nailgunner wrote:
1) Whenever almost anyone in the world needs the latest and best medical care they can get they usually head for the United States. Not other "civilized" countries like England, Sweden, Germany, Canada etc. It is not a coincidence that our free market system in health care and other "products" has produced the gold standard in so many things.
2) ObamaCare does nothing to fix the problems with a system that does have some issues (mostly because the government keeps making things worse by trying to make things better). Other than assessing a "tax" penalty on people, who will probably not pay it and just add to the IRS enforcement bureaucracy, and then still allow them to buy insurance after they get real sick, nothing significant will change in our current system. Insurance rates will go nowhere but UP. This particular law is a joke and will not fix anything.
3) This country is facing a shortage of Doctors as it is. Limiting what the free market will allow them to make is about as stupid an idea as can be thought of. The surgeon that your insurance company paid the "outrageous" fees to probably spent at least 8 years in medical school/training, had a ton of student loans to pay off and probably pays more than $100,000 in malpractice insurance. To get to that level is incredibly difficult, and I don't begrudge them a penny that they make. So yea, lets chase the smart and hard working among us into another profession where they can make a comparable living. Maybe make millions a year as a malpractice lawyer suing Doctors instead. Class envy over what Doctors make is not the way to fix a system.
4) If you really think the federal government is good at running ANY business, let alone a medical one, tell me what kind of job they have done running the Veterans Administration medical system? Not to mention the Medicare/Medicaid systems. It's laughable to think that they won't screw up running the whole medical system in a major way. Turning a huge part of our economy over to a bunch of career bureaucrats will end up in nothing but a disaster.
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Your point 1: Wow, you have no idea how far off-base you are. Those days are loooooong gone. Even when I had my back surgery in 2003 there were better options available in 3 different European countries, options that were still being tried here, pending approval which came 2 years later). That's the difference between keeping track of GLOBAL NEWS (which I do daily) and watching USA news only. Did you know there are two different CNN channels? One to keep Americans in America dumb & naive, and the other one with news from all around the World. Even countries like New Dheli/India have made strides that we couldn't keep up with in the past 10 years. We haven't been the "Gold Standard" in a long time and there are far more celebrities and athletes going Overseas for major medical issues, then ones who are coming here. CANCER is about the only area of medicine where we can claim to know more than anyone else, but even in that area others are right on our heels. I can't believe how grossly misinformed you are.
Your point 2: I don't care about Obamacare either, but you're completely missing what I was getting at. These days any Decmocratic President has become pretty much helpless to do anything worthwhile if it involves cooperation from the Republican side. Just look at Clinton, they actually wanted to oust him for screwing around and getting blow jobs ... like that would stop you or me or anyone else from being able to do their job right ... yet in the end he not only got rid of the budget deficit, but even had us sitting in the plus. Obama, another Democrat, and on top of that a Black Man, is having to wade through quicksand every step of the way to get *ANYTHING* done. In light of that, the current "Obamacare" was all that could be accomplished after the Republicans broke everything down completely. Eight years of destruction and I guess you're another one of those who expects miracles in the first term of 4 years? Utterly preposterous ... not to mention impossible !!!
Your point 3: I have no idea where you're getting your information from but if there's an actual shortage of Doctors ... then that's because America is the only civilzed Country on Earth where Education has turned into business. In most Countries a college education is based on the *ABILITY* of a student to be able to grasp the required knowledge for a degree, often having to pay for nothing more than books & Materials which is commonly less than $2000 per year. But in America tuition costs have sky rocketed year after year after year for the past 20 years ... to the point that anyone without a full scholarship has to think very hard whether or not they want to go after their degree, followed by paying off Student loans and other types of loans for the next 20 years or more years of their lives. DUH, you can't blame people for thinking twice before deciding to go after a 4 or an 8 year degree anymore. Are you really so blissfully unaware of the fact that there are over 1 MILLION college educated folks working in fast food joints because they took worthless classes that should never have been offered in the first place? That in and of itself should be a crime. College has become such a business that many if not most colleges are filled with worthless "crap courses" just to get more more confused students, more people enrolling, to continue making even more money ... often with such courses that benefit nobody at all, least of all the Student who has to pay through the nose for those courses. Some college coaches are making *MILLIONS* of dolalrs in salaries. THey're no better than a glorified High School coach and you actually wonder why tuitions are what they are ??? And in case you didn't know, many surgeons who work directly out of a hospital have their malpractice covered by the hospital which is substantially more affordable. Now if we passed some decent laws, prohibiting frivolous lawsuits or prohibiting massive, often absurd judgments, then that too would help save *BILLIONS* that could be used more intelligently for healthcare. That's what a socialist Government does ... they look for abusive behavior in the Non-government areas and pass laws to stop such abuses.
Your point 4: It's truly sad to see how low this Country has sunk in the past 30 years. Especially themany people who are screaming endlessly about too much Government and the terrible power that Government abuses ...
while completely ignoring the civilian abuses ... Maydoff ruining the lives of thousands, Haliburton with dirty business to get $BILLIONS worth of contracts that permit a $36K per year earning earning soldier to work side by side in a war zone with a civilian who makes triple and quadruple of that with better equipment, the Enron scandal which ruined the lives of thousands of families, the abuses by Adelphia cable, the sweat shop jobs by major *AMERICAN* companies who hide out in other countries to avoid hiring American workers at home. Man, don't even get me started. Everyone points to the stupidity of our Government while being too stupid themselves to realize just how well most people here are being played by the News Media and huge Corporations. There's no way on this planet that you're going to have me believe for even 1 second that our Government is as bad or worse than the many terrible terrible things that American families had to suffer through, at the hands of civilian American Corporations. As intimated earlier, most of us here in the USA are being kept nice and stupid by MSNBC, FOX News (the worst), CNN, and so on. And because many people are (NOW) completely overworked and underpaid, they're just too damn busy to pay attention or to give a damn about what's *REALLY* going on here.
Oh yeah, but let's tie the Government up as much as possible (since that's what big corporate America is looking for anyway).
LESS Government = LESS oversight = MORE corporate power = MORE money to be made and more people to suffer for it. (IMO)
Amen, that's it for me too.
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As of February 2012 MAGICJACK officially SUCKS like nothing else in the World ... NOTHING is worth this amount of headaches
& Frustrations !!!
