akuma587 on 24 March 2009
I haven't watched the speech yet, so I am just going off of what I know already.
The government spends a substantial amount of money on Medicaid and Medicare, and some money outside of that goes into other areas in the healthcare industry. And under Obama's plan and based on future projections the government will become even more involved in the healthcare system, which means they are potentially on the hook for a lot more.
The less people are having to spend going to the doctor, the less the government is having to pay out essentially.
Particularly, we need to change some of the fundamentals in our healthcare system. Here are some examples.
1. Doctors are encouraged to charge people more for things they don't really need rather than actually have their patients get better.
2. People wait to go to the doctor until their problems are out of control because they are worried about paying for the doctor. This is the equivalent of people waiting til their car breaks down to take it to the shop. It wastes the system's resources and ends up costing everyone more money. There are too many barriers to people going to the doctor before a problem starts. Congress needs to repeal legislation they have already passed that gives insurance companies an unfair advantage in revoking people's healthcare policies and arbitrarily discriminating against applicants.
So much of our healthcare system's cost go to treating diabetes alone. If we got people in ahead of time and prevented even 30% of the diabetes cases we now have, it would save the system an enormous amount of money.
3. The current healthcare system has a lot of bureaucracy. Insurance companies in particular spend a ton of money on overhead, more than the government does in countries with socialized healthcare.
4. Costs on new procedures with questionable benefits are out of control. One of the biggest drivers of cost in our healthcare system is people get all kinds of treatment they don't even need. Their doctor doesn't mind giving it to them because he gets paid more for ripping them off. The same is true for many new drugs (not all new drugs) that are really no more effective than the old drug. The patent just ran out and the pharmaceutical companies push a doctor to prescribe the drug under their new patent because they and he gets more money as a result. The patient is too dumb to know the difference and ends up paying for things he doesn't need.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
