Thread: Last U.S. combat convoy has left Iraq

Originally Posted by Lonekommie

From the foreign observers perspective, Obama has delivered much needed reform to the Health sector, and the leading power of the world cannot call itself developed if it cannot care for its most underpriviligied, one has to argue that that is a role of a government, to take care of those who cannot take care of themselves.

My mom has ran the finances for public county hospitals for about 15 years now. People that can't pay for their hospital bills don't, but they still get healthcare. You're fed a line of news that ignores this fact. Private hospitals can turn anyone away unless they're dying. Public hospitals though are required to take in everyone. So the underprivileged do get health care now. What the poorer people do is they just use an emergency room as a doctor's office, and then when the bill gets sent to them, they just don't pay and there's no repercussions if they don't pay. What everyone else does is subsidize the underprivileged when they pay their own hospital bills because in addition to paying their own hospital bill they also have to pay for those that don't pay (which is really how the taxes to pay for federal healthcare are going to be when you think about it). Her hospitals she works at are non-profits, in order to qualify for being a non-profit (which has tax advantages), they are required to give so much free healthcare, which is how all the people getting healthcare but not paying for it gets counted as.

The federal government also cannot afford even what they give now. My mom told me a couple years ago that the government only gives hospitals 12 cents for every dollar of Medicare (senior citizen federal healthcare) earmarked in a hospital bill. The rest is written off by the hospital as bad debt. So how can we increase the healthcare on offer when the government can't afford what it's giving now?

It really comes down to high insurance premiums, and the insurance companies are making money as the middleman, and probably they are taking too much while not giving full care in most cases, but what's the difference between insurance companies getting rich off people's healthcare and the government bureaucracy getting rich off people's healthcare? It's effectively trading one middleman for another. (Please don't say government workers are altruistic and would not look at things in a profit motive, I've known enough of them personally to know that's not true, and you also talk about banks can't be trusted but there are government corporations like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that were just as much a part of that at wrong as the banks were by lowering their loan standards to increase mortgage volume).

It's my mom's job to understand things like what the recent healthcare legislation does for the hospital she works for, and she still does not know what effects it will have because the government hasn't told them yet.