…but I work in a primary care doctor’s office, and her statements about health care are simply untrue! Under the government-run health plan, Medicare, patients choose their own doctors, hospitals, labs, dialysis centers, etc. In contrast, those insured under private insurance have little choice. The private insurers even stipulate what medications that doctors can prescribe for their subscribers. Further, the private insurers deny care when patients are ill. We have to petition the private insurers to agree to treatments that their subscribers need. We get denials all of the time. Talk about death panels! It is proven that stress is bad for our health. Imagine being sick with a life-threatening illness and then having to deal with the stress of fighting with your health insurer to cover your care! Imagine doing that when you are in your 70s or 80s! I deal with these issues on a daily basis for patients who have dropped Medicare and have private insurance. Private insurers also pay primary care doctors less than Medicare-some up to 50% less! A health insurance corporation’s job is to maximize profits for its shareholders, they can do that best by rationing and restricting coverage to their subscribers. That is not in the best interest of a patient’s health!

…Long-term care constitutes a difficult and expensive challenge in any health system. But the American patchwork, full of cracks through which people fall, has a special problem with medical expenses of all kinds bankrupting couples.
A study reported in The American Journal of Medicine this month found that 62 percent of American bankruptcies are linked to medical bills. These medical bankruptcies had increased nearly 50 percent in just six years. Astonishingly, 78 percent of these people actually had health insurance, but the gaps and inadequacies left them unprotected when they were hit by devastating bills.
M. still helps her husband and, quietly, continues to live with him and care for him. But she worries that the authorities will come after her if they realize that they divorced not because of irreconcilable differences but because of irreconcilable medical bills. There were awkward questions from friends who saw the divorce announcement in the newspaper.
“It’s just crazy,” she said. “It twists people like pretzels.”
The existing system doesn’t just break up families, it also costs lives. A 2004 study by the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, found that lack of health insurance causes 18,000 unnecessary deaths a year. That’s one person slipping through the cracks and dying every half an hour.
In short, it’s a good bet that our existing dysfunctional health system knocks off far more people than an army of “death panels” could — even if they existed, worked 24/7 and got around in a fleet of black helicopters.
So, for those of you inclined to believe the worst about President Obama, think it through. Suppose he is indeed a secret, foreign-born Muslim agent who is scheming to undermine American family values while killing off as many grandmothers as possible.
If all that were true, why on earth would he be trying so hard to reform our health care system? We already know how to prod families into divorce and take a life unnecessarily every 30 minutes — all we need to do is reject reform and stick with exactly what we have.

Nice try. However, manifest evidence of a great opposition to Obama’s health care plan send you to the corner with the dunce hat. For the benefit of Praetorian and those in Linda Vista, Praetorian is wrong.

Obamacare is less popular now than Hillarycare was at the same stage and looks very likely to become a tremendous failure for Obama.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,539305,00.html

Well, Spindok, if your point here is that so called “high level” medical treatment today leaves a lot (a whole lot !) to be desired in terms of worth & value, I heartily agree with that.

Many doctors seem to be heavily invested in things like that RVU thing you mention, jamming as many patients as possible into the hour, getting paid by insurance cos., reams of paperwork seeking payment for Medicare/Caid, even exploiting those systems…

…while notions of medicine as Art as in the Hippocratic Oath seem to have flown out the window.

Absolutely David (#35), your observations exactly parallel my own.

And the notion of government interference being the cause of something shooting craps isn’t limited to medicine. We can expand the idea to most areas of human endeavor, education, business etc.

Examples are myriad and convoluted.

Quite astonishing that many seem to want more federal government interference & regulation.

“the definition of insanity is repeating the same behavior, expecting a different result”

Again, we can find better ways to do this. The public option is absolutely the wrong idea.