no but the best and brightest doctors are here, my friend. as well as most of the innovations in medicine. people can cite individual cases where the system fails. none are foolproof and never will be. however, once you travel abroad and talk to people you understand people from everywhere are fighting to come here for any given treatment. its cool to think we suck nowadays. i understand this. its simply not the case.
the best doctors are here, i agree, even though the best are all from india, medicine is way too over priced, sometimes 3 or 4 times more expensive than other countries, that is not right. the only thing i want to happen, is that healthcare be made affordable for low income families. Maybe even start a fund that comes out of the taxes you already pay. I would trade in my yearly income tax payback for a great healthcare plan that covered myself, my wife and my daughter. As it is now, i have to use the tax money i get back to cover all the **** im delinquent on throughout the year, because of medical bills. Im getting to the point where im about to just claim as much as i can throughout the year to pay for an overpriced health plan, and just break even come tax season. Im not too fond of the government borrowing money and not paying interest on it anyway.
After my grandmother's stroke her home health provider brought over a motorized wheelchair for her to use, but the joy stick was on the left and she was paralyzed on the left side. They then brought over a second chair with the joy stick on the right side. She wasn't ever able to use it because she could not sit up well enough. All she ever used was her regular wheel chair. Those two chairs cost in excess of 10,000, and they happened to come from the medical supply company owned by the guy who owned the home health companies brother. I am of the opinion that we could solve our health care problems by, increasing the RACs program (Recovery Audit Contractor) and auditing the crap out of medicare billings. The program is being implemented nation wide and has more than paid for itself everywhere it has been implemented. I think another good and cost effective thing is to incentivize Americans to not be fat and sedentary. If there were a hefty tax credit on the table I would get int better shape.
Damn straight! :thumb: You can never understand the problem until you live it in real life. I had no clue about how medicare worked and the crap they bill the government for until this. One example....when my mother-in-law went from home health to hospice they changed her oxygen provider. The new provider brought in all this equipment and unhooked the other stuff and left it sitting in the room. I call the old oxygen company and they said "dont worry about it, medicare has already paid for it and its yours". Im thinking WTF? What am I going to do with two huge oxygen tanks, a concentrator, portable unit and a nebulizer? On top of that she probably has 5 miles of plastic tubing with masks and other gadgets for her breathing treatments that will never be used and they keep bringing MORE! All this shiit is sitting here being billed to medicare and someone is making a undeserved fat profit for screwing the government. Im convinced we can reduce a substantial amount of our current health care costs by stopping this enormous abuse of the system. Its sickening. Lets fix what we have now before cramming some bloated health care legislation through that will probably create more avenues for abuse.
Medicare tried repeatedly to over-treat my grandmother after she had a paralyzing stroke. She couldn't get out of bed and had to be turned on a different side a couple of times a day. The nursing homes/hospitals would have "physical therapy" at $200 an hour in bills that would come to my parents' house. My mom read them and called BS on all of that. The care providers would say, "Well, Medicare pays for it." Wth? She wasn't GOING--so why was Medicare paying ANYTHING???? THIS is where we need to start fixing things--but, no, we want to government in charge of the whole enchilada (a little nod to our Mexican neighbors who will still enjoy perfectly free health care here in America.)
ok, if anyone wants to know where i am i will be out changing the laws. wtf? all i can do about that is write congressmen and senators and i have been doing that for years. Its not the companies my ass, there is no money in cures, the money is all in the fact that they patch you up so you can come back next month and squeeze every penny out of you they can. They just want to sell you a product or service, thats crap also, they want to bleed you, so the CEO's and lobbyists can get millions of dollars in bonuses, and further pad their pocketbooks. Talk about theives. Why is it that i can get the same drug in mexico for a third or fourth the cost here?
No, that's not what I said at all, but someone has to pay for it. I guess you could earn minimum wage and live off welfare if you chose. You could also move somewhere else if you don't like it as you so eloquently out it earlier. I didn't agree to that. I don't agree with using the word socialism as a scare tactic either. We're light years from anything resembling socialism. There are far too many politically conservative people in this country to keep us from drifting that far. I'm not advocating a free healthcare plan for everyone. For the most part, they already have a free healthcare program. The people you're frustrated with don't pay their doctor bills as it is now. They go to charity hospitals, emergency rooms, etc., seek treatment and then skip out on the bill. You and I are already footing the bill in the form of taxes and increased insurance costs. Obviously what we have now isn't working as well as it should be working. I'm not sure that free, blanket coverage for everyone is the answer, but what we have now sure as hell isn't the answer either. I haven't had the time to invest in looking into what I think might be best. I just think that with the money we already spend, we should be able to get something better.
Are you under the impression that doctors are struggling? I fully agree that the government is crippling health care; I don't think the drug companies should simply be trusted, though (Rex_B). I am simply pissed that it costs 400 dollars to have a dr breathe on me and say come back next week. Its not like I can shop around. What is strange to me is that a lot of people like the single payer idea and the white house didn't even seriously consider it. I don't have a problem with the rich getting the best treatment and the poor getting the worst, but it seems that the health care system should be much more simple and could be much more efficient.
