The Supreme Court is currently considering whether to uphold or overturn key provisions of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, commonly called Obamacare.
On Tuesday, Congressman Pete Stark, the democrat who represents San Leandro and a staunch supporter of the President's plan, listened to some of the arguments before the court .
Afterwards he sent out an email:
"The topic for the Court was the constitutionality of the individual responsibility component of the law. This provision requires people to choose between insuring themselves, or paying a penalty to help cover the cost of the health care they will inevitably need.
Without the individual responsibility requirement, it would be very difficult to enforce two key consumer protections: guaranteed insurance for all comers and a ban on insurers denying a person health care coverage because of a pre-existing condition."
Conservatives strongly oppose the act, as captured in a commentary in the journal National Affairs:
" 'Obamacare' poses one of the gravest challenges to republican self-government since the Civil War. It establishes a vast array of new entitlements, cost controls, and regulations over the health sector that comprises one-sixth of the U.S. economy. And it raises profound constitutional concerns — not only because of its sheer scope, but also because of the authority it claims for the federal government.
Politico, the insider news service in Washington. DC, excerpted seven key moments in Tuesday's arguments before the court.
What do you think? Leave a comment and vote in our poll.
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http://www.indecisionforever.com/blog/2012/03/29/stephen-colbert-on-the-death-of-obamacare
If you're looking to preventative care to save money, it won't on average. It's simple math. If it costs $900 for a colonoscopy, and we screen everyone at age 60 by law, let's say. There are about 4M Americans who turn 60 every year. Let's make the math easy and say that's $4 Billion in "preventative care." How many cases of full-blown colon cancer will it "prevent"? More than $4B worth? The incidence of colon cancer (http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/colorect.html) is 47/100,000, one fifth, or about 9, let's say 10/100,000 or 1/10,000 are diagnosed between 55-64. So if your government mandated colon screen were to occur at age 60, you might prevent 500 cases of colon cancer, at a cost of $4B, or $8,000,000 per cancer case prevented. Now, treating cancer is expensive, but no regimen costs $8,000,000/year (the most expensive, the FOLFIRI regimen costs between 100-150k/year). So, actually, so-called-preventive care is not cost-effective. Increasing access to it will increase costs even more. As I've gone through on other posts, the actual number of US citizens with no health insurance, no access to government programs, and not enough income to buy health insurance is quite small--about 4% of the population. This is the "mess" you think is such a massive problem it requires literally trillions of dollars in taxes, etc etc to fix? Really? Or do you mean you have a different problem?
We pay a lot for health care. The majority of health care payments are payments to nurses and doctors. Nurses and doctors in America make far more than nurses and doctors in other OECD countries. If you want to reduce health care costs in this country, doctors and nurses and staff must be paid less. To do this and maintain access to health care, doctors and nurses and staff liabilities must be reduced--lower med school costs/debts, lower malpractice premiums, lower dead-weight working capital. There are "entrenched" interests who are trying all the time to reduce the cost of care. They're called insurance companies.
Keep it real, kids.
But keep trying, skippy. One day you'll figure it out...ah, who am I kidding.
Sure Fran, the costs for colonoscopies have gone down, with little or no government intervention. The costs will continue to go down with the government funding them? Uh, no. Guess what medical procedures have not increased as much in price compared to overall costs? The ones paid for OUT OF POCKET--i.e. LASIK, cosmetic surgery, etc. Not the ones paid for by insurance or the government. Give me an example where the government has began subsidizing something and the cost has decreased. College tuition? Uhhhhh. Medicare? Uhhhh. Insult my intelligence again. Please.
We need to think of health care as a type of Money Ball. If it were a baseball league , we would be at the bottom of the OECD Division with the highest team salary for a country in the league and leaving 40,000,000 without coverage. On top of that, its the highest cause of bankruptcy for families in the country, millions of tragic stories. In a one on one , equal dollar campaign Single Payer would get a lot of support and with a little luck could win in referendum, even though two thirds of Americans haven't seen the main media talk about this option ,so therefore they don't know much if anything about Single Payer.It would be the player that would pull us out of the Health Care cellar within the OECD division. That said , maybe technology will save us. According to Michio Kaku noted scholar and writer , in the future they will be able to place computer chips in toilets to help people detect cancer 20 years ahead of the two or three year detection time for numerous cancers.
Sooner or later, everyone is going to get buried. Why not have the government bury everyone? That'd be a lot easier to administer than hundreds of millions of different people's health care procedures from a central bureaucracy. Canada's outlays have doubled, just like America's in the past decade. they just started from a lower base (because they pay their doctors & nurses less). We won't agree that the government is the best arbiter of who receives what health care for how much money. Fundamentally, I'll never agree that the government is capable of doing that efficiently (and seriously how can you believe that, given your criticism of the government--you admit that everyone gets bribed, you think it'll be different with single payer?--guess who'll go to the front of the line etc etc). My preference is for what I stated above--high-deductible health INSURANCE plans that are portable etc. Pay for routine care, OTC meds, just like you pay for oil changes and gas for your car.
1) Premature babies born in other countries aren't counted as "live births" if they're less than 1 kg, therefore if/when they die, they don't enter the life expectancy calculation. Obviously a death at 1 day disproportionately lowers life expectancy. 2) Murder rates in the USA. Again, for whatever reason, the US has much higher murder rates than most other developed countries. Most murder victims are under 40 years old. Again, disproportionately affects life expectancy. 3) Car accidents. Again, we drive more than other countries and have higher traffic fatalities. Again, a lot of younger people are killed. 4) Guess what Fran, the USA leads or is near the top in the the world in disability-free years for people over 60. The US is also near the top in life expectancy after 65. The USA leads in cancer survival rates and heart disease survival rates. 5) Enjoy your "free" health care in Cuba. Which is why people like heads of state like the pm of Newfoundland go to...not Cuba for his heart surgery. (he came to the US of course).
1, Who are you? You hide behind a single name. 2, All the stuff that state and the studies/statistics that you quote are pretty much sophistry (BS!). You must get your stats. etc. from the same sources as Rush L.
In addition, the US has good survival rates for tumor cancers across the board, though our supposed superiority in prostate cancer survival is illusory; the mortality rate for prostate cancer is the same in the US & UK @ 25 per 100,000 (unless you happen to be African American, in which case you're mortality rate just doubled). http://voices.washingtonpost.com/factchecker/2007/10/rudy_miscalculates_cancer_surv.html As for waiting times for surgeries, Businessweek says "in reality, both data and anecdotes show that the American people are already waiting as long or longer than patients living with universal health-care systems." http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_28/b4042072.htm There are often challenges when comparing data across countries, and health care is no exception. Unlike some on this thread, the CIA thinks life expectancy at birth is a valuable metric. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2102.html Finally, while the US does comparatively well on survival rates for preterm babies, we're not so good with full term babies, and since there are a lot more of those, it means that even though we spend a lot on health care, we still lose a lot of babies in the process. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db23.htm
2) I cite studies frequently. You don't. You lose.
Or, you can go to a actual collection of statistics: http://www.oecd.org/document/11/0,3746,en_2649_33929_16502667_1_1_1_1,00.html The USA is #1 in breast cancer survival #2 in Colon cancer survival etc etc "Spending on Ambulatory care providers – that is, physicians and specialists as well as dentists, is much higher than in the other OECD countries – almost two-and-a-half times the average of the other five countries." As I wrote, health care in the USA costs more because doctors, nurses, etc here MAKE MORE MONEY. Guess what we're also #1 in? PUBLIC, tax-payer supported per capita health care spending. So you really think that if the government took the whole thing over, we'd SAVE money? I have a bridge or 3 to sell you. As for "African American" prostate cancer survival, how many African Americans are there in Britain again? Perhaps you should look at Afro-British. Anyway, EEEVIL racist doctors and generally EEEVIL white people aren't behind Africans poor prostate cancer outcomes: http://www.cancer.gov/newscenter/pressreleases/2008/prostatecancerambs/print?page=&keyword= "The results of this study suggest that biological differences may, in part, underlie the disparity in prostate cancer survival rates observed between African-Americans and European-Americans." For genetic reasons, African-descended people tend to have more aggressive breast and prostate cancers.
But it is typical of your side to call my side's arguments "silly." It's that kind of dismissal of the other side that led to the lack of preparation and abject failure of the Solicitor General to make any kind of coherent defense of Obamacare. But of course there's no convincing you, just like there's no convincing the 4 Justices certain to shred our Constitution to pursue their "liberal" dreams. You're also wrong when you presume that the rest of the world has single-payer. Most places have both public and private systems, and many places are not directly centrally administered with no/little private care like Canada or Britain. Germany for example runs it through the states and has private insurance also. Switzerland runs via an individual mandate system with private insurers. There are numerous attempts at statistical studies, rather than anecdotes, that you should read.
http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/87/8/09-069872/en/
Picture posted above (click on photo link above). ;-)
This is what David is referring to (I posted this a short while ago on another string). It's been a long (and obviously still festering issue), so I don't really have much more to write at this point. "What are civic-minded people to do? They can't censure online speech, nor should they try. But they can start teaching themselves and others what makes forum comments valuable. One mark is that the author is willing to stand behind his or her statements with that person's real name. Without a name, /credibility/ is up in the air no matter how smart the comment sounds." (from http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2017734048_harrop13.html) For David: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdLIerfXuZ4 ;-)