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Obama is having a virtual town hall
And you can participate: Go here and write a question.
First you might want to watch a video, and read some reports from Britain.
The real Death Panels (video)
Testimonies
A young woman whom, "the best health care in the world," gave up on at 12 years old, American healthcare is in truth already rationed.
In the United States there is no basic protection for working people. My fully employed, doubly insured parents were pushed to the brink of bankruptcy four times before my 15th birthday. I exceeded the "lifetime maximum" coverage before I was old enough to vote. My family paid huge sums for insurance, then 20% of the cost for treatments, without assistance from any public entity.
And I never received more than essential services, on large wards, in grim hospitals. My most significant childhood memory is knowing exactly how much I cost, and regretting the expense. I can tell you that it costs at least $200 to ride in an ambulance regardless of distress or distance. The price goes up for every lifesaving procedure performed during that journey. Extrapolate from that the normal charge for every test, procedure, blood draw, and dose of radiation – the costs of staying alive can be extreme. One day in the hospital can easily total more than an average person earns in a year.
A man who is glad he broke is leg in England
Of all the thoughts that flashed through my mind as I fell from 15ft up a ladder one morning last May, the potential financial cost of my unexpected descent was not one. I had been trying to paint the weatherboard above the bedroom windows of our house; a whim that had occurred to me in the middle of the night (as these things do) while working out chores for my week's holiday. Unfortunately, I reached just a little too far on a ladder just a little too short, and suddenly felt it slide from under me. Bouncing off the wall, knocking off the guttering and a carriage lamp in the process, I eventually collapsed in an inelegant heap on top of the ladder...
Not so, perhaps, had I bounced off the front of my parents-in-law's house in Houston, Texas. They are in their early 80s, expatriates from Britain for more than 50 years, and have followed my medical care with what I now realise is more than solicitous interest, thanks to the vitriolic US healthcare debate of recent weeks and the slagging-off that British medicine has received as a result...
Back here, once my neighbour had raised the alarm, not one but two ambulance crews arrived within minutes. I thought I'd only dislocated my knee but they knew better. I'd shattered my tibia, a plateau fracture that left fragments of bone floating about aimlessly in my leg. They haven't shown me the x-rays yet, but my wife says they're quite spectacular (one of my doctors said it was the best break they'd seen at the hospital for at least three weeks). The ambulance crews turned up at my bedside at the end of their shifts out of professional interest. Ah, they said sympathetically, they'd known it was a break, but hadn't liked to tell me.
Since then, at our nearest accident and emergency hospital, the Kent and Sussex in Tunbridge Wells, I've had the services of consultant orthopaedic surgeons, anaesthetists, doctors, nurses, ambulance crews, physiotherapists, x-ray staff, porters and even chaplains. Until last week, for 14 weeks, my leg was encased in a complicated and sophisticated exterior framework with metal pins and wires binding the bones back together. Now it is just bandaged from knee to ankle and bound in splints. I hop about on hospital crutches and a zimmer frame and an ambulance calls when I need a hospital appointment.
I have so far spent three weeks in hospital, had four operations under general anaesthetic, daily home visits from district nurses and face weeks, if not months, of more care. Yet I have never been asked for my credit card or insurance documents before treatment, as I was the only time I fell ill while visiting the in-laws in the US. No one has murmured that this treatment or that service might be a little on the expensive side, or will incur a delay. And no one – despite what conservative Republicans allege – has yet questioned whether my life is still worth living, or whether amputation would be cheaper.
I can't tell what my treatment has cost the NHS, but I have some idea what it might have been in the US thanks to the in-laws' doctor, who gave an estimate based on prices in Houston. The figures are eye-watering. She reckons: $12,000 per operation; up to $3,500 for anaesthetics each time; hospital at $500 a day and ambulance $300 a trip. That's not counting the cost of medicine. It adds up to more than $76,000, or at least £47,000. We'd have had to sell the house I was so rashly attempting to paint.
This is what the insurance industries tell you is impossible. I wonder why? What is it about America (or Americans) which they think makes it impossible for us to do what the rest of the developed (and much of the developing, as with Brazil) world manages to do?
How is it that Germany, and England, have more people who work for themselves than we do?
It's partly because we have an insane idea that everything must be profitable is keeping us in national penury. We have crappy infrastructure. It costs us(try to commute on a train... they cost too much, and run too slowly. In Europe they lose money, but the country sucks it up because it makes other things more pofitable; the same with healthcare).
We can do better. If we don't, we are going to collapse. Press for single payer; it might get us a public option. We have to drag them to the left, so the "center" isn't on the right.
First you might want to watch a video, and read some reports from Britain.
The real Death Panels (video)
Testimonies
A young woman whom, "the best health care in the world," gave up on at 12 years old, American healthcare is in truth already rationed.
In the United States there is no basic protection for working people. My fully employed, doubly insured parents were pushed to the brink of bankruptcy four times before my 15th birthday. I exceeded the "lifetime maximum" coverage before I was old enough to vote. My family paid huge sums for insurance, then 20% of the cost for treatments, without assistance from any public entity.
And I never received more than essential services, on large wards, in grim hospitals. My most significant childhood memory is knowing exactly how much I cost, and regretting the expense. I can tell you that it costs at least $200 to ride in an ambulance regardless of distress or distance. The price goes up for every lifesaving procedure performed during that journey. Extrapolate from that the normal charge for every test, procedure, blood draw, and dose of radiation – the costs of staying alive can be extreme. One day in the hospital can easily total more than an average person earns in a year.
A man who is glad he broke is leg in England
Of all the thoughts that flashed through my mind as I fell from 15ft up a ladder one morning last May, the potential financial cost of my unexpected descent was not one. I had been trying to paint the weatherboard above the bedroom windows of our house; a whim that had occurred to me in the middle of the night (as these things do) while working out chores for my week's holiday. Unfortunately, I reached just a little too far on a ladder just a little too short, and suddenly felt it slide from under me. Bouncing off the wall, knocking off the guttering and a carriage lamp in the process, I eventually collapsed in an inelegant heap on top of the ladder...
Not so, perhaps, had I bounced off the front of my parents-in-law's house in Houston, Texas. They are in their early 80s, expatriates from Britain for more than 50 years, and have followed my medical care with what I now realise is more than solicitous interest, thanks to the vitriolic US healthcare debate of recent weeks and the slagging-off that British medicine has received as a result...
Back here, once my neighbour had raised the alarm, not one but two ambulance crews arrived within minutes. I thought I'd only dislocated my knee but they knew better. I'd shattered my tibia, a plateau fracture that left fragments of bone floating about aimlessly in my leg. They haven't shown me the x-rays yet, but my wife says they're quite spectacular (one of my doctors said it was the best break they'd seen at the hospital for at least three weeks). The ambulance crews turned up at my bedside at the end of their shifts out of professional interest. Ah, they said sympathetically, they'd known it was a break, but hadn't liked to tell me.
Since then, at our nearest accident and emergency hospital, the Kent and Sussex in Tunbridge Wells, I've had the services of consultant orthopaedic surgeons, anaesthetists, doctors, nurses, ambulance crews, physiotherapists, x-ray staff, porters and even chaplains. Until last week, for 14 weeks, my leg was encased in a complicated and sophisticated exterior framework with metal pins and wires binding the bones back together. Now it is just bandaged from knee to ankle and bound in splints. I hop about on hospital crutches and a zimmer frame and an ambulance calls when I need a hospital appointment.
I have so far spent three weeks in hospital, had four operations under general anaesthetic, daily home visits from district nurses and face weeks, if not months, of more care. Yet I have never been asked for my credit card or insurance documents before treatment, as I was the only time I fell ill while visiting the in-laws in the US. No one has murmured that this treatment or that service might be a little on the expensive side, or will incur a delay. And no one – despite what conservative Republicans allege – has yet questioned whether my life is still worth living, or whether amputation would be cheaper.
I can't tell what my treatment has cost the NHS, but I have some idea what it might have been in the US thanks to the in-laws' doctor, who gave an estimate based on prices in Houston. The figures are eye-watering. She reckons: $12,000 per operation; up to $3,500 for anaesthetics each time; hospital at $500 a day and ambulance $300 a trip. That's not counting the cost of medicine. It adds up to more than $76,000, or at least £47,000. We'd have had to sell the house I was so rashly attempting to paint.
This is what the insurance industries tell you is impossible. I wonder why? What is it about America (or Americans) which they think makes it impossible for us to do what the rest of the developed (and much of the developing, as with Brazil) world manages to do?
How is it that Germany, and England, have more people who work for themselves than we do?
It's partly because we have an insane idea that everything must be profitable is keeping us in national penury. We have crappy infrastructure. It costs us(try to commute on a train... they cost too much, and run too slowly. In Europe they lose money, but the country sucks it up because it makes other things more pofitable; the same with healthcare).
We can do better. If we don't, we are going to collapse. Press for single payer; it might get us a public option. We have to drag them to the left, so the "center" isn't on the right.
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Because those two things shape a lot of the, "debate."
So, we have to spread the word ourselves.
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Because the insurance lobby owns ///a lot/// nearly all pols.
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My bf has pulmonary atresia with ventricular septal defect, and he has no pulmonary artery. He has a total of twelve heart-lungs birth defects. He practically lived in the hospital and was in ICU sixteen times before he turned 18. He grew up knowing that he would have a shortened lifespan - his doctors took pains to tell him that he'd never make it to adulthood. His birth defects have rendered him permanently disabled.
He's been on Medi-Cal his entire life. They've covered all of his operations, prescriptions, rehabilitation, etc. They didn't cover them very well, but he's still alive. They covered the diagnosis and treatment of an abscess he developed in his brain when he was 16, which he got from a hospital-contracted staph infection. Michael has incurred considerably over $1mil. in healthcare costs throughout the duration of his life.
Our disability laws are pretty stupid. Michael can work a desk job about 30 hours a week - past that, he's too tired. However, if he earns more than $80 in one month, he loses his disability and his health insurance (Medi-Cal, or whatever the national version is). He's 33 and has been stable since he was 17. So he sits at home, leading an unproductive life, because if he loses his health insurance and then gets sick, we're screwed. And he will get sick, unless a beer truck hits him - his blood oxygen levels are 80 on a good day, which means his organs are slowly suffocating to death. But that might not happen until he's in his 40s, or 50s, or 60s. Maybe later, if medicine keeps improving.
I get so frustrated, because he's smart and the way things are, he's wasting his life sitting around. Sure, he's fully covered. But it's wrong to make sure that the only way he can survive is to not have a job. He makes a pittance on disability (esp. for the Bay Area) so we could certainly stand losing his income from that if it meant gaining his income from a real job. He gets all these grants to go to college, but what's he going to do with a college education?
If we didn't have to worry about him losing his health insurance, his life would suddenly blossom with all sorts of opportunities. It's funny that, before, I'd never related my anger with our ridiculous disability laws to the health care debates going on right now. So, thanks for posting this.
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EDIT for clarity: I don't mean that there won't be any entrepreneurism without UHC, but that really encouraging it (the way we should be in the current economy!) could well require UHC.
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And the cost, for those who are self-employed, in sudden problems, which could have been detected sooner; had they been able to get regular preventive care... massive. Scraps de Selby had an aneurysm. If he weren't a self-employed copyeditor, his healthcare might have caught the changes in his blood pressure which led to it.
We don't know. We do know there are lots of people who die in this country from treatable condidtion, only because they weren't identified quickly enough.
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Where I'd like to live, is four hours from the nearest such location.
So yeah, I have coverage, (and good coverage, no lifetime cap), but healthcare still controls my life.
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Could your bf volunteer for a nonprofit? There are so many who could use a bright, intelligent person.
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He did just finish a volunteer gig with a local teen center a few months ago. But he has to take time in between them. If Disability finds out he's healthy enough to volunteer, they'll consider him healthy enough to work - and cut him. If he has back-to-back gigs, he's too healthy.
As I said, bizarre laws.
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-- Steve knows that several manufacturers located major industrial plants in Canada instead of the US because of health care policies. (And education policies, but that's another fight for another day.)
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And towards the opinion that practically all of the politicians in DC -- including the Administration -- are perfectly willing to ignore this because they believe they are or will be getting sufficient contributions from the health-care/insurance Industry to buy enough psychological-manipulation advertising to be (re-)elected.
I'm doing what I can to combat this, but don't hold out much hope for the passage of any plan, and almost none for the passage of a reasonably good one.
Come the next major election, the Democrats will blame the Republicans (mostly) for having obstructed needed legislation, and the Republicans will blame the Democrats for not having come up with a decent plan. I won't be able to disagree with either of them (assuming -- as I do -- that I'm still alive by then).
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(Something on the order of "Why have we not been offered a Single-Payer or a firm Public Option plan, and what's the chance that we will be?")
I was somewhat surprised & displeased to find that, as soon as I clicked to submit it, a new page came up, not acknowledging receipt but asking for a Donation. My attitude is that we're already paying our President and our Legislators, and that they shouldn't need either tips or bribes to do what we instruct them to do.
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So, maybe he gets stuck with yours.
I said, as a vet, I wasnted to see the same sort of system as the VA (which, for all the faults inherent to a large system; and worse one of variable funding) has been doing well (it was better under Clinton, and seems to be recovering under Obama/Shinseki), and I want to know why we can't single payer, like that, for everyone; the same way Puerto Rico does.
I want the benefits which accrue from a healthy populace which can afford to work where they please, and take flyers on private businesses, etc.
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People who've been injured by a company's practices or products wouldn't have to hope for a large payout from a lawsuit in order to get the medical care they desperately need. Companies could still be sued, but toward a better end of change rather than settlements and buyouts.
Ah, here it is: Susie Madrak writing at Crooks & Liars
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And this has been done by the 'socialists'. One of the opposition parties wants bidding wars on health care. Nuh-uh.