The future of American healthcare
August 3rd, 2009 by adminA telling report from StoptheACLU:
Cancer Patient Offered Gov’t Suicide Funds But Not Medical Care
Doctor C.L. Gray and his Physicians for Reform group tell us of the horror story of Oregon’s government run healthcare plan that offered a cancer patient named Barbara all the suicide assisted funding she wanted, but not one penny for the medical care that could save her life.
As Doctor Gray put it, Barbara was no longer thought of by government as a patient but instead had become a “negative economic unit.” Oregon’s government run healthcare system wanted Barbara dead because keeping her alive was simply too costly.
It’s bad enough that a handful of states have taken up these uncaring, cut-rate medical plans, but at least patients in Oregon or Massachusetts can go to another state to find the proper care. But once Obamacare becomes a nationwide plague, there simply won’t be any other place to go…
That’s the future the Dems want for all of us, or as Obama puts it, maybe you should just take a pain pill instead of getting life-saving surgery. At least if some bureaucrat decides you’re a “negative economic unit.”
Posted in General Medicine, Politics | 13 Comments »
August 4th, 2009 at 10:41 pm
Thank you for all the time and efforts to report the quagmire medical care has fallen into.July 28, 2009
How to Stop a Nationalized Health Care Tax
Change: Stop Insurance Payments to Doctors
Consider Catastrophic Coverage
Solution proposed, first step: To control the cost of medical care and stop a nationalized healthcare tax, stop private and Medicare insurance payments directly to doctors. Would a catastrophic coverage be a workable alternative to complete nationalization of medical care?
Nationalized Health Care: This means that something that was normally private has been taken over by the government. Those pushing it must never have read history, or they expect to have personal gain, money, or re-election.
Impact on Medicare Patients: If Medicare patients paid the doctor directly, part B insurance would not be deducted from their Social Security check (Part B covers only outpatient laboratory and 80% of doctor’s fees). That would put $96.40 into the pocket of each Social Security recipient every month. If not used, that amounts to $1,156.80 in each person’s bank account each year, or $2313.60 per couple. What an economic stimulus that would be. Stopping bureaucratic paperwork for routine medical care would also save an incalculable amount of tax money.
Impact on everyone else: Administrators of insurance take about 30% of your premium for themselves. Perhaps 10% is lost in the doctor’s office, filing insurance claims. Stopping insurance for routine medical care could save you about 40%.
Medical care basically has three arms: doctors, drugs, and hospitals. Medical insurance, hospital expenses and drug costs are now unbearable. These require separate considerations. Medical care was not an economic burden until after insurance became an expected part of salaries and Medicare was enacted.
I am beginning my 40th year of solo medical practice. Most people can pay their doctor bills just like they pay their TV cable bill. Your annual cable bill is probably more than your annual doctor bill. In reality, only your doctor provides your medical care. Currently, insurers and Medicare (not physicians) dictate all medical fees, to the penny—except for the uninsured, who have not paid the “protection” fee offered by insurance companies. Before Medicare, doctors had only one fee schedule, equal for all. Now there is a fake fee (doctor’s charges), a real fee (approved charge) and a Medicare approved fee.
Go look at your doctor’s “approved charges” (the real bill). How many dollars did your doctor get last year for your medical care? The insurance companies caused creation of the fake bill, but only pay the “real bill.” How many dollars did you spend last year on your car payments, or pay for your medical insurance or have deducted from your paycheck for insurance? What did the insurance cost your employer? That could be a raise.
What is your deductible before you receive any insurance payment?
You cannot adequately think about this until you pull some bills and look at the doctor’s “approved” or “covered” charges.
My patients have proven they can pay my professional bill; no private or Medicare insurance needed. I have never signed a contract with an insurance company. I am out of network. Most people now recognize that medical insurance is a scam, but you need it for protection from the fake charges. Eliminating direct insurance payment to doctors would stop the doctor having to file an insurance claim each time you sneeze and having to deal with the insurance company.
Doctors determine medical costs by what they order. Those costs are hidden from them also. Require doctors to know the approximate cost of everything they order for a patient. With changes, that information would be easily acquired. If doctors have to look to the patient for compensation, there would automatically be thousands of physicians scrutinizing the cost of everything they order because of patient feedback.
No bureaucracy could achieve cost savings as effectively as the doctor. Stop the government control, insurance work, the red tape, and paperwork for routine care. Then the quality of medical care in the United States would continue to lead the world, and medical costs would no longer be a threat to your existence.
This does not solve the problem of outrageous hospital charges. It is difficult to find out what the hospital accepted as full payment from the insurance company. Medicare patients never get to see their hospital settlement. But you can tell by the CEO’s million-plus salary and the constant remodeling and building that non-profit and for-profit hospitals are flush with money.
Stopping insurance payments to doctors would be a giant step in halting a huge nationalized medical tax and reduce your cost of medical care. It would dismantle about 90% of a government bureaucracy handling and manipulating routine medical care.
If you support this “change,” contact your friends, and all of you contact your elected officials while they are home this month, before it is too late. How are we going to conquer this evil?
A history lesson: Perhaps these events listed below are expected social regression. Aside from the unbearable tax for socialized medicine, there is something basically evil in this much government control over people and doctors.
1801 President Thomas Jefferson: “If the people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.”
1883 Germany introduced Social Security and compulsory medical insurance.
1917 Lenin, first dictator of the USSR: “Medicine is the keystone of the arch of socialism.”
1933 Hitler, January 30, became chancellor of Germany (50 years after socialism enacted) and 45% of doctors and most university professors joined the Nazi party. Hitler carried out extermination and sterilization of large numbers of “non-productive” Germans with the assistance of German physicians before starting the extermination of the Jews.
1935 U.S. enacted Social Security.
1967 U.S. enacts Medicare; (32 years after Social Security).
1990 September 1, Social Security Act (Section 1848) requiring providers (doctors) to submit claims to the government. The penalty for not submitting claims to Medicare is $10,000 for each claim, with triple damages (i.e., $30,000) for each repeated offense. Now, probably more than 95% of U.S. doctors participate in Medicare. (Is that adequate coercion to join?)
1991 June 5, Special Medicare Newsletter. No. 99 from Blue Cross of Texas: “Inquiries Regarding Dissociation from Medicare: ”…only way a physician can dissociate: Discontinue Medicare services; or surrender his/her license.” (Does that sound like a threat?)
1996 The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. “The Privacy Rule…permits disclosure of personal health information for … and other important purposes.” The privacy section of this act is a farce. When you sign the papers in the doctor’s offices you authorize dissemination of your medical records for “other important purposes”. (You may end up on the ‘termination’ list.)
1964 Ronald Reagan: “Plutarch, Roman historian 86 AD, warned, The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.”
“. . . the doctors fight against socialized medicine is your fight . . . We can’t socialize the doctors without socializing the patients … government invasion of public power is eventually an assault upon your own business.”
“We will preserve for our children . . . or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness.”
1864 Abraham Lincoln: “The people of the United States are the rightful masters of both Congress and the Courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.”
Don’t forget the mandatory new tax. On the face, socialized medical care looks charitable, with only good intentions, but once power over your health care is given to a government bureaucracy, it may take you places you do not want to go, a little at a time.
Follow the trail of the best and worse outcomes of socialism: read about Germany’s plan during the era from 1883 to 1945 at these links: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_eugenics and/or http://highschoolbioethics.georgetown.edu/units/cases/unit4_5.html).
Now, do you want to go along with nationalized (socialized) health care?
Sincerely,
Richard B. Swint, M.D.
2510 Stillhouse Road
Paris, TX 75462
903-784-5727
903-784-5814
903-782-8140
rswint@suddenlink.net
RBS/sj/medical care3
August 9th, 2009 at 8:09 pm
Why anyone would want a for-profit entity making these decisions (insurance company) is beyond me. The government who be far less likely to create the fictitious *death panel* spouted by Palin, et al than the insurance companies.
The easiest job in the world is to be a Repub politician. Things work..we did it; things don’t work; government doesn’t work.
August 9th, 2009 at 9:59 pm
Except, of course, the government is already doing it, at least in Oregon. Hope and Change, and Soylent Green.
September 2nd, 2009 at 11:35 pm
There is some question on the veracity of the quote Lenin is suppose to have made about Medicine. Since you have a date listed is there a source material that you can point to to support this quote? I don’t want to use it on my Obamabot friends and then have them throw it back at me. Thanks
September 4th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
Don’t know, since it’s not my quote. However, the more apropos quote is
“The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency”
Watch what happens as Obama takes us down the hyperinflation road…
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