Will Democrats' "universal health care" plan fix the system or just force us into a broken one?

Question

Seems like Hillary's plan is just to force people into a broken system. What is being offered to fix the system? Anything? Forcing me to have health insurance is going to wipe out any disposable income I have so all my money goes to rent, gas and health insurance. Isn't the problem healthcare COSTS?

Who suffers from these crazy costs? Working as a Pharmacy Technician I remember elderly people on Medicare demanding brand-name drugs over generics for their heart medications. Who was paying for this upgrade? The government of course. Only about a $75 upgrade per PILL on some medications!! That's right, per pill. But this is where the problem lies. Its the costs. I don't have health insurace b/c I can't afford it. Something needs to be done to make it affordable.

My options: vote Democrat and be forced into a broken health care system. Vote republican and indirectly kill more American troops. Great choices.

Answer 1

the health care system is already broken here.



obama can only improve it.



and when hillary and bill were in the white house for 8 years, she tried to implement her health care system. and we all know how that turned out. A BIG FAT FAILURE



it's time for a change and that's why i'm voting obama.



hillary has already had her chance to do right by the american people and she didn't.

Answer 2

I don't exactly have a "plan", but I figure getting rid of all the insurance companies would have to be a good start. It's a simple fact that the cost of drugs and medical procedures didn't skyrocket until those middlemen got in on the action. If everybody has to pay out of pocket (or if the government provides the coverage and sets strict payment limits), drug companies and doctors would have no choice but to lower their prices. Conservatives and Libertarians are typically afraid of socialized health care (and with perhaps some good reason, considering some of the horror stories that came out of the old Soviet Union), but they don't seem to realize that HMOs are already the worst form of socialized medicine there is - you're being made to pay for other people's medical problems (as well as the big salaries of the company executives who do nothing more than move other people's money around), and yet when YOU need a doctor they look for every possible B.S. excuse they can fabricate not to pay for your own care (and sometimes they even cancel your policy outright without even at least refunding you the money you already paid into their company). How many legitimate businesses do you know of that actually look for reasons NOT to serve their customers, and refuse to give any refunds if they are unable to provide you a service?? It's just legalized fraud, and no real capitalists would ever tolerate such inefficient and unproductive parasites. Either allow the free market to truly take over the matter, or let the government handle it entirely. HMOs are an unholy half-assed mixture of both socialism and capitalism, and are a worse solution than either one or the other.

Answer 3

I see your point. Both parties avoid the real issues concerning health care. Preferring to blame high costs rather than looking at the reasons for those costs. Why should health care cost so much? Is it the insurance companies driving costs up due to high premiums? Is it the number of uninsured seeking treatment that does it? Are they uninsured due to poverty, low income or no insurance offered by employers? And these just a few of the many questions that need to be answered before a concise health care system/plan can be developed and none of the candidates seem to have addressed them. Obama's plan appears simple enough. All he basically wants to do is offer to the American people the same, affordable health care plan(s) that government employees enjoy. And he does not mandate that all adults carry health care insurance like Hillary's.

Answer 4

Actually, the Medicare patients who demand name-brand medications have to pay the difference themselves, or have a co-insurer that does so, and the latter almost never happens.

One of the major contributors to high costs is the inefficiency involved in cost-shifting. The money spent on care for the uninsured and underinsured has to come from paying people, and it costs money to do that. Obama's talk is a bit more truthful than Clinton's, but both will still leave a hole in the middle for people who can't afford insurance, and some parts of their proposals make it more affordable. And don't forget: Clinton's proposal is in essence a national version of Romney's MA legacy.

Answer 5

From the UK, my perspective is that it will not fix it, but it aims to improve on a system that fails those who can not pay. US healthcare is great when your insurance company pays out. But the system you have, fails Americans on the whole.



You, in the USA pay more for your healthcare system per person than any other country in the world, and you only have health outcomes that a thrid world country would be proud of. In Western Europe, cursed with bad 'socialist' systems, the rates of infant mortality are lower, and life expectancy is higher. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care#Economics



Your system fails Americans and fails America. Personally, I do not think that the propsed healthcare changes of the Democrat candidates go far enough, but I suspect that both are aware that if they tried to fix the system, they would never get into government.



However, if you are proud to have a system of healthcare where babies die in the USA that would have a better chance of life if born in Western Europe, then keep your expensive system and do not bother to change it.

Answer 6

If heath insurance were mandatory like car insurance, the overall cost of insurance for the individual would be reduced drastically. There would be 47 million more payers in the pool. Taxpayers pick up the cost of uninsured individuals now. You may think you don't need health insurance or can't afford it. Hillary's plan makes it affordable to all, and I for one having to deal with the enormous medical bills even though I thought I was covered, am looking forward to the solution.

Answer 7

Don't worry, the way both parties are functioning, none of the candidates plan on pulling the troops out immediately (or in the next few years), except Ron Paul.



As we all know from recent and past examples (FEMA, etc.), anything run by the federal government becomes a leaking wound for our taxes to be sucked up and abused. Health-care is a mess and will not get any better with any of the current candidates plans, especially the democrats since their campaign contributions include fundraiser money from health-care lobbyist (whats that tell you, the healthcare companies stand to become richer if Clinton is elected!).



Unfortunately for us, almost all of the candidates take their marching orders from the same people (check their advisers, they all share the same or similar people), democrat or republican. Do not kid yourself otherwise.



The ONLY candidate still campaigning who hasn't sold his soul for financial gain and power is Ron Paul.

Answer 8

Part of the cost is profits made by the insurance companies. A good universal health care system should eliminate that. Hillary's probably won't, but it's a step in the right direction.



Keep in mind that most democracies have government-run health care. Their people can vote to eliminate such programs, but they choose to keep them.

Answer 9

HILLARY'S PLAN IS THE BEST. SEE BELOW THE EXPERTS' ANALYSES:





That Obama health care plan is a dog's breakfast of bad ideas from Left, Right, and center, topped with an unhealthy amount of wishful thinking. If enacted it would cost Americans dearly — in higher taxes, lost jobs, reduced freedom of choice, and lower quality health care. Here is the detailed analysis of what is wrong with the Obama’s health care plan.

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=8266







Obama’s health care plan is not universal (Hillary’s plan is universal), and it lacks audacity. Obama’s’ plan is like himself – full of hope but not deliverable.

Compared to John Edwards, who had a detailed plan, and Hillary Clinton, whose fluency with the subject is unmatched among the contenders, he seemed uncertain and adrift. An Associated Press article asked, "Is Obama all style and little substance?"

Number one, he didn't make sure everybody is in. There is perhaps no more surprising fact about Obama's plan than that it is not universal. It is certainly sold as if it is. In his speech unveiling the proposal, Obama bragged that, "[m]y plan begins by covering every American." But it doesn't. To say otherwise is rhetorical overreach, the appropriation of a popular and broadly-supported goal without an attendant mechanism for achieving it.

There are a few ways to achieve universal health care. You can create a single-payer plan that enrolls the population automatically. This is what Canada does, and how Medicare covers the elderly. You can create an employer mandate, where the primary responsibility falls on workplaces, and smaller mandates mop up the remainder. That was the approach showcased in the Clinton reforms of the early '90s. You can create an individual mandate that charges every American with procuring health insurance, and penalizes them if they don't. This is the approach favored by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts, Arnold Schwarzenegger in California, Ron Wyden in the Senate, and John Edwards in the presidential campaign. Obama's plan offers none of these approaches.

Instead, it seeks to make care cheaper and more accessible, assuming that, if it succeeds — and that's a big if — Americans will enroll of their own volition. It is a plan with the potential to be universal, rather than a universal plan. In that respect, it is very much like Obama himself.

Few are looking to Clinton for details, as her public record is so well-known, and her policy commitments so lengthily expressed. It is Obama who has remained a relative cipher, the interplay of his ideology and political instincts opaque. Obama’s plan lacks details, and skeptics say Obama is merely an inspiring speaker than a practical health care advocate.

Obama’s failing, somewhat ironically, is a lack of audacity. It accepts the sectioning off of the market into the employed, the unemployed, the old, the young, and the poor. It does not consolidate the system into a coherent whole, preferring instead to preserve the patchwork quilt of programs and insurers that make health care so difficult to navigate. It does not sever the link between employment and health insurance, nor take a firm step towards single-payer, despite Obama's professed preference for such a system.

Obama's plan is not dissimilar from Obama himself — sold with stunning rhetoric and grand hopes, but never quite delivering on the promises and potential. And so he remains the candidate of almosts.

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=a_lack_of_audacity

Answer 10

The health plans and care today are broke only the rich can afford it, we need Hillary's plan now..live in my shoes and millions of others and maybe you'll get it

Answer 11

I for one do not want to be forced to buy anything the government puts together.



No Hillary Care for me.

Answer 12

Avoiding the tangential issues, let's talk about health care. The main cause of high costs are:



government meddling



the insurers refusal to honor their contracts

Linda Peeno, MD testified that SHE had often denied treatment JUST to save the insurance company money (http://www.thenationalcoalition.org/DrPeenotestimony.html)



Furthermore:

"the vast majority of health insurance policies are through for-profit stock companies. They are in the process of “shedding lives” as some term it when “undesirable” customers are lost through various means, including raising premiums and co-pays and decreasing benefits (Britt, “Health insurers getting bigger cut of medical dollars,” 15 October 2004, investors.com). That same Investors Business Daily article from 2004 noted the example of Anthem, another insurance company. They said the top five executives (not just the CEO) received an average of an 817 percent increase in compensation between 2000 and 2003. The CEO, for example, had his compensation go from $2.5 million to $25 million during that time period. About $21 million of that was in stock payouts, the article noted.



A 2006 article, “U.S. Health Insurance: More Market Domination, More CEO Compensation”

(hcrenewal.blogspot.com) notes that in 56 percent of 294 metropolitan areas one insurer “controls more than half the business in health maintenance organization and preferred provider networks underwriting." In addition to having the most enrollees, they also are the biggest purchasers of health care and set the price and coverage terms. “’The results is double-digit premium increases from 2001 and 2004—peaking with a 13.9 percent jump in 2003—soaring well above inflation and wages increases.’" Where is all that money going? The article quotes a Wall Street Journal article looking at the compensation of the CEO of UnitedHealth Group. His salary and bonus is $8 million annually. He has benefits such as the use of a private jet. He has stock-option fortunes worth $1.6 billion."

--Save America, Save the World by Cassandra Nathan pp. 127-128



Antitrust laws are also violated with impunity. The government does NOTHING with rogue insurers--just puckers up its lips and charges taxpayers.



"While growing into a colossus, UnitedHealth has repeatedly failed to perform its basic job of paying medical bills. UnitedHealth, which covers 70 million Americans, has been sanctioned in nine states for paying claims slowly; shortchanging doctors, hospitals, or patients; or poorly handling complaints and appeals.

One Nebraska woman complained to state regulators that UnitedHealth's computers had incorrectly rejected claims related to her son's surgery six times.

At one point, UnitedHealth owed Dr. George Schroedinger, an orthopedic surgeon, $600,000. He and his clinic sued UnitedHealth of the Midwest in 2004.

Deciding for the clinic, U.S. District Judge Stephen Limbaugh of Missouri declared that the company's claims processing systems were "flawed in many ways, denying, reducing, and improperly processing claims on a regular basis. And despite innumerable requests, United was unwilling to remedy the underlying errors in its systems" (Star-Tribune Dec. 12, 2007).

Payment troubles continued after the verdict, and Dr. Schroedinger filed a second lawsuit. "These people can never get it right, which says to me that they just plain lie," he said in an interview.

Failure to pay isn't the only complaint. The insurer also gives incorrect information on which physicians are in its network, creating enormous problems for physicians' staff.

The AMA said that no other insurer has prompted as many complaints as UnitedHealth about abusive and unfair payment practices. AMA officials have met with UnitedHealth executives 16 times since 2000, with little to show for it.

"They have always got a new plan to fix it," said Dr. William G. Plested III, past president of the AMA. But "nothing ever happens."

It seems to us that this case is just the tip of the insurance iceberg. More and more stories are appearing daily in the news media about how insurance company are instructing employees their jobs are to deny claims and/or delay payments.

With such a high percentage of medical premiums and other costs going to the legal profession, to maintain compliance with endless government rules/regulations and being hoarded by the insurance companies and executives — is it any wonder medical costs are increasing so dramatically?

It's time to take a closer look at the medical insurance companies.

UnitedHealth Group is not the first medical insurance company to rob patients, hospitals and clinics to pay obscene salaries to their executives.

It's a modern day robbing patients to pay pimps.

Michael Arnold Glueck, M.D., comments on medical-legal issues and is a visiting fellow in economics and citizenship at the International Trade Education Foundation of the Washington International Trade Council.

Robert J. Cihak, M.D., is a senior fellow and board member of the Discovery Institute and a past president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.

http://www.newsmax.com/medicine_men/medical_insurance/2008/01/03/61543.html



There also is NO price transparency in the system.



Anyway, long-story short, with the unconstitutional FEDERAL health care plans (Medicare plus) etc. that all need fixing, one person did hit on a sensible fix for this mess:

QUALITY, ACCESSIBLE, AFFORDABLE health care for all.

That means preventative care (physical with follow up). Real medication (no Medicare "donut holes" the really ill are ripped off again.) No bogus ridiculously low "caps" on needed medical procedures. No abuse of the ER. No paying for the silly with the sniffles to go to the doc for free. No more bankruptcies over medical bills. I want THIS plan that ends abuse of the taxpayer, takes the burden off employers, provides price transparency, and ends the rip-off of the US taxpayer at the hands of greedy insurance CEOs (which has been repeatedly documented).

http://www.booklocker.com/books/3068.html

Read the PDF, not the blurb, for the bulk of the plan. Book is searchable on Amazon.com

Cassandra Nathan's Save America, Save the World



You have a shot of getting Republicans to listen to that. Dems are still fixated on UHC and expanding SCHIP "kids" and Medicare until they meet and we're all sucked in to the abyss.

Answer 13

it will help not fix