Today, if it weren’t for Children’s Special Care Services, which is a form of Michigan Medicaid, my daughters would have been buried long ago. Am I looking for a handout? No, I’m grateful. If it weren’t for this social net my daughters couldn’t survive. They both suffer from juvenile onset diabetes. I pick up monthly supplies that would cost about $400.00 per month just in co-pays. The true costs, with insulin costing over $130.00 a vial (and they get 15 vials per month, each,) would be financially crippling. That’s just for the insulin alone, not counting all the other supplies that go along with diabetes. I do have to say, there was a time that I could go to Windsor and purchase the insulin for $17.00 a vial, same brand, same insulin, but George W put a stop to that. Why? I wonder. Oh yeah, American free enterprise.
I had a dear friend, a very successful makeup artist for the movie industry, Lynn Campbell. Lynn was born with congenital heart issues. She married, and divorced, losing her instate medical coverage through her husband. She couldn’t find another insurance company to carry her with her prior condition. She needed new wires in her pacemaker. That surgery, along with serious leg surgery after being hit by a taxi in New York, wiped out her savings. No longer able to work while still healing, another health issue popped up: she needed a heart valve replacement. Without any money to pay the hundreds of thousands in American medical expenses, she was thinking of moving to France, for there they have superb universal healthcare. Living in L.A., her time was growing short. She spent a lot of time trying to get state coverage. After many denials, finally, her surgery was covered, maybe too late. She had the surgery, but died from an infection due to the surgery, and malpractice due to the lack of administration of antibiotics. The malpractice was blatant, but the caps and regulations inhibiting us from suing, another George W implantation, rendered nothing for her loss.
So, before people whine about Obamacare, think about what you are really saying. Do I think American’s should be required to have insurance or pay a fine, of course I don’t, no more than I think they should have to pay the Department of Treasury in Michigan for a traffic ticket, or wear a seat belt, or do a lot of things we suddenly have to do. Personally, I think the attack should be levied against the medical industry to bring down the costs of care. Nobody wants to talk against free enterprise. We can cap income on athletes, but not on our medical profession, interesting. We can throw a lid on malpractice, so the guilty go free, but we can’t cap our pharmaceuticals and our medical services? We can, we just continue to vote in favor of free enterprise. This isn’t democracy, this is capitalism.
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - Dr. Joseph S. Maresca
We should be reauthorizing renewed funding for the Hill Burton Program which offers free or reduced cost care to people who cannot pay. Also, The National Institutes of Health offers free care (even surgical ) if you fit into their protocol. In addition, when is the right or left going to talk about excess consumption taxes for junk food which is the cause of quite a bit of ill health.
2 - Boeke
Good article, Pam.
3 - Pam Messingham
#1 Dr. Tax junk food, really? Why not simply tax the rich at the same rate the middle class is taxed. Legalize marijuana and tax that. Food shouldn't be taxed, it's already costly enough.
#2 Thank you!
4 - Igor
Once again, what we need is single-payer UHC. Whatever steps we can take towards that goal are good. But all the republicans are offering is "Repeal and retire". They have NO intention of replacing Omneycare. They will simply stop after repeal. That's all they care about. They have never offered anything beyond window-dressing.
The Republicans are lying to you.
5 - Pam Messingham
#4...Igor, so many people think I bash Republicans. The meaning used to mean less government involvement. I understand to a point, but it certainly doesn't mean that now. What the Republicans are doing today is a disgrace to all of human kind. Even the supporters are duped, believing the base stands for something...when in reality...they stand for nothing except helping corporate America grow richer by abandoning laws that contribute to evironmental demise, creating laws that make slave labor a priority, and cheating the people out of freedom. Why? Because extreme right is fascist and thats what they want. It's as plain as day...I am not a democrat, I am an independent...so that says a lot. If I had the power to control people or to gain support, you know, if I could buy support like the billionaires have been doing, I would suggest and support everyone voting against both parties to break the backs of the stranglehold the two party system has on the people....damn it...I lack that power.
6 - Clav
...cheating the people out of freedom.
Like a law forcing everyone to buy health insurance does?
7 - Clav
...if I could buy support like the billionaires have been doing...
Biillionaires like George Soros, Warren Buffet, Teresa Heinz, the Rockefeller family, Carnegie, Mellon and "...In Chicago, Obama’s hometown and the location of his re- election headquarters, fundraisers include Les Coney, an executive vice president at Chicago-based Mesirow Financial; John Rogers, chairman of Chicago-based Ariel Investments LLC; Chicago billionaire Neil Bluhm, managing principal of Chicago- based Walton Street Capital LLC and chairman of a new casino operation opening this month in suburban Chicago; entrepreneur and philanthropist Fred Eychaner, who supported Hillary Clinton in 2008 and is one of the nation’s top Democratic donors; and Penny Pritzker, who led Obama’s 2008 fundraising efforts..." to name a few of those who give and collect enormous sums to Obama and the Democrats?
8 - Pam Messingham
Clav....I didn't say Obama wasn't a Sero's plant...I firmly believe he was...but this...what we are seeing today...is really out of hand and abosolutely not right. I was just thinking a few minutes ago...we need real men that have dignity and honor that can't be bribed or bought. Someone that stands for something and isn't afraid of not having the big $ support. I honestly think we need to break the backs of both partys and start over...maybe then someone will run on something besides the desire to win and money.
9 - Igor
What all of us want is good medical care.
Nobody cares about getting a good insurance policy EXCEPT that the insurance companies have planted themselves firmly in the middle of Lifes Highway and would force every traveller that comes thereby to pay a tariff, a tariff that is made ever more huge by benefit of the highwaymans monopoly of the road.
But we don't allow highway men to menace our roads and our travellers like that anymore, so there's no excuse for allowing insurance brutes to menace our citizens.
10 - Pam Messingham
Igor...touche'
11 - Clav
But we don't allow highway men to menace our roads and our travellers like that anymore, so there's no excuse for allowing insurance brutes to menace our citizens.
You might wanna tell that to Barry, Igor.
With Obamacare and its despised "mandate," which is a tax, but isn't, depending on whether Johnny "flip-flop" Roberts or Barry is doing the talking, Obama has thrown the insurance companies the biggest windfall in the history of American health insurance; I've been buying stock in them since last week.
12 - El Bicho
"Obama has thrown..."
Double check those history books and replace Obama with Dem Senators like Baccus who are responsible for the ins. co. windfall
13 - Clav
Double check those history books and replace Obama with Dem Senators like Baccus who are responsible for the ins. co. windfall
Point taken, EB, but Obama didn't try to stop it, did he?
As I've said many times before, they're all in it together: president, Congress, SCOTUS -- all three branches.
Democrat or Republican.
14 - Clav
Forgot the "independents."
Them too.
15 - Igor
Years ago I worked for a famous paternalistic company that took care of it's employees and their families. The medical plan was excellent: they even paid for the flowers when my kids were born. Then one day they announced that they were going to "self-insure", that is, instead of paying premiums to the insurance company and then filing claims with the insurance company, they would just put the premium money in a fund and then pay claims out of the fund. Brilliant! It worked perfectly and we saved 20% of insurance cost! And they still sent flowers to my wife's room!
That's exactly what UHC, single payer, will do. And the actuarials for 300 million people are even better than for 200,000 people.
Now let me see, the USA spends $2.5trillion per year on healthcare, so a 20% saving is $500billion! That's pretty darn good!
16 - Clav
Except that your assumption of a 20% savings based on your company's experience is only that: an assumption -- and an unwarranted one at that.
The government hasn't a clue on how to save money; everything it runs inexorably grows in cost. LBJ's Great Society ended up costing trillions more than forecast; as have both Medicare and Medicaid, every war we;ve ever fought AND all the weaponry and machinery we've produced to fight them.
And Obamacare will be no exception:
" Part of the reason we spend more is other countries have price controls and we don’t. For instance, they restrict the amount drug companies can charge much more than we do. That sounds great; price controls save us money! But if nobody pays for new drugs, they don’t ever get created. Without these controls, our consumers here indeed pay more, but that funds much of the life-saving and life-extending healthcare innovation available for Americans and the rest of the world.
It is frankly unfair that the world is free-riding off us. Free-riding means they let us pay for the innovation that benefits them at lower cost. But if nobody pays for the innovation, the innovation just does not happen. If we try to free-ride off ourselves, it doesn’t work, innovation dies for us too. U.S. consumers paying fair prices (not government restricted artificially low prices) does lead to higher U.S. healthcare costs, but the alternative is far worse: Joining the world in severely limiting prices, and not seeing the next generations of new innovations and improvements...
Let’s get back to healthcare. Due primarily to the tax subsidy given to employer-provided healthcare (a bipartisan, so-far-untouchable disaster), catastrophic health insurance is not Americans’ norm. Rather, employers provide essentially all healthcare from basic health maintenance and symptom relief to the most expensive life-saving procedures, and they do it because the government massively subsidizes this approach.
This is odd. You don’t go to your car insurer to fill your car with gas or to your homeowner’s insurance company to change a light bulb...
Why does this matter? ObamaCare sets out to fix health insurance, and to provide it to more people. Laudable goals. But the system we had was not badly managed health insurance. It wasn’t insurance at all. ObamaCare does not throw out the crazy system we had in favor of real insurance, which would actually work, but rather enshrines and extends all the problems of an insane healthcare payment system masquerading as insurance and built as a tax dodge."
The end result, of course will be that instead of a 20% cost reduction (or even just 10%), we, the taxpayers, will be stuck with a vast unwieldy and essentially unchanged system administered by bureaucrats with lifetime sinecures, and its costs, like the costs of everything the government manages, will escalate inexorably and incessantly, until it becomes yet another Medicare monster, rife with waste and fraud.
17 - Igor
Other analyses I've seen predict healthcare savings of $300-$600billion for UHC. And it makes sense since ALL the other advanced nations (with UHC) have pro-rata GDP health costs of barely half of the USA.
Most drugs are developed in universities and the NIH, not drug companies. Drug companies spend 3 times as much on advertising and lobbying as on research, and most of their research is devoted to finding a patentable variation of a generic drug so they can demand Big Money.
So most drugs are developed by taxpayer funds and thus there should be a more equitable way to spread the benefit rather than just giving a monopoly to a drug company.
Sick Americans are being ripped off by insurance companies and drug companies, each of which has developed ways to operate virtual monopolies.
Your constant refrains about excess government costs and mismanagement are simply not borne out by facts.
18 - Glenn Contrarian
Clavos -
So how are those car companies doing?
19 - Clav
ALL the other advanced nations (with UHC) have pro-rata GDP health costs of barely half of the USA.
As the article I quoted from above noted, that's because most of the world's medical R&D is carried out in, and paid for by, America. The rest of the world gets a free ride on that.
Also, most of the rest of the world does not allow the extent and degree of litigation the USA allows -- a factor that, in the form of defensive medicine, adds significantly to the cost of medicine here.
No matter what the lying slime in the White House and their minions in the bureaucracy say, Obamacare will NOT reduce the cost of healthcare in this country; NOTHING the government runs goes down in cost -- nothing.
Your constant refrains about excess government costs and mismanagement are simply not borne out by facts.
I literally laughed out loud when I read that, Igor; it is so typical of you: you invoke facts yet present none -- none at all.
You want facts? Chew on these, Igor, from the same article I quoted earlier -- and then present some of your own research with facts before you pathetically and lamely denigrate others' arguments with nothing more substantial than gas.
" Many of the surveys of “outcomes” that show other countries spend less for similar or better healthcare than the United States are just intentionally disingenuous (i.e., they lie). The ultimate example is the U.N.’s 2000 World Health Report, which has been extensively cited by progressives and the media. Yet there are concrete examples of its anti-American bias. For instance, the study included high-speed auto fatalities and murders in their assessment of a country’s life expectancy, and then progressives cited that life expectancy to indict the U.S. healthcare system. Well, Americans drive more often on a more extensive highway system than most others, and we sadly have more crime than many. Reputable studies exclude these fatalities as, while tragic, they are not the fault of the healthcare system and should not be used to judge or modify the healthcare system. With these fatalities excluded, the U.S. ranks 1st in the world on life expectancy. With them included, we rank 19th, as reported in the 2000 study cited so often by ObamaCare advocates. The studies of infant mortality may be even worse, with the comparisons of what constitutes a live birth (and thus an opportunity for mortality) substantially different across countries, with the United States holding itself to the highest standard (and thus producing worse statistics). But, this does not stop enemies of free-market healthcare from citing warped statistics showing the United States to rank well below the truth, while to a person they’d all opt to have their babies in the United States, particularly if it was a complex or premature situation. That kind of hypocrisy is simply breathtaking...
"...Perhaps even more insidiously, most of the U.N.’s 2000 World Health Report does not really even rank healthcare outcomes. The actual oft-quoted final rankings, with the United States ranking poorly, are an average of many different ratings, many of them explicitly about how “socialized” or “progressive” a healthcare system is. For instance, their rating system gives 25 percent weight to “financial fairness,” and if one goes through their other categories you find they again are not rating who lives or dies or lives better (you know, healthcare outcomes), but how much the healthcare system has such things as “respect for persons” (this is part of the 12.5 percent weight they gave to “responsiveness,” which is separate from the 12.5 percent weight they gave to “responsiveness distribution,” whatever on Earth that is). The report goes further, judging these things with such objective measures as “respect for dignity” and “autonomy.” In total, more than 60 percent of a country’s score in this survey was some measure of progressive desires, not what you or I would call a healthcare outcome. And, as in our auto example above, much of the rest contained expressly anti-American flaws. That we pay for the United Nations to lie about us is a topic for another day."
20 - Glenn Contrarian
Clav -
and every year in the free world, hundreds of thousands of people lose their homes or go bankrupt because they can't pay for health care...
...and ALL of them are in the United States.
21 - Christopher Rose
Clavos, sticking to facts rather than rhetoric is always a good idea but your outburst in #19 appears to fall short.
Isn't it the case that government spending on things as diverse as social security and the military goes up and down?
Indeed, the amount being spent on many fronts is quite variable depending on what happens with the factors that drive them.
Of course, total government spending and the size of government does tend to increase, which is certainly bad in principle but, to the best of my knowledge, no workable process to change that tendency has yet been put forward.
That doesn't mean to say that it can't be done of course. I think a total restructuring of the legal and political systems that made them both more responsive to the needs of we the people, less expensive and more efficient could be done but that would require a complete re-working of a country's legal and constitutional framework, which nobody anywhere around the political spectrum in any country appears to have the appetite for - except me of course!
As to your "facts" which you claim counter Igor's position - which I am neither supporting nor rejecting - they don't actually appear to be facts.
To itemise just a few, the UN is not anti-American, it is just not pro American, which is just as it should be; granted not being pro probably seems like anti to some in the USA.
The UN itself is in massive need of reform of course, but that is a subject for another time.
It follows therefore that to exclude high speed auto fatalities, when there are plenty of countries, such as Germany for instance, that are also populous and have higher speed limits, or to exclude murder, again there are other countries that have large populations and higher murder rates such as Mexico, as being anti-American is NOT a fact but more of that typical special pleading many in the USA often indulge in. Very surprised that you support that view by the way but I guess today is just one of those days when you're feeling a little more USA than usual for you!
Similarly, referring in passing to "reputable studies that exclude" such factors without actually citing them is not factual but dogmatic.
The references to the USA holding itself to the highest standards with regard to infant live birth is also just an assertion, not a fact.
I could go on, but hopefully you get the point; what you point to as facts is, IN FACT, nothing other than political dogma, some fairly subjective interpretation of data and a spoonful of wishful thinking.
In terms of a personal political perspective on such matters, in principle I oppose big government and high taxes and am actively working towards reducing my personal exposure to such things, particularly the legalised theft known as inheritance tax, known as estate tax in the USA.
Reality appears to contradict my views though and such things as wealth redistribution and universal health care, although wrong in principle, seem to be the lesser of two evils in practice.
Short of the fundamental restructuring of the legal and political framework which I believe to be both necessary and desirable but extremely unlikely due to the massive inertia of history and the status quo, we appear to be stuck with what we've got and nothing short of a complete systemic failure or a massive grass roots rebellion seems likely to change that.
Given the extremely short term nature of contemporary politics and the lack of either politicians that tell us the truth or public demand for substantive reform, my expectation is for complete systemic failure at some point, unless unexpected factors such as transformative technological innovation change the dynamics.
There are some encouragingly positive signs on the technological horizon that hold out real hope but it is probably too early to start counting on such welcome developments just yet.
That pretty much leaves us with muddling through for now, with all the excessive burden of the legal and political systems that we both instinctively dislike. Unfortunate but true..!
22 - Pam Messingham
Clav,
You're stats are wrong. I just researched this and I tried to use the best of all the stats I could find. All the stats rate us very low on infant mortality and preventable death...and like I said, we aren't the greatest on life expectancy, either. Those are the facts. I looked at your cited article and I researched who American Enterprise Instutite is. It's a conservative think tank. I'm disappointed:
The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI) is an extremely influential, pro-business, conservative think tank founded in 1943 by Lewis H. Brown. It promotes the advancement of free enterprise capitalism[1], and succeeds in placing its people in influential governmental positions. It is the center base for many neo-conservatives.
Not a cool site to count on when you are looking for the facts. The fact is our heathcare sucks...no matter how you cut it. The propaganda can't continue to hide the truth.
As for us being the leading country? We have sacrificed our lead in most things. We used to have a grand education system, but we dummied it down and have been for years.
In America, about ten years ago, my daughter and I both had the same prescriptions. Her prescription was covered by her husbands health care @ a $10.00 co pay. Mine wasn't covered under my health plan. Interesting enough: I had to pay $320.00 for that prescription. The cost to her insurance was under $200.00. Why would the cost be higher to someone that didn't have insurance and lower for someone that did? I questioned the pharmacy. I was told that the insurance companies agree to only pay so much for the product when it's covered. So the insurance companies get a discount...and a 33% discount at that. A paying customer, without insurance, pays a third more. Only in America.
Again, I have to state the case with Novolog Insulin, $150.00 a vile in America, under twenty dollars in Canada. Free Enterprise in America, with the new global economy, made it against the law for me to take advantage of buying the product at a cheaper price and FORCED me to pay the price in America. That free enterprise thing should work both ways, shouldn't it?
23 - Igor
Talking about "free rides": Most medical advances occur in taxpayer financed Universities and NIH labs. Few, if any, are privately financed. Therefore the rich who are saved by an operation are getting a free ride at taxpayer expense.
Most of us don't even mind that as long as we, too, had access to all the best results of publicly financed medical advances.
24 - Glenn Contrarian
Pam -
Again, I have to state the case with Novolog Insulin, $150.00 a vile in America, under twenty dollars in Canada. Free Enterprise in America, with the new global economy, made it against the law for me to take advantage of buying the product at a cheaper price and FORCED me to pay the price in America. That free enterprise thing should work both ways, shouldn't it?
Gee, isn't that wonderful? That's part of what gives us the best health care system in the world (as long as you don't look at our national life expectancy, birth mortality rate, and cost of care per capita).
25 - troll
Pam - have you looked into the degree to which that price differential is made possible by the largess of the Canadian taxpayer?
(I haven't and am making no claim)