OpenGov - Open Government Brainstorm

Comments (7)

1. 

   azaleahs

   Well ....... obviously some of us do. In a basically capitalist country like ours you can support who you want by giving them money. Those without money have to wait until there's an election.

   Then there are those who believe in the violent overthrow of the government. Of course they all think they'll be the ones in charge when its all over.

   3 years ago

   0

   0
2. 

   sallietoo

   "NO" to SOCIALIST NATIONAL HEALTH CARE!!!!!

   OBAMA NATIONAL HEALTH CARE WILL NOT COVER EVERY AMERICAN. FACT IS IT WILL COVER ILLEGALS AND THOSE THAT ARE NOT AMERICAN CITIZEN. FACT IS WE ALREADY COVER ILLEGALS AND THOSE WITHOUT HEALTH INSURANCE, THEY RECEIVE FREE HEALTH CARE AT OUR LOCAL HOSPITAL EMERGENCY ROOMS AT THE TAXPAYERS EXPENSE. FACT IS WE WILL BE TAXED ON OUR HEALTH INSURANCE BENEFITS WE ARE FORTUNATE TO HAVE. FACT IS OUR EMPLOYERS WILL BE TAXED AND WILL BE THREATENED TO TELL THE GOVERNMENT WHO IS NOT COVERED BY HEALTH INSURANCE OR BE FINED. FACT IS OUR EMPLOYERS WHO PROVIDE HEALTH INSURANCE BENEFITS WILL DROP EMPLOYEE HEALTH BENEFIT LIKE A HOT POTATO TO SAVE MONEY, WHICH WILL FORCE US TO BE ON THE GOVERNMENT RAN SOCIALIST HEALTH CARE PLAN - NO MORE CHOICE, NO MORE FREEDOM, NO MORE 2ND OPINION, NO MORE QUALITY HEALTH CARE. azaleahs is that really what you want???

   3 years ago

   0

   0
3. 

   azaleahs

   I guess so. Its sort of hard to understand what you write when its all capitals though.

   What I want is to be able to get health care for me, my friends and my family without breaking the bank.

   I don't care about the big words (or the capitals).

   Now, granted, I think the solution is to take the insurance companies out of the equation, something that certainly wont happen because this is a capitalist country. The guy with the most money to spend on advertising and getting his message out wins the election.

   The insurance companies and other interested parties will be the ones who determine what kind of health care we receive. The politicians will be blamed or will take credit depending on what they wanted or how they are perceived but the determining factor will be money.

   Those people who think otherwise are wrong. It may not always be easy to "follow the money" but money is the only determining factor in a country that sees anything else other than capitalism as being a loss of freedom.

   In the United States you are only free if you have the money to pay for it. If you have no money you have no freedom from hunger, no health care unless there's a "socialist program" available, you probably have the freedom to live in the streets or the freedom to be a vagrant, but you certainly wont have the freedom to get a job unless another "socialist program" helps by giving you a place to stay, clean clothes to wear, an official mailing address to declare on your employment application. You also wont have the freedom to travel to other locations seeking a job that will support your family. In our country as long as you have money your free and if you don't you aren't.

   3 years ago

   0

   0
4. 

   hairlip

   Don't know which way to vote.........

   Looks promising from the author's comments....

   But.. on the other hand, I'm not so sure about the Left leaning AARP making these phone calls endorsing the Messiah's health program.

   Bren. Regarding the vote, Which is which??

   Personally, I don't think we do not need Uncle Sam meddling into our personal lives until they get the likes of the Veterans Hospitals and Veterans Health Care taken care of. That, in itself is a total disaster.

   Try to find a Veteran who has received the benefits that he has been promised..... they are few and far between. And, people want the Government to run a similar program?????

   3 years ago

   0

   0
5. 

   Juzjon

   No more big brother government intervention. Enough is enough. I vote NO !!!

   3 years ago

   0

   0
6. 

   creeksneakers2

   I'm sorry, but I think you made a math error. 82% of 264.4 million is 216.8 million. So if we subtract the correct numbers, we get 47.6 million unisured, which is in line with most public estimates.

   3 years ago

   0

   0
7. 

   apugh96

   Date: 6/18/2009

   Ron Paul: I’d like to talk a little bit about the medical care crisis that we’re facing. Sometimes I’d like to think that it may be a government crisis rather than a medical care crisis, but we do have a mess in medicine and there is a lot of talk about what’s going on, not only throughout the country but here in Washington.

   But first I’d like to describe how I see the problem developing and what has happened. A lot of people are arguing that free markets can’t deliver medical care, which I disagree with and the problems that we face today are not a consequence of the marketplace. They’re a consequence, they’re a failure of the government.

   This idea of managed care was introduced during the Nixon years and this was a program designed to force people into medical care and provide PPO and HMOs and tax credits for certain groups and not any others. So we have been enduring managed care over these last 35 to 40 years and what has developed from this has been corporate medicine.

   The individuals who were best able to gather up the money passed out by the government and were mandated by the government, they became the chief lobbyists. So the drug companies are lined up, the health insurance companies lined up, the health management companies lined and it turned out that they started running the show and actually made it less efficient.

   So there is too much management and at the same time, too much of the money was going into these corporations, which was sort of the middlemen and the patients have suffered, the doctors have become unhappy.

   The main complaint I hear is that medical care costs too much. “I can’t afford my insurance”, and there’s a lot of truth to this, but one thing that most people don’t talk about is why are the costs high? Why are the costs of medical care higher than say the cost of bread or computers or television sets or whatever?

   The truth is it’s a reaction to government. It’s a reaction to our monetary policy. We do inflate the money supply. We do have price inflation. But prices go up, more so in certain areas that the government gets involved in than in others, so the government is more involved in education and medical care, so you have more inflation there and that is part of the problem.

   Over these years, there has been less competition in medicine and that has been gradual over a hundred years or so where people couldn’t enter the medical field without getting all kinds of licenses and protecting special groups. But if there’s more competition and there’s less insurance, actually costs go down.

   If you look at some of the procedures provided by the plastic surgeons or the eye surgeons who do keratotomies and they’re not under coverage of the insurance company, those prices actually go down.

   We don’t have insurance for medical care. We have distorted that word. Insurance is supposed to measure risk and you’re supposed to buy that protection. So if you want medical insurance, you would be insuring against bad accidents or major surgeries or against cancer or something like that. But today, people expect prepaid services. They want every penny taken care of. They want the drugs paid for and then that invites abuse. When third parties pay the bills, doctors, labs, and hospital, and everybody else, all of a sudden, they charge the most, not the least.

   I experienced medicine before they had managed care and patients were always charged the least and nobody went without medical care. The churches and volunteer hospitals and other groups took care of the people, but now, everybody has to have this so-called insurance, which doesn’t do a whole lot more than boost prices and then cause shortages and then there’s a demand for what? For more government and that’s where we are today.

   So we’re going from corporate medicine, which was deeply flawed and not working and now, the proposal here is to go to government medicine, which is socialized medicine. This has not really worked well any place else. People, yeah, they surely get care if they want to wait and watch, but today, even and in spite of our shortcomings, people come to this country still for top medical care, but that would soon change if we want to equalize everything by leveling it and making sure that everybody gets poor medicine rather than extra medicine, extra and better medical care.

   But we could do better. What we could do is introduce the notion that patients do have rights. Anything that comes out of Washington here, and something will, what we ought to fight for is the fact that we have a choice. We shouldn’t be forced into a program. If the government starts a program, we ought to have the right to opt out of the program.

   We should be very generous with tax credits. Give tax credits for the entire amount of money you spend on medical care, so you can be independent. The concept of medical savings account is a good concept and we should promote that and encourage that and we should demand privacy.

   I mean, this is one of tools that the government agents always used and they’ve already set the program up. It’s been passed already where there would be essentially no medical privacy. So there’s a lot of things that could be done through the tax code, the tax credit and also protecting the individual’s privacy.

   Now, the one other thing that we could do, we could pass legislation that would actually help along these ideas with the problems that we have with malpractice suits. What we ought to do is talk about getting rid of the anti-trust laws against the doctors where they could negotiate with their patients and get the attorneys out of the ball game where you would agree on an arbitration board and get a tax credit for buying an insurance policy like that.

   So there are ways you can, through the market place, literally reduce this fear mongering and excessive costs that are involved in litigation against doctors because right now, believe me, if you get a bump on your head, you come to the emergency room because of the third-party payment, we’re fearful as doctors of missing something due to the attorneys. Believe me, you can’t walk out of the emergency room without a $10,000 or $15,000 bill and that is not the way it should be.

   There are alternatives. Now, I do want to say that the Campaign for Liberty did such an exceptional job when it came to HR 1207 at the grassroots’ level. So I suspect that the Campaign for Liberty, if they get behind some of this free market approach to medical care, they can do a tremendous job in changing the course here in Washington because right now, we are on a course towards socialized medicine and it doesn’t have to be that way.

   3 years ago

   0

   0