Illegal! White House in Panic Mode -- “Temporarily” Suspends Individual Mandate For People Who Had Their Plans Cancelled…

Are you really that vapid, or are you being sarcastic? PLEASE tell me you were trying to be funny. I sincerely hope that you are not brainless enough to have been serious.

It is unconscionable that in one of the most advanced nations in the world, there are nearly 50 million people who lack health insurance and millions more who have burdensome co-payments and deductibles. In fact, some 45,000 Americans die each year because they do not get to a doctor when they should. In terms of life expectancy, infant mortality and other health outcomes, the United States lags behind almost every other advanced country.

Despite this unimpressive record, the US spends almost twice as much per person on healthcare as any other nation. As a result of an incredibly wasteful, bureaucratic, profit-making and complicated system, the US spends 17% of its gross domestic product – approximately $2.7tn annually– on healthcare. While insurance companies, drug companies, private hospitals and medical equipment suppliers make huge profits, Americans spend more and get less for their healthcare dollars.

If we had Medicare for all; paid for through taxes; and remove the “for profit” component; you would save 30%+ right out of the gate. Some of the things you do need to spend money on to supply health care to someone are doctors, nurses, hospitals, drugs, medical equipment, clinics, etc. The one thing you don’t need is insurance companies. They are the direct reason for the US being #1 in healthcare costs and # 37th in actual healthcare services. Insurance companies offer no service except to jack-up the costs and provide a return for their investors at patients expense. Through sheer volume, we could self insure ourselves at a much cheaper price and much more efficiently.

Think about it. The only way an insurance company can make money is to collectively overcharge their customers the percentage of profit margin, over and above their expenses. The expenses include the paying of claims, but also include, executive pay and bonuses, profits, employee pay, benefits, taxes (maybe not), Marketing and Administrative Expenses ( you even have to pay for their TV ads), utility costs, maintenance costs, and much, much, more; that are passed directly to the patient on top of already high actual health care costs.

A 2004 economic study published in The New England Journal of Medicine determined that a national single-payer healthcare system would reduce costs by more than $400 billion a year “despite the expansion of comprehensive care to all Americans.” I’m sure that figure has increased since then.
I think the cartoon at the bottom of this page says it all –

http://www.healthcare-now.org/whats-single-payer/

Cheers

Big Pharma is breaking it off in our ass in a big way too. Consider this – What was the last disease that medicine has ‘cured’? Polio was the last one I could think of and that was quite a long time ago. Sure, if you need a woody or have heartburn, they can fix you up; but what have they done for us lately? I contend that they have an incentive to keep things just as they are.

If you were a technician at a pharmaceutical company, and walked into the board of directors meeting with a pill that would with one dose, cure all cancers; what do you imagine they would do with that drug? Do you think they would develop it and shoot themselves in the foot, by losing all of the revenue produced with chemotherapy drugs? Of course not. By law, a corporation’s main objective is to return shareholder value. They have all the incentive to help you with your symptoms, because that makes you a repeatable customer, but no incentive at all to produce cures because cures lessen profits. It’s time to take the profit OUT of healthcare.