pennylane100
pennylane100's JournalFor those of you that watched Julie Pace of AP question the president this morning.
I loved the way he turned the question back to her. I decided to sent her a tweet about it and you are welcome to use it if you find it mildly interesting:
@jpaceDC Now its Julie's turn to cry, Julie's turn to cry, Julies turn to cry. You would cry to if it happened to you
I very much agree with you.
The Wikipedia definition of reform is
"Reform means the improvement or amendment of what is wrong, corrupt, unsatisfactory, etc."
There are so many billions of dollars that could be saved by just cutting out the wasteful spending that just makes big pharma and other providers rich while adding no value to the service that is provided. My mother-in-law, who is quite financially comfortable receives a brand new pair of quite expensive looking shoes every year because she has diabetes.
She said that she did not recall requesting them, but they come every years. I am willing to concede that possibly she did request them and then forgot, but I would love to see the exact contract that this company has signed with medicare and how much they make from it. And I certainly do not begrudge anyone who these shoes if they are needed but they look like top of the line shoes and of what she is saying is true, they are being sent to millions of people each year who may or may not use them. What is wrong with reforming that system.
I also remember reading that the federal government does not negotiate with the drug companies that set the price of medicine. I believe that the medicare pays more for drugs than the price in many other countries. That kind of reform would not be bad.
I read of the billions of dollars that is being stolen from the system by providers who commit large scale fraud to recover costs that they did not incur. While we know it is impossible to catch all incidents of fraud, we should increase the fines and prison terms of those we do catch. We should make it so expensive and the jail terms so long that it would deter others from doing the same thing.
We should also make hospitals present bills in a way that can be verified. A man was recently hospitalized for a few days and received a bill of almost half a million dollars. That works out to roughly $500 per hour. That is insane. While that may have reflected the actual costs incurred, he had know way of knowing because he could not understand the hundreds of pages of documentation. Reforming that would certainly help all of us, on and off of medicare.l
I recently had surgery to remove some breast tissue that had the ability to turn cancerous in the future. It was a one day procedure done in a surgical unit run by the hospital but the patient is not checked it. It was a simple procedure and everyone was very professional and very nice. I was covered by private insurance as although I am retired, my husband still works. When I visited the site run my by insurance company, I noticed a bill for the services of someone I had never med and had no idea why he/she was involved. The fact that my insurance paid it made me believe that it was valid as insurance companies rarely pay bills they do not owe. However, I think that all costs and procedures should be spelled out before the surgery, as they certainly have enough time and energy to explain to the patient in every way possible how they cannot be help responsible for the several hundred things that could go wrong while you are in their care, so take a little more time and tell you how they are spending your/your insurance company/tax payer money. That would help catch any errors before they happen.
I know I have rambled on but I think that we sometimes jump to the wrong conclusions when reform and medicare are used in the same sentence and that is not always the case.
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