends up playing a large role in health care, we can expect rationing and delaying tactics as a means of controlling costs. We can also expect more levels of health care bureaucracy, a slowing of medical research, and a nationwide reduction in doctors per capita.

[goGopherBill]

I watched..

ABC did a good job in questioning and not allowing a totally free OBAMA campaign speech.

It didn't allow questioning about where it has worked or why the millions of illegals are driving cost up..it was all about the end of life.

The cost is way more than he says ..and unions wont beTAXED on their benefits..just everybody else.

[hammer]

I believe one of Obama's campaign promises was to not tax anyone's health care benefits. Looks like he is breaking that promise. And, as you point out, Dems want to give unions a special exemption. Just what we need, more loopholes in the tax structure.

[Deleted]

I don't understand, hammer. Isn't what you describe exactly what HMOs do?

If you're going to have health insurance, someone is going to have to manage it. The question is, do we really want Corporate America charging whatever they want to charge? Do we want the profit motive to be the guiding light? Maybe _we_ do. I'm just asking.

Now, if you're just talking about people paying for whatever they can afford -- leaving health coverage out of it -- that's a separate issue. And if you can't afford medical care at all, tough luck. Is that what we want?

[bunnywailer]

Health care is totally GWB's fault. If he didn't get us involve in that stupid war in Iraq, we'd have so much more money to pay for all the health care we need. Everyone would have healthcare if it weren't for Iraq.

[hammer]

Jun 25, 2009 15:09:42 GMT -5 @ruffda said:

I don't understand, hammer. Isn't what you describe exactly what HMOs do?

If you're going to have health insurance, someone is going to have to manage it. The question is, do we really want Corporate America charging whatever they want to charge? Do we want the profit motive to be the guiding light? Maybe _we_ do. I'm just asking.

Now, if you're just talking about people paying for whatever they can afford -- leaving health coverage out of it -- that's a separate issue. And if you can't afford medical care at all, tough luck. Is that what we want?

I agree to a point. HMOs, PPOs, non-profit clinics, company sponsored Total Health Plans are all part of the nationwide managed health care system, and they do attempt to limit care for various reasons. One of the biggest of these is government reimbursement (both state and federal) for emergency care and Medicaid services. Many also overprescribe (to collect fees) or overtest patients due to litigation concerns, so that adds cost.
However, many of the managed care providers have very good appeals processes so that patients have a way to obtain needed care if they think services have been unjustly denied.

There are a number of studies that indicate that the best medical care comes from the small single provider offices because the doctor in charge is intimately involved with his/her patients and solely manages office staff (nurses/receptionists/etc). So in a sense, the larger the organization (or more levels of bureaucracy) the chance for quality care decreases.