A National Healthcare Mandate? May 22, 2008
Posted by reformedville in : Government, Media , trackback
The questions asked in this video (link ) should be taken to actually cover any “national healthcare” plan, similar to how social security works, a forced deduction from your pay check. Do you like how government has raped the social security trust fund? Do you want to trust them with even more of your money? Or your health?
Trust every medical professional with your medical records?
Lower Health Care Costs by Investing in Electronic Information Technology Systems: A key feature of Barack Obama’s health care plan is the use of technology to lower the cost of health care. Most medical records are still stored on paper, which makes them difficult to use to coordinate care, measure quality, or reduce medical errors. Processing paper claims also costs twice as much as processing electronic claims. Barack Obama will invest $10 billion a year over the next five years to move the U.S. health care system to broad adoption of standards-based electronic health information systems, including electronic health records. He will also phase in requirements for full implementation of health IT and commit the necessary federal resources to make it happen. Obama will ensure that these systems are developed in coordination with providers and frontline workers, including those in rural and underserved areas. Obama will ensure that patients’ privacy is protected. A study by the Rand Corporation found that if most hospitals and doctors offices adopted electronic health records, up to $77 billion of savings would be realized each year through improvements such as reduced hospital stays, avoidance of duplicative and unnecessary testing, more appropriate drug utilization, and other efficiencies.
Let’s jump to the real world , outside the utopian bubble . Think about the credit bureau report that is maintained on you buy the three/four CRA’s.
- All your information is available to anyone with access to the system.
- How many times are there errors in the information?
- How many times is the system breeched?
Now look at Obama’s plan here again; “avoidance of duplicative and unnecessary testing”
- Have you ever tried to get a error corrected on your credit file ( if you knew it was there) ?
- Have you ever sought enforcement for unauthorized access to your credit file by a hostile party?
An error on your medical records because of a transcription error, and the government saying you cant have the test again, or that test is unnecessary, again places the government in the physicians role. And the selling of some comfort that your rights will be protected is a pipe dream too.
Trust the government with your life?
Plan Would Bar Treatment of Elderly, Chronically Ill in Medical Disasters
By Associated Press
CNSNews.com
May 05, 2008(Chicago/AP) - Doctors know some patients needing lifesaving care won’t get it in a flu pandemic or other disaster. The gut-wrenching dilemma will be deciding who to let die.
Now, an influential group of physicians has drafted a grimly specific list of recommendations for which patients wouldn’t be treated. They include the very elderly, seriously hurt trauma victims, severely burned patients and those with severe dementia.
The suggested list was compiled by a task force whose members come from prestigious universities, medical groups, the military and government agencies. They include the Department of Homeland Security, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services.
The proposed guidelines are designed to be a blueprint for hospitals “so that everybody will be thinking in the same way” when pandemic flu or another widespread health care disaster hits, said Dr. Asha Devereaux. She is a critical care specialist in San Diego and lead writer of the task force report.
The idea is to try to make sure that scarce resources — including ventilators, medicine and doctors and nurses — are used in a uniform, objective way, task force members said.
Their recommendations appear in a report appearing Monday in the May edition of Chest , the medical journal of the American College of Chest Physicians.
“If a mass casualty critical care event were to occur tomorrow, many people with clinical conditions that are survivable under usual health care system conditions may have to forgo life-sustaining interventions owing to deficiencies in supply or staffing,” the report states.
To prepare, hospitals should designate a triage team with the Godlike task of deciding who will and who won’t get lifesaving care, the task force wrote. Those out of luck are the people at high risk of death and a slim chance of long-term survival. But the recommendations get much more specific, and include:
– people older than 85.
– those with severe trauma, which could include critical injuries from car crashes and shootings.
– severely burned patients older than 60.
– those with severe mental impairment, which could include advanced Alzheimer’s disease.
– those with a severe chronic disease, such as advanced heart failure, lung disease or poorly controlled diabetes.
Dr. Kevin Yeskey, director of the preparedness and emergency operations office at the Department of Health and Human Services, was on the task force. He said the report would be among many the agency reviews as part of preparedness efforts.
Public health law expert Lawrence Gostin of Georgetown University called the report an important initiative but also “a political minefield and a legal minefield.”
The recommendations would probably violate federal laws against age discrimination and disability discrimination, said Gostin, who was not on the task force.
If followed to a tee, such rules could exclude care for the poorest, most disadvantaged citizens who suffer disproportionately from chronic disease and disability, he said. While health care rationing will be necessary in a mass disaster, “there are some real ethical concerns here.”
James Bentley, a senior vice president at American Hospital Association, said the report will give guidance to hospitals in shaping their own preparedness plans even if they don’t follow all the suggestions.
He said the proposals resemble a battlefield approach in which limited health care resources are reserved for those most likely to survive.
Bentley said it’s not the first time this type of approach has been recommended for a catastrophic pandemic, but that “this is the most detailed one I have seen from a professional group.”
While the notion of rationing health care is unpleasant, the report could help the public understand that it will be necessary, Bentley said.
Devereaux said compiling the list “was emotionally difficult for everyone.”
That’s partly because members believe it’s just a matter of time before such a health care disaster hits, she said.
“You never know,” Devereaux said. “SARS took a lot of folks by surprise. We didn’t even know it existed.”
History of US Health Insurance
‘During the Great Depression, hospitals and doctors organized their own insurance companies, known respectively as Blue Cross and Blue Shield (or “the Blues”). The Blues lobbied and convinced the states to treat them as nonprofit charity corporations rather than “for-profit” insurance companies, on the grounds that they were organized by doctors and hospitals. The Blues also requested and received tax-exempt status from the federal government. In return for their nonprofit status, the Blues agreed to offer health insurance on the basis of “community rating,” which meant that every customer would pay the same premium, regardless of age, sex, health history, lifestyle choices, or regional demographics. (This was occasionally modified to reflect different premiums for age and location and was then called “modified community rating.”)
The primary goal of the Blues was to obtain steady income for their member doctors and hospitals by guaranteeing that they received payment for all the services they provided. Their strategy was to provide coverage for all expenses—even routine, ordinary, easily affordable medical services. In contrast to the original purpose of health insurance—which was to protect against rare, unforeseen, catastrophic expenses that could bankrupt a family—the Blues turned health insurance into a form of pre-paid medical care in which the insurance company (rather than patients) would pay doctors and hospitals for all medical services—catastrophic, routine, and everything in between—on a cost-plus basis.
The model created by the Blues was not the result of free-market thinking and competition. It was a direct result of government meddling and intervention, giving preferential treatment and economic advantages to one insurer (and its health plans) over others. This initial distortion of the health insurance market was exacerbated by the 1942 Stabilization Act, passed during World War II. This act froze wages nationwide but allowed employers to provide or increase employee benefits such as health insurance, since benefits were not considered wages under the Act. In 1943, in response to the Act, the IRS decreed that health insurance premiums paid by employers are not taxable income to employees and are therefore exempt from federal income tax. The IRS further decreed that health insurance premiums are a legitimate cost of doing business and can be deducted from the employer’s taxable income.
These income tax laws are largely responsible for the explosive growth in employer-purchased health insurance. In 1939, only 6 percent of the population had health insurance of any kind, and only a small fraction of those insured had employer-sponsored health insurance. By 1960, 18 percent of the population was insured under an employer group plan, and that percentage grew to almost 70 percent of the insured by 1980.The percentage has since declined, but even today about 60 percent of insured Americans obtain health insurance through their employer”
Think very hard with your mind
Government today is trying to figure out what we are going to do come 2019 with Medicare going bankrupt and at 2040 with Social Security (even though they continue to rape the fund today). This is our forced government pension fund and our government medical care for senior citizens. The last thing done to stabilize it was to increase taxes during the Reagan administration to offset this but Congress has continued to rape the fund year after year and it is in trouble.
If we can’t trust them with our retirement funds why would any rational human think they should be given even more control over our lives and our money when they have proven they could not be trusted with what they already have?
This is like having your stock broker steal all your money from your 401 k and instead of holding him responsible, let him sell you health insurance too. Has the nation lost its collective mind?
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