http://newsbusters.org/blogs/geoffr...rticulate-obama-couldnt-even-sell-watermelons Has Dan Rather got the scoop on why Obama is having so much trouble getting his healthcare plan passed?
He was stating how obama opponents think. Certainly there is a undercurrent of racism by obama opponents, but the primary problems is political: obama is not of the same party as his detractors, if it had been hillary or bill or gore or what ever other democrat they would still stone walling everything despised and hated everything. Obama did fuck up certianly. He should have sent through many smaller bills that would have spend through while attracting less attention from his opponents. For example sent through standardized electronic medical records bill, then a bill to prevent insurance companies from dropping clients who become ill, bills to reduce the price of medications and medical procedures, bills to grade doctors and hospitals by performance, etc. Each small bill if properly designed would have allowed for radical change when there combined effect took hold. One single combined bill was a spruce goose: it allowed for enemies to rally against a singular cause, allowed for allies to nit pick and compromise between each other, and stall, stall, stall. Now there is no chances of it passing in its totality. Oooh and this should be on the politics forum.
If a Republican said that, the media would be in a frenzy. Rather got a free pass. Obama's plan to take over health care is meeting with HUGE opposition. If he and his democrats pass this bill despite Americans screaming against it, they will be out of jobs soon.
I actually agree with you here. But, you know, double standards always exist. (Warning: John Stewart is a jackass, and not really funny. But his reporting puts a lot of big networks to shame.) Fetus is right, in this regard. I think most Americans realize that something is terribly wrong with health care in this country---we spend more, per capita and as a percentage of GDP, than any other country in the world, yet the level of service the average American gets is sub par. Most people oppose Obama's bill for different reasons---with a big bill it's always easy to find something to hate.
Not much is wrong with the care; it's the cost. And like I said it's mostly from fraud, theft (refusing to pay), and extortion. We need tort reform. No more hospitals paying $5 million to some hag who had a defective baby. We have the best doctors in the world. We just have a lot of dirty people sucking them and their hospitals dry.
Maybe. Another idea which I particularly like is from the German system. In Germany, as I understand it, malpractice cases are tried in front of a jury of doctors. So, the person filing suit has to convince 12 doctors that the defendant was negligent, and not 12 people from the street.
Good idea. I have seen so much waste in these frivolous suits it's insane. There should be a cap on payouts. No one deserves $160,000 for spilling coffee in their lap.
Well, again...maybe. I had strong opinions about this until my friend told me about the following case., which gave me a bit of perspective. A man (35 ish) goes into the hospital for a vasectomy, and during an otherwise simple operation, the doctor decides that the man's penis needs to be removed. So the man wakes up, sans penis, after what should have been a relatively simple operation. So how can you put a price on a penis? Is a 35 year old man's penis worth the same as a 90 year old man's? Anyway the point is that any system we come up with will have some degree of unfairness. I don't disagree with you that we need some sort of tort reform, but I'd be pretty bummed if I lost my penis and got a check for $25,000.
Yes , you're right. Not racist at all. It's like those tickets to the theatre Obama sold. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
jackass he may be but he funny as hell. A point that missing that I want to reiterate is that Dan Rather was not talking about his opinion in those racially questionable quote, he was talking about what he thought other people would think, thus Dan rathers was saying that obama opponents are going to think things involving "watermellons" and "articulate", in short he was saying they are racist. I did not mean all his opponents. This brings up another point, why do we have political opponents, can it merely be disagreements on specific issue, why does it have to be divided as though obama is now your enemy from now and forever.
Bullshit, of course (- unless you regard the overhead costs of private insurance setups to be fraud.) Do we have to append the "bullshit" label to that assertion every time it is made, to avoid the effect of repetition by those employing the Big Lie tactic, or can people be trusted to (say) consider the source? Americans pay as much (or more, increasingly) in taxes to support government paid health care, for the minority of Americans who receive it, as the French do to provide health care for every citizen of their country. The fact that people are somehow looking to Obama to "sell" a reform of that situation - one that is so tame as to not reform much, save much, or fix the major problems - is a prime symptom of the actual problem. Sell it to whom? Isn't it pre-sold to pretty much everybody?
I should have nailed sandy (heh heh) on this, but you have some statistics to back up this assertion? I am curious to know how much of the health care costs go to malpractice insurance, etc. My girlfriend's father (who is pretty liberal on most things) confirmed my suspicion that it was actually quite a lot. Another good friend of mine, and anesthesiologist, also seems to think that malpractice is a major contributor to overhead.
Last I heard the direct cost was on the order of 1% or less, even restricted to the private sector (Medicare and the like pay much less, of course). This is typical of the figures I have always run into: http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2009/07/23/102434.htm The higher estimates of its cost come from estimates of the cost of "defensive medicine" - unnecessary and even damaging wastes of resources to forestall anticipated possibilities of lawsuit. This is a real issue, and yet another area in which something like a single payer system can save real money. The reason you have to allow large malpractice awards and all kinds of lawsuits is that civil suits with large possible payouts are the only accountability possible for large corporations who otherwise make fortunes by cutting corners and shortchanging their customers. The moral hazard is built in - it's much cheaper to supply poor care, and cutting costs is how big insurance companies and HMOs make their money. It's probably a major contributor to his personal overhead, but the burden on some kinds of doctors is small potatoes among the overall costs of the system. And again, it's an artifact of a dysfunctional setup. France, Norway, Germany, don't have that problem.
I think this is really the point---for example, the Economist had an article a few months back about health care reform in America. (It was what really convinced me that there was a problem.) Anyway, there was a statistic that, in America, there are something like 5-8 MRI's per 1000 people (not per 1000 doctor visits). In Europe, the number is more like 1/2 - 1. The conclusions was, and my girlfriend's father confirmed this, if you don't give a patient an MRI, they will either go to a doctor that will, or you are liable in the event that something terrible happens. As a doctor, YOU don't have to pay for the MRI, and if you prescribe it, the insurance company will most likely pay for it. At the end of the day, though, I don't see how a single payer system can eliminate this, if there is no reform of malpractice lawsuits. Well, I disagree because you're not suing a company when you file for malpractice. I thought you typically sued a doctor? Anyway, probably most people would agree with you when it comes to big corporations. To establish this you have to tell me how malpractice lawsuits are different between America and those other countries. In Germany, at least, there is a cap on malpractice settlements---something like $25,000. You haven't established that the health care systems are better just because they're``single payer''.
So I looked for data on Germany, France and Norway (your examples), to see what I could find regarding they deal with malpractice lawsuits, but I couldn't find anything worth reading, except this: I'd also like to correct something I said earlier: the German system refers plaintiffs first to a ``Mediation Center'', staffed by doctors and lawyers. The mediation center suggests a settlement, and the plaintiff can either take the settlement or leave it, and pursue his case in court. The court typically follows the recommendation of the mediation center, although this isn't a rule. I also found some info on the Canadian system (source): The Canadian insurance company (read: the) that provides malpractice insurance for doctors (Canadian Medical Protection Agency) pursues cases very vigorously, whereas in the US the claims are mostly settled out of court: ==== I don't think you can separate the single payer system from some sort of tort reform, which is what Obama is trying to do in America presumably. I'd love to see some data to the contrary though.
Reform of malpractice law becomes easier. Without the profit motive to point at in court large jury awards become less frequent (as do lawsuits in general). In addition, as with Medicare, treatment becomes standardized more easily and doctors have more support in denying gratuitous stuff. Also, kickbacks and influence peddling by device or drug manufacturers becomes less of a factor, and easier to regulate. And of course there is the dreaded rationing - which doesn't generate lawsuits as easily when it's consistent throughout, instead of calibrated by corporation and a tool of competitive profit generation as now. And so forth. What we have now is some kind of employment program for lawyers - every entity needs a team of them, and there are a lot of entities. Single payer takes out almost half of them. You sue a doctor, and the other doctors, and the staff, and the hospital, and the four separate insurance companies of all of these entities. You sue, and your insurance company sues, and the insurance company of the guy who hit you sues, and anyone else affected sues.
