patrick.net

The current system provides free medicaid, unlimited free drugs, and free food stamps for sugary drinks, processed snacks and all kinds of candy.

So Republicans are hackers now are they?

How deep does the blame well go?

Where's the article that talks about a piece of Legislation that was crammed through, like an after thought, and admittedly nobody read?

It could be sensibly argued that the Republicans are saving America from the sloppiest law ever passed.

Dan8267 says

And that is what happens when you let capitalism run health care. Capitalism is good for luxuries, not necessities and infrastructure.

It's also why banks should be turned into Utilities and should go back to being staid, boring institutions with more holidays than most.

thunderlips11 says

It's also why banks should be turned into Utilities and should go back to being staid, boring institutions with more holidays than most.

Yep. Finance and accounting, when done correctly, is boring. Boring is good in some fields. And in those fields innovation is code for fraud.

Dan8267 says

Biggest Problem w/Obamacares Rollout

Dan, respecting your deep and granular knowledge of logical rules, I will defer to you on the precise sub-type of substitution that occurred between the article and the headline. It's big though:
1) regarding the Texas anecdote, what makes anyone think the guy's cancer would have been cured if he had insurance? Many cancers remain incurable, and depending on the type of cancer, the approved treatments result in patients dying more expensively and slowly. Patrick Swayze and Steve Jobs both died prematurely, not from lack of money, but from the fact that their types of cancer remain incurable no matter how much money you spend. The biggest problem with Obamacare is the same as what Eisenhower described in "The Chance for Peace" and his farewell address warning of the military industrial complex: the mandatory diversion of resources away from research and into toxic placebos and massively overpriced billing games and other waste, fraud, and abuse, in addition to the massive power it confers on the politicians who steer that money at every level and the subordination of living humans to the Matrix of corporate "persons" that control our elected officials.
2) regarding Medicaid, the best data on that topic, the Oregon experiment, found "no significant improvement" in health but much higher spending.
3) Jonathan Gruber has been pushing this plan since it was called RomneyCare; he's made his fame and fortune pushing this plan, all he does is push this plan and steer $ as a Massachusetts insurance commissar (sometimes even the Tea Partiers are not always wrong). He is less credible than a used car salesman. Read about him from sources left and right, his concealment of conflicts of interest, his testimony as an "expert" while on the administration's payroll, etc. He is a symptom of the type of government-industrial complex Eisenhower warned about, and we see it again and again, "expert" testimony bought and paid for by government officials pushing policies that enrich their corporate sponsors.

To paraphrase Eisenhower, the increasingly doped or even comatose existence within the medical industrial Matrix is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under a fog of psychotropic prescriptions, lost in the depths of coma where immobile female patients become "miraculously" pregnant, it is humanity hanging from the cross of an IV drip. Every trillion dollars wasted on hospital billing games and pushing toxic placebos and daily maintenance pills represents a theft, in the final sense, from the genuine cures that the same money could have developed, a loss of freedom and in its stead an imposition of mandatory chronic dependence. Humans created corporate and governmental machines, and as in The Matrix, those machines have become self-aware and have taken over, and we exist only to supply them with power.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/08/16/obamacare-exchange-problem-caused-delays-in-coverage/?intcmp=latestnews

Until this month, Reed was listed as having no health insurance. But she has paid seven months’ worth of premiums to Nevada Health Link, the market place through which consumers buy subsidized insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

"It's like paying for car insurance and getting into an accident to find out you don't have coverage," Reed said.

Reed says she has also paid $2,100 in out-of-pocket medical costs this year. Her employer contributed $2,500, but the amount doesn't get close to the $30,000 needed. Because Reed's situation isn't deemed immediately life-threatening, she can't be treated by a hospital or emergency room, regardless of her ability to pay.

It's pretty fucked up when the Hospitals aren't very hospitable.

thunderlips11 says

Yep. Finance and accounting, when done correctly, is boring. Boring is good in some fields. And in those fields innovation is code for fraud.

Exactly. Math isn't new. If a few complex calculations were all that was required to make financial markets "innovative" and "More efficient" The City of London or Amsterdam would have detected them before Victoria was Queen.

The last honest financial innovation was double-entry bookkeeping.

HydroCabron says

The last honest financial innovation was double-entry bookkeeping.

Double entry? Front and rear?

curious2 says

regarding the Texas anecdote, what makes anyone think the guy's cancer would have been cured if he had insurance?

Everything in medicine is risk management, but detecting and treating cancer early is by far the most cost effective and successful (least chance of dying) way of treating it.

Dan8267 says

The American health care system before Obamacare was a complete fucking joke that cost more lives than if a 9/11 happened 10 times a year every fucking year. And that's a damn conservative estimate that doesn't include the multitudes of people who die because their health insurance providers weasel their way out of covering treatments as shown in Sicko.

Maybe we should rebrand Aetna a terrorist group and conservatives will finally care about their victims.

curious2 says

Every trillion dollars wasted on hospital billing games and pushing toxic placebos and daily maintenance pills represents a theft, in the final sense, from the genuine cures that the same money could have developed

This is exactly why "free markets" don't handle necessities and infrastructure like health care well. Best to socialize the whole industry and pay individual scientists for their discoveries. Do that and scientists will form their own teams to compete to finding cures. Then set up the 1 to 20 scientists who cure some disease like cancer with enough money to live like kings for the rest of their lives. It still would be cheaper than the billions spent on big pharma, and with much better results.

Dan8267 says

Everything in medicine is risk management....

Yes, definitely.

Dan8267 says

detecting and treating cancer early is by far the most cost effective and successful (least chance of dying) way of treating it.

Not really. First, regarding "cost effective:" misdiagnosis and overutilization overwhelm the cost savings of early detection; it's been proved so many times that there isn't really any controversy except among those who make money off denying it (it's the medical equivalent of evolution vs "intelligent design"). Second, regarding efficacy, there is genuine controversy, but it is clear that early detection is terribly overrated. Two cancers that are perennial favorites of "tribal" politics illustrate the pattern: breast cancer and prostate cancer. To detect breast cancer, female patients are routinely irradiated (mammograms), and radiation actually causes cancer. Detecting "early" increases the five-year survival rate, which is the definition of success, but not necessarily lifespan. To cite a famous example, Elizabeth Edwards was "saved" by early detection because she endured more than five years of expensive/lucrative treatment before the cancer killed her. The question is, would she have got the cancer if she hadn't gone in for all those mammograms? Likewise prostate cancer, studies keep showing that testing in the name of "early detection" confers no benefit on the patient, only revenue for the providers. The list goes on and on. You may find a few pockets where early detection does really save lives, but you can find many more where false alarms result in injurious (or even lethal) but lucrative treatments that had no chance of being helpful.

BTW, regarding treatment, insurance discrimination against the sick is reportedly "creeping back."

As for whether free market vs socialism would work better, it would be interesting to compare results if you could find actual examples of each system. The British have currently among the closest to socialism, and the NHS is much better and cheaper than what we have. The Mexican system combines subsidized public education (including especially medical education) and vaccines and hospitals, and a mostly free market, and they achieve very good results with the lowest costs in the world. We have lemon socialism, designed to produce the highest costs in the world and the most uneven results; it operates as designed.

curious2 says

First, regarding "cost effective:" misdiagnosis and overtreatment overwhelm the cost savings of early detection

Yes misdiagnosis would be. However, I don't think that applies in this case. He had cancer, so it wouldn't have been a false positive.

curious2 says

You may find a few pockets where early detection does really save lives, but you can find many more where false alarms result in injurious (or even lethal) but lucrative treatments that had no chance of being helpful.

If that's so for most cancers, someone should inform the World Health Organization. They are still recommending early detection.

The articles you posted do show that specific tests are more harmful then good, but does that negate the very approach of trying to detect cancer early? I'm not a doctor, but it's common knowledge that the longer cancer goes untreated, the more it grows and spreads to other parts of the body. Perhaps we just need better screening methods.

From your WHO link: "Based on the existing evidence, mass population screening can be advocated only for breast and cervical cancer, using mammography screening and cytology screening, in countries where resources are available for wide coverage of the population." Regarding breast cancer specifically, mammography really only saves lives in women over 50; if you were 18 and female with no particular risk factors, it would be crazy to start getting yourself irradiated every year, but of course providers would sell you that "service" for $1000 each visit (don't worry - no copayment!). The risk factors for breast cancer are (1) age, (2) smoking, (3) obesity, (4) excessive alcohol; in 50 years of Medicare, life expectancy in that age group has increased three years, mainly due to fewer people smoking.

Again, I will defer to you on which logical error is committed by looking at an anecdote and saying that because he had cancer we should screen everyone. I am fairly sure he didn't have cervical cancer, and he probably didn't have breast cancer either.

curious2 says

Again, I will defer to you on which logical error is committed by looking at an anecdote and saying that because he had cancer we should screen everyone.

Um, I don't think I ever implied that.

From the original article,

When his pain became severe, she sent him to an emergency room, but the personnel there refused to treat him because his symptoms weren’t an immediate threat to “life or limb.”

I think that severe pain is an important enough symptom to warrant a doctor examining a patient and trying to find the cause of the pain. After all, pain is nature's way of letting you know something's wrong.

Letting this guy "slip through the cracks" when he was already in severe pain is an indication that the system does not work. That was the point I was trying to make.

Dan8267 says

I think that severe pain is an important enough symptom to warrant a doctor examining a patient and trying to find the cause of the pain.

That happened.

Dan8267 says

After all, pain is nature's way of letting you know something's wrong.

True.

Dan8267 says

Letting this guy "slip through the cracks" when he was already in severe pain is an indication that the system does not work.

That's a leap. I hesitate to debate an anecdote when neither of us has the facts, but I followed the links to the original doctor's article. She wrote:

"There was cancer in his kidney, his liver and his lungs. It must have been spreading over the weeks that he’d been coming into St. Vincent’s.
***
UTMB sent him to hospice, and he died at home a few months later."

She does not mention his age or whether he smoked or how much he drank, or any other risk factors, so any prognosis can only be based on aggregate statistics. Depending on the type of lung cancer, it would likely have more than an 80% chance of killing him no matter what he did. Cancer of the liver kills people at all income levels, in fact Steve Jobs died because his pancreatic cancer spread to his liver. You contend that "the system does not work" because it let him "slip through the cracks," but he didn't really slip through the cracks, and you don't have evidence to show that a different payment system would have produced a better result. If you want to say we should develop cheap and reliable cures for cancer so everybody can afford them without worrying about how to shift the cost, fine, but until such cures actually exist you can't really use this anecdote as an indication that a different payment system would have saved the guy.

BTW, I'm not the person who Disliked your comment, though I do think you denied implying something that the article and your earlier comments seemed really to imply. The bottom line remains, even with the best medical system in the world, everybody dies. If you look at statistics to see how long people live, you can do a lot by reducing smoking and obesity. You can't do nearly as much by screening everybody, partly because even unlimited treatment ("no lifetime caps!") has real limits in terms of efficacy. Everybody's lifetime remains ultimately capped by the nature of mortality, and no politicians' promise has ever changed that basic fact.

Dan8267 says

As time passed, his condition deteriorated until he began having difficulty breathing. It was only then that an emergency room finally admitted him and diagnosed the cancer that had metastasized throughout his body.

CaptainShuddup says

Because Reed's situation isn't deemed immediately life-threatening, she can't be treated by a hospital or emergency room, regardless of her ability to pay.

Two examples of why the healthcare system is horrible. The ACA is attempting to fix this issue. Emergency rooms will not see people without insurance because they won't get paid - unless the situation is life or death.

I've been in the healthcare field for 25+ years, and have seen many people die due to lack of insurance (and the resulting lack of treatment).

If they have insurance, they'll see any idiot who walks in with an owie on their finger. Like the school teacher in NJ. His insurance will only allow approved costs, and the actual bill will be substantially less. Hopefully the guy will have a deductible so that he might learn what ER's are for.

In the Cap'n's example, the woman has been paying but the website the state of Nevada paid Xerox to set up has totally fucked everything up. So what does Nevada do? Awards them a multimillion dollar contract to do other stuff for the state. They have a plan for next year's insurance, but those people who haven't been able to get insurance because of the fucked up website are shit-out-of-luck until then. They've hired a lawyer and NV will pay him a chunk of change, the victims will receive very little and suffer physically due to their lack of insurance, but it all looks very good in the news.

It's fodder for the news, which is certainly more important than actually helping someone.

What a laugh. Wasn't medicaid/medicare supposed to handle this? Basically, EVERYTHING is capitalism's fault. In the meantime, I think European socialism often does some things rather well but then again... it's Europe. The limosine liberal left is trying to make the USA demographically into Ferguson, Detroit, or Oakland (not Sweden) while bashing right wingers as "hypocrites." Yeah, got it.

So in the end, rather than making a European socialist paradise, the left creates a third world hellhole run by economic fascist/crony-capitalists. Good going.

Yet another report confirming the same pattern:

"Unlikely to Benefit, Older Adults Still Get Cancer Screening
***
These results raise concerns about overscreening in these individuals, which not only increases healthcare expenditure but can lead to patient net harm," the researchers write."

PolishKnight says

So in the end, rather than making a European socialist paradise, the left creates a third world hellhole run by economic fascist/crony-capitalists. Good going.

Crony capitalism left or right are the only beneficiaries of this new healthcare system.
No matter how it's spinned, the middle men once again make all the money and the patients get nothing but shit.