Writes Michael Moore, in "A Manifesto Against For-Profit Health Insurance Companies/I hereby give you my Oscar-nominated Documentary on the Killer Health Insurance companies like United HealthCare —SICKO — for FREE… and let’s end and replace this so-called 'health care system' NOW" (MichaelMoore.com).
In the United States, we have a whopping 1.4 million people employed with the job of DENYING HEALTH CARE, vs only 1 million doctors in the entire country! That’s all you need to know about America. We pay more people to deny care than to give it....After the killing of the CEO of United HealthCare, the largest of these billion dollar insurance companies, there was an immediate OUTPOURING of anger toward the health insurance industry. Some people have stepped forward to condemn this anger. I am not one of them. The anger is 1000% justified. It is long overdue for the media to cover it. It is not new. It has been boiling. And I’m not going to tamp it down or ask people to shut up. I want to pour gasoline on that anger....
Yes, I condemn murder, and that’s why I condemn America’s broken, vile, rapacious, bloodthirsty, unethical, immoral health care industry and I condemn every one of the CEOs who are in charge of it and I condemn every politician who takes their money and keeps this system going instead of tearing it up, ripping it apart, and throwing it all away. We need to replace this system with something sane, something caring and loving — something that keeps people alive....People across America are not celebrating the brutal murder of a father of two kids from Minnesota. They are screaming for help... But the politicians and the pundits and the headlines aren’t telling you that..... They’re so busy telling you not to riot and not to participate in an uprising against their advertisers and campaign funders that they won’t tell you what this really is — a RICH ON RICH crime! Luigi, a young rich man with a couple of Ivy League degrees, scion of a family that owns 2 of the biggest country clubs in Maryland and who is in line to inherit a chain of nursing homes... this young, rich man with an ax to grind against another multi-millionaire...."
But I have a solution. No one has to kill anyone. And it doesn’t cost anything. I have a solution that does not involve any violence..... Throw this entire system in the trash, dismantle this immoral business that profits off the lives of human beings and monetizes our deaths, that murders us or leaves us to die, destroy it all, and instead, in its place, give us all the same health care that every other civilized country on Earth has....
पोस्ट्स
१३६ टिप्पण्या:
Moore: "I have a solution that doesn't involve any violence. Unless violence to you means us taking money out of your rich effing pockets."
Why yes, Mike, that is violence to me. Especially when someone else gets to decide who's 'rich.'
JSM
Couple of thoughts.
1) I have never been denied coverage for anything by my various health insurance companies over my life of 75 years
2) the "statistic" of coverage deniers vs physician tells me we have a shortage of MDs. (How long does it take to schedule an appointment?)
3) I can assume Mr Moore then self insures rather than do business with those evil health insurance companies
About 5-6 years ago on Christmas Eve, my best friend from high school collapsed on his kitchen floor after returning from a run. The rescue squad came to the house. A neighbor of his who is a doctor came over and saw him on the floor and thought he was a goner.
Even though it was a holiday, the right doctors came in and performed surgery.
My friend was in a coma for over 60 days. At the hospital, they called him the “Miracle Man.”
Full recovery. Same as ever. And the insurance company paid for everything.
I’ll see him this Saturday. He was able to attend the weddings of two of his kids and birth of his first grandchild.
That’s the American health care system I know.
In a funny note, I asked him if he lost anything. He said his math ability wasn’t quite the same. The joke here is that he graduated from Notre Dame, with honors, with a BS in mathematics.
There probably is a shortage of doctors. That’s why Creighton opened a new School of Medicine in Phoenix.
When my brother-in-law was dying of stomach cancer his insurance company kept denying or delaying the authorization to give him the various chemos that his doctor prescribed. When you have cancer every second delay counts. This situation was when I started hating our medical insurance system. I do not condone murder. But our system sucks and needs to be fixed.
We have bad policies perpetuated by Moore and people like him. Their rants don’t really register with people anymore do they?
…and if we use the killing as a motivation for the conversation we incentivize more killing…
We’re so far down the rabbit hole, supposed solutions from the good guys are nothing but bad policy…
How much would healthcare cost if nobody was saying “no”. Socialist healthcare says “no” all day long!
Setting the ethical questions aside for the moment, let’s do a sanity check on Moore’s numeracy. First, a quick internet search gives credence to the 1 million medical doctors in the US figure at 1.11 million, but the health insurance industry only employs on the order of 0.91 million, not the 1.4 million that Moore quotes. Even so, that healthcare insurance figure includes Engineering and data science, Human resources, Public relations, Financial analysts, Claims adjusters, Actuaries, and Insurance underwriters, only a fraction of whom ‘deny care’ to subscribers (i.e., claims adjusters). Whereas, doctors are only a fraction of the healthcare industry - he conveniently leaves out Nurses, Orderlies, Administration, Schedulers, Pharmacy, etc., not to mention all the companies designing, building and installing medical equipment.
Not an apples-to-apples comparison, but then, it’s Michael Moore.
This A. F. Branco cartoon is exactly what happened and why.......This is why he is the BEST cartoonist around. He tells the truth through his comics.
https://www.creators.com/features/a.f.-branco
Is there a reason why they second guessed on the specific chemos being suggested?
I'm talking about the 12/18 comic, although his others are great too.
Would overall healthcare expenses be lower if less people were grossly obese like some filmmakers?
My populist plan for health-care reform:
1. Tort reform. This will lower malpractice insurance premiums and allow docs to lower their prices.
2. Medical education loan forgiveness. Do it the right way, with a statute. This will eliminate docs' debt and further enable them to lower their prices.
3. Outlaw medical insurance. The existence of insurance inflates medical prices because, for both doc and pt, it's just other peoples' money. Eliminating it will force docs to lower their prices if they still want pts coming in the door. What's the legal basis for outlawing medical insurance? States could do it under their police powers. Congress could do it under the commerce clause. If the commerce clause says I have to let you eat in my diner, then surely it stands for the proposition that Congress can regulate one-fifth of the national economy, or whatever we spend on health care.
4. Keep in mind that insurance companies are already lowering the cost of care. They are just keeping the savings for themselves, or more kindly stated, passing it to their premium-payers in general. Lots of innovations: telemedicine, increased use of PAs and NPs, and just the proliferation of drugs for everything. Prescribing a mass-produced pill should be the cheapest medical intervention of all. Do the reforms above, and it will be.
I am sure there are many cons to the above. Feel free to attack.
JSM
"We need to replace this system with something sane, something caring and loving — something that keeps people alive...."
But ... but ... I thought we already solved our healthcare problems. Remember The Affordable Care Act?
Moore would tell you it didn't go far enough towards socialism. Socialism tries to spread the misery out evenly, so everyone suffers. That is, unless you're at the top of the government. You think Castro got the same health care as the rest of Cuba?
Yes, they second guessed on cost. The doctors wanted to give him a new class of drugs that stimulate the immune system to fight the cancer. I was familiar with these drugs as I prosecuted the patents for some of them for a major drug company. These drugs are cutting edge. When they work they cure the disease - for example Jimmy Carter’s late stage melanoma was cured by this class of drugs. They cost $15,000 per dose (just for the drug hospital costs will increase it further).
Michael Moore is late to discover that actions have consequences, and that the political screw always turns with the next generation. He and other leftists (e.g., Al Gore) laid the groundwork for the current crop of terror-leftists through garbage advocacy "documentaries" based on lies and half-truths.
Moore's lies and smears generated false confidence and unearned moral superiority within the naive young left. The chickens are now coming home to roost. Will Moore panic and join MAGA in a few years?
The insurance companies could do a better job promoting themselves. Healthcare is always going to be rationed. Is it better that this be done by a number of competing insurers and a single group of SEIU members with guaranteed lifetime employment?
Medical care is one of the areas that I side with liberals. I spent my entire career as a scientist and lawyer working on disease treatment. But our system is flawed and it’s not just Obamacare that makes the system flawed. Costs of care have exceeded inflation for years. Drug companies profits are much higher in the US than ex-US - i.e. our flawed system subsidizes drugs for the rest of the world. This is just one example of how our systems flaws escalate the costs of treatment.
wendybar said…
“This A. F. Branco cartoon is exactly what happened and why.....”
Related content from the Babylon Bee: https://babylonbee.com/news/now-now-lets-not-be-so-hasty-to-find-and-assassinate-everyone-responsible-for-the-healthcare-crisis-says-nervous-obama
I like these suggestions. But is treating medical care as a pure commodity the real solution. There is something about medical care that makes it seem like it isn’t just a mere commodity.
Saith Michael Moore:
"In the United States, we have a whopping 1.4 million people employed with the job of DENYING HEALTH CARE, vs only 1 million doctors in the entire country! That’s all you need to know about America. We pay more people to deny care than to give it...."
If single payer is instituted in this country, it will be that same disaster as the NHS in the UK, and as on Canada.
When I worked in a hospital in SoCal in the Eighties, the administrator and a cadre of consultants toured hospitals in Canada and came back with glowing reports on the level of care and the efficient utilization of resources. Yes, they started out well, but it collapsed under its own weight of bureaucracy and overregulation. The worst part of it is that if the government denies a claim, there is no higher authority for appeal. Michael Moore hasn't given any thoughts to that.
And yes, under single payer, the bureaucrats and functionaries will grossly outnumber all care providers - not just doctors, but all medical support staff combined. And that, folks, is why we need DOGE.
I despise what I call “bumpersticker logic” when making arguments. Moore’s ratio of MDs to insurance employees is that kind of nonsensical, millimeter deep thinking. He also makes it sound like healthcare systems in other countries don’t deny coverage. Of course they do. Or, they make you wait forever for treatment. Or, they offer assisted suicide to save costs. That being said, I think our system is overly complicated, including the emphasis on employer-sponsored health plans.
Let me know if anyone is aware of any single-payer or socialist healthcare system where care is not rationed by the patient’s age. As a person in his late seventies this is a matter of concern for me. Since he’s in his seventies too, you’d think Michael Moore wold also care, but that might require more functioning brain cells than he has.
How many of those denied treatments were experimental? That's usually the reason a treatment proposed by doctor is not approved. A good friend of mine (United Health Care PPO with The Villages Health) has been treated for lung cancer for the last two years. He showed me his medical bill for the various treatments he has received and the portion the PPO has paid: his payments were ZERO, the PPO's share was over $350K. My experience is similar, although I have not had a serious bout with cancer, I have had two neurological surgeries and numerous other specialty treatments and tests performed at no cost. I don't know what Moore is looking for in health care, but he appears to be delusional.
It's not often that my work gets a killer five-star review from an actual-killer...
This is poor form. There's nothing funny about a man being gunned down in cold blood. While Moore can be interesting because he generally has his finger on the pulse of middle America better than most Democrats, personally I find him to be an abhorrent person.
Nebraska has a cap on damages in medmal cases. It works. Premiums in NE much lower than in IA.
I recently read that up in Canada a shopping 5% of all deaths — one out of every twenty — are now due to medically-assisted suicide. It’s one thing to argue that some people who are slowly dying of a painful, incurable disease might desire medical assistance in ending their lives, but that cannot possibly be one out of every twenty deaths.
OTOH, killing is cheaper than curing.
I would remind Michael Moore that Julius Streicher never pulled a trigger or dropped Zyklon B pellets into a gas chamber stuffed with Jews. Instead he spent 12 years telling the German people how nasty and dispicable the Jews are.
He got the short drop at the end of a short rope nevertheless.
Jeez. Our system is definitely in need of fixing. But handing it over to the government- of all places- is the most absurd idea ever.
Canadians who can, still stream into the US to get needed surgeries, instead of having to wait 6-8 months, or more, to get their needed work done.
And in the UK, patients sit in on carts in hallways, waiting for government level care to get to them. It's awful.
We won't even get into Cuba, Michael Moores medical system of choice (he's a moron).
The same people who cannot do anything efficiently, who run up costs as easily as most people breathe, who care least about doing a job right, who look at you with disdain in every other governmental office, are now going to be put in charge of our health??
Please. Spare me what you say the rest of the world is doing. Those who can, those with the means, fly to the US for their specialized healthcare. That does not mean we're doing it right. But it does mean we know how to do it. We just have to allow the medical field to live in a free market like all other successful people and industries do. More competition, not less (government). More price transparency, not less (government). More open marketing of doctors and services, not less.
The marketplace would clean this up. If we allowed it to do so.
Interestingly, I thought Obamacare would make everything right. I guess that didn't happen. Who knew?
Great minds think alike!! It always comes down to OBAMA.
My wife's Brit grandfather developed pneumonia as an 86-year-old pensioner in a small village in East Anglia and was admitted to the hospital in Norwich. After two weeks and little improvement, the NIH doctors were tired of dealing with him (he was a bit crotchety!) and sent him back to his village to be treated as an outpatient even though he lived alone and the village clinic was not staffed or equipped to provide proper treatment. He died three weeks later. So, they saved his pension costs as well as the treatment costs. That's how socialized medicine deals with controlling costs.
I started out in Pre-Med at The Creighton University in the late 60's. But Dr Schlesinger's Biology Class 101 convinced me that it ain't gonna happen!
A lot of us did. That's why we were protesting the monstrosity that took over our healthcare and made it WAY more expensive after he promised that it wouldn't cost us one thin dime a million times over, and that every family would save $2500. a year. He lied and people died.
Go Bluejays!!
Obamacare created this catastrophic mess. Government takeover of the medical business exponentially increased prices and reduced coverage. As leftists always do, Moore just wants to double down on abject failure.
Moore is an ultracrepidarian propogandist, and only ignorant fools pay him any mind. Unfortunately, that describes a large cohort of my fellow Americans.
Thread winner here.
I’m in favor of 150,000,000 payer health care. Your employer will choose what’s best for them. Likewise, the government will choose the plan best for its needs. If people paid for their own insurance, costs should come down. Available options can increase, unnecessary coverage end, etc. There would still need to be Medicaid in some form, but I think the majority of Americans would benefit from.
Profit is what on the other side is called consumer surplus. Profit is the amount that the payment exceeds what the service was worth to the company; consumer surplus is the amount that the service is worth to the consumer exceeds how much he paid for it. Without both positive profit and positive consumer surplus, the deal cannot happen.
The sum of profit and consumer surplus is new wealth added to the wealth of the nation. Trade is the only source of new wealth.
If we go to a system that. Lore wants the job of “denying healthcare” will go to bureaucrats. The implementation of euthanasia in other countries (Canada employees bureaucrats to urge Canadians of all ages to kill themselves) is not some humane idea, it instead a way to save costs on their allegedly free healthcare.
It is everyone’s dream to have a healthcare system that is cost effective, comprehensive, and where services are provided on a timely basis. If is a fact that there is no system in the world where the system has two of those characteristics.
Moore's solution is 350 million go fund me accounts.
How did they come up with single payer as the tagline
In the words of P.J. O'Rourke, if you think healthcare is expensive now, wait 'til it's free.
In 2020, the CBO tracked a $ 100 payment through the healthcare system. You give $100 to a private insurer. The insurance company takes $ 16.00 and pays its employees' salaries (including the blockbuster salaries its CEO makes), its advertising costs (the celebrity telling you to buy Blue Cross Blue Shield gets paid big bucks) and so on. The hospital takes another $16.00 to cover its administration costs (including the massive amount of money it spends on its executives' salaries and trying to recoup unpaid medical bills). Eventually, $ 68.00 is spent on healthcare.
Single payer cuts administrative costs by 70%. Economy wide, that is close to $ 500 billion. If enacted, single payer would be the biggest economic stimulus of our lifetime. And the oligarchy would be smashed. Imagine the number of small businesses that would instantly form when we're no longer indentured to our employers because of insurance. Retaining employees would become so much more difficult for the average corporation and competition would flourish as new businesses are created.
"Yes, they second guessed on cost..." This is my exact experience with the drug that has recently been prescribed. Denied until I fought it, which wasn't easy. Insurance companies really do follow the Deny, Delay, Defend protocols more than should be allowed, and they do it because sick people are often weakened and unable to defend themselves in their condition. It's a sh*tty system that has more administrators than care providers. On the other hand United Health is a movie star right now in the investment performance world. Thanks, Obama.
Of course, the first thing that is needed is transparency in medical pricing. Once people have line-item sight on what things are being billed for, there will be a huge pushback and demands for rationale, and rightfully so.
Obamacare was written largely by the insurance industry. It took power away from practitioners (like myself) and gave it to administrators in the insurance and hospital industries. Of course, it is a joke that will only get worse as bureaucrats gain more power over healthcare.
There is a Canadian woman in my next-door neighbor's house right now. She will have a knee replacement at the local hospital later today. She met with the orthopedic surgeon who will do the procedure for the first time about 3 weeks ago. In Canada the wait time was over 2 years.
She was lucky to get in so quick here, there was a cancellation. Normally she'd have had to wait here too, but only for a couple months.
Obamacare/ACA gets a lot of blame for our current problems, here and elsewhere. Others point out that our problems predate ACA; don't blame Obama.
Both are true.
ACA is not the only, or even primary cause of increased costs, decreased availability, and worse outcomes.
The thought processes behind ACA (and all other government interventions into health care) are the primary problem.
Paraphrasing T Sowell, the hubristic concept that solutions exist.
There are no solutions. There are only tradeoffs. In the present system, more care cannot be given to person A without giving it less to person B.
There is not a doctor shortage. Doctors could easily increase the number of patients they treat in a day by 30-50% if they did only medical care. Instead, they spend half their workdays entering data (that will never again be accessed in the vast majority of cases) into a computer system. This is intentional- when a doctor is typing at a keyboard or dictating and later reviewing the transcription, he or she is not ordering costly CT scans, expensive medications, or (worst of all), spending hundreds of dollars of hospital/government money every minute in an operating room.
We can't afford free health care. No one can.
I'll go ahead and point out the elephant in the room: the most socialized area of the healthcare industry, Medicare, spends ridiculous amounts of money while the rest of us are keeping it afloat with our money, not just taxes, but the prices we pay for insurance premiums and doctors visits.
My mom was refusing to pay a $1400 ER bill because "I shouldn't have to pay anything. Medicare should cover it." My inlaws crowed about a multi day hospital stay bill being less than $1000. Do any of you know how much I pay when I take a kid into the ER? I'd cry tears of joy if it was just $1400.
So yeah I want to scrap the system, but to be truly effective, it probably won't happen because Boomers vote.
Moore's stuff rots the brain. Similar to Maddow.
The left actually think that Cuban health care is superior.
It's a horror show.
Other thread winner.
"a whopping 1.4 million people employed with the job of DENYING HEALTH CARE" Meaning, people enforcing contracts, limiting spending, and preventing provider fraud and featherbedding.
I lived for decades under the assorted Canadian health-care *systems*, as an adult, in four different provinces. To say things generally suck there ... is an understatement.
The core problem is this -- in for-profit medicine, each new patient, procedure, prosthesis, etc is a REVENUE item. In government medicine they are an EXPENSE. What do all managers do? They *limit* expenses as much as possible.
Government bureaucrats, who run the "insurance" systems are no different than private bureaucrats with insurance *companies*. The difference is that in Canada, in most cases, governments *OWN* the medical providers, yet at the same time are the funders of medical care.
In the US there's a "balance of power" situation -- we seem to like that approach, because it tends to keep people honest, whether in government, medicine, or free enterprise in general. It's a GOOD idea to have medical providers and payers SEPARATE and in competition.
That's how it works in the States, and people get better care. Alberta has one of the better systems in Canada, yet a couple there, dealing with pending natural quadruplets, had to go to Great Falls, Montana [pop 60,000] to be guaranteed of four NICU places [neonatal ICU] because it was not possible in Calgary [pop 1.2 million] or any other Canadian city.
Anecdotes are always dicey, but a dear friend of mine in Québec still cannot get a PCP [assigned by the government BTW] after over 5 years of begging. And you cannot see a specialist unless referred by a PCP. She's dealing with an autoimmune situation which, amongst other things, is attacking her eyes and joints. There are medications which help significantly, but they have to be prescribed by a specialist.
She is likely to end up crippled and blind, not by active denial but from systemic non-availability of essential care. At that point she WILL have ready and immediate access to MAID -- Medical Assistance in Dying, which now accounts for over 5 percent of *all* Canadian deaths.
In these parts she could be getting the care she needs within a month at most, and I'm working to arrange her legal immigration ASAP.
Meanwhile, 300 to 500 Ontario doctors per year immigrate to the US Midwest because in Canada they are not allowed to provide the level of patient care they believe is professionally necessary and appropriate.
For all its flaws, the US system is medically better than government systems.
That's funny how you people revert to your GOPe attitudes when populist opinions are delivered by non-trumparians.
What a fool you are. You learned nothing from the catastrophic failure of Obamacare.
Nancy Pelosi was right, we had to pass the bill to find out what ObamaCare hath wrought.
I'd like pro-Cuban health care leftists to explain with actual facts - how amazing it all is.
Also - dear leftists - remind us again how ObamaCare was going to solve it all.
I have always maintained that what people are really saying when they ask for "national health" or "socialized medicine" is that they don't want to be bankrupted by a ruinously expensive case of cancer or diabetes or a terrible traffic accident. And I don't object to this. Practically everyone but the anarchists accepts that we set up government to do the things for us that no individual can reasonably be expected to do for themselves. National defense, diplomatic relations, border security, courts, cops, and so forth.
The disagreement between Republicans and Democrats is where to draw the line on what is reasonable for an individual to do for himself. I think that line should include routine medical care up to a cost of several tens of thousands of dollars. Keeping some skin in the game for individuals encourages shopping around for better deals and harnesses the power of the free market to keep costs competitive. But catastrophic illness and injury, with costs of care that run into the hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars? That's a legitimate collective function of government.
What I would like to see is a version of the public-private partnership that works very well in Switzerland and Singapore. In effect, it is similar to the current combination of an HSA (Health Savings Account) with a very high deductible insurance policy, with government providing the insurance.I propose the following:
- Tax-favored health savings accounts are established for everyone. Both individuals and employers are incentivized to contribute pre-tax dollars. The account owners choose their own investments, which grow tax-free.
- The money currently spent on Medicaid and Medicare is instead put into the HSA accounts of destitute, disabled, or elderly individuals, who then manage it like everyone else does, with the help of a conservator or guardian if necessary.
- Withdrawals for health care expenses are tax-free.
- After age 65 any remaining balance above the catastrophic coverage level rolls into your IRA or 401k tax-free, and going forward, Medicare would "top up" every retiree's HSA yearly. This retirement bonus incentivizes careful shopping around for good deals and discourages wasteful spending such as ER visits for the sniffles.
- Doctors' fees and hospital charges are made 100% transparent to facilitate shopping around.
- Serious tort reform reduces the cost of "defensive medicine".
- Once a family's medical expenses exceed half the average annual household income due to catastrophic illness or injury, government picks up 100% of the additional costs.
- Insurance companies are free to offer "gap" coverage that can be purchased by individuals or employers to take care of the difference between one's HSA balance and the level at which catastrophic single-payer coverage from government kicks in.
This would be guaranteed to cut costs and provide everyone with an acceptable standard of coverage.
However, it will never happen, because insurance companies would be decimated, and plaintiff's attorneys would have to find honest work.
Babalú Blog is a site I visit from time to time and is written by either an expatriate or a 1st generation Cuban. He chronicles the unnecessary living hell that is Communist Cuba. Oh if we could only drop Michael Moore under an assumed identity. On a second thought the inevitable weight loss might be beneficial. Let's leave here munching down on our flawed food pyramid.
Spiros asserted: "Single payer cuts administrative costs by 70%."
NO IT DOESN'T.
Exactly right Thomas.
This is the new Russia Russia Russia… it’s all the MSM wants to ok about.
Also, their God-like Obama was the one that caused that “BFD” ACA to be passed, (and Robert’s upheld the damn thing). So don’t go nothing about Trump or republicans about the “health care system”
Boomers are not responsible for Medicare- that's a gift from preceding generations who recognized that the increasing (at that time, anyway) population would allow for a program such as Medicare (see: Social Security). Did they plan for the possibility that the population might not keep increasing? No, but that wouldn't matter to them. They'd get their benefits and Boomers would get the blame when things started to fall apart.
Spiros - You do know - that "Single payer" = the government is the payer - using our tax dollars. right? There is no single larger waster of tax payer funds - than the US government.
Recent examples: Biden's billions for unbuilt mailtrucks, Biden's billions for charging stations that barely materialized. this is just tip of the iceberg..Biden just pardoned a women who defrauded the government for millions... and used her windfall to buy expensive horses. and on and on.
Plus!
"The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently announced that the 2024 fiscal-year federal budget deficit — the amount the government spent over and above what it received in total revenue — was $1.8 trillion. That makes the Biden-Harris administration by far the biggest deficit spenders in modern history. Worse yet, Biden-Harris also wasted more money than any other administration, roughly $1 trillion, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
but but - Moore used a BS propaganda shot yelling thru a bullhorn... in an ocean bay!
In all seriousness - Cuba is a backward hell-hole where its citizens are kept poor while the Castro family live large. (sort of like Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden)
Most here have taken off on this by discussing the health care industry. I am more interested in what I see as Moore's actual motive for writing this screed. As in this from him: "Yes, I condemn murder, and that’s why I condemn America’s broken, vile, rapacious, bloodthirsty, unethical, immoral health care industry . . ." In other words, his interest is in protecting his right to be outraged and pure, "I condemn, I condemn, etc., and I am pure and you are pure evil." As near as I can tell, he has no other real motive here. In the face od this heinous murder and so many on his side of the spectrum excusing it, he feels a need to shore up his moral superiority.
Still have receipts of two years of speech therapy bills, prescribed by pediatrician due to speech delay and autism diagnosis, denied by United Healthcare. Policy language included coverage for in-network speech therapy, so not a coverage issue. However, there wasn't a single United Healthcare-authorized speech therapist in Chicagoland area. 6 million people in Chicago tri-county area, and not one speech therapy in UH network. We were young parents; this was a significant chunk of household spending.
Meant authorized "speech therapy provider" in UH PPO network in Chicago area. Spent lots of time calling UH customer service, to no avail.
Obamacare has given us so much.
Suddenly everyone here sounds like Mitt Romney, defending a corrupt system that truly benefits only a minority and routinely screws over people least able to defend themselves at the lowest moment of their life.
Every leftist-Democrat Soviet Idea - is meant to fail. It helps the larger goal as we nudge closer to "Single Payer!" Government controlled Cuba-Care.
The best way to solve our healthcare problems is to get the government OUT of it all.
Abortive ideation. Let me guessed, Moore subscribes to the Pro-Choice religion. The problem is in government monopolies in monopolistic practices that are first-order forcings of progressive prices and availability. The same problem that exists in education, energy, etc. American Civil Liberties Unburdened
Catastrophic Anthropogenic Immigration Reform, too. Levine's Dreams of Herr Mengele, etc.
Systemic Diversity (e.g. racism, sexism, ageism, classicism).
United Healthcare is affiliated with AARP is affiliated with DNC operating under the Obamacares umbrella adjacent to Planned Parenthood to relieve "burdens" for social, clinical, criminal, political, and climate progress.
All's fair in lust and abortion? Wicked.
Depends on who's counting and how they are counted. Certainly there are armies of people whose job is to fight with the insurance companies for reimbursement. One practice I work with has three people working on reimbursements for each and every doctor in the group. I could easily see them adding up to another half-million people whose services would not be needed in a single payer regime to Michael Moore's liking.
Just a note: ObamaCare locked it in that insurance companies would pay out 85% of what they take in, and keep the rest.
So if they deny your claim, it's because they're giving the limited pool of money to someone with a better claim than you.
Which means what these people are really bitching about is that they themselves aren't paying more for their health insurance
My dad and I had to pay for my auntie's hip replacement, as the NHS in England refused to pay for it at all, saying she was too old and should get a wheelchair instead. "Going private" is still possible in the UK, and it was done quickly and for a quite reasonable price. I think we paid $15,000 about fifteen years ago, at a time when the charges would have been $50k or more here, and surely double that now.
Wow. This faux "neutrality" "above it all" "middle of the roader" "a pox on all your houses" schtick really requires you to pretzel yourself into knots at times, doesn't it? Not to worry. You appear to be just the fellow that thinks ge can pull it off....
....(do I even need to add the "spoiler"?)
Single payer is tax-payer. Rationing required and administered by your favorite government bureaucrats. Very popular among the healthy in the UK and Canada.
Also in healthcare, insurance must pay for transitioning anyone who thinks they need it, and also detransitioning when they change their mind. Because "medically necessary" at least in some states.
MD's are being replaced with DO's, NP's and PA's as primary care providers. Good enough for insurance!
Exactly! Canada Medicare, UK NHS are shitshows in their own special ways.
Until the USGov can get its own "house" in order w/r/t "waste, fraud, and abuse" (a/k/a "improper payments), I'd prefer doing business with private insurance providers who verify claims* BEFORE payment. Y'know..., to KEEP THE HEALTH CARE INDUSTRY HONEST.
* many denials by private insurers are due to provider mis-coding, plan lack of specific item coverage, etc. -- legitimate initial denials, that may often be reversed upon competent appeal. (...ask me how I know.)
Taking Medicare & Medicaid as representative of a federally-managed, single-payor system, this is what you get:
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-107487
You'd be employing a proven incompetent, and fiscally negligent, management system to run a national health care industry with little accountability and rampant self-dealing (See, Military-Industrial Complex, for example.) You really, REALLY want to do that?
Germany has an insurance based system. So does France.
I hear that the greedy kulaks are getting rich from the food they sell to everyone else, so I propose that they be eliminated in favor of collective government farms that are managed by average guys. What's the worst that could happen? It's not like 20 million people will starve next winter. Right?
Right?
Bingo. I sue health insurance companies for denied benefits and know more than most about the entire system. Everyone has some familiarity with care and payment, but what they know is a small fraction of the overall system. It's like the blind men describing the elephant by what parts they feel, and it's human nature to extrapolate one's own experience with how it it all works. There is a lot of ignorance about how we pay for health care, the insurer's role in reimbursement, and who is responsible for the absurd costs. Hint: same answer to Mick Jagger's question about "Who killed the Kennedys?" Fatties like Michael Moore stress the system. Best way to deal with it is to kill the monster we have, starting with getting employers out of the health insurance buying decision, eliminating the tax break for employee benefits, and reverting to some form of market system where providers have to actually charge amounts people can afford.
A lot of these systemic problems would vanish or become dramatically easier to solve if more Americans got to a healthier weight. While, I don't think RFK Jr. can do anything that will be a panacea, I am hopeful about him in his (likely) future role. I feel like he can be a leading figure in changing the American zeitgeist regarding nutrition and exercise. GLP-1s also feel like they could be a game changer too. While I personally am hesitant about chronically being on any prescription medication and feel like less invasive measures are preferable, I also don't want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If tens of millions of Americans got to a healthier weight over the next few years this would in aggregate save hundreds of billions of dollars in annual healthcare expenses.
I have been priviledged to have been in the health care systems of both Germany and the UK. You do not want what they have. Facilities are poor, staff disinterested and lethargic. The doctors I dealt with were not of the same standard we have here. Luckily, in both cases, the, unit staff was able to get me taken care of in military facilities, or airlifted home.
To add on, I think former Senator Bill Frist made a similar point on Bill Maher's show many years ago. Bill was trying to sell Bill on some sort of left wing 'fix' to the healthcare system, and Bill kept pointing out that American healthcare is so expensive because a lot of Americans are unwell.
The treatments were all FDA approved, not experimental. My mother had a similar experience for an expensive osteoporosis treatment. FDA approved but expensive. If you don’t think insurance companies are denying claims based on cost you are deluded.
so, just to Be Clear..
people are Actually saying that:
a) there are TOO MANY administrators and bureaucrats in "private" health care..
and that:
b) their "solution to "a" is MORE GOVERNMENT health care
??
do i have that Right? are people ACTUALLY SAYING, that they think that more government means LESS Admins and bureaucrats?
Mal-tactics reform can go too far. Someone I know well was flatlined by malpractice in NV. It was cumulative - a doctor pulled out their breathing tube a day earlier than ordered by their surgeon. The patient went into anaphylactic shock from either latex or iodine, both of which the patient was allergic to, as was marked prominently in their charts. As a result of the anaphylaxis, they quit breathing. They were still comatose, after a 12 hour back surgery, and in the ICU, where the rooms had breathing monitors. But they had been turned off by the nursing staff, because the ICU contained a lot of older people with apnea, and the nurses didn’t want to be bothered. It’s only when her heart stopped that this was detected. 5 minutes w/o O2 caused brain damage, and esp degradation of the central vision nerve, which meant significant loss of vision. Compounding this, whoever reintubated her, did it incompetently, permanently damaging her throat. That incompetence was been remarked on by two different specialists in the last year (which suggests recognition of guilt). Still cannot swallow properly. Not surprisingly, medical staff got very vague, in her charts, very quickly. Still don’t know who ordered the breathing tube removed, who removed it, or who turned off her breathing monitor.
Malpractice attorney informed her that while the care was substandard, it wasn’t bad enough to win a malpractice suit, after NV Malpractce Reform, but would have been before. Malpractice killed her (but they were able to paddle her heart back to life), but the malpractice wasn’t bad enough to even cover her loss of income. Luckily, her regular (private) healthcare insurance covered the extra 6 weeks in the hospital and several months of therapy to relearn how to swallow.
Michael Moore is a piece of shit. No one has to kill anyone NOW. And yet they do because they're broken, not because the system is broken, which it's not. It's inefficient.
Guess what? The socialist healthcare systems that Moore wants employ tons of people whose job it is to deny health care. In fact, they now employ people to push killing those people instead of paying for their health care because it's cheaper. I guess under Moore's logic, the victims of those so-called health care systems are completely justified in murdering the government officials who run them.
In general, you are allowed to go out of network and have that provider paid at the in-network rate if there are no in network providers available or capable of providing medically necessary care. You have to be up front with the provider, however, and get them to agree not to balance-bill you and accept only the deductible, co-pay and the in-network rate paid by UHC. Sounds like this already happened, so maybe of no benefit to you now, but next time . . .
Insurance is a regulated industry. Administrators, and staff, are a Gross Domestic Product in government, education, medical, non-profits, etc.
First, not that Rich. Not that rich either.
A very major source of the problem is the federal law, ERISA, that renders health insurers bulletproof from any meaningful liability if they kill someone with their coverage decisions. The law pre-empts state insurance law, such as a bad faith claim, and applies (with exceedingly limited exceptions) whenever you get your coverage through your employment. This is an old case but the result would be the same today. So would this result. Under ERISA, in the unlikely event you get a coverage determination overturned in court, all you recover is the benefits that should have been paid in the first place, and maybe something on account of your attorney fees; zero for things like wrongful death, emotional distress, certainly not punitive damages. And that goes for any bad behavior by the insurer, up to and including outright fraud. As I liked to say in my now defunct blawg, Problem is ERISA, if you get covered through your employment, you don't have insurance—you only think you do.
@Steven Wilson, https://www.14ymedio.com/ is published from Cuba, and Yoani Sanchez is one of the journalists doing actual journalism there. They may have some affiliation with Babalú Blog as I heard of 14yMedio from there some time ago.
@Steven Wilson, https://www.14ymedio.com/ is published from Cuba, and Yoani Sanchez is one of the journalists doing actual journalism there. They may have some affiliation with Babalú Blog as I heard of 14yMedio from there some time ago.
Health care begins with personal responsibility.
The issue is not insurance, but prices, and treatments.
The goal is to make medical care affordable, available, and a rare requirement.
All's fair in lust and abortion? Lose your religion.
1- we have the healthcare moores people wanted. We live under the rules of Obamacare. A democrat president house and senate could make any healthcare system they wanted. No republican votes necessary. This is what they voted for.
2- most people were satisfied with their healthcare before Obamacare. Perfect? Of course not. But satisfied. If you had a PPO you got what you needed promptly. If you had HMO you got what you needed but with some delay. Medicaid you got what you needed but with a bit more hassle and delay.
3- moores prescription of socialized medicine certainly does not improve on healthcare. The statistics from Canada are that it takes months to see a specialist, mo the more for an mri and mo the more for surgery. A process that takes a week or two with a plo, a few weeks for an HMO, and a month or two on Medicaid. If you’re worried about denial of care there’s a long list of standard medicines and treatments that either are not available or not available in a timely manner in Canada and Britain. His solution of socialized medicine would put everyone in a system like Medicaid.
Before I was in medical school heart attacks resulted in open heart surgery and bypass. A week in the icu. A week on the floor. More time in a Stepdown unit. Since then we have stents. You go in, have a small procedure and you’re home having dinner that evening. Truly miraculous. The ONLY reason we have such advances is the free market system enabling profits by drug and medical device companies. If you take away the profit and we see socialized medicine we will have access to all of the advances in medicine we paid for but investment dollars will go elsewhere and we will never have access to those miracles we could have had. It’s unfortunate that we pay more than Europe but if we adopted a Canadian or British system never again would we see meaningful advances in medical care. The era of miracles would be over.
@Earnest Prole: Nah. Obamacare converted a bad situation into a bad situation plus government waste and mandates. Nothing improved and it saved no money.
This law was (1) proposed and then rejected by Republicans as a bad idea, and (2) is the point where the Deep State took over from the elected officials. The cowards in DC didn't want to go on record so they voted on separate things and then "deemed it passed" with a procedural move. Pelosi. She's also the one who said you must pass the bill to find out what's in it. Procedural moves then dominated the rest of Obama's administation and 100% of Biden's too.
A bad legal origin leads to eventual rejection. See Roe v. Wade. Obamacare was merely a shell game for the same-old, same-old. Plus the loss of existing insurance plans and mandatory coverage for transgender surgery.
My wife has a condition called Amyloidosis. There is a relatively new drug out called Amvuttra (Vutrisian) that is designed to treat the neuropathic effects. The cost is $176,000 per dose. She is on Blue Cross Medicare Advantage and this drug was approved for payment with no questions and she has received this drug quarterly for the past five quarters.
100% agree. We likely do the same thing professionally. I may try to contact you through your blog.
I have a friend that investigates Medicaid fraud. Her stories about the depth and breadth of it are simply disheartening. Providers are incredibly imaginative. A recent example is of a woman who went for a follow-up after rhinoplasty. The doctor noticed a small cut on her wrist- a mosquito bite that she had scratched. He treated it with several thousand dollars' worth of lab-grown skin courtesy of Medicare (taxpayers). This is one reason that pre-approval of novel treatment is required, and the physicians that review the requests have a difficult task.
"In the United States, we have a whopping 1.4 million people employed with the job of DENYING HEALTH CARE, vs only 1 million doctors in the entire country!"
To be accurate, insurance companies don't deny health care- they deny payment for claims. It's doctors who deny providing health care without payment for their services.
Just sayin'.
More assassination porn from the far-left.
"I have a solution."
No, you don't. You are a hack with no real world experience other than writing scripts for documentaries that no one watches.
"Throw this entire system in the trash, dismantle this immoral business that profits off the lives of human beings and monetizes our deaths..."
From Wikipedia...
His documentary Bowling for Columbine, released in 2002, probes the culture of guns and violence in the United States, taking, as a starting point, the Columbine High School massacre of 1999. ... At the time of Columbine's release, it was the highest-grossing mainstream-released documentary.
With a budget of $4 million, Bowling for Columbine grossed $58,008,423 worldwide, including $21,576,018 in the United States.
"Monetizing deaths", you say?
That's funny how you people revert to your GOPe attitudes when populist opinions are delivered by non-trumparians.
Socialized medicine is a populist opinion? Good lord.
Why do wealthy people from around the world come to the US when they need the best care?
What nation's health care system gives us the model to emulate?
Stop whining and propose a better system.
"We need to replace this system with something sane, something caring and loving — something that keeps people alive...."
We're from the Gov't and we're here to help.
"Caring and loving", also see: FEMA, North Carolina, Trump signs.
We’re self-employed. Using the “marketplace” would eat up 25% of our pre-tax, pre-payroll tax (which is tax) income before covering anything other than a few bucks off visits and an annual mammogram until we cover the Moop, premiums, and the built-in rejections of coverage. The private insurance market is full of desperate humans selling their souls in boiler rooms. We had an Aetna subsidiary blatantly lie to us about coverage. Our only choice is them, Humana, or Blue Cross (some choice). They would allegedly only cost us 20% of the above. They swore repeatedly that pre-existing conditions were covered (at an hefty extra price) but I had to pay to get the contract to sign it (the others require this too). My husband, a health insurance attorney who defends both clients and companies, reads every word of the forms. Pre-existing conditions were not covered despite the additional fee we paid. There were many gawking disparities. I taped them telling me repeatedly that pre-existing was covered, how much the Moop and deductibles would be, etc. Not one thing they said was barely close to true in the paperwork.
Ten calls in, my husband asked them what we should do about pre-existing conditions. They actually told us to lie to our doctors and pretend they were all new symptoms. They actually used the word lie. The guy on the phone said doctors usually don’t notice this. That would be hilarious if it wasn’t nauseating and scary.
Ever since Obamacare, the insurance market has squeezed the self-employed until we are screaming, but this is the first year they’re just using pure lying. Obamacare is so “progressive” that anyone making over 50K a year or less than 200K can barely afford it, but if you make little or nothing, or don’t report income, you make out like a bandit. A woman I know, an “artist” by choice, pays $40 a month with a $400 deductible and $3000 Moop for a platinum plan. We cannot afford their worst plan at 30 times more for the premium, a $9,000 deductible, and $18500 Moop (for both of us). We don’t make 40 times more than she does. She could get a job. This isn’t progressive: it pays for the lazy and unproductive, then everyone else falls off a cliff.
I document everything, so the credit card company will get our money back, or we will easily sue. But we’re still astonished by the quantity and quality of lies I was fed. And I was a healthcare lobbyist. I’m thorough, but it gets much worse and harder to navigate every year.
Now they’re not answering our calls. I’ve been purchasing insurance since college. I have never experienced anything barely resembling this year. You must be one lucky guy, Mr. Mazo. I bet none of the “happy” people here are self-employed. You’re basically members of a big union that can negotiate for you. Remember that. We were happy when we could choose catastrophic and pay other costs out of pocket, at cash rates. Now they have taken that choice away from us.
And Jeff, we have a shortage of MDs because the AMA decides how many seats there are in medical schools, and they want to discourage competition, and 10% of our medical seats go to foreign nationals, not all of whom are as competent and not all of whom stay here, while the med schools make lots more money from them and we citizens subsidize the schools — yes, even the private ones.
People who hate private health insurance could always move to Canada, where the health care is free, as long as you realize "health care" means euthanasia.
Every scarce resource is rationed. Either by price, or availability. Takes your choice.
The Villages, Jaydub? I’ve spoken there more than once and live an elbow away from Sun City Center.
I’m sorry to say so, but the Medicare cohort is bankrupting us faster than the Medicaid cohort, and you pay a fraction of your pay into the system compared with us. In 1972, it was 2.9%, and 3/4 was paid by the employer. We self-employed are nearing 14%, and then we have to buy marketplace or virtually imaginary private insurance plans that are expensive scams. And I’ve been denied many times, with a serious illness, despite planning carefully in advance and seeking the cheapest alternatives for tests and treatments. We really can’t afford insurance anymore, so we are selling the house I just finished rebuilding with my own hands before I became too ill to use power tools or get on the roof.
So, enjoy your welfare benefits, which are what Medicare is. You never paid in what you will take from me, inflation and interest combined. I’ve put off so much medical care I crossed a line some time ago.
Keep bragging about your pals in the Villages. I refuse to ever speak there again. If we can’t have honest discussions about how you folks are the new welfare queens, I’m not abiding by my principle to talk about fiscal reality.
The problem is Obamacare excluded stable markets — non self-employed. They left the most vulnerable and decent workers - lower-income, private middle and even slightly higher high income - people to subsidize the underclass.
The goal was to eliminate small businesspeople. One by one, they are literally succeeding.
The American healthcare system you know is an anomaly for far, far too many people, Dave. We often agree. But I think I know a lot more about its flaws. They’re literally killing us. They’re killing me. Ironically, I spent most of my working life getting coverage legitimately for other people.
Now I’m lucky if I get out of bed.
Not in my experience. And I did everything right.
I agree, Bruce. I’ve had to purée my food for five years due to malpractice and am begging for a feeding tube.
And I didn’t sue. I don’t have the energy. My husband is working too hard to take on more. We did everything right all our lives and we lost everything anyway, especially me. I’d kill a bear for a Pastrami sandwich.
I’d also kill Michael Moore for a Pastrami sandwich. No, not really. Although in his case, one less pastrami sandwich might actually save his life.
Look, the system is broken. Nobody in either political Party cares. There are rational solutions.
But I’m the canary in the coal mine. I lost mine a long time ago, along with the rest of my productive life. Just stop being ideologues. There are ways to do this right. Nobody has the courage.
I’m afraid in all honesty I would kill Michael Moore for a sandwich. Depends on the sandwich.
Actually, John, these sound like steps in the right direction.
How do you feel about this? You certainly didn’t pay barely enough in payroll taxes to cover it, but your wife is receiving a miracle. Bless that.
What about those of us who pay and pay and don’t get basic care as we waste away?
I have, Ampersand. And I lobby on it. What do you do?
I pretty much agree.
Keith: somewhere between you and lawnerd lies an answer. I’d personally rather have the both of you find it than our elected officials.
You know, none of my comments have gone through for a few hours. Normal for this time of day. I’m basically an open-eyed pragmatist on healthcare: 30 years ago, we could buy everyone a Chevy Nova in the last three years of their life. Now we spend enough to keep every dying person alive at the price of a Pagani or Rolls Royce (I had to look that up, boy do their models have pretty names).
It’s not my fault. It’s not your fault. If your wife has just been saved by an expensive drug, bless you and her.
But. We upcoming Medicare recipients are from the generation of no pension, no permanent benefits or jobs, no way to save. I’m incredibly thrifty. We can’t afford the healthcare I need to survive much longer.
A lot of things are going to change. I assume people here like or dislike what I have to say but would find me a good neighbor (plus I know how to fix plumbing and love doing it for free).
I’ve had these conditions my whole life. I found doctors willing to use outpatient clinics for expensive tests, etc. But not everyone has that skill set. Not bragging. It’s always just been a necessity.
I love the TEA Party. We elected the populist most capable — and empathetic to make our system better. Frankly, first I’d kick every foreign student out of our medical schools. There are more than enough incredibly talented second and fourth generation immigrant kids to fill those spots.
I bet the demographics would barely budge. Still SE Asian and Asian kids would dominate, Jews too, but they would be taxpaying Americans.
Second, if we are to have a registry, the sliding scale is way, way off. I leave that to math minds.
Third, I am radical in that I had been paying cash rates for a lot of these past few years, out of necessity. Before Obamacare I did that too. I managed chronically illness and knew a surprise wouldn’t bankrupt us. Now that choice has been taken away, and we simply can’t afford the other ones.
I’m not like most of the commenters here. I can’t work anymore, but I worked hard when I could. My husband sees horrible things at his job as an insurance litigator: teenage girls strapped to a wheelchair for life screaming pejoratives because a bunch of illegals hit her head-on with a tow truck. A LOT more than people know is caused by illegal drivers, at least in Georgia.
Politicians from both parties protect the employers. Enjoying the chicken in your pot? Or, for the leftitarians who infest this state, just the pot?
Doctors are miserable and can’t treat their patients. Patients are dying. An elite class of government workers, plus a dwindling class of private workers have no such problems. Medicare workers increasingly paid in far, far less than they take out, so look it up and shut the hell up. I’m tired of you.
So what do we do? I see only two paths: we all become government employees, or we die from lack of care. There are good suggestions on this thread. I have zero confidence they will be heard.
That’s nonsense. Doctors spend more time filling out duplicative forms than examining patients.
Medicare recipients didn’t put a fraction into the system than they take out. OK, great, medical advances have extended their lifetimes.
But they should have the humility and face the reality that they’re living off our contributions and work with us on solutions.
I’m a pro-Trumpian populist. Glad others are catching up.
All we really need to do is eject illegals sucking off our system, eliminate fraud, and make non-productive healthy people raise their own damn kids and work for a living.
You can set that to folk music if you want.
Medicaid fraud kills honest people every day and is much more of the federal budget than virtually anyone realizes.
Exactly right, Barry.
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