No to Chemo, Yes to Assisted Suicide

[Freedom4all]

As published June 7th WSJ France Fights Universal Care's High Cost

The problem is that Assurance Maladie has been in the red since 1989. This year the annual shortfall is expected to reach €9.4 billion ($13.5 billion), and €15 billion in 2010, or roughly 10% of its budget.

It took decades before the pieces fell into place. Only in 1999 did legislation mandate that anyone with a regular residence permit is entitled to health benefits with no strings attached. Also that year, France clarified rules for illegal residents: Those who can justify more than three months of presence on French territory, and don't have financial resources, can receive full coverage.

That made the system universal.

In the U.S., health-overhaul bills don't attempt to cover illegal immigrants. Doing so would increase costs and is considered politically difficult.

Yet even the smallest budget moves are proving controversial. Local residents are up in arms over a cost-cutting measure that makes patients pay €1.10 an hour to park at the hospital. "It's a scandal," says retired local Communist politician Gérard Eude. "It goes against the very idea of universal health care."

Tilting the Balance

Since France began building up its universal health-care system, in 1945, successive governments have been faced with the challenge of balancing the national health insurance budget without going back on the original promise of taking good care of the entire population.

For the past three decades, small reductions in health care coverage and incremental increases in health-care taxes have been the main recipe.

1976 -- Coverage of ambulance costs is reduced.

1977 -- Coverage of some medications is reduced. Some hospital beds are closed.

1982 -- Patients must pay a "moderating fee" of 20 francs (3 euros) out of pocket when they are hospitalized.

1985 -- Coverage of some paramedical procedures is reduced.

1986 -- Increase in health-care payroll taxes.

1987 -- Letters sent to the national health insurance must be stamped.

1988 -- Creation of a special tax on medication advertising to help fund health care.

1990 -- Introduction of the CSG, a new tax levied on all types of income to help fund health care.

1991 -- Increase in health-care taxes levied on payroll.

1993 -- Increase in CSG rate. Coverage of doctor consultation is reduced.

1996 -- Increase in health-care taxes. A new health-care tax is levied on private health-care plans.

1999 -- New tax levied on drug makers when their revenue exceeds a pre-defined level.

2000 -- Doctors are required to explain to the national health insurance why they granted a worker sick leave.

2003 -- The "moderating fee," which was increased over time, is raised to 15 euros.

2004 -- Patients must register with a "preferred" general practitioner who will reroute them toward specialists when necessary, or face lower reimbursement for care.

2005 -- The national health insurance deducts 1 euro off doctor consultation fees before it starts calculating how much it must reimburse patients.

2008 -- The national health insurance deducts 50 cents off every pack of medicine before it starts calculating how much it must reimburse patients.

 

[Freedom4all]

As the administration trumpets the benefits of socialized medicine and often refers to the Britain as a shining example, there are cause for concerns for the elderly, IE: Death Panels

The effects of socialized medicine in Britain, engineered by government-run cost-cutting panels on which Obamacare would be modeled continue to wreak havoc on the elderly and infirm:

*Elderly left at risk by NHS bidding wars to find cheapest care with reverse auctions

*Patients forced to live in agony after NHS refuses to pay for painkilling injections

*Elderly suffer in care shambles

*Twisted priorities that let the elderly suffer

*NHS neglects elderly depression.

*NHS failure on Down’s screening kills healthy babies

*‘I said to the nurse, please feed her:’ Pauline Pringle’s mother went into hospital for a hip operation and came out close to starvation. And as Blake Morrison reports, hers is not an isolated case

*Shame on the doctors prejudiced against Down Syndrome

Obama's solution? Take a pill.

 

[Freedom4all]

Yet another example why there is much debate about Obamacare.

Government Medicine Should Horrify Americans
Excerpt:

Look what you're missing in the U.K.:

* Breast cancer kills 25 percent of its American victims. In Great Britain, the Vatican of single-payer medicine, breast cancer extinguishes 46 percent of its targets.

* Prostate cancer is fatal to 19 percent of its American patients. The National Center for Policy Analysis reports that it kills 57 percent of Britons it strikes.

* Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data show that the U.K.'s 2005 heart-attack fatality rate was 19.5 percent higher than America's. This may correspond to angioplasties, which were only 21.3 percent as common there as here.

* The U.K.'s National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) just announced plans to cut its 60,000 annual steroid injections for severe back-pain sufferers to just 3,000. This should save the government 33 million pounds (about $55 million). "The consequences of the NICE decision will be devastating for thousands of patients," Dr. Jonathan Richardson of Bradford Hospitals Trust told London's Daily Telegraph. "It will mean more people on opiates, which are addictive, and kill 2,000 a year. It will mean more people having spinal surgery, which is incredibly risky, and has a 50 per cent failure rate."

* "Seriously ill patients are being kept in ambulances outside hospitals for hours so NHS trusts do not miss Government targets," Daniel Martin wrote last year in London's Daily Mail. "Thousands of people a year are having to wait outside accident and emergency departments because trusts will not let them in until they can treat them within four hours, in line with a Labour [party] pledge. The hold-ups mean ambulances are not available to answer fresh 911 calls. Doctors warned last night that the practice of ‘patient-stacking' was putting patients' health at risk."

Things don't look much better up north, under Canadian socialized medicine.

* Canada has one-third fewer doctors per capita than the OECD average. "The doctor shortage is a direct result of government rationing, since provinces intervened to restrict class sizes in major Canadian medical schools in the 1990s," Dr. David Gratzer, a Canadian physician and Manhattan Institute scholar, told the U.S. House Ways & Means Committee on June 24. Some towns address the doctor dearth with lotteries in which citizens compete for rare medical appointments.

* "In 2008, the average Canadian waited 17.3 weeks from the time his general practitioner referred him to a specialist until he actually received treatment," Pacific Research Institute president Sally Pipes, a Canadian native, wrote in the July 2 Investor's Business Daily. "That's 86 percent longer than the wait in 1993, when the [Fraser] Institute first started quantifying the problem."

* Such sloth includes a median 9.7-week wait for an MRI exam, 31.7 weeks to see a neurosurgeon, and 36.7 weeks - nearly nine months - to visit an orthopedic surgeon.

* Thus, Canadian supreme court justice Marie Deschamps wrote in her 2005 majority opinion in Chaoulli v. Quebec, "This case shows that delays in the public health care system are widespread, and that, in some cases, patients die as a result of waiting lists for public health care."

 

[Flying Titan]

Theres already plenty of hard data available that a majority of that 45 million have no health care because they choose not get it. The CBO has already stated that there very well may be that same amount go without health care under Obamacare. So we are trading a broken system for another broken system. That makes no sense whatsoever.


No they do not, that couldn't be further from the truth. Why do others come here for the higher quality care? Ask Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi after having a pacemaker implanted at the Cleveland Heart Center.

So why should you care?

Because this is one of those specific examples of a wealthy European leader traveling to America for life-saving medical care that he himself deemed superior to the care available in his own country. If our health care advancements are the envy of the world and are hand-picked by leaders for whom money is no object, why would we want to strangle that innovation with government control?

Interesting you should bring up Cleveland. My brother-in-law, in his 30s, has come down with cancer. He worked for the same company for several years...paid for their best health insurance option...thought he would be well covered. Well...not so much.

It's been a nightmare from the beginning. First of all, his plan wouldn't allow him to go to the place that we, as a family, identified as the best place for his type of cancer, the Cleveland Clinic. He stayed with a local doctor because that's the care his insurer agreed to ration to him, even though we feared that this was not the best qualified doctor to handle his case. We offered to come together as a family to pay anticipated six-figure bills so he could go there. He didn't want to burden anyone so he followed his insurance company's referral. He was out of work for so long that he lost his job. Stayed with COBRA as long as he could. During one of his multiple procedures (some necessitated by mistakes in earlier procedures), he had a type of internal "drain" implanted to deal with internal bleeding and pressure. It was supposed to stay in for a few weeks and then be replaced. Well, insurance ran out after that procedure. Nearly a year later, guess what.... it's still in - and it's causing new complications. He's now receiving indigent care, and there's no question that he's at the back of the line for any care at all. There is no question if he were in Canada, Germany, Japan, France...etc, he would be receiving much better care than he's getting today. He's an American citizen, he has cancer and he's got no coverage - plain and simple.

The point of this is that - sure - if you can go to the Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, Sloan Kettering, etc, you're going to get great healthcare - but most people aren't the president of Italy or multi-millionaires, so that's not at all indicative of the US healthcare system. There are a lot more cases like my brother-in-law's.

 

[tech2101]

Interesting you should bring up Cleveland. My brother-in-law, in his 30s, has come down with cancer. He worked for the same company for several years...paid for their best health insurance option...thought he would be well covered. Well...not so much.

It's been a nightmare from the beginning. First of all, his plan wouldn't allow him to go to the place that we, as a family, identified as the best place for his type of cancer, the Cleveland Clinic. He stayed with a local doctor because that's the care his insurer agreed to ration to him, even though we feared that this was not the best qualified doctor to handle his case. We offered to come together as a family to pay anticipated six-figure bills so he could go there. He didn't want to burden anyone so he followed his insurance company's referral. He was out of work for so long that he lost his job. Stayed with COBRA as long as he could. During one of his multiple procedures (some necessitated by mistakes in earlier procedures), he had a type of internal "drain" implanted to deal with internal bleeding and pressure. It was supposed to stay in for a few weeks and then be replaced. Well, insurance ran out after that procedure. Nearly a year later, guess what.... it's still in - and it's causing new complications. He's now receiving indigent care, and there's no question that he's at the back of the line for any care at all. There is no question if he were in Canada, Germany, Japan, France...etc, he would be receiving much better care than he's getting today. He's an American citizen, he has cancer and he's got no coverage - plain and simple.

The point of this is that - sure - if you can go to the Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, Sloan Kettering, etc, you're going to get great healthcare - but most people aren't the president of Italy or multi-millionaires, so that's not at all indicative of the US healthcare system. There are a lot more cases like my brother-in-law's.

I am sorry to hear about your Brother's predicament. I sincerely hope that it gets better for you and your family.

You provide a real-life stark example of the current state of our system.

When I went on strike, my COBRA insurance for my wife an I would have been $800/month. Needless to say, I took the first job I could find that offered coverage. That same policy from back in 2005 would now cost me over $1000. The care and coverage is actually less than the policy was then.

So, we should just stay the course...

I think not.

This proposal, put forth by Senators Howard Baker, Tom Daschle, and Bob Dole; all former leaders in the Senate is the best I have seen.

The plan will be cost neutral:

The anticipated cost of health reform is $1.2 trillion over 10 years. The
delivery system, reimbursement, employer “payâ€￾ contribution, and tax
exclusion reforms in the proposal (and related interactions) are expected
to achieve over $1 trillion in savings and new revenues. To ensure budget
neutrality, Congress could enact additional Medicare or Medicaid savings,
create an enforceable budget “triggerâ€￾ mechanism to slow spending
growth above a target level, or empower the Independent Health Care
Council to develop additional recommendations for achieving federal
spending growth targets.

Here is a great website that shows all of the proposals out there for health care reform.

Health Care Reform Proposals side-by-side comparison.

 

[Freedom4all]

There is no question if he were in Canada, Germany, Japan, France...etc, he would be receiving much better care than he's getting today.

Nope, that is purely an assumption. Look at whats happening with their HCS, people are dieing waiting for care, or getting rationed away. Again a broken solution for a broken problem is not a better solution.

 

[Freedom4all]

I am sorry to hear about your Brother's predicament. I sincerely hope that it gets better for you and your family.

You provide a real-life stark example of the current state of our system.

When I went on strike, my COBRA insurance for my wife an I would have been $800/month. Needless to say, I took the first job I could find that offered coverage. That same policy from back in 2005 would now cost me over $1000. The care and coverage is actually less than the policy was then.

So, we should just stay the course...

I think not.

No one is advocating "staying the course". People are not buying into the single payer gov run health system is going to be the cure for all the ill's, in our current HCS. Its not. Its a (proven) bad system that will replace an existing broken system. The current bill is rife with sweeping changes that will drastically change the HCS for the worse. Just look at Canada, Britain and France, etc.

Look at Mass, 2 years in and they are broken.

Massachusetts Takes a Step Back From Health Care for All

BOSTON — The new state budget in Massachusetts eliminates health care coverage for some 30,000 legal immigrants to help close a growing deficit, reversing progress toward universal coverage just as Congress looks to the state as a model for overhauling the nation’s health care system.

Think that cant happen with Obamacare?

 

[Freedom4all]

When one delves in to the details outlined in the bill, the result is that you'll lose more then you will gain.

5 freedoms you'd lose in health care reform
If you read the fine print in the Congressional plans, you'll find that a lot of cherished aspects of the current system would disappear.

Excerpt from Forbes

1. Freedom to choose what's in your plan
The bills in both houses require that Americans purchase insurance through "qualified" plans offered by health-care "exchanges" that would be set up in each state. The rub is that the plans can't really compete based on what they offer. The reason: The federal government will impose a minimum list of benefits that each plan is required to offer.

2. Freedom to be rewarded for healthy living, or pay your real costs
As with the previous example, the Obama plan enshrines into federal law one of the worst features of state legislation: community rating. Eleven states, ranging from New York to Oregon, have some form of community rating. In its purest form, community rating requires that all patients pay the same rates for their level of coverage regardless of their age or medical condition.

3. Freedom to choose high-deductible coverage
The bills threaten to eliminate the one part of the market truly driven by consumers spending their own money. That's what makes a market, and health care needs more of it, not less.

Hundreds of companies now offer Health Savings Accounts to about 5 million employees. Those workers deposit tax-free money in the accounts and get a matching contribution from their employer. They can use the funds to buy a high-deductible plan -- say for major medical costs over $12,000. Preventive care is reimbursed, but patients pay all other routine doctor visits and tests with their own money from the HSA account. As a result, HSA users are far more cost-conscious than customers who are reimbursed for the majority of their care.

4. Freedom to keep your existing plan
This is the freedom that the President keeps emphasizing. Yet the bills appear to say otherwise. It's worth diving into the weeds -- the territory where most pundits and politicians don't seem to have ventured.

The bill gives ERISA employers a five-year grace period when they can keep offering plans free from the restrictions of the "qualified" policies offered on the exchanges. But after five years, they would have to offer only approved plans, with the myriad rules we've already discussed. So for Americans in large corporations, "keeping your own plan" has a strict deadline. In five years, like it or not, you'll get dumped into the exchange. As we'll see, it could happen a lot earlier.

5. Freedom to choose your doctors
The Senate bill requires that Americans buying through the exchanges -- and as we've seen, that will soon be most Americans -- must get their care through something called "medical home." Medical home is similar to an HMO. You're assigned a primary care doctor, and the doctor controls your access to specialists. The primary care physicians will decide which services, like MRIs and other diagnostic scans, are best for you, and will decide when you really need to see a cardiologists or orthopedists.

Under the proposals, the gatekeepers would theoretically guide patients to tests and treatments that have proved most cost-effective. The danger is that doctors will be financially rewarded for denying care, as were HMO physicians more than a decade ago. It was consumer outrage over despotic gatekeepers that made the HMOs so unpopular, and killed what was billed as the solution to America's health-care cost explosion.

 

[Freedom4all]

Remember When Dissent Was Patriotic?

2003 Hillary Rodham Clinton: Audio Link

"I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration somehow you're not patriotic. We should stand up and say we are Americans and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration."

 

[delldude]

This proposal put forth by Senators Howard Baker, Tom Daschle, and Bob Dole; all former leaders in the Senate is the best I have seen.

The plan will be cost neutral:

That was exactly what they said about Medicare..........


Daschle's plan is based upon rationed health care with denials of service for those deemed not worthy..............an extension of Hillary's closed door BS.

 

[tech2101]

Daschle's plan is based upon rationed health care with denials of service for those deemed not worthy

Obviously you did not bother to read the plan by Howard Baker (Republican), Bob Dole (Republican), and Tom Daschle (Democrat).

It has nothing of the sort.

 

[delldude]

Obviously you did not bother to read the plan by Howard Baker (Republican), Bob Dole (Republican), and Tom Daschle (Democrat).

It has nothing of the sort.

Source????

 

[tech2101]

Source????

Look 4 posts up dude.

The one you originally responded to.

Since you seem to be challenged at the time, I will re-post what I posted above:

This proposal, put forth by Senators Howard Baker, Tom Daschle, and Bob Dole; all former leaders in the Senate is the best I have seen.

If you can't navigate the little underlined thingy above, try this:

http://www.bipartisanpolicy.org/ht/a/GetDo...tAction/i/10782

 

[delldude]

Look 4 posts up dude.

The one you originally responded to.

Since you seem to be challenged at the time, I will re-post what I posted above:



If you can't navigate the little underlined thingy above, try this:

http://www.bipartisanpolicy.org/ht/a/GetDo...tAction/i/10782

The only challenge I face is thinking for myself and not letting the government decide all aspects of my life.

Your boy Daschle is the one who wants 'term limits' on Grandma's life....... 😱

 

[tech2101]

The only challenge I face is thinking for myself and not letting the government decide all aspects of my life.

Your boy Daschle is the one who wants 'term limits' on Grandma's life....... 😱

Try again Dude.

Show me where that is in any plan being proposed.