http://www.democracynow.org/2009/8/14/you_dont_cut_deals_with_the

The above is a stance of some Americans as to why we shouldn’t make anything public.

The VA issue is a solvable and sad problem. There isn’t enough people that care enough to push congress to fund the system. A national health care system would put the majority into the same boat. It will be a powerful voting block, even greater than social security and medicare. It’s hard to imagine how it could fail.

It sounds like your Canadian friend got great care despite her fears. I’m glad she was taken care of. It sounds like a great system. I have to wait a month sometimes for routine exams because my doctor is very busy and works 3 days a week. I’m free to find a different one, but there are only 4 on the eastside with his specialty. He is quiet expensive. No one in my area is in network. I’d have to drive from Seattle to Vancouver WA. So I pay out of network which means I pay 100% upfront, then spend (this is going on right now) six months calling Aetna, and the Dr., like a project manager would, and see what the problem is now. All this to get my lousy 50% which is $1,600. I’m wealthy enough to kiss it goodbye and just move on with life. Aetna is incentivized as a private industry to provide bad service so people leave them alone in frustration. As a condition of employment, I’m required to use them. Yeah, tough nuts, but not really all that bad since I’m a upper middle class software developer in a dual income family.

Right now, we have a really great health care system. There are a ton of great hospitals in the Dallas area, and they are constantly advertising to get you your business. The problem is the costs rising. We should fix that instead of tearing down the whole thing and starting over. Taking competition out of the equation will create a system where hospitals no longer need to improve themselves to get you to come in. They’ll do just enough to meet government standards.

Do we have a great medical system?
We have health costs that go up about 6.9% a year, (http://www.nchc.org/facts/cost.shtml) or said another way, since 1999 employment-based health insurance premiums have increased 120 percent, compared to cumulative inflation of 44 percent and cumulative wage growth of 29 percent during the same period (citation: The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Employee Health Benefits: 2008 Annual Survey. September 2008. )

We have lots of hospitals which compete at high prices that few can afford, (unless your are middle to upper). Does that really sound like a great system?

Pre-existing conditions suck because it forces you to “stay in the system.” If you stop being insured, for even a day, then everything you where treated (I don’t know the stipulations for how far back) for becomes a pre-existing condition when you restart your insurance. That sucks. It’s in place to prevent you from realizing that you are pregnant (need knee surgery, or what have you) and then conveniently getting insurance. That puts the insurance company pretty firmly in your affairs. I’d rather have a national plan and just stop screwing around with this. I know why pre-existing is there. It’s sometimes fair, it sometimes is not, it certainly complicates matters beyond a national plan. REFACTOR this complicated piece of architecture.

Who says (other than Faux News) that we are tearing down the whole system? When something doesn’t work, you refactor it. Let’s get to it and stop trying to “put lipstick on this pig.” No matter how hard we try, it only works well for the middle to upper class. Marshal, people like you and me need the least help. You can’t expect everyone to be like us. It’s not realistic. Are you going to be served a burger by someone who makes a six figure salary? Can you afford that burger?

When thinking about government policy, it’s good to look beyond your front yard, your neighbor’s front yard, and think about the whole city or the whole country, or the whole state. (It’s hard to think about the whole country because it’s far away and abstract.) We don’t force individuals and corporations to pay for each road that runs past their house. The roads are public. It’s a simple system. Lets make health care simple too.

Americans are resilient; we believe in picking ourselves up, dusting off, and going again. The more government goodies come out, the more this core American belief is eroded.

Americans believe in helping each other out. The government is there to serve the people, not big pharma or the health insurance industry. Today, the government seems to be around to help the corporation more than the individual. American’s are no more against government goodies than roads, libraries, Internet, airports, public utilities, schools (though I heard you don’t like yours. There are plenty of great ones out there. I can introduce you to some teachers in the Puget Sound Area.) Colleges, hell-many of the professional sports teams are supported by the public that is willing to pay taxes to keep them (is is their right). Greenbay is a fully municipal team. Bridger Bowl ski area is municipal to Bozeman, Montana. Winter Park ski area in Colorado is municipal to Denver. There are a lot of great public institutions that people love.

Americans also believe in telling each other what we believe. Discussion is necessary for Democracy. It helps you see what’s going on in other people’s back yard. It’s most educational when we don’t agree and can discuss, rather than the cranks that show up to town hall meetings and say that there is going to be a death panel. Those people are speaking from irrationality and emotion. Keep the science fiction out of politics man!

As for health care, I have a totally different take on ways to solve it that I have only heard a few people ever talk about. First, I don’t think we need insurance for simple things like Pink Eye or sore throats. If everyone gets something once in a while, and everyone needs treatment, there’s no reason to send your hard earned money off to someone, filter it through bureaucracy (insurance or government) and then spend it for me. Capitalism has been totally taken out of the equation. I have no idea how much my insurance really paying, so I don’t need to shop around for the best value for a doctor’s visit.

I firmly believe that my take on the VA is a valid projection for how the new public option would work. You are no longer treated like a customer; you are on the government take. My Canadian friends were not joking when they were talking about their system. One in particular has a tumor just behind her eye. When she moved here, she called a doctor for her routine checkups expecting to get the usual 4 months out. However, they were able to take her in the same week.

Right now, we have a really great health care system. There are a ton of great hospitals in the Dallas area, and they are constantly advertising to get you your business. The problem is the costs rising. We should fix that instead of tearing down the whole thing and starting over. Taking competition out of the equation will create a system where hospitals no longer need to improve themselves to get you to come in. They’ll do just enough to meet government standards.

As for the precondition thing; yes, it sounds scary when someone tells their sob story, but no one ever discusses what would happen to the whole insurance market without it. There would be no incentive to have insurance unless you really needed it. God forbid anyone have to pay for something by themselves anymore; even if it breaks the bank. If these precondition cry babies don’t have insurance, but they have big screen tv’s, three cars, and expensive stereo systems, they need to buck up and reset their priorities.

Americans are resilient; we believe in picking ourselves up, dusting off, and going again. The more government goodies come out, the more this core American belief is eroded.

So of course, I could list a bunch of things the government does well: you’re car has seatbelts and airbags, your air is clean (even texas, the most polluted state in the union, probably has cleaner air than I breath in XiaMen–which BTW is one of the cleanest places in China.), you have roads to drive on, etc.

Then I could also talk about examples where going from public to private has really screwed things up: Energy deregulation and Enron, civilian contractors (really mercenaries) instead of soldiers in Iraq, Haliburton’s management of the armed forces supply chain and how they constantly overcharge the government (and the Pentagon has reports on this), we could look at the privatization of the Bolivian water supply by Bechtal and how the price of water increased geometrically (but that’s not in this country so you may not take that example.) The US as a nation has also done the experiment during the early 1900s about not having ANY social programs and many people died of hunger and sickness during the depression (the Libertarian theory is that the Churches would somehow handle this, but churches rely on tithes and donations just like the government relies on taxes. But Churches are weaker at redistributing wealth because they don’t have the power of law.) That experiment failed so the government evolved some social programs: SS, medicare, Medicaid, welfare. No program is perfect but all of them were a resounding success over what was happening– people dying because they couldn’t care for themselves.

The point is, I don’t see the public versus private argument as always being that private is the right answer. You can find TONS of grievances people have with private insurance companies. And they lobby congress to create crappy rules like “pre-existing conditions” to screw you over if you ever drop out of the system. Naturally, they like it because it raises the barrier of them ever having to pay.

As far as the hockey players go, I’m really surprised. Maybe your question was framed in a joking manner and they were playing along. None of my Canadian friends echoed that American myth that Canadian health care meant waiting in lines for heart surgery. One friend did say that they once had a PM that started to de-fund the whole system and there were some problems for 3 years. He got voted out the next election. So yeah! A public system can be screwed up by a “starve the beast” president. But if you and the public care about it, you’ll do what you have to do to defend your rights. It’s your government.

Pick up a copy of Sicko (http://www.sicko-themovie.com) and see what you think. If you only talk to fiscal conservatives and libertarians, then you’ll only hear their view. And most people are just repeating what they heard from someone else rather than get a deep understanding of what’s going on. Naturally, you could accuse me of the same since I suggested a More film, but when someone spends an hour explaining something to you, you will have some different understanding than if you watch a 30 sec-1 min blurb on TV. In that time frame, the news is ineffective at giving you enough information to apply any critical thinking. Watching a show with more depth: 60 minutes, documentaries, news papers, magazines, (hell, the Daily Show, Colbert Report though they are a bit lite) they usually spend enough time where you start to see a lot of information that looks wrong to you, or you see a lot of information you’ve never seen before and think a little differently.
Those people who show up to town hall meetings just because Fox News said have no information whatsoever. All they can do is say “socialism scary, Obama == bad, they are going to ask me to die when I’m too old,” etc. They haven’t a clue and Fox feeds them this misinformation because their marching orders are to be a pain-in-the-ass to all things that aren’t Republican–why? Ask Murdoch. (Watch “Out Foxed,” http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6737097743434902428 it’s pretty interesting too, but watching a lot of Fox news in a documentary does start to wear thin.)

Marshal, it’s great to hear from you! I thought you move back to Seattle?!

==>Lancer—-

The United States already has several government run options that are miserable. My dad occasionally has to go the VA hospital for surgery. I have been with him on these occasions. You are first given a day to show up. You have arrive at 7am to sign in. There is a triage session for everyone who is there. The sickest get to bee seen first. If you are not seen by 3pm, you have to reschedule. This is such bad customer service, any private practice doctor that tried this would find himself without very many patients. I have a feeling this is what the public option would look since it is a real life sample.

I went to school, college, have a job. I’m certainly not rich, but I do all right. I send my kids to a private school because I want the best for them. Public schools in my area are over crowded and under performing. There is something like a 50% drop out rate in Dallas. However my tax dollars are still paying their bills. Again, a bad investment in which I have no choice. In a sense, I am paying double for my kids education: 1st for the failed public education they are not attending, and 2nd for the tuition at our choice of school.

That’s the real American Dream, isn’t it? I want what is the best for my offspring. If I wasn’t being double dipped, I wouldn’t even think about it. I don’t have an abundance of toys like iPhones or Blackberry’s or ATV’s; I generally want my disposable income to go toward my kids. (And a little bit for Hockey).

If I have a nice health care package from my company, and I’m also being dipped into by the public option people, I’m going to be upset about it. I will once again be paying double. Argh!

If there will be a public option, let the public option people pay for it. It isn’t free. Stop asking me to invest in bad government run plans. If I were go gauge the public health option based on ‘Yesterday’s Weather’, I foresee failure.