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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAndrew Sullivan: This is not about Obamacare.
I thought this was spot on, and wanted to share for the masses on DU
http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/09/27/how-to-think-about-obamacare/ (more at link, also, from Gruber, Romneycare creator)
The thing that staggers me about the Republican hatred of this law is its abstract quality. They never address the real problem of our massively inefficient private healthcare market, which is a huge burden on the economy. They never address how to help the millions of uninsured adults get the care all human beings need. They appear to regard a Heritage Foundation, free-market-designed, private healthcare exchange system as some kind of communist plot. They do not seem to believe there is any pressing problem at all. And they have nothing constructive to offer.
This is not about Obamacare. It is not even about politics. It is about a form of revolt against the very country they live in. - Andrew Sullivan
Get it here -> http://www.zazzle.com/youre_not_in_the_1_why_vote_like_you_are_bumpe_bumper_sticker-128479630785214922?rf=238107662556833486
dkf
(37,305 posts)How can we escape an obviously screwed up system when the government now tells us we must all be a part of it?
It sounds like new models are about to emerge, like paying a doctor a retainer and then no one is concerned about billing. Doctors are sick of the system too.
Obama glammed on to and perpetuates this ridiculousness. It would have been smarter to create something outside the system to provide care for those who can't get it. It shows no imagination, no vision.
Bernie Sanders would have gotten closer to getting this right I bet.
LuvNewcastle
(16,847 posts)to the bill before he would support it. Wasn't it something about building 10,000 clinics across the country? Has anyone heard if they're building them?
dkf
(37,305 posts)There are blurbs here and there about individual grants and expansions but no clear picture.
ProSense
(116,464 posts)http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/opinion/sunday/report-card-on-health-care-reform.html
There is also the single payer waiver provision
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023715400#post10
Heather MC
(8,084 posts)About the Different Healthcare systems available in Other Countries
I wish we had partnered our plan after some of those instead of Romney Care.
I wish I could find that story again it was very very informative
dkf
(37,305 posts)kenny blankenship
(15,689 posts)merrily
(45,251 posts)Wounded Bear
(58,670 posts)I think Thom Hartmann has said that.
However, I believe Switzerland does not allow for-profit companies to engage in primary care. One of the common features of real health care plans around the civilized world is the disallowance of profit taking over health care.
ProSense
(116,464 posts)on various health care systems:
Every wealthy country other than the United States guarantees essential care to all its citizens. There are, however, wide variations in the specifics, with three main approaches taken.
In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. Weve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false. Like every system, the National Health Service has problems, but over all it appears to provide quite good care while spending only about 40 percent as much per person as we do. By the way, our own Veterans Health Administration, which is run somewhat like the British health service, also manages to combine quality care with low costs.
The second route to universal coverage leaves the actual delivery of health care in private hands, but the government pays most of the bills. Thats how Canada and, in a more complex fashion, France do it. Its also a system familiar to most Americans, since even those of us not yet on Medicare have parents and relatives who are.
Again, you hear a lot of horror stories about such systems, most of them false. French health care is excellent. Canadians with chronic conditions are more satisfied with their system than their U.S. counterparts. And Medicare is highly popular, as evidenced by the tendency of town-hall protesters to demand that the government keep its hands off the program.
Finally, the third route to universal coverage relies on private insurance companies, using a combination of regulation and subsidies to ensure that everyone is covered. Switzerland offers the clearest example: everyone is required to buy insurance, insurers cant discriminate based on medical history or pre-existing conditions, and lower-income citizens get government help in paying for their policies.
In this country, the Massachusetts health reform more or less follows the Swiss model; costs are running higher than expected, but the reform has greatly reduced the number of uninsured. And the most common form of health insurance in America, employment-based coverage, actually has some Swiss aspects: to avoid making benefits taxable, employers have to follow rules that effectively rule out discrimination based on medical history and subsidize care for lower-wage workers.
- more -
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/opinion/17krugman.html
Health insurance covers the costs of medical treatment and hospitalisation of the insured. However, the insured person pays part of the cost of treatment. This is done (a) by means of an annual excess (or deductible, called the franchise), which ranges from CHF 300 to a maximum of CHF 2,500 as chosen by the insured person (premiums are adjusted accordingly) and (b) by a charge of 10% of the costs over and above the excess up to a stop-loss amount of CHF 700.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Switzerland
Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin
(108,036 posts)Remember Michelle Bachman tried for dual US/Swiss citizenship.
kenny blankenship
(15,689 posts)[H1]2007 Interview with Swiss President, Pascal Couchepin[/H1]
T.R. Reid
One of the things really striking for Americans is that under LAMal, (the Swiss Health Law of 1994 which mandated individual coverage) you now say the insurance companies can't make a profit on basic coverage. What's the thinking there?
The idea is very simple: If it is a social insurance, and everybody is obliged to be a member of a health insurance system, you can't ask them to pay so that the shareholders get a better revenue. It is a little the same, if I can compare with SBB, our railway system. We are very attached to the railway system; Switzerland is a country of railway. ... I think that the people wouldn't (have) agreed to privatize the railways (as) it is done now in Great Britain. To think that they can (make) a profit on the railway system, it [would] be against equality in this matter.
... When you said to the insurance companies, "No more profit on the basic health plan," what did they say?
They accept it; they have no choice. And (all these) companies are (heirs) of former social companies. For instance, the Groupe Mutuel ... was built on this idea: no profit; everything must be given to the people who are members of it. So there is a tradition of social attitude in these systems. I am not systematically against the idea of having profits in the health insurance system, but if we introduce it, it is more with the idea to balance the power in the health insurance system, because now there is a lack of balance of power.
-=-=--=-=-=-
Does this really compare with the ACA? Mostly by way of CONTRAST. The only similarity is the rule requiring people to purchase insurance. However, before the imposition of such a mandate in 1994, Swiss citizens were already 95% insured. 95% insured out of their own pockets with no subsidies. This is a fact mentioned elsewhere in the interview which derives from the fact -mentioned in the excepted passage above- that the Swiss tradition of health insurance, dating back to the 19th century, is overwhelmingly a NON PROFIT tradition. It offends Swiss nationalism and social solidarity to put the greed of "shareholders" before the lives and health of patients. The Swiss system was already more healthy than anything the ACA will possibly achieve, BECAUSE IT WAS NEVER INFECTED WITH GREED IN THE FIRST PLACE.
95% of the Swiss people could afford insurance before being mandated to buy it because the prices were low enough, not bloated by the profit margin desired by a parasitical middleman who needs to show more profit every year to keep its stock rising. They did not need the cure of a "mandate" to achieve (what we in the Benighted States would proudly hail as) universal coverage. We will be told we are receiving the treatment, but the cure will elude us.
Just to note these features of the Swiss system, before and after the 1994 law, dispels any superficial illusion that our ACA is "patterned after what Switzerland has." Our system maintains the centrality of profit motivated private insurance corporations in the iron triangle of profit motivated hospitals, profit motivated physician groups, and pharmaceutical corporations. One only has to look at the five year charts of the stocks for the Big Five Insurance cartel to see that Wall Street sees nothing but blue skies ahead for their rising profits.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/interviews/couchepin.html
Enthusiast
(50,983 posts)kenny blankenship
(15,689 posts)Journalist and author of Sick Around The World
That book was a survey of health care delivery models in different countries, which he was inspired to write after moving to Britain with his family. His daughter had to go to the ER for an infected ear piercing, and he had something of a stroke himself when tried to find out how to get the bill and where to pay and kept being told that there was no charge and that their system was different. Finding out that health care in Britain was not masked banditry like back in the States made him curious to find out how it was handled in other countries.
Rose interviewed Reid about his survey in 2008.
merrily
(45,251 posts)What a coincidence!
Iliyah
(25,111 posts)because of Obamacare but that is not the worst of it. They want the sequester to remain the same. 100,000 jobs will be lost and programs crucial to helping many Americans are and will be dismantled.
Obamacare is the law of the land and will officially be opened to all Americans on October 1, 2013. Why GOPers don't want 30 - 45 million Americans insured for healthcare is beyond hatred. Its evil.
merrily
(45,251 posts)The individual mandate and the bit that denied all medicaid funds to states that did not adopt Obamacare. The SCOTUS upheld the first bit as a new tax and struck down the second bit.
I would have done the exact opposite. That is why I will never have power.
bvar22
(39,909 posts)...is taking advantage of BIG Government Insurance.
They just don't want regular Working Class Americans to have what they take for granted.
Lying HYPOCRITES...one and all!!!
Divine Discontent
(21,056 posts)they don't like what this country "is", and all the changes we've seen, and they're trying everything they can to destroy it.
libdem4life
(13,877 posts)"The constitution entitles Iranians to basic health care, and most receive subsidized prescription drugs and vaccination programs. An extensive network of public clinics offers basic care at low cost, and general and specialty hospitals operated by the Ministry of Health and Medical Education (MOHME) provide higher levels of care. In most large cities, well-to-do persons use private clinics and hospitals that charge high fees.[3] About 73% of all Iranian workers have health care and social security coverage.[3] In 2000, 94% of the population could access local health services, according to the WHO. Access ranged from 86% in rural areas to 100% in urban areas.[3] Between 80% and 94% of the population could access affordable essential medicines in 1999.[3] Since 2009, a new government plan called "the comprehensive insurance plan" provides basic coverage to all Iranians.[7]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Iran
Rain Mcloud
(812 posts)If people like what their government assures then it is harder to destroy the government.
Once all the protections are done then they can get on to:
Shooting who they want
Raping who they want
Enslaving who they want
Paying no taxes
The face of the new four freedoms.
Skittles
(153,169 posts)people will not look to you for solutions