Global Economy Bursting?

[Terrel L. Shields]

well then who will?

you cannot fix it by controlling the price...and medicare tries that. The "fix" is to increase competition by the following

Loser pays tort reform.

Increase the size of medical schools

Pin a green card to every foriegn graduate's degree from Med School

Allow "across the line" insurance sales

Train more Doctor assistants for treating patients needing minor care.

Follow the European model of having the "Chemist" (Pharmacy) administer the screening part of care. That's where you go when you are sick. They will assess your condition and send you on to the right "doctor" or facility.

Require more Gen. practitioners from med schools, not everyone needs to be a specialist.

Any MRI or CAT should be coordinated with the need. It's idiotic to see an MRI that isn't run 2 hours a day knowing the hospital down the road also has an underutilized MRI...an MRI they have only because the government downgrades the hospital rating for NOT having one...share.

 

[Michigan CG]

TLS-You say gov't isnt going to fix anything with health care,...well then who will? The insurance co's? Come on... they have had free reign over the system and health care now accounts for 17% of GDP, per capita US citizens pay more for health care than any other country in the world. 50% of all bankruptcies are due to health care costs, even among those WITH insurance! But the blowhards on the radio proclaim that 'we have the best healthcare in the world'. For those able to forego insurance and pay out of pocket this is correct, for the rest of us this is a LIE. Will the almighty FREE MARKET fix these inequities? Hell fing no. If we the people, who elect and populate the gov't won't do it we are at the mercy of the insurance co's. As we have been for the past 40 years. Look where that's got us.

You are very selective in who you blame for the health care debacle. If you could get the left to quit bowing to the ambulance-chasing lawyers and cap lawsuits that would be a big start. Look at health care in Texas, a Republican state with lawsuit caps and then New York you will see a big difference.

Then we get the right to quit pandering to the insurance companies and let insurance companies compete across state lines and that would drive down rates.

You seriously want the government bureaucracy to fix health care? Social Security is insolvent because government steal the money to pay for other things. Government is wasteful. Here we have lunch ladies putting corn on a kid's plate for $20/hour with a pension. All levels of government are not as efficient as the private sector because the government spends other people's money.

Privatization is the open market and has to work within a budget. Government does not have to work within a budget. The U.S. has not had a budget in three years but they continue to spend.

.....per capita US citizens pay more for health care than any other country in the world. 50% of all bankruptcies are due to health care costs, even among those WITH insurance!.....

False and false.

We do have the best health care. Why do Canadians come to the U.S. for health care? Because they have a government controlled system that rations health care, just as is the intent of Obamacare. They admitted it.

 

[Michigan CG]

you cannot fix it by controlling the price...and medicare tries that. The "fix" is to increase competition by the following......And because of the government price fixing many doctors will not accept Medicare. It will get worse.

Loser pays tort reform. Tort reform would greatly reduce health care costs, look at Texas.

Increase the size of medical schools There will be a shortage of doctors because of government price fixing.

Pin a green card to every foriegn graduate's degree from Med School

Allow "across the line" insurance sales YES!!

Train more Doctor assistants for treating patients needing minor care. My wife is a nurse practitioner, and people like her can take care of a myriad of problems. The doctors are fighting this.

Require more Gen. practitioners from med schools, not everyone needs to be a specialist. There will be a severe shortage of general practitioners in the very near future if Obamacare is not overturned. There already is a shortage. Who wants to go to college, then medical school and then internship only to make $120-$150,000/year? That is what it has been reduced to.

The government is making health care worse, not better. Medicaid is most likely the biggest fraud ever. Reform is needed, but the answer is not the government takeover of it.

 

[coolhandluke]

you cannot fix it by controlling the price...and medicare tries that. The "fix" is to increase competition by the following

Loser pays tort reform.

Increase the size of medical schools

Pin a green card to every foriegn graduate's degree from Med School

Allow "across the line" insurance sales

Train more Doctor assistants for treating patients needing minor care.

Follow the European model of having the "Chemist" (Pharmacy) administer the screening part of care. That's where you go when you are sick. They will assess your condition and send you on to the right "doctor" or facility.

Require more Gen. practitioners from med schools, not everyone needs to be a specialist.

Any MRI or CAT should be coordinated with the need. It's idiotic to see an MRI that isn't run 2 hours a day knowing the hospital down the road also has an underutilized MRI...an MRI they have only because the government downgrades the hospital rating for NOT having one...share.

TLS-I agree with some of these proposals, how will they be implemented? Almost every fix you have noted would require additional legislation, i.e; the government would have to fix it.

Lassez-Faire has been the approach, Insurers lobby congress in order to write the rules of the road, they benefit from all the ills you list above. Health care for profit has resulted in pricing 50 million of our fellow countrymen out of the market.

 

[coolhandluke]

The government is making health care worse, not better. Medicaid is most likely the biggest fraud ever. Reform is needed, but the answer is not the government takeover of it.

MCG-What do you think about Medicare?

 

[coolhandluke]

MCG-True and True
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/jun2009/db2009064_666715.htm
http://www.kff.org/insurance/snapshot/oecd042111.cfm

 

[Randolph Kinney]

Discrepancies on Medical Bills Can Leave a Credit Stain

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/05/y...?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120505

Even people with good insurance coverage know how hard it can be to figure out how much they owe after a visit to the doctor or, even worse, the emergency room, which can generate multiple bills. But as patients become responsible for a growing share of costs — not just co-payments, but also deductibles and coinsurance — bill paying is becoming ever more complex.

On top of that, more medical providers are using collection services and turning to them more quickly than they have in the past, some experts say.

The reason is that the portion of the bill that patients owe has become a larger percentage of medical practices’ and hospitals’ revenue, said Mark Rieger, chief executive of National Healthcare Exchange Services, which offers software to help providers manage billing. “They are getting increases in their fee schedule amounts, but their revenue is declining because more of the responsibility is being shifted to patients,” he said.

Medical providers collected no more than 8 percent of their revenue from patients about 10 years ago, he said. Now, it is closer to 20 percent, or even 30 percent, in some markets.

FICO, which produces one of the most popular credit scores used by lenders, said it viewed different types of collection agency accounts — medical-related or otherwise — as equally damaging. For someone with a spotless credit history, “it wouldn’t surprise me if their score dropped by 100 points or more,” said Frederic Huynh, a principal analytic scientist at FICO. And the blemish does not entirely disappear for seven years.

In 2010, an estimated 9.2 million people aged 19 to 64 were contacted by a collection agency because of a billing mistake, according to research by the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit research group, while 30 million were contacted by a collection agency because of an unpaid medical bill.

 

[Terrel L. Shields]

because of the government price fixing many doctors will not accept Medicare

The local "old doctor" retired and a new doctor came to town. In 2 years, he has already had to limit medicare patients - his cash flow is bottlenecked for months according to one employee. My retired cousins had to stick with their internist even when he moved 30 miles away due to divorce. He then remarried and moved out of state. They are still looking for a "regular" doctor. My doctor quit private practice and became an emergency room doctor. She was sick of medicare paying her six to 12 months after she did the work...at a discount. I have had to go to a Physicians' assistant because there is no regular doctor at the clinic now. The New Doctor I mentioned above comes to my clinic on Friday afternoon's. They have been unable to find a new doctor to come to the clinic since the vacancy last summer. Many patients are scambling to go to other doctors and this is making the clinic - in a town of 1,200 - likely to close.

 

[coolhandluke]

Yes lets look at Texas
http://www.iwatchnews.org/2011/09/01/6097/analysis-mythical-benefits-tort-reform-texas

 

[Randolph Kinney]

Disabled Americans Shrink Size of U.S. Labor Force

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-03/disabled-americans-shrink-size-of-u-s-labor-force.html

The number of workers receiving SSDI jumped 22 percent to 8.7 million in April from 7.1 million in December 2007, Social Security data show. That helps explain as much as one quarter of the decline in the U.S. labor-force participation rate during the period, according to economists at JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley.