If 3 million healthy insured dropped their policies in the next two weeks not only would they save thousands of dollars the insurance industry would faint in disbelief that this many people actually are awake and give a damn.

Sooner or later another few million would do the same. Suddenly all of america would realize the medical insurance business has been doing nothing but making tons and tons of profit by way of fear mongering.

At that point all would see that america could have insurance at a much much lower rate such as 225 a month for the best coverage in the world that includes the entire family.

Makes dollars and sense to me. More money to invest smart instead of supporting high rollin executives and shareholders.

Maybe get on with that home improvement with cash instead of borrowing from the bank.....just maybe.

Maybe go to Jamaica for a few weeks instead of supporting high rollin executives and shareholders.

Bill Moyers

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blo...

If you’ve been watching the Senate Finance Committee’s markup sessions, maybe you’ve noticed a woman sitting behind Committee Chairman Max Baucus. Her name is Liz Fowler.

Fowler used to work for WellPoint, the largest health insurer in the country. She was its vice president of public policy. Baucus’ office failed to mention this in the press release announcing her appointment as senior counsel in February 2008, even though it went on at length about her expertise in “health care policy.”

Now she’s working for the very committee with the most power to give her old company and the entire industry exactly what they want – higher profits – and no competition from alternative non-profit coverage that could lower costs and premiums.

A veteran of the revolving door, Fowler had a previous stint working for Senator Baucus – before her time at WellPoint. But wait, there’s more. The person who was Baucus top health advisor before he brought back Liz Fowler? Her name is Michelle Easton. And why did she leave the staff of the committee? To go to work – surprise – at a firm representing the same company for which Liz Fowler worked – WellPoint. As a lobbyist.

You can’t tell the players without a scorecard in the old Washington shell game. Lobbyist out, lobbyist in. It’s why they always win. They’ve been plowing this ground for years, but with the broad legislative agenda of the Obama White House – health care, energy, financial reform, the Employee Free Choice Act and more – the soil has never been so fertile.

The health care industry alone has six lobbyists for every member of Congress and more than 500 of them are former Congressional staff members, according to the Public Accountability Initiative’s LittleSis database.

Just to be certain Congress sticks with the program, the industry has been showering megabucks all over Capitol Hill.

From the beginning, they wanted to make sure that whatever bill comes out of the Finance Committee puts for-profit insurance companies first -- by forcing the uninsured to buy medical policies from them. Money not only talks, it writes the prescriptions.

In just the last few months, the health care industry has spent $380 million on lobbying, advertising and campaign contributions.

And -- don’t bother holding onto your socks -- a million and a half of it went to Finance Committee Chairman Baucus, the man who said he saw “a lot to like” in the two public option amendments proposed by Senators Rockefeller and Schumer, but voted no anyway.

"An army of private bureaucrats burns 15 percent to 40 percent of your money"

"So what exactly are those bureaucrats doing? Basically, rejecting your claims and preventing sick people from being covered."

People who believe these things are not entrepreneurs and have no business sense, otherwise they would know these simply cannot be correct. If Mr. Burress truly believed these numbers are correct he should be in a mad dash to start his own insurance company because he could save up to 40% of his costs by scrapping the meanie bureaucrats who do nothing but deny claims, and he would steal all the other companies' customers by paying these extra claims. Run to the bank and tell them your genius business plan Mr. Burress to get a loan so you can open up your new company: Caring Insurance, Inc. If the bank won't give you a loan, just put an ad in the JW--there are plenty of suckers here who believe the same thing. You'll get your seed money in no time.

As you shouldn't, Brent. The reason Medicare has such low administrative overhead is because the 'administering' is left to the doctors, practitioners, and hospitals. Not hard to keep the costs down when you don't have to do the work.
The other aspect conveniently left out of these arguments is that Medicare doesn't succeed in a bubble. Medicare relies on private insurers to make up the underage it doesn't pay - 7 to 10% per dollar. And what comes out of that percentage? Research and development for new procedures, medicine, testing, technology; and that's R and D that the world relies upon as well. All these wonderful industrialized nations the writer references, the one's that provide single payer or 'Medicare for all' systems, ride the backs of our technological advances in medicine. Things won't be so Edenesque if we adopt their methods.

When has the government done anything efficiently lately? At least profit is a motivation to be somewhat efficient. Government bureaucracies have absolutely no motivation to be efficient. If they go over-budget, all they have to do is soak the taxpayer for more money.

" Other countries do NOT get comparable results"

You're right-- they take care of everybody, for a lot less money.

That's just pure BS, LO. Pharmaceutical research in this country would grind to a halt without the huge amount of research done or sponsored by government institutions, both federal and state, and Big Pharma is the most direct beneficiary of that research.

Tom - "Who in their right mind would trust gov't. figures relating to 'bureaucracy' overhead?" - Now that's funny!

"the US healthcare system is the most expensive and least efficient in the entire world."
Hyperbole much, bozo?

"Hyperbole much, bozo?"

What's hyperbolic about it? We spend nearly twice as much, while providing no or reduced coverage to nearly 1/3 of the population.

LO-- You're just plain wrong. There is a great deal of medical and pharmaceutical research taking place in other industrialized democracies.

And to claim that the vast amount of government-sponsored research somehow supports the notion that the healthcare system here is superior because it's "private" is downright Alice-In-Wonderland absurd.

just_another_bozo_on_this_bus (Anonymous) says…

"LO— You're just plain wrong. There is a great deal of medical and pharmaceutical research taking place in other industrialized democracies."

Sorry, but you are just plain wrong.
75% of biotechnology development done in the US.
82% of biotechnology R&D money comes from the US
66% of new medicine sales generated from the US research.
http://www.efpia.org/Content/Default....

61% of world pharmacuetical R&D dollars come from the US
http://www.pmprb-cepmb.gc.ca/CMFiles/...

Etcetera, etcetera...

Overall about 85% of all new procedures, devices and pharmacueticals are developed in the US. The US makes up 4% of the world population and 23% of the world economy. I'd say we are pulling more than our fair share.

"And to claim that the vast amount of government-sponsored research somehow supports the notion that the healthcare system here is superior because it's “private” is downright Alice-In-Wonderland absurd."

I didn't claim that. I guess you didn't look up the word "arguendo."

Why pay the most expensive medical insurance industry in the world anything?

Never never never forget… It is the private medical insurance industry that cancels YOUR medical insurance AFTER taking YOUR MONEY for years. Years and hundreds of thousands dollars later no one has any guarantee of any coverage.

Not only that if an employer makes a switch there is no guarantee any coverage or same coverage will be available.

Face it what wayyyyyyyyyyyyy too many healthy citizens pay out to insurance companies in a 12 month period they would never spend that much in 12 months no way jose'... with very very few exceptions. So why are we giving a middle man so much money? What's the point?

Paying out all that money is no guarantee the most expensive insurance industry will stick with you when the bills come rolling in.

Think about it. It's so many many many working people WITH insurance that are being forced into bankruptcy. Why pay an insurance company anything?

It makes little difference whether the government gives taxpayers (or their employers) a deduction for their health care spending, on the one hand, or collects their taxes then pays for their health care, either directly or via a voucher, on the other.

Moreover, tax dollars also pay for critical elements of the health care system apart from direct care—Medicare funds much of the expensive equipment hospitals use, for instance, along with all medical residencies.

All told, then, tax dollars already pay for at least $1.2 trillion in annual U.S. health care expenses. Since federal, state, and local governments collected approximately $3.5 trillion in taxes of all kinds—income, sales, property, corporate—in 2006, that means that more than one third of the aggregate tax revenues collected in the United States that year went to pay for health care.

Recognizing these hidden costs that U.S. households pay for health care today makes it far easier to see how a universal single-payer system—with all of its obvious advantages—can cost most Americans less than the one we have today.

Medicare must exist in the fragmented world that is American health care—but no matter how creative the opponents of single-payer get, there is no way they can show convincingly how the administrative costs of a single-payer system could come close to the current level.

More on this matter:
http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archiv...

I do not think expanded Medicare/public option is the best, but the continuous defending of the status quo makes absolutely NO sense. The for-profit Insurance industry model of health care is plain and simply a BAD idea. Either go public or we have to REALLY regulate it creating virtually a non-profit environment while at the same time encouraging the R & D environment to survive and prosper. The only reason this isn't a done deal, either or discussion between these two options is the health care lobby as described many times above...

Comrade, you are better than that. I have been wrong in these forums before, and learn from the likes of you but unless I am wrong again we are talking about the evolution of a necessary evil that we small humans have less than 70 years experience with.

Looks like Professor Kline must have passed out a new vocabulary worksheet.

I love analogies. That is easily one of the top five worst I have ever heard. Computers and health insurance are not at all similar.

You call it "administrative overhead." Most call it "identifying and eliminating waste and fraud," a problem endemic to and devouring Medicare (by the government's own admission). The problem is not that private insurance has higher overhead. The real problem is that public insurance DOES NOT.

'They do it to maximize profits. Successful insurance companies will fully insure only healthy people who don’t really need much insurance. It’s called cherry picking or cream skimming. Economists call it “adverse selection.” '

Yes, and unsuccessful insurance companies become insolvent and their unfulfilled obligations cause other insurers who are members of guarantee associations to either fund their failures or assume their risks.

Adverse selection has nothing to do with economists-at least for the purposes of this discussion. The practice of adverse selection (or as it is more often described; *antiselection* or *selection agaisnt the insurer*) is the tendency of individuals who believe they have a greater-than-average likelyhood of loss to seek insurance protection to a greater extent than do those who believe they have an average or less-than-average likelyhood of a loss. In other words, a person with a pre-existing condition is more likely to seek health insurance coverage than one without such conditions.

While portions of Mr. Burress's observations are meritorious, some of his criticisms don't apply in the context of group health insurance coverage. For example, employees or dependents with pre-existing conditions are often fully covered from the date of enrollment or have 90 -180 day periods where pre-existing conditions are not covered. After that period expires they are covered for all conditions-no matter the onset date.

An insurer writing group health insurance would have to accept coverage for all the *eligible* members of an employer's group that they've accepted for coverage. Eligibility is typically defined as those who are actively working at least 25-30 hours/week at the time of enrollment. And yes, unfortunately the business of insurance involves administrative overhead for things like policy design and approval by state insurance regulators, sales personnel to market the business, underwriters to assess the risk, policy holder services to issue and service policies and claims people to determine benefit eligibility. That's just the way these regulated businesses are run.

Cont.

Millions upon millions of the healthy dumping their medical insurance and paying out of pocket would put consumers in the drivers seat in a big way.

Then elected officials would dump their stocks and resign from boards across the nation.

Then consumers would be more likely to obtain national health insurance. A good bang for the tax buck.

whatthehell (Anonymous) says…

"I love analogies. That is easily one of the top five worst I have ever heard. Computers and health insurance are not at all similar."

This is the problem, you think there is some economic difference. There is not. Health care commodities respond to the laws of supply and demand the same exact way that computers, oranges, furniture and all other commodities do. You are too emotionally invested to rationally think about this issue. The economy doesn't "care" whether the government is a dictatorship or an elected one, it doesn't "care" if interventions are by popular demand or at the request of special interests, it doesn't "care" how important or non-important we think a certain sector of the economy is, whether it be health care, education, pencils or fuzzy dice. The rules of economics apply no matter what. The way to address these issues is the same regardless of the commodity at issue. To say that free market capitalism is fine for HDTVs but for health care a government program is the right way to go belies a lack of understanding regarding how the economy functions.

The health care bill isn't about improving health care, lowering costs, or helping people who don't have it - it is about federal government control over individual citizens, aka tyranny.

The few remaining boundaries in whats left of our constitution will be breached if this health care bill passes. If the federal government can force private citizens to buy health insurance, what else can they force us to do?

In the US private industry supplies only 57% of the total funding for medical and pharmaceutical research. State, local and federal govt. supplies 32%, which is a bunch, but for the most part, private industry gets to use the govt.- sponsored research results without having to pay a penny in licensing fees to the US taxpayers who paid for it.

http://www.rand.org/pubs/documented_b...

The notion that medical research will grind to a halt if there is a change in the healthcare system is wholly unsupported. We could easily take a relatively small portion of the savings that would come with a sane healthcare system and increase funding to the taxpayer-supported NIH, which is already doing some of the best research in the world.

whatthehell (Anonymous) says…

"it just doesn't stand up for many reasons…not the least of which is the nature of the world economy, cheap international labor practices and so forth."

Those reasons support my argument. The world economy means that competition from outside sources should help drive prices down. Instead cheap drugs from Canada aren't allowed in the US because of FDA regulations. Cheap international labor actually should have an effect since a lot of our medical personnel are immigrants coming to the US, which should drive prices down. Again, government regulations only allowing a small number of people to practice medicine prevent this normal market effect from occurring.

"If you like analogies… For the first part of the 20th century, industrialization wreaked natural disaster after natural disaster (Acid rain?). It took govt intervention to regulate the big businesses and FORCE them to do the right thing."

You have it backwards. At first the polluters couldn't pollute at all because of strict enforcement of property rights. If one ounce of mercury gets on my property you've committed a trespass. The government let up on its enforcement in the name of promoting development. The situation got so bad a river caught on fire. Then instead of enforcing property rights again the government stepped in to create compromises. You can dump X amount of sulfur into the Kansas River, Y amount of lead and Z amount of mercury. Of course favored parties get special treatment...

"I agree the US does great research, but what has that got to do with insurance companies? They aren't paying for the research"

Yes, they are.

"But unlike most of you, I can see what others are going through and empathize with them"

Give us all just a slight break! Why, aren't you the special one. The rest of us just want the poor to die, but you really, really care. Another wonderful nugget from the Holier Than Thou Society.

"The notion that medical research will grind to a halt if there is a change in the healthcare system is wholly unsupported"

Yeah, except for the number you just threw out of 57% coming from private insurers. Take away 6 out of every 10 dollars going toward medical research and everything will continue to run smooth as silk. Brilliant.

"States do not require people who don't drive on the roads to have car insurance."

Is that a double negative?

Either keep 'er parked in yer front yard on blocks, or race it around the lower forty then, mister...

"The federal government cannot force people to buy anything. If you believe otherwise, please cite the portion of our constitution which permits this."

This is an interesting question as there isn't really much historical example of people being forced to buy private services (or goods). Of course, the obvious reason is that when government finds some matter important enough to require action the government usually directly requires it via taxation and exclusive government programs. While many may have an interest in the theoretical aspect of this, the reality is a judicial defeat would prove a Pyrrhic victory than leads directly to a one-payer (socialistic) system financed not by premiums but taxes. (Thanks for nothing, guy. Whose side are you on?)

"Car insurance is not a good example. ...Technically, they don't require people who do drive to have it - they require them to be “financially responsible” for damage they cause to others in the event of an accident. Most (not all) people do this by having liability car insurance."

No, not quite. You are in fact required to have liability insurance. You are also financially responsible whether you do or not. The two are not exclusive.

It isn't a perfect example but it's good enough. As Bob Dole used to say during the 'big government controversy' a generation ago - over motorcycle helmet laws - 'If I'm required to pay to scrape your brains off the road then I'm entitled to have you take prudent action to avoid getting your brains scattered all over the road.' Likewise, just as I'm in practice footing the bill for much of the uninsured's medical costs, I don't have a problem demanding that they get insurance. If you want to live free in a state of nature, I hear Somalian immigration laws are easy.

The problem with your perfect libertarian world of property and property rights, LO, is that it's all based on property. One of the nasty little side effects of a laissez faire economy (even an impure one like ours) is that over time, property (and power) accrues into ever fewer hands. The result being that those who have no property, which eventually is the vast majority of the population, have zero rights.

Liberty_One (Anonymous) says…
The poorest Americans today live better than Queen Elizabeth thanks to improvements in techonology. At the time everyone would have been quite content to have the same comforts that the Queen had. But would you trade clean water, antibiotics, computers, cars, airplanes, TV, the internet etc. to be rich in 1590?

If you think the poorest Americans have access to all those advances in technology, you're sadly mistaken. Even clean water is a commodity in America. If you can't pay, you're out of luck.

Know what else is a commodity? Our lives...bought and sold by the healthcare and food industries.

streamfortyseven (Anonymous) says…

"Even if all government regulation and subsidies were taken away, we'd still have a medical care cartel, essentially a group of companies which engage in fixing prices and restricting the supply of licensed physicians and healthcare practitioners in order to keep profits artificially high. Free markets exist only in theory."

Cartels actually don't work. There's always somebody who will break ranks to undercut his fellows. That was the reason why the Interstate Commerce Commission was created--to protect the cartel. The first thing they did was force prices to be declared publicly--in other words, no secret price cutting. The only way cartels can be maintained is with government help.

When the antitrust laws were first proposed people were saying what you say--that cartels and monopolies were cutting supply and raising prices. Looking back at that period today, we see that actually prices were falling so much we thought there was a depression going on. But what was happening was that productivity was increasing so rapidly and competition so vigorous that prices fell, raising the standard of living for everyone.

Free markets don't exist in theory, capitalism is what people do when you leave them alone.

just_another_bozo_on_this_bus (Anonymous) says…

"One of the nasty little side effects of a laissez faire economy is that over time, property accrues into ever fewer hands."

Nope, just the opposite. The truth is, wealth rarely lasts for more than a few generations. Property isn't accumulating like you assume it is. Because of competition prices fell dramatically during the 19th century. The average person had more and more purchasing power and property was distributed further. The thing you don't understand is that in a free economy people only make transactions which they feel are beneficial. What's fair is judged by each individual, not your abstract notion of what's fair.

jaywalker--

With regards to the CATO link-- He really only makes one valid point, which is that there is no perfect healthcare system, anywhere. Beyond that it's really no more than a psuedo-academic, Libertarian version of SICKO. He makes a whole lot of very superficial observations, sprinkled liberally with some cherry-picked and mostly meaningless statistics. Just about the crap that can be expected from CATO.

With regards to the CAHI (a creation of the insurance industry) link, this pretty well sums it up.

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2006/january...

"After they (CAHI) have adjusted the numbers by applying their biased assumptions, the percent of private sector administrative costs is still over three times the administrative costs of Medicare (16.7 percent and 5.2 percent, respectively). The actuality of the administrative excesses is not in dispute - only the degree of the egregiousness of the excesses."

"Property isn't accumulating like you assume it is."

The wealthiest 1% have 50% of all wealth, and they are getting wealthier, at everyone else's expense. That's a fact, not an assumption.

"The thing you don't understand is that in a free economy people only make transactions which they feel are beneficial."

This assumes that only those directly involved in a transaction are affected by it. And that assumption is clearly wrong.

Liberty_One: Cartels *do* work - the diamond-selling cartel works quite well, if you go outside and undercut, you don't get any more diamonds to sell. You're out. Same case for the medical/industrial complex: there's no competition, really, it's all a state capitalist/corporatist system. Libertarians can't (or won't) admit this, perhaps because they get so much funding from the very industries that benefit from the status quo remaining in place. You didn't address the material I cited from George Soros, and for good reason - it underscores my point: "[free market theory] gives self-interest and the profit motive a moral imprimatur which allows them to replace virtues like honesty, integrity, and concern for others ... [it treats] the initial allocation of resources as given. This rules out any consideration of social justice."

Sure, where the corporations that fund the Libertarian Party and its mouthpieces and think-tanks have already made their hundreds of billions of dollars from the public, having used government to coerce the money away from the producers of the wealth, of course they'd prefer to keep the money. They don't care in the least about social justice or the good of the rest of society. If people can be suckered into going along with this, it's all good with them. Of course, they can't fathom why people would do such things which go against their own economic self-interest, but that's not going to stop them from enjoying the fruits of their propaganda campaign. As H. L. Mencken once said, "You'll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." It's why insurance companies can continue to swindle people out of their hard-earned money, year after year. If no one carried insurance, and the hospitals continued to charge astronomical fees for treatment, they might sue 5% of the population into bankruptcy, but eventually there'd be one hell of a backlash.

"you clearly didn't follow the link"

Maybe you should follow your own advice, Herr Klowne. Perhaps if you had followed the link I posted, you would have seen that the administrative costs for Medicare are actually higher than for private insurers. But as usual, boohoozo, facts aren't what you're interested in, are they? After all, the only thing our little Marxist buffoon cares about is that old jack-booted heel on the throat of the proletariat:

"The wealthiest 1% have 50% of all wealth, and they are getting wealthier, at everyone else's expense. "

Right, Herr Klowne - 'at everyone else's expense.' Tell me, boohoozo - exactly what did it cost *YOU* for the wealthy to become wealthy? Keep up the sniveling class-jealousy, Herr Klowne - after all, it's the only argument you have, isn't it?

nota,

Your tone continues to be disturbing.

Frankly, if it's true that you were a doctor, and now work in some sort of counseling field, I wouldn't come to see you in either capacity.

The way that the concentration of wealth hurts others is fairly simple:

Given a businesses income, if you continue to pay the folks at the top more and more, you must either keep wages stable towards the bottom or decrease them.

There is documentation (I'm sorry, but I can't remember where) that the difference (expressed as a ratio) between average wages and top wages is significantly higher now than it used to be.

And, at the same time, health care costs are increasing much faster than wages.

So the "average" worker is getting squeezed - higher costs, but not higher wages - while those at the top are just fine.

The comment on wealth was unrelated to the discussion I was having with you about property, LO. However, I fail to see how the arbitrary distinction you're making changes the reality of concentration of wealth (and property ownership.)

Jimo - Thanks for the thoughtful response.

In Nebraska, a person is not required to have liability car insurance if they have a a specified (large) amount of money in some kind of special state-approved deposit. The same constitutionality question about forcing people to buy something was raised when the state passed the car insurance law, and this was the remedy.

I say car insurance is a bad example because it is designed to protect other people. The comparison with health care just doesn’t work. Car insurance is not mandated to all Americans by the federal government. Car insurance is just for adults who have a drivers license and chose to drive on the state-funded roads. You can have a license and even own a car without insurance. You can drive all over my 20 acres without insurance, but if you want to drive on the road, the state (not the federal government) requires you have to protect people you might harm.

Bozo - if you think for every rich person there MUST be 20 poor people - you are either blinded by ideology, or you are terribly ignorant. Wealth is not a zero-sum game because life is not a zero-sum game.

People in America are guaranteed they will have the same opportunity to make of their lives what they will, but since people are not created with equal talent, intelligence, or motivation, the outcomes of their lives will not be equal, nor should it be.

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery. -Winston Churchill

just_another_bozo_on_this_bus (Anonymous) says…

"For all practical purposes, wealth is a zero-sum game, especially in a capitalist system. For any single person to be in the top 1% in this economy pretty much requires that at least 20 people will have to be poor,"

Where on Earth do you come up with this stuff? In a capitalist system you can only get wealthy by making others wealthy. Why do you keep forgetting the fact of mutually beneficial free exchange?

"Captain Lawnmower (Anonymous) says… Millions upon millions of the healthy dumping their medical insurance and paying out of pocket would put consumers in the drivers seat in a big way."

You first, Richard.

And, a few more points.

Although I agree that our founding principles had a certain nobility, they also existed in a world quite different from 21st century America.

They were written before the Industrial Revolution.

Although based on "all men are created equal", somehow the founding fathers managed to own slaves at the same time.

The task is to apply the principles to a very different situation than the one in which they were written (not an easy task, imho.)

I agree that our government has gotten too big, and much too influenced by monetary interests. It should exist to provide a government "of, by and for the people."

However, it's interesting to consider that (according to a friend of mine) even at the beginning, some distrusted the average folks. Apparently James Madison didn't think that much of them.

So from the very beginning, there's been a strain of "anti-populism" as well.