I support President Barack Obama’s promises to reform U.S Health Care made during the year before the 2008 election. However, that’s not what we got. If I had been in the U.S. Senate, I would have voted for the bill as it was presented, as a beginning. When President Lyndon B. Johnson passed Medicare/Medicaid in 1965, it too was not a complete bill. But during the following years it was modified and improved.
The new healthcare reform was a step in the right direction, but much more must be done. For example: U.S. agencies bargaining with drug companies for lower prices. The only viable national health care solution can be seen in all other first world countries and in many second and third world societies. Universal health care is needed in the U.S. and can be in a two tier system of basic help and secondarily, a more expensive and sophisticated medical level, all run by the private sector, like in Switzerland.
Our existing healthcare system, while allowing us to live longer and healthier lives, can seem inhumane as we get closer to our end on earth. The system often preys on a family’s pain to create a profit center.
We must face “end of life” issues, where currently 2/3 of our health expenses go. The New England Journal of Medicine reported that 40% of Medicare monies are used to care for people in their last month of life. That is economically unsustainable. The Swiss model requires capitation for all medical procedures/cost. The private sector provides all medical services. You can choose your own doctor, and Swiss medical indices are as good as or better than ours, including longevity. Medical and health plans must be service driven and not limited to a profit system. Healthcare must put the needs of the patient first – be holistic and include mental health and prevention.
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8 Responses
We need healthcare reform, regardless of what others say. We need an infrastructure in place in many facets of our nation, and healthcare is one of them.
Your Comments
If you go after registered professional nurses, you will have one in 44 registered votes is a registered nurse. And nurses know how and what to do to correct the healtcare system, we care for America every day in extraordinary ways that touch the soul and hearts of individual people.
Your Comments:
At present, two entities control healthcare costs: the medical community and the insurance companies, although the insurance companies determine those costs to a much greater degree. One indication of this insane union can be found when one examines his or her statement from an insurer for a medical procedure. The billed amount is often triple the amount that the insurer actually pays. In other words, the medical provider is “fishing” for the higher payment but will settle for much less. Until healthcare stakeholders, especially hospitals and insurers, move away from the profit motive, this situation can only worsen.
Yes we need Heath care. Was paying 2800 a month. Wife can’t work. Had to leave 100k job for 45k job. Getting ready for bankrupt now. 25 more days and I’ll have the insurance. All savings gone. Age 59. Vietnam vet. Wife has morphine pump and I had cancer. No it wasn’t agent orange. 7 years passed. About to lose it all. This not right.
Your Comments
As a hospice RN for over about 10 years, I can tell you one reason more money is spent at the end. It is NOT because the body’s attempts at compensation are breaking down and the patients require more care. The main reason that I saw the costs were high was because the docs were, for whatever reason, unable to let their patients go. Either they were themselves, unable to let go or were unable to present the patient’s condition to the patient’s family in a way they could accept. Basically, we are not extending life at the end, we are prolonging death. Increase hospice support and fix home health compensation.
In 2002, the Swiss government banned all new medical practices to control costs. The ban runs until 2010. Until then, a new physician cannot open a practice unless an old physician retires or dies. Efforts to save money by merging hospitals have created irrational allocations of specialty units. Alphonse Crespo, a Swiss orthopedic surgeon, reports that resources are now so poorly distributed that “because of the mergers, the distances between specialty units in some cantons are large.” Patients needing a urologist may have to go to another hospital. Patients have actually been put in helicopters just for a consultation. Researchers at the University of Lausanne report difficulties in accessing psychiatric care, rehabilitation care, long-term care, and orthopedic care. Rationing is more likely to be imposed on the elderly and those with “a poor level of social integration.” Researchers in Geneva report that outcomes from the Swiss reforms suggest that financing health care using social health insurance is more regressive than direct financing. If true, this means that social insurance systems like ObamaCare end up taxing the poor more heavily [gated, but with abstract] than existing systems in which most people pay for their own care and the poor rely on government programs.
Dear Sir.,
I will vote for the Senatorial candidate that supports the language of H.R. 676 !
When will this country prevent wall street profiteering from the sick? HR 676 will do just that and save our country $800 Billion per year, restore our economy, and in time heal this nation. All but a view of our elected officials from both parties represent for profit insurance corporations. Please look it up and learn how this 30 page easy to understand and implement bill, was taken off the table. It is Medicare for All at cost of goods and services.
It’s great to see a candidate propose end-of-life reforms.
Please also add to it tort reform (guess who’s paying for all those lawyer billboards and phone book ads)
and eliminating any procedure unless it’s been proven to be reasonalbly succesfull in that application.