Nobody is requiring it, but I sure as fluff don't want to die, so I'm going to have the government pick up the tab so I can keep living.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSjGouBmo0M

ugh. another one of those bloody lifers. ya do know that the current consensus of about 1/2 the world's population is that you actually have to die to achieve immortality and be granted eternity in God's totally boring ass kingdom. not sure that you have any choice when it comes to death. pick a decent way to enjoy the chemical reaction that is you while it's still somewhat self-maintaining.

so once a program is passed or a department created by any president that wants one and it is running it cannot be changed except to dump more money into it, but never scaling back?

epitaph of a health-nut: "I did everything healthy, wealthy and right, but died anyway.. Go figure..."

Can you name one government program that delivered the value they promised within the budget allotted? I can't think of any programs here in the US. The problem is the government has no incentive to run programs effectively or efficient.

insecticides???

Incentive got auto corrected to insecticides. I will send you some free insecticide scode (as long as you promise to drink it all).

not allowed to use them around anything that might resemble a human. they might spontaneously drop dead and require a cleanup.

any chance that a mod decided to screw with my logon? or was i just imagining things and attempting to create new accounts simply because I'm hellbent on posting regardless of what the mods or admins allow? there are much easier ways for me to post when i want to...

sorry, that the Jews documented their discussions with the One True God that requires them to suffer over and over to makes her happy. why does God have to make the Jews suffer? she should be able to get a real hobby, like model airplane building. hey Gawd... look how easy it is to make something fly...

You people still going at it? LOL I'm gonna have to make more of these threads!

OMG, Dibs has hit the nail on the head. If we all just paid as we went, the healthcare providers would be forced to accept lower payments for treatment, or go broke. No one wants to go broke, right? Some money is better than no money, and a lot of doctors would much rather never to have to deal with insurance companies who want to nickel and dime them to death right along with their patients, so, change over to a cash and carry system and buy yourself some cheap ass life insurance to pay ff when you die and your family makes out.

I know that you can negotiate payments with doctors and other healthcare providers in the event that you do not have insurance. If you don't have insurance, you'll quickly find out that the doctors and providers are quickly able to offer large discounts on procedures you might need in order to make something rather than nothing.

Call it "capitalism". :) Right? :)

Yes. Canada Post.

I'd have to look into it to find some more examples.

This Canada Post?

http://www.thestar.com/...eeks_deal_from_union.html

oh even back in 2005 they saw this coming...

http://postandparcel.info/...ension-fund-is-insolvent/


This game is fun, care to try again?

the gubment cant do anything correctly, the market will always prevail

*pays 3x more for the same standard of care as the british NHS*

oh you see thats just because the gubment is not letting the market prevail

+1

Any Americans here have an appendectomy? I'd love to compare the cost with you if you're game. I guarantee you mine was cheaper...

This NHS?

http://articles.latimes.com/...sh-health-system-20120808

http://www.theguardian.com/...al-difficulty-double-year

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/...d-looming-staff-cuts.html

It appears the British NHS is running deficits and is on the verge of going belly up if they dont make massive cuts and start rationing care even further than they already have/do.


Next?

checkmate libruls, your gubment service which provides healthcare at a lower cost is $$$NOT PROFITABLE$$$

yeah, yeah, i know the patients are better off but you need to tradeoff the needs of the patients and the shareholders

private companies have never laid anyone off or closed unprofitable sites btw, just doesnt happen

The Star? heh

As I said, the Conservatives have manufactured a number of crises by cutting funding, and then saying "oh look, public doesn't work"!

Watch when I cut the US military budget to $1 and it stops operating; obviously it needs to be privatized! Govt can't do anything profitably!

Anti-trust regulations. These regulations might need to be updated in the wake of moving insurance out of most of healthcare, but then you might just create incentives for doctors to move their practices closer to home because they no longer have to be part of a big company to have patients. They also no longer need the backing of pencil pushers that come with large organizations because the paperwork is a lot less when the patients pay on their own. Some of these areas unprofitable to corporations because they can make more money somewhere else may well provide enough business for a one doctor office.

A lot of healthcare is predictable and can be budgeted for when insurance companies are taken out of the equation. The best value proposition on health insurance is catastrophic care policies because you can't predict this and you can't budget for it, but it also has a low risk of occurring. Why should anyone come between the customer and the provider for needs that can be predicted. That just adds another body that has to be paid, whether it's the government or a health insurance company.

One American company's employees are scrambling for cover after Obamacare, because that company had some time ago decided that it was cheaper for them to just pay the entire cost of a catastrophic care insurance plan for their employees and put $1000 (or whatever it was) a year into a health savings account for their employees to pay for their predictable costs. The employees owned that health savings money and it always rolled over. They could use it to pay for doctors visits, against their catastrophic care deductible, prescriptions, etc. Over the years, some employees had accumulated $10,000+ in their accounts because they carefully monitored their costs with doctors and got discounts because their "insurance" consisted of swiping a payment card. Some employees could literally have a catastrophic health event and not pay a single dollar out of their personal money (their HSA could pay for the entirety of the deductible). This experiment in business recruitment and retention/healthcare has now been killed because of Obamacare.

Perhaps the best solution for the VA and everyone else is to re-privatize predictable healthcare to the customer and the provider (and NO ONE coming between them). Sure, for the VA, they may have to set payments for predictable care and their would be additional health problems that fall under "predictable", but that just means less to leave to the remaining VA health system.

*opens another bag of popcorn*

*poops*

Heston's IQ has gone up recently, what's up with that?

You guys are all a bunch of idiots


Vets have been shat on for centuries, nothing is different because of democracy. It doesnt matter which political party is in charge.


It has and always will be the true hero's of any war that gets shat on be their leaders, not only political but their military leaders too.

Unfortunately there is nothing any of us could do that could ever fix the injustices that all veterans in all countries have to put up with from their respective leaders.

http://www.msnbc.com/...you-clearly-represent-the

The issues at the VA stem from the horrible management structure that routinely ignores IG reports and generally provides a low standard of care than other government providers. Provider licensing routinely violates state scope of practice laws and everything is all over the place. Honestly, the best system I think would be to simply provide some sort of voucher-like system for these folks to receive care elsewhere and pay on par with the Medicare schedule. However, that's pie-in-the-sky dreaming because of the bureaucracy that exists beneath it.

What's more troubling is that the big vet groups have been bringing these issues up to Sec. Shinseki during their infomal weekly meetings. He's obviously not doing much in response. Time for a shakeup.

As for healthcare in general, it's a multi-faceted problem. In the public sector, the issue is that it rewards volume over outcomes. There is a movement afoot to move toward quality-related outcomes, but I still think it will be a long time coming. On the private side, the payor rates tend to mimic a scale of the government payment level, continuing this problem. Meanwhile, the lack of transparency for the actual costs of providing services really puts a damper on consumers from shopping around because they're paying the same copay regardless. And the President's solution was simply to add more people to the system.

The meek shall inherit the earth, right after it's absolutely worthless to fight over. meh, you can't tell me that you are decreasing the costs of healthcare if you have to adda minimum of 15% overhead and profit just for the insurance companies to maintain healthcare savings to a minority of the population.

2

This is actually one of the most insightful comments in this thread o.O

oh my, i must not be drinking enough. need more booze before i flip out and guillotine a bunch of demoncrats.