posted
JLM, it's worth noting that most of your "criticisms" here depend quite heavily on your own remarkably biased presumptions -- like, for example, the belief that government-run health care will be less efficient than the current system, something that's actually pretty unlikely.
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posted
Trying to decide whether or not it's worth the effort of going point by point with him...
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Blayne Bradley
unregistered
posted
GW;s plan was either incompetently carried out or never done. What is YOUR plan to fix the US?
And how much do you make a year? How much are you spending? How muh do you really need? Are you living beyond your means?
I shoukd point out that many countries like the UK, Canada, France have large sized socialized medicare and it works just fine for us. Why can't you do it?
The Union exist to protect the rights of the workers, before unions you had rich bloated aristocrats and trusts bossing around workers forcing them to operate under horrible conditions for long hours for pocket change. Its not unions driving up the costs of labour it is the rising stanard of living in the States that is driving up the costs the non union workers who take the dirty jobs don't live off of what many live off of.
paying for all of it is a no brainer, taxes, and loans.
And frankly the US military needs to massively downsize and pull out of iraq it cannot afford such an overly elaborate military rusted machine.
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posted
Blayne, look at CNN's page on PA. You can run your cursor over each county and see the results as they come in, it's cool.
The counties that Obama needs big turnout in are Allegheny, Dauphin, Chester, Montgomery, Philadelphia, Deleware, and to a lesser extent Lancaster, Berks, Lehigh, and Bucks.
Those first six are the big keys though.
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Blayne Bradley
unregistered
posted
grrr this is why old people should not be allowed to vote.
and women, them womenfolk are trouble yessiree.
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posted
I don't think Obama's going to take Pennsylvania. I'd be happy if the difference was single-digit, however.
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posted
Ouch, losing Pittsburg hurts, but that was the more blue collar area of the state. Clinton was always going to take the area around the city, but the hope for Obama was that urban dwellers would make up the difference. He's still running up huge numbers in Philadelphia, and Chester and Montgomery are just barely coming in. He could still make it a single digit game.
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posted
South eastern really. Harrisburg and to the east, and Allentown and to the south are where Obama is going to get the bulk of his votes. Some of the counties that are expected to give him a margin of victory have either yet to report in entirely (Chester) or have not reported in much (Montgomery 13%, Deleware 35%), but he's pretty well milked Philly for all its worth. I think there's a very, very good chance at this rate of it staying under a 10 point margin, and probably even within the 5-8 point margin I predicted.
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posted
Good speech. Hard to stay inspiring though when he's just repeating things he's already said. He can't help that though in a primary this long.
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I guessed Clinton would win by 8% so I'm alittle unhappy that I was too optimistic for Obama. I would have liked Obama to close that gap just a bit more, but I am fairly certain he has Indiana tied up at least as strongly as Clinton had Pennsylvania.
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Of course I can't say that out loud, or I'd be labeled an elitist and summarily run out of the race.
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quote:Reduce healthcare costs by creating a bloated goverment run healthcare system that will raise taxes?
Our private system is actually the most bloated and inefficient of any developed nation's systems.
It's profoundly unlikely that you could possibly not reduce healthcare costs by abandoning the actuarial model system we have now in favor of a public system.
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quote: It's profoundly unlikely that you could possibly not reduce healthcare costs by abandoning the actuarial model system we have now in favor of a public system.
I would be very willing to bet that the costs of the public system would be much much higher than what we currently have and that the quality of care will dramatically drop if we go to universal health care like Clinton and Obama are proposing
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quote:I would be very willing to bet that the costs of the public system would be much much higher than what we currently have and that the quality of care will dramatically drop if we go to universal health care like Clinton and Obama are proposing.
Every country in the world that has a Universal Health is able to cover all the people for less than half of what it costs us in the US to cover only a fraction of the people. What's more by any quantifiable outcome of the Health Care system, they do better than the US system.
[ April 23, 2008, 08:08 AM: Message edited by: The Rabbit ]
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posted
An Engineering Prof. Quibbles with the media math.
The media are reporting a double digit lead. By my calculations, Hillary Hillary won 215,948 more votes than Obama out of a total of 2.3 million votes caste. That is a 9.4% lead, which when rounded should be reported as a 9% lead not a 10% lead.
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posted
I would love universal health care. My husband needs some major tests to even figure out what is causing his pain and problems, but we can't afford our part after the insurance pays. And I have pretty good insurance, where they usually pay 90% and even 100% for well care.
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posted
I believe American health care staff are paid more in those other countries. I know everyone is fantasizing that we will cut out all the Golgafrinchan* bureaucracy associated with HMO's, but is that what is being proposed? Or are we talking about simply expanding the degree to which the Golgafrinchan bureaucracy can suckle the federal teat?
*Golgafrinchan = the planet where they put all the cellulite of society on one ship and shipped them offworld.
We are looking at our surburban and saying the neighbor's prius is so much nicer, and so maybe if we put a bunch of battery packs in the back of the suburban, it will be like the prius only better, because it will be bigger.
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quote:Originally posted by Morbo: The 5-8% estimate is reasonable. But even an 8% win wouldn't translate into 20 extra delegates.
If the delegates were apportioned smoothly 8% would translate into 14 delegates, according to CNN's delegate counter. But of course they aren't apportioned continuously--8% I think would work out to less than 14 delegates.
Universal Health Care by Obama or Clinton is not free. This is to be funded partly by taking some percentage of a business' payroll which means you get less money
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posted
Wouldn't that be the same as what is deducted from my paycheck already for insurance and what my employer pays on my behalf for insurance every month? It is a pretty hefty sum, with my employer paying more than I do every month already.
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posted
It may be more depending on how much it costs to insure every one. The specific paragraph says "Employer Contribution: Employers that do not offer or make a meaningful contribution to the cost of quality health coverage for their employees will be required to contribute a percentage of payroll toward the costs of the national plan. Small employers that meet certain revenue thresholds will be exempt."
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posted
In the short term it is virtually certain costs will go up, but in the long term, they're pretty likely to go down (at least, relative to what they would have been), as that's been the near-constant experience of countries moving in that direction.
And the long term could start in as few as five years.
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posted
I sincerely doubt that 5 years after the plans implementation will see any reduction in what we pay
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Decimal fraction of 1,258,278 divided by (1,258,278 Clinton votes plus 1,042,573 Obama votes) or ~54.7% of the "99% counted". I got ~0.546875 so pooka used another media site's figures. Both of which and Rabbit's differing from the tallies provided by Pennsylvania's Department of State.
quote:Originally posted by DarkKnight: I apologize in advance to Pooka if this was covered before
Oh, it's me who learned a lesson from the last run-in. No worries.
My figure was just from CNN, which I believe gets their numbers from AP. Don't know where AP gets them.
quote:And the long term could start in as few as five years.
I don't see this happening with the baby boomers aging. I agree things have to change. I just don't think extending HMO insurance (or the equivalent thereof) to everyone is the answer. Hopefully it won't be too tragic and ugly, whatever the change is. But too many people are employed in the healthcare sector for us to radically streamline it without a major economic disaster.
P.S. (since there were no new posts) A spreadsheet digesting the McCain v. Obama or Clinton polls in key states . It does show McCain beating Clinton and not Obama. There were some surprises, like McCain leading Clinton in Wisconsin and Washington. Also, McCain's lead over Obama has strengthed in VA. Just saying, my chart doesn't show that because it's a snapshot. The source charts are on pollster.com.
posted
Am I the only one who is a bit confused about all the headlines saying things like "Clinton decisively wins Pennsylvania"?
She won by significantly less than she hoped or was supposed to have won weeks ago. How is that decisive? And would it have been decisive no matter what she won by, as long as it was at least 1 percentage point?
posted
the media is having fun with this going on. They want it to continue. Clinton winning decisively is much more about the continued fight then once more Clinton performs worse then expected.
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posted
But Clinton performed pretty much just the way the recent polls predicted. Its hard to say it was worse than expected. It was certainly worse than she'd hoped for and worse than she needed to win the popular vote. It was also considerably better than Obama and his supporters hoped for and better than some of the recent polls.
I don't think its an exaggeration to call winning with a 9.4% margin a decisive victory. It certainly wasn't close.
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quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: But Clinton performed pretty much just the way the recent polls predicted. Its hard to say it was worse than expected. It was certainly worse than she'd hoped for and worse than she needed to win the popular vote. It was also considerably better than Obama and his supporters hoped for and better than some of the recent polls.
I don't think its an exaggeration to call winning with a 9.4% margin a decisive victory. It certainly wasn't close.
This Rabbit speaks the truth.
Also I don't think one could say that Obama would have continued to rise while Clinton fell as time went on. It seemed to me that people were pretty much decided on who they were supporting at least two weeks before the primaries. But then again a month ago Clinton had a much larger lead, so maybe another 2 weeks would have meant something.
Obviously a scandal on either side could have changed things around but not much else.
Exit polls also show the pretty much all demographics expected to vote for Clinton or Obama did. I think we will find the remaining primaries are quite predictable.
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posted
Under the present health care system, the uninsured frequently go to emergency rooms either a) for non-emergency treatment or b) for treatment of things that could have been seen earlier by a family or general practitioner and treated far more efficiently, from both a cost and health perspective. Emergency treatment is almost always much more expensive, and is frequently the equivalent of swatting a fly with a bazooka.
The result is clogged emergency rooms, and higher costs for everybody. There are significant economic benefits to "universal" care, but some of the other benefits are less obvious- it also reduces disease spread and potentially reduces the overprescription of antibiotics for cases antibiotics cannot effectively treat, reducing the danger of breeding antibiotic-resistant disease strains. A centralized health system also has greater ability to negotiate for reduced drug costs and generic medicines.
And maybe- just maybe- it could encourage a few more medical students to go into general, family, pediatric, geriatric, or ob/gyn service- instead of the current overabundance of specialists, who can pay off their medical school loans much more efficiently.
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quote:Originally posted by DarkKnight: I sincerely doubt that 5 years after the plans implementation will see any reduction in what we pay
Our system costs two and a half times the industrialized world's median for healthcare costs, and provides worse care.
Other countries are healthier and pay less despite covering everybody.
They also waste less. Our system loses thousands of dollars per person in things like bureaurocracy and paperwork in order to accomodate steps that do not exist in social models.
Every other modern country on earth is an example of this as we're the last developed nation to rely on this system. And that's for a reason — it's markedly more costly and inferior.
Like the rabbit said, by any quantifiable outcome of the health care system, they do better than the US system.
Put a different way, it means by any conceiveable metric, our system does not compete with the social systems used in other countries. Quality of life, efficiency of treatment, life expectancy, treatment quality, patient satisfaction, per capita cost, everything. Ours has the added "benefit" of being so unstable that even the HMO's are largely operating on the assumption that it may collapse in the near future if kept actuarial.
You say you are very willing to bet one way on the issue but nothing seems to evidence this hunch.
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posted
pooka: mostly I'm talking about relative to what they would have been.
And there's ample empirical evidence that within a time period of five to ten years we'd see such a reduction. The primary cost-saving vehicles would be improved wellness care and reduced free-riding (which is extremely costly). There would probably also be significant administrative savings, as small businesses are very prominent in the US, but are very inefficient at handling the bureaucracy of providing employee healthcare plans.
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quote:Like the rabbit said, by any quantifiable outcome of the health care system, they do better than the US system.
I believe my original comment was too sweeping. If you consider profit for insurance companies, medical professionals, pharmaceutical companies and the entire medical/industrial complex to be a desirable outcome of the our medical system, then the US system is quantifiably out preforming most others.
Its only if you consider health and well being of the population as the desired outcomes of a health care system that ours performs poorly.
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posted
So how's Obama going to wave a magic wand and get the insurance, pharmaceutical, and med/indstrial complex to go away? cf. my prior comment about the suburban and the prius. You can't fix American healthcare by making it bigger.
While there is some truth to the expense of emergency care, the 100 most expensive citizens of New York, for instance, would also need an apartment, a chaffeur and grocery delivery to stop them from overtaxing the ER system. And I think they's still wind up in trouble regularly.
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quote:So how's Obama going to wave a magic wand and get the insurance, pharmaceutical, and med/indstrial complex to go away? cf. my prior comment about the suburban and the prius. You can't fix American healthcare by making it bigger.
This is a specious argument. Every other industrialized country in the world has managed to do it so its clearly possible. Every other country in the world has citizens like those in New York who end up in the ER regularly. We don't have to invent the wheel. There are already half a dozen working wheels out there that have found a way to deal with all the issues you are talking about.
On the other hand, I'm not particularly impressed with either Obama's proposal or Clinton's proposal. I think we need a single payer system, preferably administered on the state and local level -- but right now I don't think that's politically feasible. The plans Obama and Clinton have proposed have at least a chance of passing.
The problem is that we should have done this 30 years ago. Every day we wait, the problems get worse. Right now our medical system is about to collapse from the strain. Its hard to say exactly when we will reach that critical point but it will come.
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quote:Every other industrialized country in the world has managed to do it so its clearly possible.
Have any switched from a privatized system to a government run system? Also, wasn't the system originally non-profit and then became for-profit in the 80's or something? Other systems have gone from non-profit to socialized, but not for-profit to socialized. I'm just saying things will get more expensive, not less, barring some kind of systemic collapse. Keep in mind that healthcare was 20% of the GNP in 2000, up from 6% in 1964.
But I guess if a universal health plan allows the industry to grow long enough for us to weather through the housing meltdown, it will be a blessing. The health industry will have to melt down eventually, though. It just can't keep growing, and there is no soft landing in sight.
quote:There would probably also be significant administrative savings, as small businesses are very prominent in the US, but are very inefficient at handling the bureaucracy of providing employee healthcare plans.
Small businesses don't handle employee healthcare plans. I don't see how they even could if they wanted to. They can buy into coverages.
You want to know the real reason we won't be rid of the bureaucracies is because of labor unions. They collect, hold and disburse healthcare contributions, and it's an incredibly profitable stream of income for them, so whatever the democrats have in mind, it's not going to hurt the Unions.
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Blayne Bradley
unregistered
posted
Russian went through shock therapy to switch to a open market system, the US can go through its own shock therapy to switch to socialized medicin. Bite the bullet now not later.
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quote:Every other industrialized country in the world has managed to do it so its clearly possible.
Have any switched from a privatized system to a government run system?
Yes, all of them have although most of them did it at a time when the private systems were much simpler.
quote:Also, wasn't the system originally non-profit and then became for-profit in the 80's or something?
The US medical system has always had some for profit sectors. Since we have many systems some of which are for profit and some of which are non-profit it would be incorrect to say we have either one.
Fifty years ago,l medical insurance was relatively uncommon in the US and we had a fee for service medical system. As higher technology and more expensive medical care became wide spread we transitioned to a mixture of private insurance, HMOs, public insurance (Medicare and Medicaid) and fee for service. Most medical insurance in the US is through companies that are technically not for profit.
We have transitioned from a primarily fee for service system, to a system that is a mixture of fee for service, private insurance, HMOs and public insurance.
quote:Other systems have gone from non-profit to socialized, but not for-profit to socialized.
No! Very few countries have "socialized" medicine. I believe that England has such a system. I don't know of any other Western country that does. Many of them have single payer National Health Insurance but care is actually provided by private organizations. Some countries have a mixture of National and Private health insurance. Each country has a different history. All of them had for profit medical care before their current system.
quote:I'm just saying things will get more expensive, not less, barring some kind of systemic collapse. Keep in mind that healthcare was 20% of the GNP in 2000, up from 6% in 1964.
I don't think immediate savings is the primary goal of any of these health care plans. The goals are to improve coverage and reduce the rate at which costs are growing. I have seen detailed proposals that show how we could provide health care for everyone at no additional expense. If you are interested, I can try to find links for you.
Right now, the US government pays more per capita for medical care than any other country. That's not the total health care bill, only the part that we pay through taxes and that covers only a fraction of the population (senior citizens, disabled, government employees, those who qualify for medicaid . . .)
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