My partner and I ran a small software business for 11 years as an S-Corp. Quite a few of our customers were healthcare entities - insurers, hospitals, drug companies. We NEVER made anything close to $250,000 either together or individually.  The privately-run companies were not all that efficient or cost conscious but slavishly served their investors.  We would have gladly paid the extra taxes to get to that 250K income level. 
    We attended business seminars to help grow - and one tenet stood out among those seminars:  businesses who cannot reliably show PROFIT (return of 7 to 13% over overhead) will eventually fail and are not worth continuing in the long run.
  By definition then, a government non-PROFIT, single payer healthcare system would be alleviated of that extra 7 to 13% concern.  It could focus on cost-cutting and efficiencies and ignore satisfying investors of any stripe. Profit is not “overhead” when it comes to competition. 
  The mere fact that government is involved should NOT be a deterrent - otherwise the same people who denigrate all of government would also have to attack the armed services - those very troops that they daily laud .... along with church groups, the Red Cross, United Way, and hundreds of NGOs that do help people effectively.

Dennis,

I’m not sure I understand your comments.  You say that hospice care “in many cases it is seen as a means of withholding care.”  Who sees it as such, and who profits by it?  If anything, it seems that some physicians try to hold on to the patients too long. My comments are based on what I have observed over time by being involved with my local hospice organization, learning about the patient’s history, and talking with family members. The patients I’ve been involved with have been quite elderly and some had received plenty of treatment already.  One woman I visited was not that old but she had refused all medical treatment after being diagnosed.

Jim Yell,

Thank you. You brought up a most important point in your comment—actually more than one point. “The amount of aggressive intervention” that you mention is indeed a huge issue and one that is not discussed in depth and/or often enough. 

As a hospice volunteer, I have witnessed incomprehensible things. For those who may not know, the job of hospice organizations is to keep the terminally ill comfortable when medical intervention has stopped. I have nothing but praise for them. But, in order to qualify for hospice, the patient has to be released by the doctor.  You can guess that some doctors try to hold on to the patient longer than they should.

I was once asked to help out with a very elderly patient (90+) at a nursing home. Apparently, her daughter had requested hospice to send someone to help feed her mother because the nursing home aides were too busy to take the time this required. When I got there, I found an old lady propped up in a wheelchair, unable to open her eyes, speak or respond to sound, and unable to move.  It would take me 1 hour to get a teaspoon of baby food into her mouth. I felt terrible for doing this and wanted to reject the assignment altogether, but I stuck it out for one week until she died.  All along, the doctor visited her and checked her out. At one point, the doctor was even considering doing some testing for something or other.

The issue of excessive and unnecessary testing is huge.  Patients often demand tests that even their doctors consider unnecessary, and by the same token, some doctors order unnecessary tests (some profit by this.) There is the case reported in detail by the NY Times where a piece of expensive equipment with dubious or minimal benefit to patients came into the market. Some doctors and hospitals bought it and, guess what, they are pushing it on patients and, as a consequence, other patients are requesting it too.  But the trick was to get Medicare to approve it.  When a group of manufacturers and doctors went to Medicare, an official told them they had to first submit studies proving the benefits of the equipment. They refused to comply, and they went the “back way” using their lobby power. And, in that way, they managed to get Medicare to approve it without any studies.

All of the things I’ve mentioned have been making profits for everyone involved, except for Medicare and other government agencies and us, the taxpayers. Nobody expects to have a perfect healthcare system, but what we have now has exceeded all rational boundaries. People need to be educated. They have bought into the fantasy that with costly medical care, positive thinking, and the right cosmetics, we can live and look young forever. It’s amazing that we are still arguing over having a true National Health Care plan in 21st century USA.

Thanks to David Sirota for his report.

Republicans pushing competition? Even in healthcare? What a crock of fecal matter that is. Competition has no place in republican policy or action. As a matter of fact the media is the clear cut example of republican dogma and it is not competition it is CRUSH THE COMPETITION. There used to be upwards close to 100 owners of the msm as we know it from a fews back, tv, radio, newspapers, magazines and books, books get a little leeway as ‘if it sells, print it’. There are some opposing view points even in tv, radio and newspapers but the general gist of the republican agenda is to kill the competition because then the survivor gets all the spoils. But now we have the disadvantage of there being just 4 or 5 owners of the msm. So, where is the competition? Which goes hand in hand in, ‘where is the fairness doctrine’? Unfortunately, the huge mass of people that just get their information from the msm are the ones that need competition and the fairness doctrine considering how the neocons have stolen that venue also. And how tell tale is it that the dems voted NOT to reinstate the fairness doctrine?

Actually medicares overhead is closer to 2% . The 5% number is the one republicans use , it’s quite telling that even when they inflate the number it still comes in at a fraction of for profit healthcare .

One day our tame Sisters and Brothers must face the fact the plutoligarch owned-and-operated industrial juggernaut ruling and ruining their “individual” lives is programmed specifically to ignore the welfare of subject/citizens.  The reason the corporate “form” has been so useful to their purposes is its utter indifference to the effects of its behavior on its expendable “human resources.”

Corporations are the physical expression here of our tormentors’ own essential nature….energy addicts who will get their “fix” by any and all means necesssary and possible, “the public be damned.”  The thing IS what it DOES, not what its misled apologists and “expert” rationalizers claim it to be.

Already the domesticated peoples are reduced to begging for scraps from the “tables” of privateering gangs who’ve hijacked their virtual world….fighting over cast-offs that will only sicken them further anyhow.  The political shills David Sirota and others take-to-task here are actually acting (unbeknownst to theirownselfs) as a sacrificial suicide-squad doing “rear-guard” duty while the perpetrators escape to their fortified “undisclosed locations” here-and-there.

If it is really their health people want to recover, they’d maybe best stop looking to the fraud that was put in-place to profit from their industrially-induced ailments.  Human “individuals” ALL have seriously compromised immune systems which can only be made whole and effective again by reORGANizing their insufficient “selfs” into Living Communities….the Natural Form of Humanity within the Living Arrangement of our Mother Earth.  Why else have “....the destroyers of the Earth” gone to such lengths to disband actual communities and families, and reduce them to atomized “individual” components that are so readily exploited and disposed-of?

Health and wholeness for Human Beings is found only in what our Lakotah cousins call the Tiyoshpaye Way.  Everywhere outside of it can be nothing but a world-o’-hurt for the inmates one command-and-CONtrol apparatus or another.  There is no genuine healthcare except what is provided by Living Community members to one another….right where they live-and-breathe.

Best get TOGETHER, Sisters and Brothers, ‘cause “individual”-ly you’re plumb outta luck.

HokaHey!

Re David Sirota: “government-is-ineffective “conservatives”

The most ineffective part of our government are the Republican conservatives.

50,000,000 without access to health care.

Children suffering and dying from lack of medical care.

My own daughter was one of them.

When will it be time to grab these bastards by the throat and thrown them in the dumpster where they belong?  And I do mean this literally.

Oh that’s right, this is America where we prefer being screwed.  So sorry.

Their arguments don’t make sense because they do not believe what they say themselves. They only believe in the perks and cash they get from the insurance industry.