Comments on: “Reform” means higher costs, not lower

By: $700 Billion in Health Care Waste – and We’re Doing Zip About It

$700 Billion in Health Care Waste – and We’re Doing Zip About It — Thu, 28 May 2015 01:06:35 +0000

[…] cut health care costs to match the rhetoric about affordability. I warned about this in my post, "'Reform' means higher costs, not lower" and then proposed "Driving down the cost of health care: What would actually […]

By: Joe Flower

Joe Flower — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 08:32:01 +0000

What amazes me is being called a right-wing nut job. Thats a first! I have many times been called a socialist merely for insisting that, yes, we really should find a way to cover everyone, as well as for my analysis explaining why free market competition cannot be the panacea that fixes health care.
I wonder if you actually read the full argument or just the headline – and I invite you to read other articles on the site. You might find that there is a bit more complexity to this issue than you suppose.

By: Frank Thomas

Frank Thomas — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 18:16:46 +0000

This article is just a load of bull. These right-wing nut jobs never cease to amaze!

By: Joe Flower

Joe Flower — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:36:04 +0000

Wow, you read the whole first paragraph before rendering that carefully-considered judgment?
Unfortunately, the explanation for this counter-intuitive observation is in the following paragraphs, not the first one.

By: Glen

Glen — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:25:08 +0000

“more competition causes the price to go up not down” !??! I read the first paragraph and already this guy is full of sh*t !!!

By: Clint Shepherd

Clint Shepherd — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 02:07:53 +0000

After reading a few of the comments posted here, I would be remiss to not respond in kind. Losing Our Rights: Your claim, which struck me as mildly smacking as a warning of the imminent arrival of some sort of quasi-police state intent on forcing the 48 some-odd-million Americans who, for a host of reasons, have simply not been able to keep up with the cost of insurance deductibles, co-pays, et al that have risen over 489% in the last 10 years. Any effort to reform what is comically referred to as “healthcare” is not an attempt to dictate what Americans should eat (although, given the fact that our society is plagued as having the highest rate of obesity, even that might not be a bad idea). Here are a few facts to underscore my response to you: http://helpglobe.com/answers.aspx?qid=570 http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/51585.php Kate Sender: Whether or not the folks over at Fox News (sic) continue to rewrite what our country bore witness to the past eight years, President Obama inherited the misdoings which led to “the tanked economy” to which you refer. Moreover, it was Mr. Bush who, just as he had done in informing the Americans he had decided that Iraq had to be invaded, delivered another of his “chicken little,” “the sky is falling” speeches. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Vote2008/story?id=5879591&page=1&page=1 http://www.aim.org/aim-column/bushs-big-bank-bailout/ So while I agree that some blame must be placed, let it be attributed to the party responsible for it.

By: Kate Sender

Kate Sender — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 08:24:42 +0000

This congress, the same one that tanked the economy then bailed out banks with our tax dollars that they could buy naming rights to stadiums (capitalone = new yankee stadium) now demand control over health care that they determine who is eligible for medical care funded by increased tax dollars from a smaller number of working folk (layoffs and reductions in force per above economic mismanagement). Campaign promises are merely fluff – it’s time to govern; vote out the congressmembers funded by the banks and insurance companies and fico and replace them with those who understand simple math.

By: Consider your people and your country Joe

Consider your people and your country Joe — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 08:28:24 +0000

Heh heh, good thing for the public, you’re not giving financial advice.
Don’t worry about insurance companies costs going up, their costs (instead of their profit) should’ve been higher, after the reform, they’re just going to have to shift some of that profit over to their costs, just the way it should be.
We’ve seen the ways insurance companies already keep *their* costs down and inflate
their profits:
– dictating the $ amount to cover, not based on market rates, but based on what the insurance companies want, leaving the doctor & the patient as the victim, to either have the doctor eat the costs that go over or to deny care to transfer that cost to the patient (even though the patient paid for insurance)
– after years of pocketing a patients premiums, at the first sign of the patient needing serious care, insurance companies take out a team to investigate that patient’s health, digging up centuries old dirt to list them as having a pre-existing condition, so they don’t have to pay up a small portion of the premium they’ve been pocketing.
want more? lots more? I find it funny that your blog is being advertised on Google Adwords, as if this is a coverup for propaganda against health care reform….

By: Losing Our Rights

Losing Our Rights — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 08:44:19 +0000

And that’s just the beginning… but ultimately, it’s all about more federal control over the individual. With increased health care costs comes the next logical argument by the feds: take over/control the food industries to regulate what we eat in order to make us “a healthier nation”. This will be the rationalization they need to help drive health care costs down which we all know will never happen. And we the people will willingly give up more of our individual rights to the elitists.

By: Kirk D.

Kirk D. — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 07:53:39 +0000

Health care for profit is an ugly concept since it exposes the business to the possibility of corruption at the expense of people’s very lives.
You are absolutely right that there are no caps on anything, so how can this save us money? The only cap that I can see is the possibility that if things don’t go right in the future, that there will be a trigger to initiate the public option.
If costs do escalate where are the trigger points? Congress is able to ask the Iraqi government to perform according to a timetable. Why can’t they ask the insurance companies and the health care industry to do the same?
If a public health plan trigger is initiated it would then sound the death nil for the insurance companies. That would be more than just a cap it will take their head as well. Unless the insurance companies are somehow contracted or merged into the government (a government buyout) in order to manage the public plan, else-wise I see that business withering and us dying in the meantime.
I believe that the government alone would be incapable of managing a plan of this size considering every social plan that they have attempted has become bankrupt and they know next to nothing about actually running an efficient business. Ultimately a government run plan with the help of a well controlled insurance and health care industry may be the eventual outcome. But things are so broken at this point it will take quite a while to mend.