Health care and health insurance…
…are not one and the same.
This fact continually gets lost in discussions of Obamacare, which was supposed to improve both but may end up improving neither in any substantial way. In fact, as this piece points out, it may actually decrease the former while only effecting a very slight increase in the latter. The author of the piece I linked, Nancy Pfotenhauer, points out not only that “universal health insurance is profoundly different from better healthcare,” but that the two might be inversely related.
One doesn’t have to go back so far in history to get to a time when neither health care nor health insurance was considered to be within the proper purview of the federal government. But government regulation of the insurance business has been in place for a long long time, and now the real argument about health insurance regulation by government is over how much of it we need and whether federal or state government should lead, with the usual conservative/liberal split.
The trend even before Obamacare had been to greater and greater government regulation, but Obamacare represents an enormous leap in that direction, so large a jump that we could start to use the word “control” rather than mere “regulation” at this point. As such, Obamacare has reduced choice more and more rather than maximizing it, as federal government control is everywhere wont to do.
If you look in the dictionary, health is defined as a personal condition, not a commodity or service you can buy. You can’t buy health care or health insurance. You can buy medical care and medical insurance.
BTW, one of the candidates running for govenor of Maryland is calling medical care a right.
I can testify from personal experience about the quality of universal health coverage, which is what you get when you are on active duty in the military. To relate the anecdotes I experienced while on active duty would require an extended comment. I will just explain it thusly. The doctors and nurses work 8-5, five days a week except hospital staffs, which have three shifts – seven days a week. There is no personal relation with a doctor. You will see whoever is on duty. You may never see the same doctor twice. You may be operated on by a doctor recently transferred into a unit while the top-notch surgeon that is on staff plays golf. (This happened to me, with less than desirable results.) There is no incentive to excel or to provide the kind of service a private practitioner considers standard. Sick call at a military base consists of large numbers of sick military personnel as well as their dependents. They are “processed” on a first come first served basis and the “processing” is as impersonal and devoid of human concern as one can imagine. They can’t be sued and they won’t ever run out of patients. They don’t earn more for good results. It is socialism of a service and the lack of incentives results in the lowest common denominator of results. Universal health care – include me out, please.
I’m hearing rumors that Shinseki over at the VA, is intentionally getting veterans killed, as a way of promoting Obama’s military loyalty testing and feminist nazi homosexual nazi conditioning. Shinseki, if same one by same name, wanted more troops in Iraq. Either to make the fighter harder, so he can claim victory, or make more body bags so he can claim posts like the VA.
A Great Leap Forward.
Learning from the lesson of Hillarycare, the left made sure this time around to bribe and co-opt the insurance industry first. This is standard cronyist/fascist fare.
The insurance industry’s return on investment is starting to look shaky, though. They, like the citizens, may end up regretting their actions.
We should ensure that is so, mainly by removing any hope of an industry bailout. This ought to be an easy sell to the people, and therefore its opposition would be politically dangerous.
The insurance industry can still be turned back to our side, which would be an advantage for us.
Ray is correct, but it is way too late.
As to medical care, I am unaware that Leftists anywhere in the Western world have worked, as a group or by policy, to actually improve medical care and medical outcomes. They have worked with the money, of course. They always do.
One of our leftiest-left acquaintances pretty much epitomizes the cliché of the low-information voter on this topic. She refuses to work for “evil big” companies and only works for tiny mom ‘n pop or singe-owner companies – thus she has no first-hand experience with normal health insurance as most of us understand it. For years, it has been, “Yippee! I’m going to get free health care!” You try to explain how, for $200-600 a month she gets a few trinkets like “free” birth control (and she’s way past needing it) but for any actual coverage, first she’s $6,000 out of pocket and then they’re only picking up 60-70% – IF your doctor is in network, IF it’s covered at all, etc. You might as well talk to a brick wall. Since she’s never had normal insurance, she doesn’t even understand how much of a terrible deal this is, compared to the insurance the rest of us took for granted just a few years ago.
Not long ago, she discovered that she couldn’t afford the “free” health care coverage that she was thinking she was going to get and is without insurance now, but blames Republicans for both the absurd cost of this garbage and the fact that after all this she still has no health insurance.
That’s not even touching the fantasies this person has about single-payor – even though, of course, she has no first-hand experience with any sort of single-payor health care coverage. (I do. Was not impressed.)
I have spent the last 24 hours in a land that Kafka would recognize. My son, a 58-year-old man diagnosed with autism in his mid-40s, lives and functions well relatively independently within a structure that includes health care administered by Medicare, with prescription coverage that also works well for him. He was notified within the last two weeks that he would be “disenrolled” from his present coverage and “autoenrolled” in a different plan unless he “opts out” of said “autoenrollment”. “Opting out” sounds straightforward, but in practice it is a complex procedure, involving interaction with multiple government agencies, none of which has so far been able to give him the option of simply retaining the plans he currently has. It is clear that he is being forced into a plan he did not choose and which will not meet his needs – e.g. his current medical provider does not accept the plan in which he will be “autoenrolled”. It is also clear that we have stumbled into a situation that exposes some of the worst abuses of a system that has worked well but now sacrifices the individual and some of his most basic needs to a bureaucratic tangle. And it does so without the knowledge or consent of the individual who is affected. The quasi-totalitarian picture that emerges is one that should concern us all, and we need to voice our objections loudly while individual voices can still be heard.
Another problem is that more government control probably means more PC medicine: a whole round of unneeded tests and then the med de jour, but no time to listen to the patient; gobs of counselling for problems most people used to work out for themselves; and plenty of diet programs. And, of course, for the latter types of disorders, patients will get get-out-of-work slips from the doctors. That is if there are any true doctors left. We may just end up with a bunch of credentialed idiots.
NO. no no. Dammit. no.
Shite. Curmudgeons.
Obamacare is failing and will fail because we hate it. 2014 will change a lot. 2016 even more. Pretty soon, you will have a virtual doctor who will be nice and attentive. Robot surgery. Look to Israel. See this:
http://www.givenimaging.com/en-us/Pages/default.aspx
Medicine’s advances will outstrip socialist stupidity.
Leading up to the Obamacare vote, leftist commentators would refer to those who were either “for healthcare” or “against healthcare”. They wouldn’t refer to the impending act as “healthcare reform” or “healthcare finance reform” which is a more accurate description. That’s the way it was discussed, and non-leftist commentators picked up the term as a sort of Beltway shorthand. In so doing the left successfully torqued the language for their own ends, as they often do.
What we have in the roll-out is a high-concept horror film, sort of Orwell Meets Kafka, as Elaine (above) knows firsthand.
Kafka knew well the absurdities of bureaucracy: he was an attorney for an insurance company.
What’s happened so far is peanuts compared to what will happen when the employer mandate comes into effect in 2015 (assuming that actually happens in 2015).
I admit, Obama was smart enough to delay it until after the 2014 election. But he’s playing a “one-day-at-a-time” delay strategy which only ends one of two ways: 1) The employer mandate is delayed indefinitely or 2) It eventually kicks in.
If it is ever enacted, voters will be especially angry when it is exposed how they were duped until it was too late.
Hitting that many people in the wallet will wake up a huge percentage of the electorate. People like the one described by Kyndyll above will start denying they are Democrats.
One of our leftiest-left acquaintances pretty much epitomizes the cliché of the low-information voter on this topic.
Easy come, easy go.
Born with a God, divine, or randomized free will and soul. Sold it for some trinkets and free healthcare that isn’t free.
Expat, new eco friendly mandatory diet will be 1,200 calories per day, per person.
Long exposure to a “all covered” insurance type HMO creates it’s own dependency. When my daughter was in college (2000 miles from home) she had brand name drug for her infrequent migraines which worked very well. When we changed insurance (I own the company so we have some changes every year) the new plan called for using generics before going to the brand name. Since we didn’t want to change the drug until my daughter was home for the summer, I had to convince my wife that we could simply pay for the refill ourselves! After a few moments her eyes lit up and she said of course we could. Now we control much of what our business does on health insurance (we pay for nearly 100% of everything for employees) we should have known better. I imagine someone who works for a large organization is simply not capable of taking any initiative but to complain to the benefits office.
The first step is to remind your self that you are really in charge no matter what.
Ymar,
And if that crowd has its way, we will be eating insects. Personally, I’d like to send them out to collect cockroaches. Think of all the pesticides we could avoid.
Expat, enforced vegetarian eating habits.
Those that don’t obey, will lose their jobs and be ostracized like Eich and black Repubs.
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