Healthcare bill-any other ideas?
For those of you who are mad at the health care bill passing, I would like to hear your real ideas for fixing health care in this country, which is definitely broken. Costs are skyrocketing, businesses and workers who have insurance through work are suffering from rising costs, small businesses can't afford to cover their workers, but the
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I tried to find out what sort of state regulations you are referring to. A quick google search found this:
http://www.allhealth.org/briefingmaterials/HealthInsuranceReportKofmanandPollitz-95.pdf
The description of most of these regs. sounds fine to me. Actually, from what I gather from this paper, the health insurance regulations that are in effect probably came about because of consumers complaining about getting screwed by the insurance companies. Course this is clearly not my area of expertise. Hmm, it would be fun to just work on policy stuff for awhile, there is so much I could learn from that.
By definition little guys trying to start insurance businesses of any kind are going to have a big potential barrier to get over. It's all about having a big pool, and new guys have a little baby pool.
I do agree about the tax laws being bizarre for health insurance. It was decided a long time ago to tie our health insurance to work via these tax laws. Maybe that doesn't work now, so we should change it. But that's not going to change the whole system.
Sure, they will compete to provide you good service, while you are healthy and making them $, until you get sick, at which point they will drop you if they can. That recension issue is probably something they write into the contract, so they can reserve the right to take away your insurance later if you "left something out". But they just use it as an excuse to drop people for totally unrelated reasons, and most people, especially when they're sick, don't have the time and $ to hire lawyers to fight it. Lawyers are really expensive and court cases are awful. My family went through one; they are yucky!
I really think the incentives for private health insurance are just wrong. Do you really want a company that is mainly worried about their bottom line in charge of determining your care? Sure, your story makes it sound like you got a good deal here for your chemo. (wow, that must have been scary, btw. glad you lived.) But lots of people have horror stories with private insurance as well, like this one from my friend:
http://celesteh.blogspot.com/2009/08/rationing-health-care.html
And their family had the $ to hire a lawyer and was even willing to pay with cash. Explain to me how getting rid of regulations is going to make stories like that one go away? Private health insurance companies have an incentive to make as much $ as they possibly can, which doesn't always mean they will give you the best care they can. Competition in this business is over getting the healthiest of the applicants and dropping the sick faster and denying as many claims as they can get away with, because that is how they make $. If everyone is doing it, then it doesn't matter that it may give them a bad reputation. And they will all do it because it saves them so much $.
They have private insurance in the UK too, so you can pay for that if you want to. You do have the choice.
The thing is, for those of us who don't trust private health insurance companies, we were totally screwed by this healthcare deal. I liked the way Jared Polis put it "If you trust private insurance more, buy private. If you trust the government more, buy the public option. If you are worried the public option will be so good that it'll put private insurers out of business, well, maybe you are on the wrong side."
An aside, related more to the FB discussion, I definitely would not have an education at all if it weren't for public education. My parents are not financially responsible. Should I and my 3 sisters have paid the price because of that? As it is, we are all college educated contributing members of society.
You philosophy on education is inconsistent with your economic philosophy. You assume an educated population of consumers, but without public education that would not be the case. Democracy itself relies upon having a population educated enough to make these important decisions. Democracy and capitalism require an educated populace. Public education is the bedrock of our society. Yes, we have much improvements to make on the current system, but that's another topic.
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On science. I'm going into science ed., so science and ed. are hot button issues for me...ok, i have a lot of hot button issues, but these 2 are big. I know that as a researcher, especially as a grad student, you often feel like a cog in some huge science machine and that your work has no meaning. I feel that way all the time. It's hard to see the forest for the trees (trees like, my laser won't make these spikes go away, my code won't compile, I can't get rid of this noise in my data, etc). But you never really know where the next big thing is going to come from. Your research that seems totally out there and unapplicable may prove incredibly useful. The Michelson-Morsley experiment (disproving aether) led to the atomic bomb, thru Einstein's SR. Whether you like it or not, it's an example where a totally out there experiment and then weird theory led to some very applicable thing. Your research (or mine) may prove to be incredibly useful, you never know. The point of gov't funded research is that we are willing to do the high risk stuff that doesn't necessarily have an obvious use.
Oh, that reminds me of the healthcare issue. I'm not a medical person, but isn't the reason we have lots of advances in medicine because of our high level of funding of the NIH? They increased NIH funding big time back in the 90's. We are doing amazing things yes, but I believe that is mostly because of gov't funded science, not because we have a private insurance system. This is obviously not my field, I should probably discuss this with Adam's dad, who is a Dr. All I know about medicine I learned from ER and House...
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