Health Country » Town Hall Meetings

Health Care Economics

admin — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 23:56:04 +0000

If nothing else, the political process in this country is exciting when it gets heated up. I haven’t seen such commotion since I don’t know when. Congressmen and senators are having town hall meetings across country attempting to sell a healthcare bill that isn’t quite fully written, several versions of which are in excess of 1000 pages and written in a legalese that would make any laymen’s head spin. It is enough to make anybody anxious about the future of our health care system.

President Obama tells us that if we don’t do something now, the current system will implode. Politicians are calling citizens who disagree with them “Nazis,” and the democrats say that all those people that show up at the demonstrations and town hall meetings have been put up to it by the Republican Party. The press and the comedians are as divided as the parties as is hyperbole that comes with any emotionally charged discussion.

So with that said, I would like to take a more simplistic and logical view of the health care issue in the context of our current economic situation. Our current situation appears to be this:

1. 85% of the people have health insurance and are satisfied with the policy they have;

2. The country is currently 7 trillion dollars in debt, (approximately $23,000 of debt for every man, women and child in the county), and that debt is projected to go to 9 trillion dollars over the next ten years.

3. The latest count of illegal aliens currently in the United States is approximately 12 million. When these people visit our hospitals and clinics more often than not they cannot afford to pay the bill.

4. Hospitals by law cannot refuse treatment because of inability to pay. A double edged sword in that, we are showing our generosity to those less fortunate, but the hospitals pass their costs for this unreimbursed mandated care on to the patients who can pay, again raising medical costs and insurance rates. This law turns out to be a mandated subsidy for the poor paid for by the responsible paying patrons of the hospitals.

5. This country is lawsuit crazy. Medical malpractices suits, both frivolous and justified, contribute once again to increasing medical costs and medical insurance costs not only because of the cost of the suits and the large and often time excessive awards, but also through the extreme defensive medical practices that doctors and hospitals employ in order to avoid law suits and avoid loosing law suits.

6. Projections are that both Medicare and Social Security will be paying out more money than they take in a few years. (This item alone should give one pause when considering the resolution of the problem through government programs).

7. The unemployment rate in the country is currently 9.6%.

When considering the above items, why would anyone want a government run health care system? It would be just more bureaucratic waste and inefficiency. The healthcare bills currently in Congress are a smoke screen for the government’s failure to control our boarders, provide meaningful tort reform, control wasteful spending and represent its citizens honestly. As it looks now, if anything passes. it will more than likely deal a catastrophic blow to the economy when implemented.

I believe we need to focus on the cause of the problem, not on the symptoms.

Let’s fix the tort system.
Let’s enforce the borders and remove all illegal aliens from the country.
Let’s cut corporate taxes so that corporations find it profitable to have there companies in the United States.
Let’s implement health saving accounts for standard medical care and have insurance for the big ticket items.
Let’s take insurance away from employers and put it in the hands of consumers.
Let’s put America back to work so that more people can have health insurance.

If we do these things, I believe, medical services and medical insurance costs will come down, that in turn will help the economy to recover, and that will get more people covered.

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Democrats Demand Sartorial Handicap in Health Care Reform Debate

admin — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 16:22:18 +0000

Senator Barbara Boxer recently declared that, before the current round of town hall meetings on health care reform, the last time she had seen such suspiciously well-dressed protestors was during the 2000 Florida election recount. Well, yes-until Obama’s presidency, that’s the last time Republicans showed up en masse to get really angry about something; screaming and chanting are political tactics more naturally suited to the left.

As for the couture angle-here’s a newsflash for Boxer: Republicans have higher standards than Democrats. A typical left-wing protest involves twenty-somethings in ratty T-shirts and shredded jeans breaking windows at a local Starbucks during the midmorning rush.

The typical right-wing protest-invariably held in the evening, since attendees have jobs in the daytime-involves adults who dress as though they would like to elevate community standards, not degrade them. Participants address their concerns directly to those in power, such as legislators, rather than assailing defenseless third parties, such as coffee franchise employees. The fact that most conservative protesters come directly from work may explain why they wear suits and skirts. But apparently Senate Democrats believe opinions are valid only if expressed by people sporting “Kill Bush” buttons and Birkenstocks.

When Boxer and other Congressional Democrats realized that Americans don’t see “well-dressed” as an epithet, they moved in the opposite direction: they claimed that the protesters were scruffy rabble-rousers after all. House Leader Nancy Pelosi insisted that demonstrators have been “carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on healthcare.” Translation: One protester had a swastika with a slash through it, and others were displaying American flags and ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ banners-you know, symbols like swastikas.

Saddling protesters with the “brownshirt” label didn’t work, so Obama’s Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina warned Democrats who were planning town hall meetings, “If you get hit… punch back twice as hard.”

Evidently some representatives took this message literally: at a town hall meeting in Ohio, Representative Russ Carnahan hired union organizers to deny entry to citizens who looked as though they might oppose health care reform legislation, several of whom were actually beaten up by union thugs and sent to the hospital. Outside, black conservative Kenneth Gladney was physically attacked and racially slandered and sent to the emergency room by an unidentified opponent for handing out ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flags. Protesters were also roughed up at a meeting held by Florida Representatives Kathy Castor and Betty Reed.

Naturally, Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid’s response to this onslaught of leftist violence and intimidation was… to blame Republicans for not minding their manners. Reid accused protesters of attempting to “sabotage” the process; he said, “These are nothing more than destructive efforts to interrupt a debate… They are doing this because they don’t have any better ideas.”

Well, yes, actually, we do have one or two, which you may not have heard, because we’ve only been ranting about them for the past two decades or so: malpractice tort reform, Medicare reform, health savings accounts, healthcare tax credits, vouchers for private insurance, and pay for performance. More generally, competition in the private market for health insurance, and individual autonomy regarding level and type of coverage and risk tolerance. Other than that, we’re flush out of ideas!

In an effort to quell dissatisfaction among constituents, Democrats in Congress finally decided to listen to town hall participants’ ideas and give thoughtful responses that address their concerns. Just kidding! The latest tactics being employed by congressmen across the nation are: (1) show up at town hall meetings, recite a few talking points, claim the crowd is too boisterous when they open their mouths, and leave, (2) announce meetings at the last minute in the hope no one will attend, and (3) hold “virtual” town hall meetings.

Representative Kathy Castor’s spokeswoman defended Castor’s recent abbreviated appearance in Florida by stating, “We said all along our role was to come and give an update on the bill in Congress… [T]hat’s what we did.” And that’s what websites are for.

Michigan Representative John Dingell waited to announce last Thursday’s 6pm town hall meeting until Thursday morning. Word of mouth spread, however, and Dingell faced hundreds of constituents who were not pleased with his deceitful maneuver.

At least Castor and Dingell showed up; other congressmen, such as Representative Brian Baird of Washington, are planning virtual “meetings” with constituents. According to The Columbian, “If you happen to be sitting near a publicly listed Clark County telephone line on the right day at the right time, your phone will ring… [T]he exact date and time will be kept secret from the public… [A]n automated message will ask whether you have a question… Sitting at his own telephone at an as-yet-undisclosed location, Baird then will choose a name based on its location and the topic… After the call is over, the recording will be posted on his Web site.”

Baird helpfully notes that this system will allow for “a much better cross-section of the public”; by which he means “a cross-section of the public that is not knowledgeable or passionate enough to attend a town hall meeting.” Note to Baird: There’s a reason they’re called “town hall meetings,” not “telephone-prescreened anonymous secret conference recordings.”

In the end, some congressmen have decided to simply give up on their constituents. New York Representative Tim Bishop chose to suspend town hall meetings in his district until “late August,” because he concluded there was no point in facing an “unruly mob.” Senator Claire McCaskill similarly issued a last-minute cancellation of a scheduled event due to “safety” concerns.

In the same way that Democrats denigrate protesters who adhere to a “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service” standard, they are now projecting the characteristics of mob rule and random violence onto frail, elderly grandparents in bowties and cardigans.

By: Scott Spiegel

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Social Minimalism’s Pigeons Back Home to Roost in Health Care Debacle

admin — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:24:09 +0000

Change, the legions who voted for Barack Obama for President in 2008 wanted.

Well, as legislators broke for their August recess it appeared changes in the way health care is delivered in this country certainly wasn’t to be one of them. At least if you listened to angry Republicans particularly in the Sunbelt states.

The hostile receptions members of Congress got at their initial town-hall meetings, from newspaper reporting and from the footage shown on national television, looked more like an orchestrated assault on everything resembling Change than it did the grassroots Democracy expressed at last years polling places. What happened?

Ah, the perils of Social Minimalism’s featherbedding! The pigeons of the 20th Century Sunbelt Era’s rush to riches, which it’s argued minimalized our humanity, i.e., exchanged our sacred indebtedness to care for each other for an unwritten moral code of feathering our nests, have finally come home to roost, it seems.

Preaching Change is one thing! Taking money out of my pockets to pay for it is something entirely different! the voices almost seemed to be saying in unison in those TV clips.

Folks, the transformation of our nation’s basic egalitarian, altruistic morality values by the Sunbelt Movement can’t be continually dismissed as non-perverse. Greed is self-destructive; somewhere Reconciliation to those left out, dumped off or cut out by the movement has to occur. Health care is a prime arena in which that singular act can occur.

The relocation or expansion of industries to southern and southwestern states opened up a flood gate of new
investment opportunities that benefited us all in some ways, yes. But those benefits not only transformed our physical surroundings to our betterment, the New South and New Southwest, but in the process they changed, morphed, the way we treated each other, too. Most noticeably, of course, in the transferring of mostly northern manufacturing jobs overseas and abandoning old communities to reassemble their lives in new, different and oftentimes awkward ways. And shoving old, caring-for-one-another values in the Sunbelt states aside to accommodate the explosion of Growth. Whatever it takes became the mantra.

This has become known now as Social Minimalism, a neo-epicurean philosophy to expound on our rush to excel versus our innate selfishness and laziness. In the Sunbelt, if you couldn’t cash in on the opportunities in this new transformation, go with the flow in a greedy rush toward what became an exercise in mass, largely unregulated capitalism, then you were left out of it; viewed as something slightly less than what was considered the standard flag-bearer for a normal human being. You were minimalized. And now, decades later, what has happened?

You see many family doctors or practitioners anymore? What about the number of private hospitals? Or county-owned hospitals that were the bulwarks of a stable society once? Before opportunities for profit arose! And, on the other hand, have you noticed the surge in corporate hospitals? And in insurance businesses, and their junk mail, and all the additional claims-related companies? Oh, yes, that’s additional jobs! We’re high on the hog! Or were.

And look, too, at the surge in legal counsels who honed in for an increased killing in malpractice lawsuits that a plethora of growth situations opened up in all industries and professions. And the army of cottage industry lobbyists that all those situations have created in Washington. You see it?

And what was the effect on all that when the economy collapsed in late 2008 and we started spinning rapidly toward a Depression? And with the well-heelers on Wall Street screaming the sky is falling, Obama stepping in with a slew of what high-on-the-Sunbelt-hog Republicans immediately labeled as socialist proposals to stop the economy’s bleeding? Huh?

There’s so much mad-dog anger now you can almost see the saliva foaming on some of the people’s mouths. Whooeee! We’re in a premier, national Showtime period, folks. Showtime! Sit back; bring out the beer and popcorn. Crank up Shall We Gather At The River!

Perry Aug. 3 of wanting to secede from Reality. The Guv already had stuck his foot in his mouth a couple of months earlier when at a tea party rally he suggested Texas exercise its right to secede from the union if Obama kept up his social legislation barrage.

Shapleigh, a sharp-tongued lawyer himself, countered in an opinion piece in the vaunted El Paso online Newspaper Tree that under Perry’s decade of leadership Texas, indeed, had distinguished itself in many ways.
* Texans breathe air with more carcinogens than citizens of any other state.
* Perry’s highway department is broke; within two years…the department will have no money to build new roads.
* On the streets of Texas, predatory lenders now charge Texas families interest rates of 1100% per year.

And on the issue of health care, he spared no punches. Ooohh! Pobresito, el Guv!
* By percentage and number, Texas has more uninsured than any state in America, with one out of four Texans lacking health insurance. In some Texas counties, up to 40% have no health insurance. Contrary to the claims of some, even if non-citizens who include legal residents as well as undocumented immigrants were removed from the statewide estimate, Texas would still have the highest uninsured rate in the country with 4.1 million uninsured citizens.
* One in six uninsured American children resides in Rick Perry’s Texas.
* Our state ranks in the bottom ten in the U.S. when it comes to the number of physicians, dentists and nurses per capita. Here in El Paso, with thousands of new troops on the way to Ft Bliss, we struggle to provide care with fewer doctors and nurses per capita than any large city in the country.
* Texas is second in the U.S. in teen pregnancies.
* All 13 of Texas’ state schools for the mentally retarded have been under a Department of Justice investigation for systemic abuse and neglect. Fight Clubs at the Corpus Christi State School, where staff pitted residents against one another, recently made headlines on CNN.”

This the reality of Rick Perry’s Texas today, Shapleigh wrote. When change is on the way, Perry talks of suing the U. S. government to stop it.
*Who benefits from Rick Perry’s reality? In Texas today, three of the most expensive hospitals in the U. S. rake in profits, with charges that are almost three times the national average.

And on and on. Folks, indeed, we’re in for a bloodletting before this thing is over. With so much finger-pointing going on, you could load up Texas Stadium in Irving with 3-year-olds, give them all the mud buckets they wanted, and they still wouldn’t stand a slinging chance up against what’s going on in the nation’s media circus.

The reality of the situation, however, remains. The debts of our hedonistic Social Minimalism lifestyles the past few decades have got to be paid–one way or another–before we can ever call ourselves a caring people again. If that’s what we really want. No amount of verbal warfare, regardless of the relevancy, is going to change that. So, if we take the voices of The People at the polls as having said yea, how do we do it? How do we make a reckoning with our spiritual selves? For our slighting others along the way in a rush to lift up our own vanities?

The proposals, equally, are myriads in numbers. Me–an old, beat-up newspaper warrior from the Sunbelt days who ended up recently as a retired justice of the peace in Presidio, a small, Far West Texas border community in the Big Bend–I still tend toward getting them in the print media, albeit there’s so much good stuff on the internet these days, too. Electronic print, call it. The Tree there in El Paso always has good stuff .

But just experience itself is enough to convince a person doctors increasingly are shackled by exorbitant malpractice insurance rates. It just makes sense to cap them. Presidio, for instance, is stuck so far into the mountainous Chihuahuan Desert up until early this year doctors on a steady basis were rare for the community, for decades. We had one here from Austin four years ago; hospital administrators 90 miles away touted him as our answer, finally.

Personally, I’ve got more than a touch of COPD, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, from 30 years of smoking cigars; got so sick with the flu one winter I thought I was going to die in one of his clinic’s waiting rooms. Loaded with patients, he was. My wife finally went somewhere in one of the other rooms and got him to come look at the old judge’s blue fingers. I was on my way out of here to the Great Beyond and going without a whimper.

Get an oxygen bottle! he hollered at someone. And they kept me on it until the ambulance arrived at the hospital. Ninety miles away.

But two months later this doctor, who’d volunteered to work in Presidio to help pay for some of his medical school costs, had to pack up an leave. Couldn’t afford the $100,000 annual malpractice insurance rate, he said.

I need more customers like you Dan! he blithely told me one day. As an employee of the state’s County of Presidio, I had county health insurance, of course. Most of these people here have Medicare. And the loudest critics of Obama’s plan say those rates will drop even lower to health professionals if Obama’s plan is approved. As one of my favorite quotes from the overseas Great Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, goes, The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.

To convolute the emotions in this issue more, turn back to The Tree. On the same day Shapleigh accused El Guv of wanting to secede from Reality, another article, one of a series, that ran on the issue from a business development manager, pretty much summed up our real reality. Jim Collins, who describes himself much as how all of us old Democrats in the Lone Star once did, a fiscal conservative and social liberal, wrote in part 3 of his What Health Care Crisis? of his own fear and anger.

Why am I afraid? I’m afraid because I am going broke paying for private health insurance,” he said. ” I am afraid that with the current federal government proposal I will be paying even more and receiving even less. I’m afraid to even use the health insurance I have because every time I have, it has been followed by a large bill anyway. I’m afraid that after paying for health insurance my entire working career, in the end I will go bankrupt and leave nothing for my children as my saving are taken to pay for medical care as I lay dying.

Whooo! Take another large breath.

Why am I angry?, he then asks. I’m angry at the health insurance company that takes over $8,000 per year out of my pocket and seemingly provides little in return. I’m angry because I was foolish enough to study this topic. My study showed me just how much profit these health insurers are making, and how much of that profit is spent on lobbying politicians, bloated salaries for executives, fines paid for denying legitimate claims, and hundred of other things that do nothing to reduce my premiums or improve the care I receive.

I’m angry because despite the billions of tax dollars dedicated to health care for the poor and the elderly, we still hear about millions that do not receive adequate health care. I’m angry because everyday I read of the games played by health care providers to dump the uninsured onto the public system, and of the public system delaying and denying services simply to keep their system running. I’m angry with health care professionals gaming the system to increase their reimbursement rate (in the worse case), or to make the required treatment fit the restrictions of the health “plan” that will cover the cost. I’m angry with the government bureaucracy with its ever decreasing reimbursement rates and complicated accounting system that push providers to do so and add administrative cost to the whole system.

Why am I disappointed? I’m disappointed because it is obvious to me that our elected officials are listening more to the lobbyists for the doctors, insurers and lawyers than they are actually debating what is the right thing to do.

Capping lawsuit damages is just one part of the solution. There’s something else sequentially that needs to be done. Call it the Texas Two-Step. If you’re away far off somewhere such as down here in the desert you can see it. It’s plainly simple. If you’re going to cap malpractice damages, at some point you’ve got to put a cap on physician’s salaries, too. It’s that simple.

Why? Because if you’re going to take from the public trough, e.g., once you make a decision as a private physician or other health care professional to accept government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, there has to be limits. And, on the other hand, if the public is going to shield you from excessive damages and inordinate amounts of law suits for the way you conduct your medical practice, there has to be public accountability, too.

As the old saying goes, if you’re going to sip of the public wine, you can’t bawl like a private year-old heifer when an innocent but stupid blunder results in someone’s tragedy. Life is not fair works both ways. We’re all learning that. Some of us painfully. Which is what wisdom is, some great poet I can’t remember once wrote. We all grow wise against our will I think were the words to the poem. But call the Texas Two-Step the New Reality brought on by our rush to riches in the Sunbelt Movement and the subsequent re-shaping of our international economy. Men and women just aren’t perfect. Again. And again. Indeed.

At Texas A&M in the Corps of Cadets once, in my first year there, one of the guys had this humorous but true saying about what the serpent really told Eve when coaxing Adam to take a bite out of that apple. Man, in all of his creative blissfulness, simply can’t be trusted, it seems. One bite, then take it away from him! You could turn him into a UT tea-sipper if you gave him more! the Aggie serpent said.

Which brings me finally to a Political Science professor I had once at another school. He’s still alive, I think; I’m not mentioning his name; nor the school. But he discussed the nation’s redistribution of wealth problem once in a very somber lecture. He actually advocated setting minimum and maximum incomes on all professions and waged jobs. The lecture went something like this:

Benevolence, benevolence, benevolence! he said, gesturing toward the ceiling each time with one hand I remember. We are a benevolent people! All the world knows it! So take away all the attention paid to people with insane amounts of wealth! Put it instead on the amount of good they’re willing and able to contribute to society!

Whoosh! Yes, students were aghast. He actually had a plan set down on paper whereby professionals, clericals, labor jobs, sales, even the clergy, would be ranked much like the military in accordance to how high they’d advanced in a certain trade or profession, and ranked and respected accordingly. Psychologists, you see, claim that if an ordinary person gets all the attention he or she consciously wants, they’d only be getting 65 percent of what the mind actually needs. Thus man in his infinite creative blissfulness subconsciously schemes these behavior patterns to pick up the rest. Making bundles and bundles of needless cash just for the glory of it is one of them.

But according to the old professors reasoning, substituting rank instead of money would bring in all the attention the human being craves, and it would by new definition be strictly positive attention. The way we have it now, attention is attention, be it good or bad, for it works to fulfill the mind’s craving all the same. And we wouldn’t have to lay awake at nights scheming how to get more; civilization would advance much quicker, and much more peacefully than then (and still now), being pulled jerkily along by the quest for profit system.

And no one yet I assumed his colleagues has been able to prove me wrong! he added for final accent. Can’t remember for sure but I think everyone was so shocked then no one could think straight enough to remind him of all those technological improvements the quest for profit has led mankind to. A minor point maybe.

But for years, I thought that guy was crazy. He may have had more than one bite out of the apple, I’m not sure. But I definitely don’t think he was an Aggie. It was the Vietnam era and university campuses were crawling with whackos. But now, looking at what needs to be done in the health care debacle, you wonder. Maybe he had something!? Who knows how this is going to play out finally?

But I do deeply believe and trust in God, and the outcome of this nation and its role in fostering that better place the religious prophets spoke so much about thru the ages, the thought that lies on the precipice of most of our consciousnesses now. We’ll make it, one way or another, folks. Call it Destiny’s Yearning. It’s like I tell my old coffee buddy when he starts ranting and raving about all the insane things people do these days. There are no bad people in this world, I tell him. Only bad ideas.

Lynching the Texas governor for wanting to secede from the United States of America is one of them. I know this guy. He was cadet corps commander his senior year at Texas A&M. The Guv only had one bite.

Believe it or not.

By: Daniel Bodine

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