"To understand healthcare in America, you have to think about bananas"

This is what I understand.

Health care is tied to your employment.

If you lose your job, you lose your health care.

Seems kinda dumb to me, but maybe I'm not understanding it correctly.

Anybody care to enlighten me?

I am 60 and I am doing all that I possibly can to stay healthy for 2 reasons. When you are healthy, you enjoy life more. But the main reason is that I just do not think Canada's health care system will be there for me when I will need it. I live in Calgary and in the last 10 years I have had 4 family doctors - 3 moved to BC and the last one retired. Canada's Health Care system is where Obamacare is leading the USA - more usage and longer wait times as a result.

The Obama health care is just a bunch of BS used to buy votes, the Democrats & Unions will have thier healthcare paid by other insurance buyers (called tax Credits)...It will take ~ 3 years for everyone to catch-on and the gates will be wide open...It is of significance that not paying the TAX is NOT an IRS criminal act. It’s a paper Jackass joke

Where will the money come from...the Congress will try to will steal more money from the SS/Medicare Trust (~1.5 trillion more) in a obscene betrayal of the decent elderly Americans that pre-paid...They can't now go back and opt out of the gangster scheme to recover thier funds

We all forget that OC (organized Crime) is still alive and well established in the System. They keep embarrassing records & "pictures"...Just ask Senator Leahy & SC Justice Roberts. Georgetown & Harvard are not Boy Scout Camps

Healthcare tied to employment is a pernicious leftover from WWII. Back then all kinds of price and wage controls were implemented for the wartime economy. Since wages were fixed, companies had to find other ways to attract and hold the scarcer workers, and benefits became one of the main tools. Healthcare was a big part of this, and when the war and the associated controls ended, unions fought tooth and nail to keep the benefits, especially healthcare.
As the video demonstrates, the resulting disconnect of consumers from cost has fatally distorted the market.
We need to get BOTH government AND employers out of the business of paying for healthcare.

It has been thoroughly demonstrated, both academically and empirically, that when you decouple buyers from sellers the result is an ever upward trend in price.

Posted by: Slap Shot at June 30, 2012 11:59 AM

That's quite an elaborate conspiracy theory.

SYF

The majority of health insurance is employer-based, similar to extended health care insurance in Canada but includes basic as well. I'm self employed and I buy high deductible, (relatively) low premium (catastrophic) insurance. The cartoon was mostly referring to large employer-based insurance which does encourage over-use. Many smaller businesses provide or assist with catastrophic coverage for employees, which is transportable upon loss of employment. Anyone with a pre-existing condition should stay in such a program regardless of what an employer offers.

Obamacare will destroy risk pools and, as deceitfully planned, actually encourage employers to drop health care coverage (paying the much cheaper fine) forcing their employees onto State or Federal pools essentially moving to single pay after collapsing all semblance of private insurance. Fortunately?, by the time it is fully implemented and running, presupposing an Obama win in November, the nation will be broke and or in revolutionary mode, forcing much of the economy including health care underground.

They forgot to mention that there is no practical difference between buying insurance one day before your house burns down, and one day after it burns down. The cost to the insurance company would be the same.

But it does point out the Ponzi scheme nature of insurance. They can't survive without new 'investors' to pay off the old 'investors'.

It's no wonder government wants to force people to buy insurance, it's already the mold of the socialist systems where payment is made for goods not received.

The protection racket is illegal for anyone else...

Caught the CNBC health care fraud documentary this morning - currently rampant to tune of some $80B per year and likely to increase with ObamaCare. Watch for yet another ineffective bureaucracy to thwart abuse. In my opinion ObamaCare is NewSpeak for yet another war - a war against illness. Given the record, their wars against terror, drugs, hunger, poverty, homelessness,etc. have all been abysmal failures.

Bureaucracies are created not to solve problems, but rather to exacerbate them, this ensuring employment for themselves and their minions.

@1:20 - stifle yourself.

The above video could have used Canada as a template. People openly state that people go to the hospital, in Canada, to die. The unsanitary use of earth (bacteria) friendly products to clean (I use the term,'cleaning' loosely as 'cleaning' has been reduced to swiping with filthy hunks of cloth and filthy dust mops on the floors). The bureaucratic paper shufflers in big offices suck up most of the $$ Canadians are forced to give to public health. The Doctors are servants to drug companies and nurses are so overworked that they stop caring or go crazy. Lots of whiners lay in hospital beds for years, some places, like the Yukon, put older people in the hospital because there is no space in nursing homes.

The video is not Rocket science, the creators needed only look to Canada for a predictable outcome. Sane people never go anywhere near a hospital or a Doctor unless they have has a catastrophe - eg broken leg or heart attack.

Well Jema54 a few months ago my wife woke up with some strange symptoms. We went to the local doctor's office unannounced and she was ushered into the exam room within minutes. A quick exam by the Dr and she was sent for an immediate MRI. The next day she was scheduled for a biopsy. Three weeks later a full diagnosis and plan of attack in hand she went to the cancer hospital. Like clockwork every appointment was complete, thorough and on time. Even the cost of some special medication she needed was cut in half since we don't have drug coverage. Last week I had need of the same doctor. Within minutes my unexpected call was answered and my medical issue was properly diagnosed even if not fully confirmed. One of the results I needed took a bit longer than I could stand so I went to the local hospital. I sat in the waiting room for a few hours (there were several that came in by ambulance that were in much greater danger than I) and I then received wonderful treatment from some very competent and caring medical professionals. My entire time in the hospital was about 6 hours and at the end of it I felt so much better I could have walked the two miles home. From my limited experience I would say that here in Alberta we have some wonderful care and some very competent people manning the system. Undoubtedly there is always room for improvement but then again they haven't fixed the pot hole in front of my house in over a year either.

I don't need a doctorate in medical economics or to have read the whole Obamacare act to know that when government gets involved in the the markets, you will pay more to get less

EXCELLENT lesson in economics. Thanks. The issue isn't so much government per se but 3rd party pay and moral hazard. But of course, government intervention, even before ObamaCare, reared its ugly head via tax incentivized employment-linked health 'insurance'.

Co-incindentally, I just read this excellent excerpt from a 1995 Murray Rothbard piece. It contains some interesting history on government intervention in health care going back to 1910.

Government Medical 'Insurance'

But the roots of the current medical crisis go back much further than the 1950s and medical insurance. Government intervention into medicine began much earlier, with a watershed in 1910 when the much-celebrated Flexner Report changed the face of American medicine.

Abraham Flexner, an unemployed former owner of a prep school in Kentucky, and sporting neither a medical degree nor any other advanced degree, was commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation to write a study of American medical education. Flexner's only qualification for this job was to be the brother of the powerful Dr. Simon Flexner, indeed a physician and head of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Flexner's report was virtually written in advance by high officials of the American Medical Association, and its advice was quickly taken by every state in the Union.

The result: every medical school and hospital was subjected to licensing by the state, which would turn the power to appoint licensing boards over to the state AMA. The state was supposed to, and did, put out of business all medical schools that were proprietary and profit-making, that admitted blacks and women, and that did not specialize in orthodox, "allopathic" medicine: particularly homeopaths, who were then a substantial part of the medical profession, and a respectable alternative to orthodox allopathy.

Chris at June 30, 2012 12:06 PM

That's an excellent little history lesson on the post-WWII origins of employment-linked health insurance. I knew this but frankly totally forgot about it. Thanks for the reminder!

Honestly, it seems that if you dig a bit, every goatfkuc will be found to rooted in some form of government intervention.

Just wait until someone finally demands that we buy life insurance to cover our burial expenses. . .

The last bastion is the life insurance companies. They have all the money that is backing the markets and the banks. Obama started to go after it until his puppet masters put the kibosh on it.

The Company You Keep loves Obama, btw. Why should that be true?

Joe, I'm happy that it worked out for you. About a year ago, my 7 yo son was having heart pains. It got so bad once we took him to emergency. We called our family doctor for an appointment and when we told him the symptoms, he told us to bring him in immediately. He then booked some tests that we got done right away and then booked him an appointment to a heart specialist. We then had to wait SIX MONTHS to see the specialist. This is a significant chunk of the life of a 7 yo. We finally saw the specialist, but the test results from the diagnostic tests six months earlier had been lost sometime in the interim.

Luckily after having these pains a few times over a few months, he hasn't ever experienced them since and the heart specialist gave him a clean bill of health. If it had been serious, he would have likely died waiting for his doctors appointment.

Joe at June 30, 2012 2:08 PM That is lovely for you. A friend of mine went into the hospital for a knee operation (she had shattered it 6 months before she finally got surgery to fix it), got staff infection while in the Vancouver Gen and died last month. There are many other people who have similar experiences in Canada/Cuba/China - but not in countries where hospitals compete for patients in a free and open marketplace. Hospital care, like disease, is not a human right.

Well Jema54 I am truly sorry to hear about your now dead friend. However I don't think you are justified in saying that people don't die from hospital induced disease and injury in only socialist countries. Yes the private system is generally superior to the public system but it is not bullet proof either. Some bean counter decides to save a penny or two by cutting cleaning staff or using the cheap soap ... it happens. I have a dead aunt formerly of Lodi California who could testify to that .... were she still alive.

Yes minuteman there are hitches and glitches in our medical system and I would dearly love to see the system become more like the one in France which I believe is the highest ranked in the world. All that being said I do believe and I am only speaking from an Albertan point of view, that our medical system is surprisingly robust and works better than many imagine. Is it perfect? Not by a long shot. Can it be improved? YES! Will fixing it and making it 'perfect' prevent everyone from ever getting sick in a hospital or ever having wait in a queue or ever have a health record lost or destroyed? NO! We bumbling human beings make mistakes and try to take short cuts and miss the obvious with alarming regularity. Its called being human. Its why we cherish our triumphs and morn our losses because such is the way of mankind. BTW Great to hear that your son is doing fine! Hold him close he is only with you for a little while.

syf:

I worked for Blue Cross in Michigan for a year a while back. Health insurance is not, for many companies, a drag on their expenses for their workers (their retirees is another story, cf GM). They get to expense the cost just like they do wages, and if they cut out health care, workers would demand pay raises to make up the difference.

But what I saw was managers who used health care as a weapon. Some people, after 20 years at Blue Cross, were entitled to 4 weeks vacation. One fellow in IT worked his schedule so that he had every Monday and Friday in July and August off - 3 days at work, and 4 days off at his cottage in northern Michigan. But a couple of ladies in the department I was in - run by a martinet spinster who lived for her job - who were also qualified for 4 weeks could only take two. Their boss wouldn't approve any additional time, since she only took two weeks a year herself. (To suggest the workload was so onerous they couldn't be spared is ludicrous.. these people accomplished very little.) I asked her why she didn't complain to management, and her response was frank: "If Dora gets mad at me, she'll find a reason to fire me, and I'll lose my health care. I'm divorced with three kids; no way I'd find a job with the benefits I have here". Dora was aware of this, and used it to get people to work unpaid (and unneeded) overtime, etc., as well as denying benefits they were entitled to.

Across the US, this is a common refrain - "I can't lose my job, I'd lose my health care", and if your wife had developed breast cancer while you were working, good luck finding a new policy.

Over the last decade, I've had a lot of jobs in Canada, and some were pretty crummy. I stuck it out as long as I could in some places, and then quit. (It's hard to find a better job when you have a 3 hour total commute and it's impossible to get time off for interviews, so eventually you have to quit to have the time to find something better.) As a diabetic, this is a luxury I couldn't have afforded in the US, yet my doctor was always available here.

I don't doubt Bambam's plan is a disaster hiding inside a schlemozzle, but I also don't doubt a lot of companies are fighting it because they know they're losing a tool they can use to control workers.

Oh, and for the video: what kind of nonsense is "people will use more health care to get their money's worth"?! I'm going to spend 2 hours of my time sitting in a doctor's office to get an unneeded checkup or test? Most guys I know stay as far away from their doctors as they can, and only go in to see them when they're really sick.

And the oil change analogy was ridiculous.. my insurance coverage includes my diabetic drugs and supplies, but that doesn't mean I can go and get unlimited quantities either. I'm limited to how often I can get my insulin, or how often I get new test strips or syringe tips. My vision and dental coverage have similar limits - a new pair every two years, only so much in bridges or other construction, etc. The idea that the insurance companies wouldn't place similar limits on other services is ludicrous.

Well Joe
So glad that health care is so good for you, as to the French system, so nice you think its the best in the world, I hope that you have the privilege some day to try to use it.
Meanwhile .... Happy trolling ....

This video is absolutely right. I'm self-employed. I buy health insurance - with a $5,400 annual deductible. When I'm under the deductible, I ask what things cost, because I pay for them out of my own pocket. Once I'm over the deductible, which I was late last year because I had to undergo some surgery, not only do I not care what things cost, but I try to get things done in the same calendar year because they won't cost me anything in the current year but probably would next year.

Where Canadian medical care is good is in large cities. I've sent 2 patients to Vancouver when they complained about the 1 year wait to see a cardiologist. Very simple plan; do a brisk walk around St. Pauls Hospital then walk into the ER with chest pain. Both were immediately admitted and had bypass surgery. The wait time at St. Pauls ER is about 15 minutes and one of the complaints doctors who go there to do additional ER training is that there are too many residents and too few patients.

Contrast that to the situation in the interior of BC where the hospital I work in has a 7-10 hour wait in ER and, to admit a patient, it's necessary to find another one already in hospital to discharge. Getting back into hands on medicine has been very nice but the main problem doctors face here is burnout. Unlike Vancouver, where visiting ones doctor appears to be a social event, people in the interior only come into hospitals when it's absolutely necessary and they generally have multi-organ failure when they show up. Patients who repeatedly tell me they haven't seen a doctor in 30 years are suddenly quiet when I ask them if they've held off on checking the oil level in their truck that long.

Makes it very interesting medicine and my medical skills are probably at their peak now. What we don't have in BC is anywhere close to an adequate medical transportation system to get sick people from the interior quickly to tertiary hospitals. In the US, often National Guard helicopters are used for patient transport (or at least they were where one of my medical school classmates was working).

Emergencies are well handled in the Canadian system but that's all. Non-emergency elective surgery requires waits of 1-3 years and it might have something to do with why Canadians have the highest level of opiate prescribing in the world. A centrally planned system isn't going to solve the problem of demented bed blockers who have no place to go. Their numbers are only going up as the population ages and we're far too good at fixing all of the non-neurologic diseases they get. The only way I can see a solution to this is some form of assisted living where robots watch these demented individuals; the current level of AI is significantly more intelligent than many of the demented people I deal with.

The solution in a socialist system is to add more administrators. The problem of attracting doctors to our hospital probably has 5 or more administrators working full time on this. So far they haven't been interested in my approach which would be a campaign to ask doctors if they wanted to spend the rest of their lives dealing with the non-problems of the worried well moonbats that inhabit doctors offices in that city or if they'd rather come to the interior and practice real medicine on really sick people; that is if their medical skills hadn't atrophied too much in the effete city environment. Can't understand why they didn't want to use my approach?

joe, I guaranfrickintee you were not at the Peter Lougheed in Calgary.

Doctors who work for the government, yeah, that's who I'm going to get to check me out...not.

God, what a piece of crap.

I agree with Archie Bunker...

Some bean counter decides to save a penny or two by cutting cleaning staff or using the cheap soap ... it happens. I have a dead aunt formerly of Lodi California who could testify to that

Sorry to hear about your aunt. If that private hospital screws up enough to invite lawsuits or public inquiry, what will happen? Doubtless, fewer people will go there, and they may even go out of business as they are a private company. Ever heard of a public hospital shut down over quality of care? Sheesh - people DIE after 10hr in the ER of that Winnipeg hospital, and it's business as usual. No competition, no accountability = no incentive to improve. QED.

Oh, and for the video: what kind of nonsense is "people will use more health care to get their money's worth"?!

Of course they will. Look at how many people flock to the doctor's office or - worse yet - the ER, for some minor malady or ache/pain/sniffle because "it's free"? Come ON. How many people with non-critical ailments would decline the trip to emerg with a mandatory $50 or even $25 fee to make it not "free"? Free = increased demand with no increased supply = shortages and rationing.

And the oil change analogy was ridiculous... No, it's bang-on. How much would your auto insurance cost if it covered oil changes? Look, if McDonalds made Big Macs free for a week, do you think there would be shortages? Of course: even people not big fans would be scarfing free burgers and deplenishing the supply. This is simple economics, and no different with healthcare.

The problem with the insurance model is that in addition to isolating people from direct payment, the states mandated that policies MUST include scores of non-critical issues or issues whose risk may be reduced with personal accountability: port wine stains for the former, AIDS and pregnancy for the latter, etc. So naturally prices must rise to cover these myriad conditions, vs what insurance was to cover originally: catastrophic health care issues, and patients would shop for best prices for anything non-catastrophic. Fixing that, allowing people to cross-state shop for policies, and tort reform would reduce premium costs. Obamacare will just saturate the system with more demand and no increase in supply; it will be exacerbated by the fact that most of the demand will require price controls to effect payment. This will cause more MDs to decline medicare or obamatax patients, and they'll fare worse than today, and everyone's premiums will have to rise in accordance with the whole socialist scheme.

Pity the 5 SCOTUS o-bots couldn't see that, or recognize the unconstitutionality of the ACA

mhb23re