I thought so.

Weekly, I'm glad you're going to have health insurance now. That means we can fix you up! That is, if they have a cure, or even a treatment to "stupid".

Isn't he from Canadia?

I don't think his stupid ass knows where he is right now, to be honest.

Ok...now...be a good boy, open up your mouth and just take it....swallow....on your way out please pay your taxes.

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

How does it feel? You know that sting you have in your gut....That is your pride hurting.

The reason our healthcare expenses are so inflated is because we have for-profit insurance companies as the middlemen. Government socialized healthcare works. Free market healthcare works. The only thing worse that our current system with insurance companies profiting from our fear of getting sick and our tax system's hostility to saving . . . would be being forced to buy the conscienceless insurance product. You might your car insurance real helpful when you get in an accident or your car is vandalized or stolen?

The bill has passed and will be signed into law on Tuesday. They House also passed some amendments to the bill which they want the Senate to pass. Whether or not the Senate passes those changes the bill passed in the House will become law on Tuesday.

For the record I consider the passage of this monstrous bill to be a catastrophe so I will not be opening any bubbly under any circumstances. :disgust

Dude, a catastrophe is Hurricane Katrina. 9/11. You, like a few hundred thousand other vocal Americans, have been caught hook, line and sinker by a well funded campaign of people who stand to lose large. I just shake my head in amazement at how gullible people are.

Says the moron who still believes that the people are behind Obama, that the people voted in legislature, and that the economic collapse was brought on by the Iraq War. Once again, you're an idiot.

you got to hand it to Murdoch realy

Seriously, insurance costs more than healthcare. I currently pay for healthcare and I do not pay for insurance.

Please explain to me how my life will be improved, if the government forces me to buy insurance I can not afford and then, instead of just going to the doctor I wish, I have to deal with red tape and insurance bureaucrats.

How is this an improvement?

Get ready for a bunch of jibberish a little kid would have trouble understanding.

Look here.....Nobody gives a fuck if you can afford insurance or not.....

The MAIN benefit is the banning of denying one based on pre-existing conditions.....The next benefit is that there will now be some affordable insurance....If YOU can't afford it, that's your problem. :2 cents:

So you die. End of story. Do you have a couple of million to save your sorry ass if you get cancer? If you do, good luck to you. But I bet you don't. that is what is curious about this. The most rabid anti universal health care guys, are those who can't afford it if they need it.

I will agree with you that government socialized healthcare works. I was all for the public / single payer option, but unfortunately it was unpassable at present.

I disagree that healthcare should be free market. It's basically free market now and it's not working. There are some things that are necessities to our current way of life, like electricity, water, oil, etc. These are things that the government regulates because as the need is so essential the market alone can't be depended on to acheive a fair price. I feel health care should be included.

This isnt the end all be all, it's reform, and IMO it's a step in the right direction. We're going from a system that was half assed free market to one that is half assed single payer / socialized. Yes, we will be forced by our government into picking up health insurance, but the way alot off health insurance companies are operating many of us with pre-existing illnesses, myself included (bad kidneys and a laundry list of other things), are forced to have continuous coverage anyway.

I don't have fear of getting sick, for me it's a reality. Some of the people on this board who know me personally know that in late 2006 I took seriously ill. I got progressivley worse and at one point the doctors thought I might have terminal cancer. I don't want to go into too much detail but I was classified as accutely ill from end of 06 to mid 08. They had to run a shitload of tests on me, and some my insurance company fought against. If I hadn't had insurance and had to pay out of pocket I would probably have nothing to my name today.

The way I understand it, the tax breaks will offset the cost of insurance both for small businesses and most individuals. So people like you and I don't really lose.

It's not a silver bullet, but sometimes you need to take baby steps to get where you need to be.

Open wide....


Also, pay your taxes and be a good American....

Katrina was something no one could have prevented. This bill is a self-inflicted wound. It has nothing to do with helping people, this is about politics. If they'd really wanted a bill that worked both sides would have been concerned with the people who sent them to DC instead of the insurance companies who used lobbyists to pay them handsomely.

This bill has a couple of decent things in there, but just wait until the wealthy insurance companies with bags of money and armies of lawyers find loopholes and exploit them. Then we'll have a system that not only still excludes people, but now FORCES people to buy in or risk punishment. And who gains? The insurance companies because they will balance covering people with pre-existing conditions with millions of people who now are forced to pay premiums. If they can't afford premium payments I'm sure the government will subsidize them and the insurance companies will get paid anyway.

The insurance industry needs the overhaul. They need to lose their anti-trust status and the government needs to back the fuck off some. This is way out of line.

amen brotha

you get a policy with a high deductible. and just go to the doctor you want and pay for it yourself. your insured when you have something big happen that will bankrupt you.

Catastrophic insurance only costs a little less than regular insurance. My mother has had multiple cancer surgeries. She has great insurance. She appreciated the peace of mind, but even with multiple six figure surgeries, the healthcare costs were a lot less than what she paid those insurance companies over a lifetime and don't forget there is usually some sort of co-pay.

The math simply does not work for the customer with for-profit insurance. It *can't* work because the house has to win.

You know, it's asshole-ish comments like that that almost make a neocon like The Demon's arguments look good.

So which one is it? Is this bill likely to help people or not?

The way I see it, this bill would have been a good thing - a very good thing - if it came with a viable Public Option. But once Lieberman & company killed that plan, all we were really left with was a mandate to purchase an overpriced product from a handful of crooked companies.

Unlike you, I don't necessarily see that as such a good thing.

Health insurance works similar to car insurance (or any insurance for that matter), profitability can't be ensured on a case by case basis, but it works / makes money on a larger scale because of the people who pay in not everyone suffers a catostrophic illness. Most people don't.

Also insurance companies form relationships with doctors, pharmeceuitcal companies, hospitals, etc so the rate the insurance company actually pays out is less than what you or I would be able to negotiate.

The big problem with health insurance companies is they put so much stress on profitability within their companies that they start to cut corners to increase their bottom line. When someone gets diagnosed with a serious illness they go over paperwork with a fine tooth comb and cancel someone's policy who's just been diagnosed with cancer because they forgot to disclose they had migraines. Things like this are why we need regulation.

As far as what you pay in vs what you get out, let's go middle of the road and say someone pays $350 a month for health insurance. Over 50 years paying in at that rate that's only $210k. Get seriously ill or wind up having to stay a few days in the hospital for any reason and that money goes out fast. Several surgeries your definitely out over that amount.

It's impossible to see the future and know if you will have a serious health issue or not. You can take excellent care of yourself your entire life, eat healthy, go to the gym, etc and something could still strike you down. Just like driving your car, no matter how well you drive you can still get t-boned by someone else. Just like a bad car accident can devistate someone who is uninsured financially so can a serious illness.

I would donate money to this forum if an intelligent person called me stupid, or someone who can't bring in good arguments. Then again, I suspect you don't even know the definition of neocon and you're just using to sound cool.

Hey! I just recently pointed out that someone managed to make you look almost good.

And this is all the gratitude you can show??

Looks like maybe someone here got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning.

Yea thanks bro. So to review, you call me a neocon(lol), and say that weekly's dumbest statements almost made me look good? Hmm I think I stand by my statement.:thumbsup

Doctors have to spend a lot of staff time on dunning insurance companies to pay, so they can afford to give a cash patient, who will just pay at the time of service, a more reasonable price. If insurance companies can negotiate awesome prices, do you really think the USA would have the highest healthcare costs in the world? If insurance is helpful for pricing, then why are government systems like Japan and free market systems like Thailand so much better priced?

Where can you insure a family for $350 a month?

Have you ever had a problem where you needed your car insurance to go to bat for you? Not that long ago, I got rear-ended while stopped at a stop light. Both the other person in the car with me and I were injured. The other guy's insurance company adjuster refused to pay any of our medical and told me I should just get my bumper repainted and they saw no need to replace any crumpled parts, no matter how nice and new the car had been. My insurance company told me that, as the accident was so obviously not my fault, there was no need for them to participate in the negotiation, although they might need to raise my rates, if I had been in an accident.

If I need a cancer operation, I do not want people like that deciding whether I get to receive life-saving surgery?

He's been a little bitch since he got here.

The $350 was for a single person, since I was under the impression we were talking about the case of an individual. My point was the house does always win, but you can't judge it soley on a case by case basis. Insurance plays the odds. If just one person pays for their own health insurance their whole life and they get stricken with cancer or need major surgery requiring a hospital stay - provided the insurance co can't find a loophole - that person will have saved money by having health insurance. If a sole provider covers their spouse and children under a family plan and no one ever needs major surgery, well the house wins that one.

I also didn't mean to give the impression that the insurance company is getting clearing rack prices. We could probably play round robin all night trying to figure out why the hospital charges $60 for 2 motrin tablets, but I don't think the fracton of the billing department that wrangles with insurance providers is the root. I do know individuals have bargaining power with docs and hospitals, so maybe you or I could get that knocked down to $40 or $50, the insurance company might pay $20 or $30, but still the emergency room is making money hand over fist on something that costs them mere pennies.

I find the current state of insurance far from perfect. Actually I find it pretty deplorable. Ideally I would want a single payer / univeral healthcare, this is a compromise but one that ,as I stressed in earlier conversation, needs for tighter regulation (which will also come with the new bill). I do know what it's like to have an insurance company try to cut corners. Not sure if it was in this thread or not but there was a time, only a little less than 2 years ago, when my doctors thought I had a rare form cancer, a very agressive type. I hate to repeat the story but it illustrates the point. The insurance company initially denied me the tests I needed, so what was a week of thinking I may be dying turned into two weeks, and so on. All the while fighting to get the tests I needed. My doctor didn't go to bat for me- they worked with me, but in the end I had to do the dirty work to finally get it pushed through.

Personally, in my case, if I hadn't had health insurance I would be pretty screwed right now. I'd probably not have any capital at all. I'm not sure what the costs are like in Japan, but I don't think I'm willing to go to thailand to have major surgery done, no offense to the expats living there. :winkwink:

Maybe car insurance was a bad example, home owners insurance is probably a better comparable since you're alot more likely to get in a wreck than you are to get a serious illness or have your house decimated. Also car accidents rarely have the same financial impact as a serious illness or a flood can have.

Just a question, but do you have homeowners insurance? Most people I know have homeowner's insurance, in fact more people I know pay for home owner's insurance than health coverage. To me its the same principal. Most people won't have their house knocked down and most people won't need major surgery, but if you do and you're uninsured you're fucked.

Sorry if this is tl , I understand if you dr

This bill is just the tip of the iceberg. I guess within ten years, health care will become public. Why pay middlemen and with that much purchasing power, drugs and medical equipment will become less expensive. It is coming. Once people get a taste of freedom...they never go back.

Regarding the car accident the other insurance company is required to pay the medical costs up to the maximum coverage the individual had per accident coverage and an attorney will see that they do minus his percentage. If it is such a small amount that an attorney will not take the case you can easily persue it in small claims court. They also are required to pay for all damage done to your car...as long as the repairs do not exceed the value of your car...if that is the case they are required to pay you the current market value of your car...and you can easily persue this in small claims court. Normally your insurance company would persue these matters for you...so that they do not have to pay. Maybe it is time for you to find another insurance company.