Are you happy the Health Care Reform Bill passed?

[larry kremis]

 It's way too soon to celebrate. Every legislator who voted for it is hoping and praying that he/she was right. I'm hoping and praying they were right too.

 

Only time will tell.

[Merry]

Dallas , you are a reasonable and responsible person and shouldn't be punished for the lack of foresight of others. However consider my situation where I was forced to leave my home and marriage by the police because of domestic violence with 4 small kids and not even ten bucks in my pocket . "Mr Wonderful" had a drug problem. Eventually the abuse caught up with me and I became seriously ill, however dependant on expensive meds I recovered to the point where I could work. PROBLEM >>>do the right thing and go to work and loose ability to pay for life sustaining meds that make it possible to work or just try to be a productive healthy individual on disability. I know big brass ones for outing this. I was even told by different mental health peeps that they kept me on the disabled list to ensure that I would recieve medication and support. PTSD is a life threatening illness if it progresses to the point of clinical depression. The prospect of going without meds is almost paralyzing. And the stigma of not working in the good old American way isn't much fun either. I have yet to read the bill, I'm taking care of my possibly terminally ill husband at the moment who has VA coverage, the doctor says that it's due to agent orange so the VA will probably pick up my health care. Eventually ...........if he ever gets the service related comp. They are certainly swamped with claims at the moment. And I filled out the application to volunteer there but wasn't accepted. I guess I will have to try again when things aren't so hectic around here. The way I see it now is that I am working but the pay leaves much to be desired. My husband is 100% disabled now and needs help with quite a bit around the house.

[darroll]

Time will tell the story.

[CWO3ROBBIE]

Sara, I am unsure why you are feeling less secure about the country. Could you explain? I know I too feel less secure about the future of this country than I have at any time in my life. But it is because of the actions of our politicians. Not because the health care bill passed. I understand Dallas position and arguments against it. I just don't agree with him. That has nothing to do with my personal feelings toward him. Most of my friends disagree with me about the health care bill, and many other things in the current political environment. I guess the reason I am worried about the future is that the fact that we disagree on things like health care and toll roads, and public transportation and such is causing severe strains in many of my friendships. I find it hypocritical that retired military people who currently have the best medical insurance in the world, and most use it, will rail against government provided health care. If it is so bad why don't they go buy health insurance and deal with a HMO? Why isn't Medicare allowed to have competitive bids for perscription drugs? And on and on. If you look a Houston Texas you will see two skylines of almost equal size.
One of those is composed of the medical center. I think that says a lot about how much money is sloshing around in the medical profession. My personal opinion, and it is just that, an opinion, is that some things are to important to the country to allow capitalism and the survival of the strongest to dictate how it is managed. I have a son who has epileptic sezures, my grand daughter was born profoundly deaf. My son spends over $800 a month on medical insurance and other medical requirements. Luckly, he is very intelligent and has a job that provides him with almost enough money to handle that. He is a senior technition who works with the "Brain Boxes" on UAV's. But if he should lose employment he probably would be unemployable with the medical baggage. This is the type of situation that we have the power to correct. Why, as a nation do we want to continue with the current medical system?

[P.A.]

Very well put Robbie. Thank you for explaining things in the easy to understand way that you do. Thank you for taking a stand.

[Dallas]

Thank you, Chairman Robbie. I consider you a friend too, no matter what Pru says about you.

I appreciate the chance to speak to the fine group you have assembled here.

Ladies and gentlemen, (you know who you are), I share Robbie's dismay at the disrupted friendships I see around me, all because of disagreements over the details of public policy. As a kid, I watched my father eat BBQ with Republicans, for God's sake. Can we all just get a plate of ribs?

Robbie mentioned the Texas Medical Center. I see the TMC skyline at least twice a week. GIve me those gleaming buildings bristling with the latest technology over a ramshackle converted Costa Rican movie theatre with tongue depressors and bandages any day.

Architectural matters aside, the "medical profession" is a pretty broad category. Those building are hospitals, clinics and office suites. Two out of three of those things are not traditional private-practice physicians. Even if they were, so what? It takes smart, dedicated, energetic people with near-fanatical drive to become MDs, RNs and other high-end medical professionals. The demand for such people is high, and the supply of them is limited. Many smart driven people can - and do - choose other work. I do not begrudge them their salaries.

Many people are alive and walking the streets today because of the good people at TMC. Pru is one such streetwalker.

However, that is not why I came here to address all of you tonight. I must point out that Robbie has slighted the fair city of Houston.

He forgot the other Houston skylines: The Galleria, Greenway Plaza and Energy Alley. Upscale consumer goods, financial/entrepreneurial practices and the oil bidness in three gigantic steaming piles of chrome, glass and steel. God bless Texas!

At this point in the presentation, your applause is optional but greatly appreciated.

Thank you...thank you very much...good to see all of you...thanks...

Good night!

[Dallas]

♪ (to the tune of "Heartbreaker") ♫

Your stride is like a hot charade, spinning me, yeah I'm led
down the street by those Lucite heels, kicking me in the head
Like a frog in a blender, I am greener than I want to be
Yeah, I'm sick from the motion, and I know that I should want to flee

You're a streetwalker, phone-talker
Cue-chalker, don't you mess around with me
You're a streetwalker, tub-caulker
Star-stalker, don't you mess around, no, no, no!

[CWO3ROBBIE]

Dallas, Didn't mean to slight the fair city of Houston. I'm sure it has some things almost as good as Dallas and San Antonio.

I don't begrudge doctors the amount of money that they make. Begrudge is a pretty nasty word.
But, I do think the medical profession has strayed when it decides that medicare does not pay enough for them to see people who have to depend on that source of funding for their medical care. That is a completely diferent kind of person than the Doctor that I went to when growing up. He had set fees, but if you couldn't pay , he would see you anyway and you paid what you could. We looked up to Doctors, but they lived in the same neighborhoods as the rest of us. They were a part of the community, their kids played sandlot football and baseball with the rest of the neighborhood kids. Is that still true? There were few "rich" neighborhoods. As near as I can tell, most doctors are now very different from the patients they treat.
But they also have trouble with the insurance companies. A few years ago my doctor told me that if he didn't have to have a person in his office who did nothing but deal with the insurance companies he would be able to provide medical service a lower cost.
One of my main gripes about the current medical system is that you have non medical people deciding what treatments you should have, based on a cost factor not on a need factor.

[Dallas]

Robbie, it's OK ... I am a native Dallasite, but Houston has a great folk art scene and a regular-guy appeal that Dallas doesn't... and San Antonio?...well, Hemisfair was a long time ago, but the Riverwalk is cool.

Begrudge? ...didn't say you did, said I didn't ...

The whole medical cost/fees thing is paradoxical. It can lead one to criticize doctors who do not want to lose money by working for Medicare rates, while at the same time sympathizing with doctors, like the one you mentioned, who incur overhead dealing with insurance companies who likewise want services to be cheap.

Never mind that your doctor could fire the insurance paper-pusher, refuse all insurance payments, cut his or her fees and let patients pay in installments.

I'm not trying to be hard on you or your doctor. I'm just saying that there are all kinds of twists and turns that people - including me - use to cast themselves in a better light. I should know.

I once tried to return a ripped tie because I felt that it should have been able to withstand female fingernails. My luck, there was this snobby girl at the Tiche-Goettinger men's counter that day. She sided with my assailant.

[darroll]

Now we have two classes of people.
The government and the rest of us peasants.
When the insurance companies move out of this country people will cry foul.
Maybe we can go to Mexico to find a job. (Or Cuba). Costa Rica is building healthcare facilities.
I love this healthcare plan.
In a few years people will see how dumb our leaders really are.
Boy, we really socked it to our insurance companies, didn’t we?
How many more businesses can we run off.

[Richard Garvey]

If I get sick in Costa Rica, I'll let you know how their system is. In the mean time I will hold my comments on our new health program that no one has read, and was written by ghost writers unnamed, until I find out how much more it will cost me for my "free" medical care for life that was promised me over 50 years ago. I suspect that since I am in the elderly group, that the services will be curtailed sharpley.

Pru, I sincerely hope that it will do what you believe it will do.

Hope, that's the theme of the current administration isn't it?

Dick G.

[P.A.]

I don't believe insurance companies will move anywhere. Where would they go? Almost all of the industialized world has nationalized health care. Are they going to move to Dubia? oh wait they have national health care.

[Dallas]

"We don't need Insurance Companies for the delivery of Health Care..."

Insurance companies are indeed unnecessary. All that is required for their disappearance is for everyone to pay 100% of their own medical expenses. Nothing to it.

"...their an unnecessary middleman that adds excessive costs in their "administration"of the process."

If Insurer A is "overcharging" for the administration of its plan, competing Insurers B, C, etc., will soon steal all their customers by offering more efficient plans.

I trust you agree that insurance without cost research, fraud detection, timely correspondence with policy holders, and other administrative tasks would result in massive fraud being perpetrated on the insurance companies, thus making insurance even more expensive and inefficient.

"...bring on single payer (the next step towards logical delivery of the nations health care)."

"Single payer" just means there is one source that handles all the paperwork and cuts the checks. The money for those checks still has to come from somewhere. It comes, of course, from money collected by force of law from individual citizens and employers by the government.

Medicare in the USA is an example of a single-payer system. Everyone knows there is no excessive paper-pushing or fraud in Medicare. If it were not so, there would be criminal trials and private supplemental plans that ... oh, never mind.

O, to have Universal Single Payer Health Care! A government-run system with no market competition (thus no incentive to improve), lots of aging Baby Boomers, an increasing percentage of more poorly-educated and thus poorly-paid taxpayers.

Yep, I can see it now: Single Payer will surely not have anything like the "administrative costs" those mean old private insurance companies had.

And it goes without saying that fewer and less affluent taxpayers will not mind being taxed more each year to pay for the mathematical certainty that attends our demographic and economic facts. RIght, right ?

One last thing: it is just plain not true that an insurance company can refuse to pay a just claim without risk. If they do, they can be sued for payment, and the medical debt, the costs of the suit, plus interest on the medical debt, can be collected from them upon a judgment in the patient's favor. Medical service providers review such cases, and if they agree the patient's claim is just, they will actually join forces with the patient in the suit.