Ty
Mass Media Casualty
+2,398|6744|Noizyland

Red Forman wrote:

not just illegals.  but, how is that different from the more you make, the more taxes you pay going to the same pot?
It's not. Not in terms of cost anyway. The difference is generally that with it being taxed people are more likely to get the healthcare they need when they need it.
[Blinking eyes thing]
Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/id/tzyon
Diesel_dyk
Object in mirror will feel larger than it appears
+178|5964|Truthistan

Ty wrote:

Not having to pay legally and not paying are two different things though. The fact that the healthcare industry can absorb the cost from illegals who don't pay their own healthcare doesn't mean that it doesn't get paid - it just passes the cost on to Americans who actually do pay legally for their healthcare.
That's not entirely accurate, true illegals don't pay, false that the health care industry absorbs anything and passes it on. That's not how the system works. Counties pay for indigent care by paying tax dollars to hospitals through contracts to cover for indigent care. Illegals go into emergency rooms and its the tax payer who winds up footing the bill for an expensive ER visit. Your statement kind of makes the private health care system out to be a bit of hero which its not.

Heck if illegals had paid visits to doctors and that lowered the number of ER visits the idea might even save taxpayers money, which ironically would leave hospitals getting less money out of their ERs.


Also the question of which govt pays is also an interesting one. When an illegal comes into a hospital and the border patrol knows about it and wants the guy, the border patrol plays a game with the hospitals where the bortder patrol refuses to take the illegal into custody until after the illegal is discharged from the hospital. You see, if the border patrol takes custody of the illegal while in the hospital then the federal govt has to pay for the hospital bill. But by not taking custody of the illegal, the its the local taxpayers that have to foot the bill.
Pierre
I hunt criminals down for a living
+68|6645|Belgium

Red Forman wrote:

Pierre wrote:

Red Forman wrote:


its free here.  think about that.
LMAO
what?  you don't have to pay.  ask the mexicans.
Damn the different timezones... I have to go to sleep when the discussion starts getting interesting

Your point has been answered by Ty and others. I'm not taking into account illegal ways to abuse the existing system (they also exist in my country btw), but I look at the average working and taxpaying American, wether he'd be employee or independent. He's the person who pays the bils anyhow.

I remember a post from Kmarion in another thread, stating how good he had bargained with his private insurer, and that's exactly my point: if, and only if, you're in a position to bargain, you can make a good deal, if not you're screwed.
Red Forman
Banned
+402|5370
It's still free healthcare.  I don't care how you slice it.  You can go to the hospital and get treated.
Ty
Mass Media Casualty
+2,398|6744|Noizyland

Diesel_dyk wrote:

Ty wrote:

Not having to pay legally and not paying are two different things though. The fact that the healthcare industry can absorb the cost from illegals who don't pay their own healthcare doesn't mean that it doesn't get paid - it just passes the cost on to Americans who actually do pay legally for their healthcare.
That's not entirely accurate, true illegals don't pay, false that the health care industry absorbs anything and passes it on. That's not how the system works. Counties pay for indigent care by paying tax dollars to hospitals through contracts to cover for indigent care. Illegals go into emergency rooms and its the tax payer who winds up footing the bill for an expensive ER visit. Your statement kind of makes the private health care system out to be a bit of hero which its not.
Maybe I wasn't clear - The health system absorbs the cost of treating the non-paying illegals and this cost is then passed on to the taxpayer. We said exactly the same thing.
[Blinking eyes thing]
Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/id/tzyon
Pierre
I hunt criminals down for a living
+68|6645|Belgium

Red Forman wrote:

It's still free healthcare.  I don't care how you slice it.  You can go to the hospital and get treated.
That's called emergency, it's totally different from normal long term treatment, and does not include medications.
Ty
Mass Media Casualty
+2,398|6744|Noizyland

Or sick leave from work.
[Blinking eyes thing]
Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/id/tzyon
Red Forman
Banned
+402|5370

Pierre wrote:

Red Forman wrote:

It's still free healthcare.  I don't care how you slice it.  You can go to the hospital and get treated.
That's called emergency
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO  god where the fuck do you euros and such get your fucking info?  MM?
Barrakuda777
Member
+86|6706|Somewhere near a shrub or rock

Red Forman wrote:

Pierre wrote:

Red Forman wrote:

It's still free healthcare.  I don't care how you slice it.  You can go to the hospital and get treated.
That's called emergency
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO  god where the fuck do you euros and such get your fucking info?  MM?
Im sure i saw on TV that your current healthcare system is inferior to a number of 3r world countries...














/bait
Uzique
dasein.
+2,865|6440

Red Forman wrote:

Pierre wrote:

Red Forman wrote:

It's still free healthcare.  I don't care how you slice it.  You can go to the hospital and get treated.
That's called emergency
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO  god where the fuck do you euros and such get your fucking info?  MM?
Are you talking about Medicare? Isn't that a big, unwieldy tax burden? Only really offered to the elderly/retired? It's not really comparable to socialized or 'free' healthcare; it's as fundamentally discriminating as your private insurance schemes, a selectivity that the OP tries to portray critically as 'bad' when it crops up in the NHS. I read a report a year or so back on Medicare from an economic perspective as well, and it sounds like a bloated and inefficient system that isn't worth the budget or funding. For a world superpower, you could do a whole lot better towards a universal standard of healthcare than that.
libertarian benefit collector - anti-academic super-intellectual. http://mixlr.com/the-little-phrase/
Pierre
I hunt criminals down for a living
+68|6645|Belgium

Red Forman wrote:

Pierre wrote:

Red Forman wrote:

It's still free healthcare.  I don't care how you slice it.  You can go to the hospital and get treated.
That's called emergency
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO  god where the fuck do you euros and such get your fucking info?  MM?
Well Slick, why don't you enlighten us? Give us some info on how any American, without private insurance, can have all healthcare he needs, without having to sell his house or rob a bank to pay for it?
Red Forman
Banned
+402|5370

Pierre wrote:

Red Forman wrote:

Pierre wrote:


That's called emergency
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO  god where the fuck do you euros and such get your fucking info?  MM?
Well Slick, why don't you enlighten us? Give us some info on how any American, without private insurance, can have all healthcare he needs, without having to sell his house or rob a bank to pay for it?
either pay for it yourself thru insurance, or pay 60% tax like canada to pay for it.  its all the same money.  and if you cant afford insurance, you can still get treated.  chances are you dont have a house if you cant afford health insurance.
Burwhale
Save the BlobFish!
+136|6192|Brisneyland
Public Health works well over here (Australia) for the most part. I am certainly glad I have it , and I have private health cover. I also get a tax rebate for my private health cover, so its reasonably fair.

Funny how a country that spends so $650 billion on the military cant fork out some money to support something the public could really use.
Guess that makes too much sense.
FEOS
Bellicose Yankee Air Pirate
+1,182|6381|'Murka

Ty wrote:

Red Forman wrote:

not just illegals.  but, how is that different from the more you make, the more taxes you pay going to the same pot?
It's not. Not in terms of cost anyway. The difference is generally that with it being taxed people are more likely to get the healthcare they need when they need it.
There are also studies that show that when someone else is paying for it, people will use it far more than they need to, driving up costs. Alternatively, if they are paying for it themselves, they will be far more selective when it comes to price and quality of service, reducing costs.
“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
― Albert Einstein

Doing the popular thing is not always right. Doing the right thing is not always popular
Red Forman
Banned
+402|5370

Burwhale wrote:

Public Health works well over here (Australia) for the most part. I am certainly glad I have it , and I have private health cover. I also get a tax rebate for my private health cover, so its reasonably fair.

Funny how a country that spends so $650 billion on the military cant fork out some money to support something the public could really use.
Guess that makes too much sense.
sigh

its amazing how much you think you know.

Last edited by Red Forman (2009-08-21 03:43:45)

Burwhale
Save the BlobFish!
+136|6192|Brisneyland
So I have said it works here. Are you saying it doesnt work here?. Elaborate. Are you saying you dont spend $650 billion plus on defense. Elaborate. What are you trying to say.
Ty
Mass Media Casualty
+2,398|6744|Noizyland

FEOS wrote:

Ty wrote:

Red Forman wrote:

not just illegals.  but, how is that different from the more you make, the more taxes you pay going to the same pot?
It's not. Not in terms of cost anyway. The difference is generally that with it being taxed people are more likely to get the healthcare they need when they need it.
There are also studies that show that when someone else is paying for it, people will use it far more than they need to, driving up costs. Alternatively, if they are paying for it themselves, they will be far more selective when it comes to price and quality of service, reducing costs.
What studies are these? Who determines how much use is "more than what is needed"?
[Blinking eyes thing]
Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/id/tzyon
IG-Calibre
comhalta
+226|6712|Tír Eoghan, Tuaisceart Éireann
interesting article in the indo

Something strange has happened in America in the nine months since Barack Obama was elected. It has best been summarised by the comedian Bill Maher: "The Democrats have moved to the right, and the Republicans have moved to a mental hospital."


The election of Obama – a black man with an anti-conservative message – as a successor to George W. Bush has scrambled the core American right's view of their country. In their gut, they saw the US as a white-skinned, right-wing nation forever shaped like Sarah Palin.

When this image was repudiated by a majority of Americans in a massive landslide, it simply didn't compute. How could this have happened? How could the cry of "Drill, baby, drill" have been beaten by a supposedly big government black guy? So a streak that has always been there in the American right's world-view – to deny reality, and argue against a demonic phantasm of their own creation – has swollen. Now it is all they can see.

Since Obama's rise, the US right has been skipping frantically from one fantasy to another, like a person in the throes of a mental breakdown. It started when they claimed he was a secret Muslim, and – at the same time – that he was a member of a black nationalist church that hated white people. Then, once these arguments were rejected and Obama won, they began to argue that he was born in Kenya and secretly smuggled into the United States as a baby, and the Hawaiian authorities conspired to fake his US birth certificate. So he is ineligible to rule and the office of President should pass to... the Republican runner-up, John McCain.

These aren't fringe phenomena: a Research 200 poll found that a majority of Republicans and Southerners say Obama wasn't born in the US, or aren't sure. A steady steam of Republican congressmen have been jabbering that Obama has "questions to answer". No amount of hard evidence – here's his birth certificate, here's a picture of his mother heavily pregnant in Hawaii, here's the announcement of his birth in the local Hawaiian paper – can pierce this conviction.

This trend has reached its apotheosis this summer with the Republican Party now claiming en masse that Obama wants to set up "death panels" to euthanise the old and disabled. Yes: Sarah Palin really has claimed – with a straight face – that Barack Obama wants to kill her baby.

You have to admire the audacity of the right. Here's what's actually happening. The US is the only major industrialised country that does not provide regular healthcare to all its citizens. Instead, they are required to provide for themselves – and 50 million people can't afford the insurance. As a result, 18,000 US citizens die every year needlessly, because they can't access the care they require. That's equivalent to six 9/11s, every year, year on year. Yet the Republicans have accused the Democrats who are trying to stop all this death by extending healthcare of being "killers" – and they have successfully managed to put them on the defensive.

The Republicans want to defend the existing system, not least because they are given massive sums of money by the private medical firms who benefit from the deadly status quo. But they can't do so honestly: some 70 per cent of Americans say it is "immoral" to retain a medical system that doesn't cover all citizens. So they have to invent lies to make any life-saving extension of healthcare sound depraved.

A few months ago, a recent board member for several private health corporations called Betsy McCaughey reportedly noticed a clause in the proposed healthcare legislation that would pay for old people to see a doctor and write a living will. They could stipulate when (if at all) they would like care to be withdrawn. It's totally voluntary. Many people want it: I know I wouldn't want to be kept alive for a few extra months if I was only going to be in agony and unable to speak. But McCaughey started the rumour that this was a form of euthanasia, where old people would be forced to agree to death. This was then stretched to include the disabled, like Palin's youngest child, who she claimed would have to "justify" his existence. It was flatly untrue – but the right had their talking-point, Palin declared the non-existent proposals "downright evil", and they were off.

It's been amazingly successful. Now, every conversation about healthcare has to begin with a Democrat explaining at great length that, no, they are not in favour of killing the elderly – while Republicans get away with defending a status quo that kills 18,000 people a year. The hypocrisy was startling: when Sarah Palin was Governor of Alaska, she encouraged citizens there to take out living wills. Almost all the Republicans leading the charge against "death panels" have voted for living wills in the past. But the lie has done its work: a confetti of distractions has been thrown up, and support is leaking away from the plan that would save lives.

These increasingly frenzied claims have become so detached from reality that they often seem like black comedy. The right-wing magazine US Investors' Daily claimed that if Stephen Hawking had been British, he would have been allowed to die at birth by its "socialist" healthcare system. Hawking responded with a polite cough that he is British, and "I wouldn't be here without the NHS".

This tendency to simply deny inconvenient facts and invent a fantasy world isn't new; it's only becoming more heightened. It ran through the Bush years like a dash of bourbon in water. When it became clear that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, the US right simply claimed they had been shipped to Syria. When the scientific evidence for man-made global warming became unanswerable, they claimed – as one Republican congressman put it – that it was "the greatest hoax in human history", and that all the world's climatologists were "liars". The American media then presents itself as an umpire between "the rival sides", as if they both had evidence behind them.

It's a shame, because there are some areas in which a conservative philosophy – reminding us of the limits of grand human schemes, and advising caution – could be a useful corrective. But that's not what these so-called "conservatives" are providing: instead, they are pumping up a hysterical fantasy that serves as a thin skin covering some raw economic interests and base prejudices.

For many of the people at the top of the party, this is merely cynical manipulation. One of Bush's former advisers, David Kuo, has said the President and Karl Rove would mock evangelicals as "nuts" as soon as they left the Oval Office. But the ordinary Republican base believe this stuff. They are being tricked into opposing their own interests through false fears and invented demons. Last week, one of the Republicans sent to disrupt a healthcare town hall started a fight and was injured – and then complained he had no health insurance. I didn't laugh; I wanted to weep.

How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality? It begins, I suspect, with religion. They are taught from a young age that it is good to have "faith" – which is, by definition, a belief without any evidence to back it up. You don't have "faith" that Australia exists, or that fire burns: you have evidence. You only need "faith" to believe the untrue or unprovable. Indeed, they are taught that faith is the highest aspiration and most noble cause. Is it any surprise this then percolates into their political views? Faith-based thinking spreads and contaminates the rational.

Up to now, Obama has not responded well to this onslaught of unreason. He has had a two-pronged strategy: conciliate the elite economic interests, and joke about the fanatical fringe they are stirring up. He has (shamefully) assured the pharmaceutical companies that an expanded healthcare system will not use the power of government as a purchaser to bargain down drug prices, while wryly saying in public that he "doesn't want to kill Grandma". Rather than challenging these hard interests and bizarre fantasies aggressively, he has tried to flatter and soothe them.

This kind of mania can't be co-opted: it can only be overruled. Sometimes in politics you will have enemies, and they must be democratically defeated. The political system cannot be gummed up by a need to reach out to the maddest people or the greediest constituencies. There is no way to expand healthcare without angering Big Pharma and the Republicaloons. So be it. As Arianna Huffington put it, "It is as though, at the height of the civil rights movement, you thought you had to bring together Martin Luther King and George Wallace and make them agree. It's not how change happens."

However strange it seems, the Republican Party really is spinning off into a bizarre cult who believe Barack Obama is a baby-killer plotting to build death panels for the grannies of America. Their new slogan could be – shrill, baby, shrill.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/co … 73994.html
Red Forman
Banned
+402|5370

Burwhale wrote:

So I have said it works here. Are you saying it doesnt work here?. Elaborate. Are you saying you dont spend $650 billion plus on defense. Elaborate. What are you trying to say.
No.  I am sick of repeating myself.  fucking read.
Burwhale
Save the BlobFish!
+136|6192|Brisneyland
No.  I am sick of repeating myself.  fucking read.
OK so I assume that you mean "Medicare". There are eligibility requirements on that.

wiki wrote:

In general, individuals are eligible for Medicare if:

They are 65 years or older and U.S. citizens or have been permanent legal residents for 5 continuous years, and they or their spouse has paid Medicare taxes for at least 10 years.
or
They are under 65, disabled, and have been receiving either Social Security benefits or the Railroad Retirement Board disability benefits for at least 24 months from date of entitlement (first disability payment).
or
They get continuing dialysis for end stage renal disease or need a kidney transplant.
or
They are eligible for Social Security Disability Insurance and have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (known as ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease).
The 24 month exclusion means that people who become disabled must wait 2 years before receiving government medical insurance, unless they have one of the listed diseases or they are eligible for Medicaid.

Many beneficiaries are dual-eligible. This means they qualify for both Medicare and Medicaid. In some states for those making below a certain income, Medicaid will pay the beneficiaries' Part B premium for them (most beneficiaries have worked long enough and have no Part A premium), and also pay for any drugs that are not covered by Part D.
This doesnt take into acccount low income earners. Which are the people that would benefit the most from it. The disabled seem to have to wait 2 years to get it. Not sure what the listed dieases are for Medicaid so wont comment on that.

Medicare isnt the solution. Neither is  refusal to pay the bill.
Red Forman
Banned
+402|5370
sigh.
Pierre
I hunt criminals down for a living
+68|6645|Belgium

FEOS wrote:

Ty wrote:

Red Forman wrote:

not just illegals.  but, how is that different from the more you make, the more taxes you pay going to the same pot?
It's not. Not in terms of cost anyway. The difference is generally that with it being taxed people are more likely to get the healthcare they need when they need it.
There are also studies that show that when someone else is paying for it, people will use it far more than they need to, driving up costs. Alternatively, if they are paying for it themselves, they will be far more selective when it comes to price and quality of service, reducing costs.
That's why we have to pay 25 % out of our pocket in almost all cases, for the whole range of care, including seeing a docter, going to the ER, medications, etc. You still pay part of it yourself.
But don't you think the same is happening atm, a lot of insured people abusing the system, because their insurance will pay for it anyway?
Pierre
I hunt criminals down for a living
+68|6645|Belgium

Red Forman wrote:

and if you cant afford insurance, you can still get treated.
Still waiting for more info on how you can get treated.

Lets take an example: man, 40+, married, wife isn't working and stays home to raise the 2 kids, loses his job (and his insurance), kids need dental care, needed appendix removed, he found out during the last checkup that he has a heartcondition and will need constant care and operation in the near future, the wife, well, you can imagine what she has.

So, how are they gonna get treatment?
Burwhale
Save the BlobFish!
+136|6192|Brisneyland

Red Forman wrote:

sigh.
Youve got nothing.
Red Forman
Banned
+402|5370

Pierre wrote:

Red Forman wrote:

and if you cant afford insurance, you can still get treated.
Still waiting for more info on how you can get treated.

Lets take an example: man, 40+, married, wife isn't working and stays home to raise the 2 kids, loses his job (and his insurance), kids need dental care, needed appendix removed, he found out during the last checkup that he has a heartcondition and will need constant care and operation in the near future, the wife, well, you can imagine what she has.

So, how are they gonna get treatment?
cobra

and if you cant afford cobra, then you are screwed.  you still can get treated at the hospital. but, that is why people should save.  the cost of cobra is about what you would pay in taxes in other countries for "free" healthcare anyway.  same shit, different smell.

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