I thought George was an intelligent guy, but his banter on health care was all it took to realize that he is a snob and a elitest. His statement on subtracting illegal aliens from the equation of 46 million uninsured did it for me.
hey george its a sad state of affairs as a citizen i have to subsidize anchor babies, and their illegal parents, educate them, house them , give them food stamps, and free health care and they don't pay taxes.
A trip to the emergency room for my good friend without health care for heart problems $10,000
A trip to the emergency room for a illegal alien (((((((000000000))))))
Even when the economy was growing, 46 million people in America did not have any health insurance. Since the recession began, an estimated 4 million additional Americans have lost their health insurance and 2 million have become uninsured. The recent turmoil in the job market is likely increasing the number of uninsured at the rate of 14,000 a day. Another estimated 80 million to 100 million Americans are so under-insured that all of their discretionary health care dollars go towards paying the premiums to their insurance companies, leaving them no cash leftover to use to go to the doctor or to satisfy their very high deductibles or copay requirements. Consequently, as many as half of all Americans are unable to access medical services.
WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE.
United States: $5711
Denmark: $2743
France: $3048
Germany: $2983
Italy: $2314
Japan: $2249
United Kingdom: $2317
Now insurance companies are going to outscource medical care
Is this the future of American health care if we don't get real reform? Insurance companies shunning American medical professionals in favor of outsourcing procedures overseas, so they can save enough dough to buy another corporate jet and award themselves more stock options?*
*In 2007, [Aetna CEO Ronald] williams pulled down $40.2 million of compensation, but $32.8 million of that was the value of exercising stock options granted in previous years.
How would you like to be told by your health insurance provider that, in order to get that bypass that you need, you'll have to fly to India and check into the hospital there?
I think I'm beginning to understand what the Republican, "free market," alternative is to real health care reform. Buckle your seat belts. Literally.
Regretfully, in 2008 the US spent $2.7 trillion on healthcare, 18% of GDP, yet a 2008 Commonwealth Fund study ranked US healthcare as "the lowest quality" of 19 nations compared. Consider - a ‘99 Institute of Medicine study revealed that as many as 100,000 Americans die every year from in-hospital medical errors, a $75 billion cost consequence.
Obama's interoperable Health Information Technology "will increase patient safety and improve care coordination", says AMA President-elect. Surprise! The proposed HI Technology originated in GW Bush's 2004 Executive Order 13335 "to improve the quality and efficiency of health care". A 2005 Rand Study estimated that full application of HIT will reduce costs by $70 billion annually.
On June 1, the AMA proposed that ending defensive medicine (fear of lawsuits), as Obama suggested, would eliminate unnecessary MRI's, CT Scans & other diagnostic services, saving literally tens of billions of dollars annually.
Obama’s stimulus bill dedicated $1.1 billion to Comparative Effectiveness Research. In her Op-ed right-wing propaganda campaign, lobbyist Betsy McCaughey has portrayed CER as Obama’s new Daschle-inspired insertion of Government between doctor and patient to dictate treatment protocols, “a shameful health care rationing board” for which “US elderly will bear the brunt”. Utter rubbish. CER was introduced to US healthcare in 1989 by GHW Bush and a Baucus-Conrad CER bill introduced in last Congress. A 2009 Deloitte Study of the impact of CER systeme for medication, services & surgery confirmed the potential to provide annual cost savings of multiple $ billions.
A 2007 Commonwealth Fund Report concluded “if everyone in US had health insurance, potential saving could be over $1.5 trillion over 10 years.”
Obama's healthcare reform is no fiscal train wreck, Mr. Will. As you can see from only a few examples above, many of the planned reforms will yield significant short and long-term cost-cutting in addition to system improvements, and the magnitude of potential reductions should more than account for new costs. The only train wreck is the desperately obvious Republican smear campaign efforts to confuse and scare Americans, in the hope of derailing the Administration's overhaul of an inefficient, cost prohibitive, wasteful healthcare system which does not serve U.S. voters. Republicans have forgotten who they serve.