Government run health care

[Grace]

If you google general welfare constitution, you will be presented with close to 2 million hits.

I'm guessing there would be at least one hit to back up many differing opinions.

[Edwina's Secretary]

I teach a class on the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. It is the federal law that established how employees are paid, minimum wage, child labor, etc.

It says hours of work are "all time the employer requires, suffers or permits...etc" Participants are always confused by the word "suffer". It is not used today the same ways it was used in 1938.

The law also establishes how non-exempt employees are paid for out of town travel - based on train or automobile. Air travel was not contemplated.

So we have to think and apply our interpretation of the law. That is what employers/lawyers do and the courts decide if they do it right.

We spend lots of time in the class talking about what the law was written to accomplish and how that is accomplished today.

Any law is open to many, many interpretation. Who is right and who is wrong?

That depends I suppose!

[Puckstop31]

The Preamble says "promote then general welfare". Article 1, sec 8 says "provide".

Like I said to LH in one of the other threads... Promote is VERY different than provide.

Would a national, forced, healthcare plan work in the United States? I have not heard anybody come up with anything that would. Why not leave it to the states to decide? Our republic is kinda cool like that.

As usual, my issue with the whole healthcare thing is this... My government would FORCE me to surrender the fruits of my labor to support people who did not earn it, more than they do already. Government is force, there are no two ways about it. This country was founded on the concept of individual liberty and that government, especially on the federal level, was a necessary evil. So....


Why in world would we want to surrender something as personal and intimate as our health care to the federal government? Do we REALLY think it would get BETTER? Further, how do we pay for it? Knowing that government programs almost never come in at or under budget.

Its the highest level of insanity. We would, with the stroke of a pen, damn our posterity to effectual slavery to the government that is supposed to ensure our liberty.

[Edwina's Secretary]

I continue to be puzzled why people are quite comfortable having a for profit insurance company dictating their medical coverage. Deciding what drugs they can take, what surgery or treatment they can have...based on profits.

I am not. How could government sponsored medical care be any worse?

I am an optimist. I believe the United States is as good as Canada, Germany, France, Sweden, Denmark, UK, etc.. etc. and we could come up with a workable plan for universal health care that is less expensive and more effective than the not so good system we have now.

[Cataholic]

I continue to be puzzled why people are quite comfortable having a for profit insurance company dictating their medical coverage. Deciding what drugs they can take, what surgery or treatment they can have...based on profits.

I am not. How could government sponsored medical care be any worse?

I am an optimist. I believe the United States is as good as Canada, Germany, France, Sweden, Denmark, UK, etc.. etc. and we could come up with a workable plan for universal health care that is less expensive and more effective than the not so good system we have now.

I could not agree with you more. There HAS to be a better system then some claims adjuster (without any medical training whatsoever) determining benefits.

[Puckstop31]

I continue to be puzzled why people are quite comfortable having a for profit insurance company dictating their medical coverage. Deciding what drugs they can take, what surgery or treatment they can have...based on profits.

I am not. How could government sponsored medical care be any worse?

I am an optimist. I believe the United States is as good as Canada, Germany, France, Sweden, Denmark, UK, etc.. etc. and we could come up with a workable plan for universal health care that is less expensive and more effective than the not so good system we have now.

So a underpaid and overworked government employee is better than what we have now? You really don't think cost will be a factor in decisions made by a government run plan?

A government run plan can be a LOT worse. But, as a compromise I, for example, think it would be interesting to let the states decide for themselves what to do. Let the results of a few states trying it decide. Just not PA please. LOL I worked for 2 years as a contractor to the PA State Medicade system. Specifically in the claims processing department. I had the "pleasure" of being able to kibbutz in on some phone calls.

Government should lay the groundwork/rules and then let the private economy actually do the work. Why not start with eliminating the "pre-existing condition" rules.... Tort reform.... If fedzilla gets a hold of something as huge as our healthcare... When it starts to suck, where do you turn?

I wish I could be an optimist when it comes to my government. But I form my opinions based on RESULTS and not "good intentions". Government is not very efficient or cost effective at what it does now... I cannot understand why anyone would want to entrust their health care to them.

[Grace]

An attempt to inject a bit of levity into this topic.

From my mailbox -

Government Health Plan


The American Medical Association has weighed in on National Health Insurance. The Allergists voted to scratch it, but the Dermatologists advised not to make any rash moves. The Gastroenterologists had sort of a gut feeling about it, but the Neurologists thought the Administration had a lot of nerve.

The Obstetricians felt they were all laboring under a misconception. Ophthalmologists considered the idea shortsighted. Pathologists yelled, "Over my dead body!" while the Pediatricians said, 'Oh, Grow up!' The Psychiatrists thought the whole idea was madness, while the Radiologists could see right through it.

Surgeons decided to wash their hands of the whole thing. The Internists thought it was a bitter pill to swallow, and the Plastic Surgeons said, "This puts a whole new face on the matter." The Podiatrists thought it was a step forward, but the Urologists were pissed off at the whole idea. The Anesthesiologists thought the whole idea was a gas, and the Cardiologists didn't have the heart to say no.

In the end, the Proctologists won out, leaving the entire decision up to the assholes in Washington.

[pomtzu]

An attempt to inject a bit of levity into this topic.

From my mailbox -

ROFLMAO

Thanks for posting that. Love it-love it-love it..........

[Miss Z]

I found the article from the Times that I was referring to earlier in this thread, and thought it would be worth including here.

Now, I don't overly agree with the tone of this report, but it does raise a few points that I found interesting, and shocking.

I've highlighted the bits that stood out to me.

America has no right to speak ill of our NHS

Free healthcare is the mark of a civilised society. It is the one principle that unites British politicians across the spectrum

Janice Turner

Dear America, for some time now we’ve realised that far from being your special pal, you’re not that into us. We know the love — like the extradition treaty between us — flows mostly one way. For his military loyalty, our previous Prime Minister got yo-Blaired. For his exquisite hand-wrought presidential gifts, our present PM got White House gift shop tat. America, we sucked it up.

You can diss our food, recoil at our personal hygiene, cast our RSC grandees as 2D villains, send Gwynnie and Madonna to patronise us, fingerprint us like criminals at your airports, mow down our sons in “friendly fire”. But as the rage over President Obama’s healthcare reforms descends into attack ads and town-hall gunfire, don’t you dare speak ill of our NHS.

It is the one thing, in our digital, atomised, privatised, multi-ethnic age, that unites us; our irreducible essence, the very best of us. Healthcare free at the point of delivery is the principle upon which every politician across our spectrum — marginal self-publicists such as Daniel Hannan aside — now agrees. The NHS ministered to David Cameron’s brain-damaged son as tenderly as to Gordon Brown’s fatally ill infant girl. It shows that decency, fairness and compassion, the national traits we fear died with nobler generations, live on. That America does not have universal health-care, that 47 million of your citizens live in fear of getting ill, appals and, frankly, baffles us.

The Republican National Committee can condemn the NHS as Orwellian or evil or “socialised”, but what it is, at root, is Christian.

Perhaps not the kind of noisy, nosy, puffed-up Christianity that Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, or Congressman Paul Broun of Georgia are most familiar with, one that applies its energies chiefly to shutting abortion clinics and preventing gay couples from sanctifying their love. It is the simple, quiet, industrious Christianity of chapel and kirk that, woven into the Labour movement, strived to do God’s work on Earth. I’m no Bible-basher, but I’m struggling to recall the verses in which the Good Samaritan asks for insurance details or Jesus bills Lazarus for “co-payments”.

I happened to read Senator Grassley’s statement that in Britain the 77-year-old Ted Kennedy would not have received treatment for his brain tumour, at the bedside of my 86-year-old father. Mr Grassley’s view that “when you get to be 77, your life is considered less valuable under these [NHS] systems” seemed rather surreal, as my old pa, who collapsed at home, was brain- scanned until it was discovered that he had suffered a minor stroke. As a consultant attended him, physios assessed him and he was found a place in a rehabilitation unit, where he will spend a month recovering, I thought how the life of this elderly man — no high-born statesman but a person of modest means — was treated as immensely precious.

Throughout this difficult week, in which I was plunged abruptly into the dark labyrinth that is geriatric care, I gave thanks that the least of my worries — and more importantly my father’s — was money.

To be old, sick and poor is a ghastly fate, and worst among the Republicans’ disgraces is the alarm caused among America’s elderly, that Mr Obama will slash the Medicare system, which is their saviour. It is, as David Frum pointed out in these pages yesterday, a misconception that America has no state provision for its poor and elderly. Indeed, Medicare and Medicaid (for the poor) is so expensive that it is bankrupting your nation, America.

But unlike the lean NHS, there’s a spare tyre of fat on the system and any Briton who has been treated in America can tell you where it lies: around the bellies of physicians grown corpulent on prescribing unnecessary treatment.

To us it is unimaginable that a doctor would order a scan, pills, an invasive test, an operation even, not based on whether it will make us well but on how much he can charge. (We are revolted too by the drug company adverts nagging the sick to “ask your doctor to prescribe” some profitable new gimmick.) And if you are covered by Medicare or Medicaid, the doctor can pass this egregious fee on not to the insurance company but the taxpayer. Some even demand kickbacks from hospitals for referring patients. The scandal of unscrupulous US doctors milking state medicine makes our MPs’ expenses debacle seem like a minor dishonour. Yet why the uproar, the shots fired, when President Obama seeks to redirect tax dollars from doctors’ condos in Palm Beach to sick children?

As with so many facets of US life, healthcare seems a mix of wasteful overconsumption and appalling need. In America a doctor delivers a baby with a battery of beeping machines and a bill that goes “ker-ching!”. Here a regular birth is attended only by a midwife. Once home, a British mother is visited for the first ten days by the same midwife, and a health visitor, has a free weekly drop-in clinic to answer her questions: a new American mom must muddle along alone. Which system works best? US infant mortality is a dreadful 6.3 per 1,000 births, Britain’s 4.8.

When a British friend living in Los Angeles watched his wife give birth he prayed that she wouldn’t need a Caesarean section: they had funds only for a normal delivery. That your citizens are born into this unneeded stress ill befits the richest country in the world. My friend’s health insurance for a family of four costs £800 ($1,300) a month. Yet when his elder daughter had a developmental disorder requiring tests and therapy, the insurers balked. Every clinic visit was followed by a call haggling about what percentage they would cover. It is, he says, like arguing over your sick child’s body with a firm of car clampers. He and his wife paid $50,000, their entire life savings — 70 per cent of bankruptcies in America are caused by medical bills.

In Britain the bureaucracy you fight is the hospital, in America it is in the insurance companies. Dealing with the NHS is like wrestling a Leviathan. The system is trying, rigid, oblique: the endless wait to see a doctor if there is no emergency, the senseless way everything stops at weekends, the noise in the wards, the defining mode of grace under pressure.

But the NHS has one thing about it that is perfect — its underlying principle. Only when you can say that about your own health system, when no American suffers through lack of funds, will we permit you to point a damning finger at ours.