The Idiot-in-Chief will bankrupt us

Quote from Mav88:

Obama's Magical Health Savings (or in other words, bend over and welcome to democrat hell)


http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/05/obamas_magical_mystery_tour_of.php


This weekend, I was on a panel where the other economics journalist and I spent a great deal of time belaboring the obvious: Obama's health care plans are very, very expensive, and they mean higher taxes for everyone, not just that elusive klatch of greedy fools who are not in the 95% of working families now allegedly slated for stable or lower taxes. Otherwise, how could Obama hope to pay for it?

I think we found out today: magic!

Obama got the SEIU and various corporate entities involved with health care provision in a room and got them to promise to slash 150 basis points from the annual rate of increase in health care spending. How will we achieve this? Whitehouse.gov has a fact sheet which outlines the concrete proposals that came out of this meeting:


Improving Care after Hospitalizations and Reduce Hospital Readmission Rates payments will be bundled to include the 30 days post discharge; readmitted patients will become a cash drain. If hospitals really are making patients sicker (or not bothering to make them well) because readmissions are lucrative, it should be interesting to see what lengths they will go to to avoid readmitting very ill patients.
Reducing Medicare Overpayments to Private Insurers through Competitive Payments. Bye-bye, Medicare Advantage. Maybe. Medicare Advantage seems to cost more because it, er, provides more benefits. It also apparently has good patient satisfaction. Directly playing with senior health care can be politically dangerous.

Reducing Drug Prices Only for Medicaid. No dollar item attached to it, probably because the savings are relatively trivial; Medicaid is a small part of the overall budget, and prescription drug prices are a small part of its budget, and an 8% decrease in a small part of a small part doesn't sound as good as Reducing Drug Prices.

Improving Medicare and Medicaid Payment Accuracy aka the infamous Waste, Fraud, and Abuse. Traditionally much harder to get out of the system than promised by reformers, in part because the Waste, Fraud, and Abuse subsidizes other services, so if you eliminate Medicare overpayments, you suddenly get higher prices. This is why retailers do not actually attempt to push "shrinkage" to zero.

Pay for Performance The Holy Grail of health care wonks. Good luck. Projected cost savings: $12 billion
You may recognize these proposals; they are recycled from the Obama budget. Estimated cost savings listed: $215 billion over ten years. That leaves just $1.785 trillion for the "stakeholders" to find. And with a model of stakeholder cooperation like Chrysler before us, that shouldn't be hard.

This is all very well as political theater; politicians convene never-never working groups all the time. But, being perhaps too cynical, I suspect that the announced plan to save $2 trillion is going to be used to sell Obama's healthcare plan as if we'd already found it. Then when oh, darn, the SEIU doesn't agree to hold down wages or eliminate jobs, and pharma ratchets up the average price it charges the private sector to make sure it doesn't lose too much on its mandatory Medicaid discounts, etc, well, we'll all just have to dig into our pockets to pay for it, won't we?
actually i dont support obamas health care reform plans as now proposed. he is not going far enough. he is just tweaking what we have now hoping that it will pass easier. what he should do is go directly to a single payer plan financed by higher taxes.
 
Quote from drjekyllus:

So Obama gets to decide who gets healthcare and who doesn't? Ummm, no thanks.
right now some insurance employee in a back room answerable to no one gets to decide who gets health care. how is it working now?
 
Quote from vhehn:

right now some insurance employee in a back room answerable to no one gets to decide who gets health care. how is it working now?

I think it is working just fine. My family has no problems at all. Of course I am a productive member of society. If you are a deadbeat, with high credit card debt and are late on your mortgage and you do nothing but sit on your ass all day, I suppose it might not be all that great. Maybe those sort of people ought to get off their ass and get a job. We don't think like that in this country though. If you are a loser its always someone else's fault isn't it. Heck, its bad enough I am paying their mortgage and credit cards off, now I have to pay their health insurance too. We all know that dems are pro evolution and anti-creationism, how about we apply some of those principles of evolution and let the losers figure it out for themselves.
 
Quote from drjekyllus:

I think it is working just fine. My family has no problems at all...

No problems here either.

I'm no expert in this area but it seems to me the availability of insurance and health care isn't the problem. It's the cost. Considering the federal governments long standing reputation for making EVERYTHING it touches cost much MORE then it has to it's hard for me to see where federally managed health care is going to be less expensive for anyone. Or maybe I should say for any tax payer.
 
I'm lucky in the health insurance department, but I still feel that the wasted billions or more of bureaucratic bs could be improved considerably. When I review bills and payments, I cringe. I've actually negotiated cash deals with doctor's and save a lot.

Since well over half the Country is already on the government's health plan, in one way or another, state local, federal, military, medicare, I don't see a real problem with some sort of alliance with the gov't to streamline the back office. I know, the argument is that the private sector is better at this, but not in this case, IMO.


c
 
Quote from drjekyllus:

We all know that dems are pro evolution and anti-creationism, how about we apply some of those principles of evolution and let the losers figure it out for themselves.
never saw this until now. dont tell me you actually believe in creationism?
 
Quote from vhehn:

never saw this until now. dont tell me you actually believe in creationism?

What exactly did you never see until now?

Where exactly did I say I believed in creationism? What is your reading comprehension level?
 
Quote from vhehn:

sometimes when you rent your house to a drunk frat boy it takes a lot of money to clean up the mess he leaves behind. we are still spending 10 billon a month on bushs iraq war, the bank bailouts started under the bush watch. the car bailouts started under the bush watch. health care needed reform for the last 8 years and nothing was done.
Vhehn, hardcore ideologues can't be reasoned with. You know this well from your exchanges on religion. It is no different in politics. With hardcore ideologues, it's six of one or half dozen of the other. You can present ideas to the unthinking, but you can't make them think.
 
Quote from drjekyllus:

What exactly did you never see until now?

Where exactly did I say I believed in creationism? What is your reading comprehension level?

when you use anti-creationism as a form of ridicule it makes you look like you do believe it. i dont meet many creationists any more so i found i surprising that even someone like you would believe it but you never know on et. some of the posters on here act like home schooled 17 year olds.
 
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