3 years on, and the country is still divided over the health care reform. Although the Obama administration has put in place his plan for a health care reform, the result that ensued was less than satisfactory. People are still not being covered and prices are forcing people to cancel their subscriptions to insurance.

Way out over the rainbow, Dorothy, way beyond Kansas, there several countries that run on different principles than the US.  Way out beyond the rainbow they don’t waste money on useless adventures like Iraq when the terrorist problem is el Quaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Nor do they waste money on manned space when machines can do the job as well. Go to Mars? The moon was exciting but it wasn’t made of green cheese. And while there are mysteries of the universe, they won’t likely be solved by manned space when the necessary part of the country is breaking down. The US government should not be the employer of choice of Haliburton and other rich-Bush enterprises. The primary riches of a country rest in human capital and it takes a good education system (unlike the US) and a good health care system (not like the US) to keep the human capital in fine tune.

Really?  Initiative starts with individuals and the vote. Other areas of the world have had total health care for 40 to 60 years and they are not socialist, except by Reagan and Bush’s standards. Even Cuba has a better health system and education system than the US. If the US had moved as far in the same time everybody would have a degree! By definition, social   democracy can looks after everybody, not just the rich or the wannabe rich. Your country has many rich who are getting richer by plowing the lower strata into the ground. In the event, it is political power that changes things - and the power is in the vote as well as money - you would be surprised how much ordinary folks can raise in the interests of good government.  Then you have to get rid of the effectiveness of fat-cat lobbyist - the AMA, the NRA etc etc. If you can’t it’s time to find somewhere else to live that doesn’t drag your kids to Viet Nam and Iraq - money that should be spent on health and education.

Why not? You and millions like you have a vote, haven’t you, yet you still vote in the Reagans, the Bushes et al. And you let a Congress pander to the interests of the rich, the AMA and the pharmas. Other parts of the world have had a national health care “insurance ” for more than 50 years. WAKE UP!

Thank you!  For too many years we have had to listen to the lies of the repuglicans and corporatists representing the insurance/medical/pharma complex.  My friends living abroad are very hesitant about coming home to the states given the state of our health care.

I should emphasize that the premiums mentioned are trivial compared with the $cost of care. They are used in one right-wing province to offset care. In the case of low income the patient pays no premiums.

I’m the idiot because I’m showing you how fu*ked up the system that is in place right now is. So a hospital that has to shut down in a Spanish neighborhood, because of the way the system is, in your mind is a good thing.The entire board was corrupt, they are on trial now. But I’m the idiot because it can link back to Obamas friends.

While there is little that is wrong with a national health program - we have had it in Canada for 50 years for hospital care and about 40 for doctor’s services - I believe it is a DRASTIC mistake to put it into the hands of the private sector a la insurance companies or HMOs and hospitals owned and operated by doctors. Far preferable is a national system that ensures portability from state to state with national standards. The actual programs should be as in Canada,  state-run (province-run)  with significant federal financial assistance, which is the leverage to enforce national standards. State medical associations negotiate with the state plan on fee schedules. Coverage is universal. All hospitals would be non-profit. The obvious is that some actors have to accept less. The US system is a license for doctors, insurance companies and HMOs to either rip off society (the consumer) or shorten up on care. Sure we have waiting lines but all efficient systems have ques of some sort. The only people who complain in Canada are those who are rich because they can’t get their toe nails done on their schedule. Of course, the greedy doctors go to the US, bleating about the length of their training and the cost of their tuition, when the truth is that they have been heavily subsidized in their training and are provided with free workshops (hospitals).

The crap about socialized medicine is just that. Sure it is paid from taxes - and in the case of one province, premiums, but the system is far more economical and far more effective than what is in the US now, which to me is a horror story. When I was in the system we rescued a skier who had a ski accident outside of Denver - a seriously injured back. It was far cheaper to hire a chartered plane to bring him back to Canada under our system than to undergo another day in the US system, where the bills racked up by the thousands per day.

Expensive? Perhaps, but pennies compared to Viet Nam and Iraq adventures in political egotism.

MY god, even Cuba has a more effective system than the US!

Holy SHIT CY. I know you’re not kidding, but this sounds even worse than what we see here. You’ve got money, and they STILL want you to have insurance!

Wait, I DO understand of course. That was to get you to buy insurance, because even if it supposedly didn’t have to be ‘good insurance’ you probably would have had to pay through the -you know- to get it.

A young colleague of mine was recently denied coverage by Blue Cross, when she attempted to simply move her existing policy from her mother’s coverage, to herself, since I think there is an age limit or something.

Well, same entity, same person, same everything..been insured by them all along, would NOT cover her, because of her ‘existing’ asthma condition, (yeah asthma) that she’s had since she was about 9 years old, WITH THIS SAME PROVIDER!

So, it makes me wonder if you would have even been able to receive insurance coverage anyway, for less than the 2K that you were willing and able to pay.

That is SOOOO messed up!

It also doesn’t surprise me, now that I think about. No matter how totally ridiculous it is these days, I’m not even surprised anymore.

Anyway, you may have felt like a teenager needing an abortion in 1958, but at least you had some money to pay the doc up front. Folks needing an abortion or anything else these days with money or insurance are shit out of luck.

And, we won’t even go into the ones who actually DO have it, and have been paying for it for years, and STILL can’t get the health care they need because the insurance-health industry won’t approve it…somebody sitting at a desk in a high rise building can just write a death warrant with a big fat DENIED across the request.

Amen to the excellent reminder…folks are not being cared for via all of this privatized ‘contract’ servicing, though it has even hit the VA in respect to many of the services that the provide.

Health professionals have been run out of the state system.

Lefty, you do have a point about the socialized medical billing re: Medicare. HOWEVER, those physicians, don’t get anything close to what the services actually cost, covered by medicare, unless they are overbilling up the ying yang. (I’m not saying some of them don’t).

BUT, as a ‘for instance’, Here in California, a procedure that may have cost $600.00 8 years ago, would have had around 67% of that cost covered by medicare. NOW, they will cover…MAYBE - SOMETIMES…AT MOST, 31%. I did the books for ONE week of vacation relief at an office, and was amazed at all of the medicare payment checks that were LESS THAN TEN DOLLARS!! I even came across one for $1.45.

(I’m not kidding).

So, there are MANY physicians and other health care providers who would be perfectly fine with a single health care insurance, that came at least somewhere close to paying them for what they actually do, and they wouldn’t mind working as government employees in fully operated state facilities at reasonable salaries either.  That is especially the case with all of these HMO docs, who aren’t making the billions raked in by private practice physicians that serve the ultra elite with their many layered coverages (that they can afford).

this is from a NYT Op-Ed by Lee Hill:
“... North Carolina’s entire mental health system is in jeopardy. According to a recent investigative series by The News & Observer of Raleigh, a 2001 reform effort has failed, wasting more than $400 million and putting the 350,000 seriously ill people in the state system at risk of losing community care.

Local mental health services used to be provided by federal, state and local governments. The reform plan put the counties out of business and forced them to hire for-profit “providers” that offered sometimes specious “community support” services for exorbitant prices. Costs more than doubled, to $1.5 billion a year. Only 5 percent of the money went to intensive outpatient therapy. As a result, our mental hospitals are overwhelmed, while prisons and homeless shelters are filling up with people who have persistent mental disorders.

Peter Kramer, a local social worker, has served Hillsborough’s mental health program for 20 years. The day his program switched from state support to private contractors in July 2006, he says, “A mother called up and said her son was hearing voices, but there was no doctor there to refer her to.” His clinic is due to close entirely.”

Just to add:  privatization (“the market economy always does a better job than government”) is NOT the solution!  Those who are afraid of any form or shape of dreaded’socialized medicine’ must get over it.  In truth, Medicare, Medicaid and the Veterans Administration ARE socialized medicine - not perfect, but a good number of citizens are served bythese systems.  Face it - they’re here - and not going away soon. 
Unfettered privatization without accountability to groups with REAL POWER to regulate/control, leads to even more cost, and ultimately to abuse.  And let’s not forget the poor folk who become ‘beneficiaries’ of this alleged privatization.
Solutions?  I wish I had a microwaveable compact simple way to ‘fix’ health care….I can only posit that some type of partnership/collaboration between private and government, with a present and signficant oversight with room for immediate corrections, should be part of the picture.

HMOs and drug companies are so economically entrenched in the failed health care system that we won’t get what we need: a one-payer, everyone-covered system. It is a right of the citizenry and necessity for our democratic development and an egalitarian state.

The sick and the stressed cannot compete in education and jobs.

Better just go to Singapore, Thailand or even India…....

One of the leading heart care hospitals in the country ,shut the doors today,why because nobody paid for the care they received, they were in a very poor area also, what do these people do. and you want the government to run health care, according to most of the people on this site, the gov cant run a hot-dog stand, yet you want to let them run health care.  thank god for the Dems in Illinois, If Obama was here doing his job this might have been avoided right, Yet when they had a shooting at NIU there was 60 million at the ready for a new lecture hall, and when a church burnt down in a black community there was 2 million to rebuild it. But hey its only one of the top heart hospitals in a poor Spanish neighborhood.  and some of the money that should have went there ,went instead to Obama’s friend Tony Reszco to build a hospital up in the rich white area of Lake in the Hills, that will lead back to OB ......amazing

Ms Cocco is wrong in saying that Dennis Kucinich was the only candidate to support a single-payer national health policy.  Ralph Nader supports single payer, and he’s still in the race!!

For this reason alone, he deserves your vote.  Go to votenader.org and see if he needs help to get on the ballot in your state.

The single payer health plan is the way to go.  This will also encourage small business development and unburden large businesses also.  The biggest opponents against single payer plans are the drug and insurance companies. 

Universal plans keep the money flowing to these entities and allow them too much leeway in the distribution of services and products.  If a universal plan is adopted will we have enough enforcement of the adopted parameters and accountability programs in place to protect recipients and tax payers?  Probably not.  These same industries will then have even MORE money to lobby and undercut policy.

It is a scam they’ve cooked up and it’s win/win for them.  We all know how crooked they are and some of know it with the loss of a loved one or by suffering without needed care.  Universal plans ARE dangerous to our health.

Some doctors of course don’t “like” the plans.  That is because many doctors are deeply involved in the medical industry themselves.  And that is the ONLY reason they don’t like them, no matter what type of rhetoric they spew.  It’s still the same ol’ follow the money game.

Another aspect of that illgotten wealth,(reaped from the denial of needed medical treatment) is that the insurance industry, like big oil and the arms industry, invests big bucks in underwriting the campaigns of politicians who will protect its fiefdom by opposing national health care and to defeating candidates who advocate then needed changes.

The obstructionist wing of the ruling class, mainly repuglicans, have kept this country from having the health benefits enjoyed by the rest of the world for some 100 years.  Slavishly they repeat their “free market” dogma, chanting the same phrases over and over in the dismal belief that repetition will change reality.  This manner of “magical thinking” has been with our species since the time of the Neanderthal, so for the “conservative mind” it is a time tested method of influencing reality.

  Using their standard techniques of fear and lies these corporatists will launch the usual round of misleading ads supporting obstruction.  And,  Ms. Cocco glosses over the ever popular repuglican sport of gutting medicare.  Every election cycle they posture about the need to cut spending and offer medicare and social security as the suitable candidates for cuts.  Apparently the irony of the party, which claims to be grounded in family values,  removing needed services and funds from the halt, sick, lame and aged escapes repugs and a great many voters.  Dickens’ England had it right:  the people who own businesses and companies are entitled to all they have.  God rewards the favorites with prosperity and good health.  A popular view among those who claim to be christians.

  Given that the health care non-system we have in these United States is, as documented by the World Health Organization and others, just barely in the top 40.  There are many third world countries who provide their citizens with health care less expensively and with better out comes than ours.  Cuba has a better rated health system than ours.

  A great deal of air time and column inches are devoted to the non-competitiveness of amerika’s businesses.  The reason we can not compete on price is our employer based health care system.  Our competitors do not have to provide health care; a national health care system provides for those needs.  This is a significant cost savings for any enterprise.

  The real fight, the reason for not extending health care to all at a reasonable costs lies not with functionally.  Support must not be taken from the medical industrial complex and the chief ally the insurance industry.  These groups make unimaginable profits and pay their CEO more money than the GDP of small nations.  They must be protected!  Tax credits and government research given freely to industry with regulated price fixing is the the free market way.

The HMO’s and insurance companys have made it all but impossible for actual medicine to be practiced in the US. Instead its superficial symptom treatment and treating the consequences. Most if not all physicians I’ve spoken to favor a national health plan that would free them up to practice medicine which involve real diagnostics and preventative care.

Uhh, other nations’ health systems - and their health insurance schemes - are crumbling anyway. The REAL issue is what the precious medical establishment is going to do to change their OWN shortcomings.

The main agenda for the medical fraternity is not their patients but their jobs and that includes the medical scientists and the drug corporations. They don’t want to admit that they no longer have the answers.

The secret to health care is CARE!!! You do what is good to PREVENT the onset of functional disorders and the rest takes care of itself. Failure to do so is where chronic problems start.

That is simple responsible management but, of course, that is not what drives corporate profits. Naturopaths, chiropractors and so forth come before doctors, not after.

Hospitals are for emergencies - and the last resort in a crisis. Instead, they are misused from go to whoa and the more operations they can perform the more money they get from medical insurance.

Thus the medical profession has been playing a game that really can no longer be afforded. Medical specialists (surgeons) are at the top of their precocious shit-heap of self-serving righteousness.

They are needed but NOT in the way they are used now. GP’s are needed but NOT to funnel more and more victims to hospitals and surgeons and corporate profits.

They all need to swallow their pride and step back a little. Only THEN a workable health system can be pursued which is both affordable and user-friendly.