Home Forums Discussions General Discussion What Hillary Learned From Newt....

So my wonderful Senator that I used to respect has "learned" an interesting lesson. After Newt and his gang of thieves beat the heck out her when she first tried to "reform" healthcare, she learned exactly the wrong lesson. What she learned was to not cut out the rich and powerful Health Insurance Carriers, because they will spend as much money and do what is ever is needed to beat you down.

So now her new "reform" leaves these same greedy, corrupt SOB's right in the thick of things to continue to plunder our healthcare dollars for their own needs. No wonder she refuses to stop taking campaign dollars from big business. I wonder how much money she has actually gotten from UHC, Aetna, Cigna, BC/BS and the rest of the gang? Some reform we're gonna see. Just a lot more of the same. Just more coverage for more folks while over working, over managing and under paying guys like all of you. All while these fat cats line their pockets with our money. Yeah, real reform....

Not that he is perfect by any means, but why can't John Edwards seem to get any traction as the son of a laid off mill worker from the south????

Because he made his fortune suing obstetricians.

Bert,
I gather you mean Edwards and not Newt there, yes? Newt was mostly an over grown college professor with dellussions of grandure, who enjoyed making politics even more nasty and even more of a blood sport than it had been previously. Does anybody miss TV Nation? Does anybody even remember TV nation???

One of our favorites was when he showed emmy award winning Yafet Kodo having more trouble as a well dressed, dark skinned black man hailing a cab in NYC than a average dressed white guy who had a rap sheet a mile long. Emmy award winning actor or violent convicted felon???

Or when he sent a team of garbage trucks to do their "thing" banging cans and running the trucks at high to run the power systems, right outside the multi-million dollar homes of the executives of the garbage hauling companies. Just great stuff.

Geeze I hope the comments about Hillary Clinton being our "wonderful Senator" is sarcasm.. She hasn't done anything of any substance yet, and she's in the middle of her second term. She is once again planning on recreating "health care" in her own image, and those of us who do this for a living should really be worried about this, both with her in the Senate and with the possibility of her becoming the President. I just LOVED her speech to the illegal alien population in NY City last year about how our economy just couldn't get along without them and how she's going to fight for them. Um.. she's not THEIR Senator.. they're not citizens. She's OUR Senator, and should be looking out for the interests of people who are here legally. <sigh> She got her head handed to her by Newt and his band of "thieves" because she deserved it. She put together a plan to tell physicians how to practice medicine, without bothering to consult a single physician.

I want to be one of the doctors on the committee when they reform the legal profession.. since she figured that a committee of lawyers was qualified to reform the medical profession.

I like Newt.. but think he too has a lot of BAD ideas about fixing "health care". Sorry, Newt old boy - as much as you want to believe it is, an electronic health record is NOT going to fix primary care, or any other care for that matter. It adds HOURS to a doctors workload, and when we're being paid peanuts to see patients, I'm INSULTED that you think adding MORE work that is not direct patient care is going to IMPROVE the care I give.

I wish they'd both call it "health care financing" rather than "health care" - or ANYTHING besides "health care". There are NOT millions of people without "health care" - WE TAKE CARE OF THEM - often sucking a HUGE LOSS financially to do it. They're without insurance, and they should have more options than they have now on how to actually pay for their health care..Neither Newt or Hillaray have any clue, beyond superficial sound bites, as to what the real issues are, how the marketplace works, or why socialized medicine is crumbling in many of the countries these wonderful folks want to model our system after.

I'll get off my soap box. It's 2:00 AM and I get a little long winded when I've been up too long :-)

Enjoy the debate - we live in interesting times

V.

Vinny,
Ya know the real problem is that whethr it is a thousand for profit carriers all reduntantly doing the same thing and have nurses and para-proffessionals who never see, talk to, or touch the patient double guessing your work via statisical models or just bad internal policy, all while syphoning 33% of all dollars to the private profit bank accounts; all while price fixing and strong arming super small businesses is not an answer.

But neither is having the government do almost the exact same thing (the poor removed from actually seeing the patient care managment that is) while they too strangle and force all providers to work for the same reduced, price controlled, price fixing prices. But putting all citizens in an Al Gore styled "Lock Box" pool that would be properly managed and never can be raided (like they are doing to SS right now, Smith Barney can't wait to geth their hands on your money either, so what if seniors starve in the streets again like before WWII, right?) makes alot of sense in terms of how to finance decent healthcare expenses. Collect a little bit too much from me today, it never goes to greed CEO's and shareholders, but instead stays in a conservatively managed fund, so it will be there for me on that fateful day if and when I really do get sick.

The carriers all try to cherry pick right now and leave the really sick and needy to us the taxpayers and the gov't programs. The only real solution is to have a single pool, so the young and healthy off-set and assist with the sick and the infirm. But only with a promise of fiscal responsibility so everyone knows that it will actually be there for them in their time of need.

But the real problem and I'm not sure that I have an answer to this is, how do you create such a single, not for profit pool, that everyone has to be in, so that the numbers actually can and do work; all while not making sub-class citizens and workers out of the people like doctors and other providers who do the actual hardwork of providing the care. I guess step one is to finally classify them as workers and not private contractors so that they can negotiate as a whole, in good faith with the single payer. So many of the issues that we discuss here really are labor managment type issues. Extra busy work and documentation, more over-sight and managment of your professional choices, workload and other work place conditions, rates of pay, and all the rest.

If there is but one payer, one pool, then can there really be an open and freemarket anymore??? Not really. In many senses we have this already, because the federal gov't really sets the rates every year via the Medicare Fee Schedule and then all our other oligopoly contracts get modeled off of that. Many times it is a wind fall for these guys.

I wrote to Vinny about non par providers sueing both the carriers and the PAR providers for price fixing and limiting access to customers and customers access to the non-par providers. Isn't that a textbook definition of restriction of freetrade and two parties colluding together to overly control a market??? ...What do you think???? I choose no cotract. If no contract is really free than HMO and EPO type situations really are an impingment on freetrade. The actual end consumer has no choice but to stay in-network to access any of their covered benefits at all and that cuts out the other business people. Somehow this bozos have been able to talk out both sides of their mouths and have it both ways. Time to make them live and die by the same sword.

Good Night and Good Luck
Paul