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margalo's comments:
on Rx: Personal Values
Hope you never get fired from your job and lose your health care.
"If your not a productive person in society, then why should anyone carry you?" Are you actually advocating that Social Security Disablity and SSI should be taken away from the sick, disabled, and handicapped people???
posted 3 years, 10 months ago
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on Rx: Personal Values
HR676 would cover every American without all these extra hassles by putting all of us into Medicare.
posted 3 years, 10 months ago
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on Rx: Personal Values
HR676 does this. You can find both a summary of the bill and its entire text at http://thomas.loc.gov/
posted 3 years, 10 months ago
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on Rx: Personal Values
Retirement age is not connected to health care. People are eligible for Medicare at age 65, retired or not.
posted 3 years, 10 months ago
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on Rx: Personal Values
You can always find the contact information for your representatives and senators and also all bills in Congress at this Library of Congress site: http://thomas.loc.gov/
posted 3 years, 10 months ago
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on Rx: Personal Values
Since the Congress is refusing to consider HR 676 at this time, the opportunity to buy into Medicare is a good alternative.
posted 3 years, 10 months ago
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on Rx: Personal Values
Due to the lack of a practical health care plan in the US, there are distortions in how health care is paid.
One of the reasons Medicaid is high is that people overuse the emergency rooms for primaray care, which drives up costs. It is also causing many hospitals to close their emergency rooms.
We can solve these problems with the comprehensive public health care bill, HR 676, to put all Americans under Medicare. Medicare is efficiently run, and with all the scare tactics being used seniors are afraid that Medicare will be taken away. None of them are begging to be transferred to private insurance companies!
posted 3 years, 10 months ago
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on Rx: Personal Values
Luke T. is a shill for insurance companies not an honest consumer.
Health care costs are going up, in part because of an aging population, and in large part because of runaway greed by insurance companies. This is why we need to restructure health care in a practical way.
The current bills moving forward in Congress do not do the job, because the protect insurance and drug companies' interests not the rest of us. These bills are a sham brought to us by legislators who have takencampaign contributions of thousands of dollars from the insurance and drug companies.
posted 3 years, 10 months ago
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on Rx: Personal Values
The Obama Administration has said that the public option is not the critical issue. Without a public option, there is no real competition to private insurance costs. The co-ops themselves and other reports about them came out yesterday to say that they cannot provide that competition. HR 3200 is another giveaway to big corporations, because it will not provide good health care to us but will guarantee protections to insurance companies. The Senate wants a bill to provide even less for us. We would be better off with no bill than any of the ones proposed this year. Obama never should have taken single payer "off the table," as it is the only cost effective answer to health care.
Rep. John Conyers introduced a bill, HR676, several years ago to put all Americans under Medicare. This bill, which has been reintroduced in the current Congress, has provisions for preventive care and some coverage of alternative care. It would cover every American. Medicare costs only 2% to administer, so if this bill would pass, the cost of healthcare immediately drops by the elimination of the private insurance companies' 25% overhead, including their profits.
Everyone understands Medicare. People choose their own doctors and other providers who are paid by Medicare. The government negotiates with the providers for the payments and should be allowed to negotiate with the drug companies. In other countries, the drug costs are much lower because of their governments negotiated lower prices.
60% of US bankruptcies are due to medical bills, and most of those people have insurance but must pay co-payments or for bills not covered by their insurance. These costs are in the thousands of dollars. If the sick person cannot work or does not have a high paying job, how can they pay these bills?
Medicare should be financed by taxes. These taxes would be lower than insurance premiums, because the cost of health care would be lower.
We are paying trillions of dollars for current wars, past wars, and military readiness without questioning those costs, but we quibble about paying much less for our own health. We need to change our priorities to provide good health care for ourselves first, then pay for other
posted 3 years, 10 months ago
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on Rx: Personal Values
The profits of the insurance companies are at least 25% not 1%. All the reports I have ever seen from many sources cite that figure or higher. Medicare, by contrast, has a 2% administrative cost to process the payments to health care providers. The private sector is a model of greed not efficiency.
The per capita cost cited for Medicare says in the link that it is Medicaid, an entirely different population.
Medicare costs can be reduced by permitting the government to negotiate the prices they pay for services. This has been done for most providers but forbidden for prescriptions by the Bush Administration. This has to change.
Luke T's post is just propaganda for private insurance without the correct facts, because the correct facts show that Medicare is more efficient than private insurance.
posted 3 years, 10 months ago
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on From the Conventions: Believing in Politics
posted 4 years, 9 months ago
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