Progressive One

before ObamaCare...20+ million were without....that is a benefit right there to cover those people.....

CounterRevolutionary

Yes, prior Obamacare, some 20 million people had no health insurance. In fact, I thought it was closer to 45 million.

Some did not want it, being young, healthy and wealthy.

Some were too poor to purchase it and instead, took Medicaid or went to emergency rooms for free.

Some were lucky enough to purchase medical discount cards at $19/month, such as Ameriplan, that offered 50% off doctors office visits and negotiated down the big hospital bills to affordable payment plans.

Some prayed to old JC for his healing cures.

Some bought catastrophic healthcare policies through their bank at Wells Fargo for $50 - 120/month,

Some opened Health Savings Accounts provided by their employer and paid their own way.

Nobody went without medical care, not even the illegal aliens.

Now certainly I would agree that the cost of insurance and medicine is much too high, and lack of free choice of practitioner is greatly impeded under Obamacare; this is why we should open up interstate commerce so we might shop for an affordable policy across all 50 state borders tailored to our personal needs and wallet.

I fear the government may find it cheaper to kill us than cure us, or worse, use us like lab-rats; it has happened too many times before. Of course, you see this very differently, and I suspect you are young and naïve.

You aught to read what the Nazis did to their own citizens; the sparrows were whistling from the roof tops. Do you have any idea of how many thousands of these dudes we imported after the war, many going to work for the Health Department? Just FOIA Operation Paperclip at the National Archives or visit their reading room. I am highly suspicious of our Health Department's objectives. We all have a right to question and debate here.

Progressive One

Read about the Tuskegee experiment and black people.....you're the naive one..........lots of people will die under the GOP plan....it hits red states the hardest.....1500 counties that are 90% trump voters will be hit the hardest......look it up and see what you don't know.....

CounterRevolutionary

Progressive One, Interesting that you note the Tuskegee experiment on black people in Alabama, originated under President Roosevelt's Surgeon General Thomas Parran, a syphilis expert tracking spirochete infections that didn't end until the mid 1970s. Of course, the black farm laborers of Tuskegee did not even know they were sick with syphilis and the township was sacrificed for the "good of medical research" and the "good of the state." This is why government controlled healthcare is so dangerous. That was a federal government program. "Dr." Parran had previously worked for Governor FDR of New York running the state health syphilis eradication program.

Nor did the US Health Department warn the public about the arrival of Lyme disease in 1946, nor did it warn the public about the huge increase in multiple sclerosis while it conducted a 10 year survey in secret during the 1950s lead by US Dr. Leo Alexander and Dr. Georg Schaltenbrand, a war criminal who experimented on transferring MS from apes to humans in the concentration camps. Nor did the US Health Department expose its use of alternative antibiotic experiments with LSD and Ciguatera upon unwitting patients in public healthcare. Nor did the US Health Department and USDA warn the public about the massive brucellosis infection in livestock and the unpasteurized milk supply under President Truman where an estimated 10% of the public was sickened by 1953 until Eisenhower eradicated the disease. Just write the USDA for statistics.

Oh, but the US government wants to sell us socialized medicine? "Surely, You Must be Joking, Mr. Feynman!"

Let's look at how we could make private healthcare truly affordable for the poorest people in America:

How much do you pay for auto insurance each month? $100/month?
* Does auto insurance cover personal injury and also collateral damage to other people and their property? Yes.
* Can you purchase insurance in any state, drive all over the country, and switch contracts for a better policy & price any time you please? Yes.
* Can you collect insurance for parking, speeding tickets, flat tires, windshield wipers, fan belts, oil changes, car washes and gasoline? NO

Progressive one, the Government is selling you a Cadillac health policy where you end up buying the entire automobile industry. This is why free markets work. The difference between rich and poor is knowing the difference between what you can do for yourself and what you can't.

State legislatures have us quarantined state by state when it comes to health insurance that they regulate fixing policies artificially broad and artificially high in costs. Auto insurance is not held hostage under the Interstate Commerce Clause. Open up Interstate Commerce and end big insurance campaign contributions to politicians. This is a racket.

Progressive One

I'm the one mentioned it..Tuskegee..didn't need you to re-hash it. I can't tell you people shit and I have no insurance issues. When people disagree with what I think, I don't argue...I just tell them what I am not buying into and good luck with their own thinking. Taking 24 million people off of healthcare, making the poor end elderly pay more and the rich pay less is the GOP way....unless one is rich, they have no reason being a republican, unless they are selfish. The racial and puritan politics is the reason poor people are republican. Good luck with that!!!

Progressive One

A case study in state-run health failures
California shows why the Republican plan to replace Obamacare with local programs may not work.
By Noam N. Levey
WASHINGTON — Richard Figueroa still shudders at the memory of the calls he fielded as enrollment director of California’s special health plan for sick patients who’d been rejected by insurers.
Desperate callers plead-ed to get off the waiting list as cancer or other illnesses worsened. Enrollees struggled to understand why the plan would not cover all the treatment they needed.
Most heart-wrenching were the quiet, polite calls from those who’d received a letter that a sick relative could finally get on the plan. “They would say, ‘Thank you, but you can give our slot to someone else, because my brother or my wife or my daughter has died,’” Figueroa recalled.
California’s high-risk pool — like similar overstretched state plans around the country — became obsolete when the Affordable Care Act established a new federal system to guarantee coverage to Americans even if they’re already sick.
Now President Trump and congressional Republicans are trying to shift responsibility for overseeing health protections back to states. This approach, including re-creating state high-risk pools, is a cornerstone of the healthcare bill that Republicans are laboring to get through the House this week.
GOP House leaders announced late Wednesday that they would hold a vote Thursday. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy predicted they have enough votes for passage, despite earlier struggles to win over moderates and conservatives.
California’s experience underscores the limitations of what states can do on their own.
The nation’s most-populous state tried repeatedly over the years to plug the many holes in its healthcare system. Yet even with a huge economy, extensive medical system and committed advocates, including in powerful industries, California came up short, again and again.
“We did all these things as stopgaps,” said Figueroa, who now works at the California Endowment, one of the state’s largest foundations. “None of it was enough.”
When President Obama signed the federal health law in 2010, nearly 20% of Californians — about 6 million people — lacked health coverage.
Today the state’s uninsured rate is below 9%, as California has used the federal funding and insurance rules enacted through the Affordable Care Act to extend health protections to hundreds of thousands of previously uncovered Californians.
“Once we had that framework and the federal funding, we were off to the races,” said Anthony Wright, the longtime head of Health Access California, one of the state’s leading consumer advocates. “But without it, it was very, very hard.... We have the experience to show that if health reform was easy at the state level, California would have done it. We couldn’t.”
The state’s healthcare struggles are hardly unique.
In the decades before Obamacare, some states — including Arizona, Washington, Kentucky, Maine, Minnesota and New York — tried to expand health protections for their residents by bolstering safety net health programs or rewriting insurance rules to ensure sick customers could get coverage.
But most states — including many with the highest uninsured rates, such as Texas, Florida and Georgia — never undertook serious efforts to guarantee coverage.
And although there were some modest successes, mostly in expanding Medicaid coverage, nearly every state effort to guarantee coverage failed until Obamacare made such protections possible nationwide.
In fact, in the last two decades, only Massachusetts successfully crafted a healthcare overhaul that provided all of its residents with insurance protections . That 2006 initiative — which was heavily subsidized by the last Bush administration — became the model for Obamacare.
California officials labored for years to build their own system of health protections. The state long had among the highest uninsured rates, despite being a hub of healthcare innovation whose leading medical centers have been international destinations.
Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid safety net, was perpetually overburdened as it struggled to care for millions of poor Californians.
And insurance companies worked aggressively to exclude sick, costly customers, in many cases rescinding policies after customers got ill by alleging they had misrepresented their medical histories.
“The market was a disaster,” said Tom Epstein, a former senior executive at Blue Shield of California, one of the state’s leading insurers.
Among other things, California tried to make large employers provide health coverage to workers, though that effort was defeated in a statewide referendum just months after it was enacted.
The state adopted insurance rules to give consumers more power to challenge decisions by health plans, though state leaders were never able to make insurers cover all sick patients.
In 1991, the state set up the Major Risk Medical Insurance Program, commonly called “Mr. Mip,” a high-risk insurance pool to offer a lifeline to patients who’d been turned down for coverage on the commercial insurance market.
By the late ’90s, the plan, which was funded in part by premiums and in part by a voter-approved tobacco tax, was serving 22,000 people.
But as premiums soared because insuring sick patients was so expensive, the program became increasingly difficult to sustain. Enrollment was capped, as were benefits. The plan would cover only $75,000 of enrollees’ medical costs per year.
By 2010, when Obamacare was signed, the cost for a 50-year-old in the Sacramento area who wanted a PPO plan had soared to $878 a month.
“It was a nice little program for a few thousand people,” said Lucien Wulsin, former head of the Insure the Uninsured Project, a state advocacy group. “But we never got close to reaching the hundreds of thousands of Californians who needed help.”
Finally in 2007, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, launched a sweeping campaign to push through a major healthcare overhaul to extend coverage to millions of uninsured Californians.
The landmark effort, in which Schwarzenegger worked with Democrats in the state Assembly, picked up crucial support from hospitals, patient groups and even some insurers and leading businesses.
But the effort ultimately collapsed amid opposition from advocacy groups on the left and right, and questions about how the state could pay for extending health coverage.
“Engaging in comprehensive reform is not for the faint of heart,” said Kim Belshe, who served as state health secretary under Schwarzenegger. “You are talking about nearly 20% of the state’s economy. You are talking about issues that affect people in the most personal way. And you are dealing with the pocketbooks of a diverse array of healthcare providers, each of which have their own interests.”
Belshe and others credit that effort for helping set the stage for the state’s aggressive implementation of the Affordable Care Act, which Schwarzenegger and other state leaders enthusiastically embraced.
California has undertaken a massive expansion of its Medicaid program and runs an insurance marketplace — Covered California — that is widely seen as a national model . The state has recorded among the largest drops in its uninsured population, and though costs remain a challenge, most Californians can still shop among many health plans that are required by the state to offer lower out-of-pocket costs for some medical care than the federal standard.
Doctors, hospitals, insurers, patient advocates and elected officials worry that progress in California will be reversed if the federal law is rolled back and the state is once again left on its own.
Said Figueroa: “It’s so odd to think that we would even consider going back to the bad old days.”
noam.levey@latimes.com

Big Bass

We do NOT believe in the tooth-fairy, either.

CounterRevolutionary

You stated in your previous post that I should read up on the Tuskegee experiments. I merely wished to point out that I have read plenty about Tuskegee. You want to point out medical bias and prejudice in healthcare, I want to point out that the bias was within the government, not the private sector.

I do not suggest "taking 24 million people off healthcare," I suggest we offer poor people, including myself, a better affordable policy that is not regulated by government. Government is driving the cost up. Politicians are reaping huge campaign contributions from the insurance industry for fixing these health insurance policies artificially broad and costs artificially high.

Note that the auto industry is not under such enormous government regulation, and you can purchase a policy in any state and drive across the country. Car crashes certainly attribute as much to the medical bills as disease. Why is auto insurance 1/10th the cost of health insurance?

I am merely asking a simple question.

Progressive One

I'm kool....I posted a chronology for the naysayers who think I have to lie. Should have done that from day one when you people characterized me as a poor, uneducated, destitute black. I don't care but I posted it as a matter of principle to let the ones who make such characterizations see if they have done as much with their own lives before they try to demean the lives of others. I could give a shit less personally. I should have done that from the very beginning. I'm done with it now. We all live and learn.

Progressive One

I mentioned it first....what makes you think I haven't read about it as a originator of the comment? Can I buy a car policy in TX for a car in CA even if I never leave CA? How would you insure the 24 million at least s well as ObamaCare without gov't regulation in a equitable manner for all?

CounterRevolutionary

And, PS, if you would please take the time to read the healthcare bill before the House today, you will find that poor people are not paying any more or less than rich people, the cost of health insurance will come way down for everybody with less government regulation and the consumer once again takes control over the market.

And, how do you know that I am not a black rightwing southern Baptist minister, for all that matters? Stop playing the race card and persecution complex. If you love socialized medicine so much, apply for landed immigrant status in Canada. You are not state chattel, owned by the United States Government, you can live wherever you want.

Progressive One

I don't care who you are, you could be a Martian and I wouldn't care. I just know who you sound like. you can save the complex bullshit for blacks who believe what racists tell them about themselves. I'm done with the issue, I got mine, get yours since I can't tell people shit. I'm kool with that.......time will tell....all these agencies are not making shit up about the GOP bill...I'm sure many on the right want 24 million kicked off....it is their selfish punitive nature....want everything for themselves and not pay shit for anyone else even though others pay for them.......

CounterRevolutionary

It is very nice that you were the originator of the discussion on Tuskegee, a great malpractice against blacks. You also implied that I was unaware of the medical bias. I merely pointed out that I was very familiar with the history of Tuskegee because it was run by the PREJUDICED US GOVERNMENT, not the private sector.

I explained that you could shop across all 50 state lines for an affordable auto insurance policy but are quarantined state by state when it comes to purchasing a health insurance policy. State health insurance policy prices are fixed artificially high because the state politicians are in cahoots with the insurance industry, reaping huge campaign contributions. At some point we have to recognize that the government is not made up of saints.

Auto insurance covers the major catastrophes, car crashes, not the small stuff. Health insurance should cover major catastrophes only, not every hiccup and sniffle and cough. That would also help cut costs. Get the government out of our lives. The government does not love us.

Progressive One

I don't imply or insinuate...that is for cowards. That is what people say on your behalf when they would have liked you to have said something that strengthens THEIR argument. I am a literal guy and that is the only way to accurately interpret what I say. I asked a question about car insurance and you answered it and I will read about it. I do that as an M.O.

CounterRevolutionary

I don't know what "M.O." is, probably since I do not "text" on a cell phone. That's alright. Obviously, we do not agree, so we will have to agree to disagree. Have a nice day.