Why not PAY FOR HEALTH CARE instead of paying for HEALTH CARE INSURANCE PREMIUMS?

Don't Americans deserve SOME BENEFITS for a change? Yes! Preventative care will reduce premiums. More exercise, less trans fat. Salads are not necessary healthy if already dressed. Plain salad with cold pressed olive oil and venegar is best.

cs33ca  M.Sc. PharmD.  www. anestheticnews.com

I doubt that there is one, single Health Insurance Company that is not making a hefty profit. Especially the HMO's. Think about why they are in business? It certainly isn't because they want to provide good health care.

Single payer will eventually come to the U.S also. All other countries had to do it because insurance companies were making too much money and not paying out. Have a look at The Nordic countries, Canada, Australia, France and Europe. The criticism is longer waiting time. Now we have both. We still have to wait and our premiums are taking off like a jet. In Canada, serious complaints carry no waiting time and it is single payer. Now if you stump your toe and you need an MRI and Ultrasound, and an X-ray, that may take some time. Litmus test? Countries with free medicare where you keep your doctor like Switzerland or Canada have a longer life expectancy than the U.S. America is rated at # 37 in health treatment throughout the civilized world. Sure we can get closer to # 4 or # 5.

cs33ca  M. Sc. PharmD. www.anestheticnews.com

Time To Go, Grampa

With "controlling costs" a primary goal of Obamacare, and half of all medical costs coming in the last six months of life, "rationed care" takes on a new meaning for us all.

London's Telegraph reported Sunday that the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence, known by its Orwellian acronym NICE, intends to slash by 95 percent the number of steroid injections, such as cortisone, given to people who suffer severe and chronic back pain.

"Specialists fear," said the Telegraph, "tens of thousands of people, mainly the elderly and frail, will be left to suffer excruciating levels of pain or pay as much as 500 pounds each for private treatment."

Now, twin this story with the weekend Washington Post story about Obamacare's "proposal to pay physicians who counsel elderly or terminally ill patients about what medical treatment they would prefer near the end of life and how to prepare instructions such as living wills," and there is little doubt as to what is coming.

The Post portrayed the controversy as stoked by "right-leaning radio" using explosive language like "guiding you in how to die" and government plans to "kill Granny." Yet, is not the logical purpose of paying doctors for house calls to the terminally ill, whose medical costs are killing Medicare, to suggest a pleasant and early exit from a pain-filled and costly life?

Let us suppose the NICE plan in Britain is adopted. And an 80-year-woman, living alone, with excruciating persistent back pain, is visited by a physician-counselor. What is he likely to advise? What conclusion would Grandma be led to by a doctor who sweetly explains what treatment she may still receive, what is being cut off, and what her other options might be?

What other options are there?

Examples of how to "die with dignity" are at hand.

Three weeks ago, Sir Edward Downes, the world-renowned British orchestra leader, who was going blind and deaf, and his wife of 54 years, who had terminal cancer, ended their lives at a Zurich clinic run by the assisted suicide group Dignitas. They drank a small amount of liquid and died hand in hand, their adult children by their side.

This is the way of de-Christianized Europe. For years, doctors have assisted the terminally ill in ending their lives. Indeed, it has been reported that indigent, sick and elderly patients who could not make the decision for themselves had it made for them.

In America, we have a Death with Dignity Act in Oregon and such suicide counselors as the Hemlock Society, which itself took the cup in 2003. Now we have Compassion & Choices, which counsels the elderly sick on a swift and painless end. Before he took to ending the lives of patients who were not terminal, but sick and depressed, Dr. Kevorkian had his admirers. Not infrequently, one reads of nursing homes where the infirm and elderly have been put to death.

Beneath this controversy lie conflicting concepts about life.

To traditional Christians, God is the author of life and innocent life, be it of the unborn or terminally ill, may not be taken. Heroic means to keep the dying alive are not necessary, but to advance a natural death by assisting a suicide or euthanasia is a violation of the God's commandment, Thou shalt not kill.

To secularists and atheists who believe life begins and ends here, however, the woman alone decides whether her unborn child lives, and the terminally ill and elderly, and those closest to them, have the final say as to when their lives shall end. As it would be cruel to let one's cat or dog spend its last months or weeks in terrible pain, they argue, why would one allow one's parents to endure such agony?

In the early 20th century, with the influence of Social Darwinism, the utilitarian concept that not all life is worth living or preserving prevailed. In Virginia and other states, sterilization laws were upheld by the Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said famously, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

In Weimar Germany, two professors published "The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life," which advocated assisted suicide for the terminally ill and "empty shells of human beings." Hitler's Third Reich, marrying Social Darwinism to Aryan racial supremacy, carried the concepts to their logical if horrible conclusion.

Revulsion to Nazism led to revival of the Christian ideal of the sanctity of all human life and the moral obligation of all to defend it. But the utilitarian idea -- of the quality of life trumping the faith-based idea of the sanctity of life -- has made a strong comeback.

And the logic remains inexorable. If government intends to "bend the curve" of rising health care costs, and half of those costs are incurred in the last six months of life, and physician-counselors will be sent to the seriously ill to advise them of what costs will no longer be covered, and what their options are -- what do you think is going to be Option A?

I live in Maryland and If you go to the hosptial without insurance some hospitalls can turn you down. They can even refuse to give you good health car.

I live in Maryland and If you go to the hosptial without insurance some hospitalls can turn you down. They can even refuse to give you good health car.

This is a good question everyone should be asking. The insurance company is no more than a money broker. Instead of using actuary tables to pay for health care for all and spread the risk for all, they can use actuary tables to cherry pick the healthy and leave out the poor, those with pre-existing conditions, those who get really sick and can't work to pay their next months premium. They are ONLY in business to make money, not a health care business. When they cut costs it is cutting those who need health care. Plus they use arbitrary, uncheckable tables to charge what they want.

This means 30 percent for lobbying, campaigns, bill collecting, executive salaries and bill collecting,,,, everything but health care. These are expenses, don't forget the 10 percent profits.Eliminating them would be a huge savings in actual healthcare.

We need a single payer insurance system where the only thing the government does is be a disperser of the money to health providers, not socialized medicine by the government.  We need to let health providers be able to diagnose and heal instead of having insurance companies determine who and what to cover We need to see private health insurers as what they are. Bloodsuckers preying on the vulnerable . If I saw someone ran over in the street and didn't do a thing to help them I could be charged with manslaughter but insurance companies make those choices with no problem. 60 percent of bankruptcies are from medical issues and 80 percent of them HAD health insurance. That is a fact.

Both the democrats and the republicans are beholding to the insurance companies to the tune of about 450 thousand dollars each. Lobbying and campaign contributions are enormous. No one will say the emperor has no clothes. Private health insurance performs no function that couldn't be performed cheaper and cover more people by a single payer insurance plan. The private insurance companies are not needed. This is not theoretical. This is from my personal experience .I have been hosed on the health insurance on several levels.  Anyone who wants to know what happened can ask me. I invite to also google Tom Sawyers white wash fence story to see how we got duped into this thing. Just remember the business of private insurance is only to make money. They are not a health care business, they are only in the business of making money I hope you never really need them.

Hr676 is a bill in congress no media will talk about. Healthcare-now.org

You argue that paying health care premiums do not guarantee health care.  You are partially correct.  Paying insurance premiums does not guarantee comprehensive health care covering every possible health contingency regardless of cost, it only insures what you agreed your insurance policy would cover and the cost of each policy is determined by actuarial tables based on the historical costs of the specific health conditions covered by the policy you sign, or agree to accept.

However, you also argue that "subsidizing health care" (whatever that means )somehow equals paid health care and therefore, would guarantee health care when you needed it.  

This is where the argument breaks down and especially if you are suggesting that paying the government for your health care to insure health care is fundamentally different than paying insurance premiums for the same service and offers some sort of greater comprehensive guarantee of health care when you need it.

In this country millions of folks are currently "subsidizing health care" through the government for medicare, medicaid, Tri-care, and care through the Veteran's Administration.   NONE of those "subsidized health care systems: guarantee comprehensive health care, and all "deny, deny, deny care" just as frequently if not more frequently than "private health care insurers." 

They are simply government managed health insurance programs rather than private health insurance programs and like their private cousins payment into them does not constiture "prepaid health care" for participants.

In fact there is NO government directed "subsidized" health program in the world that operates as if your obligated payment to the system somehow amounts to prepaid comprehensive health care.  The money they take in this year usually does't fully pay for all the very limited health care that is needed by the population each year.  Most European's have way in excess of 40% of their total income taken away each year for such government insurance, and still they are denied full care even more than the average American who has an insurance policy.

If we switch to a government insurer from a private insurer we are simply switching from a flexible program with which one can choose and negotiate, to an inflexible program with which there is absolutely NO choice and no negotiation. 

That's the only difference, cause the bottom line is NEITHER system can afford all the possible care that is wanted from all the folks in those systems and that is a fact. Both will limit care to what they can afford be it private or government or individual.