Weirdly, you never hear conservatives complain that they will never see the face of the insurance apparatchik who spent two days searching for an excuse to decline chemotherapy payments. I guess that kind of bureaucrat is ok with them.
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WereBear
Will no one think of the children… Who don’t have insurance at all.
r€nato
Government oppression = bad
Corporate oppression = good
(which one do conservatives typically profit from?)
r€nato
…or, “I’m pretty sure it will never happen to me, so I don’t give a shit.”
geg6
But the insurance bureaucrat is a real working American, unlike those faceless gubmint bureaucrats. Because, as we all know, government has never created a job. So there!
Dennis-SGMM
Because a bureaucracy that depends on profits is way more better than a bureaucracy that depends on doing its job.
Alan
If there wasn’t a profit for the insurance company the creators would never have invented chemotherapy. The cancer patient should thank his or her lucky star the insurance company denied the payment.
Old Gringo
Little Dorrit, Chapter 10
The Circumlocution Office
Chapter 10
Containing the whole Science of Government
The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence,on the part of the Circumlocution Office.
This glorious establishment had been early in the field, when the one sublime principle involving the difficult art of governing a country, was first distinctly revealed to statesmen. It had been foremost to study that bright revelation and to carry its shining influence through the whole of the official proceedings. Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving–HOW NOT TO DO IT….
asiangrrlMN
Because, shut up! :That’s why!
Notorious P.A.T.
Excellent question Tim.
Bill E Pilgrim
It’s the same reason that Republicans can sit atop a bloated, mutli-gobzillion-dollar military-industrial inferiority complex and talk about how theirs is the party of “small government”.
It’s all pretty much Calvin Ball.
Notorious P.A.T.
@asiangrrlMN:
Hehe, so true.
Cain
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Win.
cain
MikeJ
On The News Quiz a few weeks ago, a panelist said something that stuck with me. When the government runs a function, inevitably someone is going to screw up something through incompetence and it will harm you. If you hand that same function to private industry, you will be harmed by design to maximize their profits.
El Cid
Not only do they not mind private bureaucrats (in the abstract), they love them.
GOVERNMENT bureaucrats would force you to wait for health care you really need.
PRIVATE bureaucrats are just there to keep the lazy parasites from using their health insurance to visit their doctor for every sniffle they have.
See?
Notorious P.A.T.
Corporations are required by law to maximize their profits. Not their services to consumers. Of course, people who aspire to run corporations generally don’t give a frak about doing good by people anyway.
asiangrrlMN
@MikeJ: I like this. I agree with this. I am asiangrrl, and I approve this message.
@Notorious P.A.T.: Doesn’t it all boil down to this? “I can shout more loudly than you, and I can call you names, too. Also.” This was to your first post. Yes, they are supposed to maximize their profits, but that can be done with humanity–oh, why do I bother to be at all idealistic?
Seebach
I’m curious. What incentive does the government bureaucrat have to make your health decisions for you? Clearly, the corporate bureaucrat will want to deny as many claims for expensive treatment as possible, and perhaps suggest less expensive treatments where treatment is unavoidable.
There would be similar pressure among government bureaucrats, I’m sure, but what other, more sinister motivations would they have that makes them worse than the corporate bureaucrats?
El Cid
@Seebach:
Because government bureaucrats involved with delivering important services to ordinary people are inherently evil and seeking to subjugate everyone to their will via dependency and manipulation.
On the other hand, government bureaucrats involved with police and security functions need the authority to be able to search anyone’s belongings and surveil their communications without warrants and to lock anyone up without charges and detaining them forever without challenge if they feel like it.
Alan
@Seebach: One would hope treatment would be decided by doctors not bureaucrats.
Seebach
Oh snap! You totally got me there, dude. My mind is blown.
It’s unfortunately going to be decided by bureaucrats one way or the other, unless only the wealthy deserve to see doctors, or doctors start working for subsistence wages.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Seebach:
It’s a very good question. I mean in the sense of trying to understand exactly what goes on in the mind of those who are so terrified of it.
I think that there’s a whole house of cards full of assumptions about how government bureaucracy just takes it out of people’s hands with no recourse, whereas with private enterprise you can always just march in and complain to the manager, or sue! by god.
The illusion being that private business is imminently accountable to consumers while government programs are immune, and can just go on their faceless heartless way giving no thought to those at the receiving end.
While there are no doubt elements of truth historically in both of these, the former assumption especially, about corporations being more liable to be held accountable to the public, is clearly about 98% illusion.
gbear
I’ve been away from my computer all evening so I don’t know if anyone’s posted this yet.
Ronald Reagan, Jr. is tired of Limbaugh making fun of Nancy Pelosi’s looks:
MikeJ
It is a fair question to ask I think. Part of it boils down to the absurd notion of running the government like a business that Americans seem to fall for every ten years or so. All employers need to make sure employees are rewarded for doing a good job, but public employers need to have a more rational basis for measuring what a good job is than simply “profit”. And of course when you start keeping track of who did what and how well they did it that requires more paperwork and bureaucracies grow larger and start sounding sillier.
PeakVT
Capitalism is good, therefore anything done in the name of capitalism is good.
/wingnut logic
Alan
@Seebach: You read to much behind my comment. There was no intended “snap.”
gbear
Back on topic.
I used to go to a weekly coffee group where one of the guys was a beancounter for a local major hospital, and he’d occasionally describe his glee at denying payments to some undeserving loser. I got to the point where I’d just greet him by asking how many old ladies he’d screwed this week and he’d just laugh. I quit going to that coffee when one of the other guys spent the evening warning us that Obama was too dangerous a candidate to run for president. And this was a gay coffee group.
Old Gringo
And yet, Social Security’s annual administative overhead cost is still just about 1% of its total expenditure, since its inception, with almost no fraud or waste.
Seebach
I apologize. I’ve had this happen before. When you’re arguing with someone on another thread, any comment starts sounding like an attack, even when it is not.
gbear
@MikeJ: MikeJ wins the internets.
Steeplejack
I do not see a thread that meets my commenting needs tonight. Unlike Brick Oven Bill, I will not insert some non sequitur remark and interrupt the narrative flow. I will graciously retire from the field, make myself another drink and finish Men at Arms, in anticipation of picking up Feet of Clay tomorrow. That is all.
P.S. I did not know that Pamela Anderson has an enormous donniker with a kink in the end. Apparently rock stars find this attractive? Maybe I should be glad I am not a rock star.
gbear
@Steeplejack:
Well have a purposeful evening, SJ. The rest of us will wreak holy hell on this thread in your absence.
Ninerdave
Challenge….give me one reason that insurance companies should exist. From all I can tell, the only reason for their existence is to suck money out of the health care system.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Steeplejack:
Your comment like totally broke the thread’s train of thought, man.
PS I’m kidding.
PPS Rock stars or anyone else finding any aspect of her attractive has always puzzled me, even before that revelation. I can just about scroll away fast enough to still keep coming to this blog. But it’s teetering on a knife edge.
asiangrrlMN
@gbear: There’s such a thing as gay coffee? Cool. As for Ronald Reagan Jr., that apple fell faaaaaar from the tree.
@Steeplejack: Don’t do that! Just make a comment that somehow is tangentially on-topic or, worse comes to worse, tag an OT on it. I got Guards Guards! in the mail today. I am reluctant to start it.
Ninerdave, insurance companies exist for the same reasons that some banks are too big to fail. Because, shut up! That’s why. Seriously, though, I think they are so corrupt now, they need to be demolished or restructured.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Ninerdave:
To give Snoopy work in his retirement?
Old Gringo
Are you aware that insurance salesman were among the lowest of the low at one time in America and the signs on front doors that used read “No Solicitors No Peddlers No Agents” referred to them as well?
Then this man had a dream…
It has turned into a nightmare. I know for a fact he would not approve and is spinning in his grave.
Wile E. Quixote
Whenever a conservative makes that argument in my presence I tell them to shut the fuck up. Then I tell them about my stay at Harborview Medical Center in 2003. I had insurance, I could afford to pay $400 a month for COBRA coverage after I left my job and did so. So in January of 2003 I buy a motorcycle, two days later I get hit by a truck and I’m off to Harborview, the regional level one trauma center, i.e, the place all of the other hospitals send you when you’re really broken.
So I’m broken and fucked up, not as broken and fucked up as some of the other people who end up at Harborview, but still pretty fucked up. My left leg is broken in four places, two fractures of the tibia and two of the fibula, and one fracture of each bone is compound. If you like you can view the X-rays. I’ve got insurance so that’s one less thing to worry about I tell myself as I embark upon an eight week journey that ended up with me walking out of the hospital on crutches minus my left leg below the knee.
The docs at Harborview were wonderful, the nurses fantastic, they did everything they could to save my leg but it didn’t work out. When I had been at Harborview for about four weeks, a few days before I found out that despite several major and incredibly painful surgeries I was going to lose my leg I got a phone call from my insurance company, CIGNA. The CIGNA rep called the Harborview front desk and had them ring my room. When I got on the phone the CIGNA rep told me that based upon their review of my condition that my continued stay at Harborview was being denied.
Now, for some background, not only was I a few days away from having my leg amputated but I also had a white blood cell count of 32,000. A normal count is between 8 and 12 thousand. The 32,000 was because I was fighting off a variety of infections that were so interesting that the doctor who was in charge of the infectious disease team asked if he could bring students in to observe me. I actually had common mold growing on my leg because my immune system was fucked up from being hammered by antibiotics and because I was low on blood. On that low on blood thing. My hematocrit was 16, a normal value for a male my age (37 at the time) was 40. I was, as we used to say in the Army, a hurting unit.
So I’m lying in bed and I’m wondering just what it is I’m supposed to do. I’m so weak that getting out of bed to go to the bathroom is a major chore that leaves me winded and dizzy. I can’t just go home but I don’t even know where to begin to fight this. I ring for a nurse and tell her about the phone call and she tells me that Harborview is not going to send me home one minute before I’m ready to go and that she’ll get one of the social workers to help me. The social worker (the social workers were another group of wonderful people at Harborview) comes to my room to hear my story and tells me not to worry, that this sort of thing happens all the time and that I’m not going to be kicked out of the hospital or hammered with enormous bills.
So the social worker faxes some paperwork off to CIGNA basically saying “Look dickheads, we’re not keeping this guy here because of his looks or personality or because we’re a bunch of DFHs who want to drain your company dry. We’re keeping him here because he’s broken and sick, so pull your heads out of your asses.” My sister in law is a billing specialist at another local hospital. She spends her days calling insurance companies and beating them up for the money that they owe her hospital. When I told her about this she wasn’t at all surprised and said that she saw it all the time as well and made some calls of her own on my behalf and I didn’t have to take any more shit off of CIGNA, but then again I shouldn’t have had to in the first place.
So when conservatives start blathering about anonymous government officials denying care I tell them this story and then get into their faces and ask them how to explain to me how being denied care and fucked over by a faceless government bureaucrat is any different or any worse than being denied care and fucked over by a faceless corporate bureaucrat who was never any closer than 2,500 miles to me during my stay at Harborview.
I had to go back into the hospital in 2004 for more surgery and ended up contracting MRSA while I was there. I could have lost my knee, which would have been horrible but I beat the MRSA and spent another six months on crutches before I could walk again. I did months of rehab which was incredibly sobering because I was the least broken patient in the Harborview rehab gym. The staff at Harborview were wonderful, they gave me back my life. I walk so well that if you saw me wearing long pants you’d never know about my prosthesis. I ride my bicycle and completed the Seattle to Portland ride in 2006 and 2008. I’ve made my peace with what happened to me six years ago. But I’m still angry about the way CIGNA treated me and the way that other amputees I’ve met have been treated my their insurance companies. When I hear conservatives start this blather it’s all I can do to not thoroughly kick their asses in such a way that they not only get to spend eight weeks in a trauma center and then undergo months of rehab and a lifetime of pain but that they also have the shame of having had their asses kicked by a one-legged man.
geg6
Ninerdave: Duh. You answered your own question. And that’s the beauty of the free market!
AhabTRuler
Question: how do you separate the gay beans from the hetero beans?
Bill E Pilgrim
@asiangrrlMN:
LogCabin brand. In that case it sounds like anyway.
skippy
when i hear the repubbbs cry “america doesn’t need a bureaucrat between you and your doctor,” i always think, “well, does that go for hmo bureaucrats?”
side note: guy dies and goes to heaven, st. peter meets him @ the gate.
“what did you do in your earthly life?” st. peter asks him.
“i invented the concept of hmo’s” the guy says.
“well, come right in,” st. peter says. “but you can only stay for three days.”
Steeplejack
@asiangrrlMN:
Okay, I was really just leaving, but I paused to look back in a broody, rain-soaked kind of way and saw your comment.
Just grit your teeth and bull through the first 20-30 pages of Guards! Guards!. It does start out like something from the slush pile of rejected Monty Python skits, but it gets better quickly as the plot gets going. Much better. And it’s not even that the beginning is bad. It just doesn’t measure up to all the hype from the Pratchett-o-philes here. But I am quite happy to have gotten into the series. Perseverance will be rewarded.
P.S. Oh, yeah–OT, OT, OT!
asiangrrlMN
@Bill E Pilgrim: I like. LogCabin brand.
@AhabTRuler: I’m desperately trying to find a joke here, but I am failing.
Bill E Pilgrim
@skippy:
There’s no way he’d get in that quick without paperwork.
gbear
For me, gay coffee tended to have lots of whipped cream on it, but skip the swirl on top. I can’t drink coffee ‘straight’ to save my life. Never got the taste for it.
gbear
Gay beans are much wittier when they’re roasting.
asiangrrlMN
@Steeplejack: Nice video. This one, too.
Ok, ok, I will give Guards Guards an honest shot. If I don’t like it, then I’m fake not talking to you in the rain for the next few days.
Bill E Pilgrim
@AhabTRuler:
Two words: “French Roast”
I was once in a Starbucks back in the US on a visit getting my mother some French Roast coffee and they couldn’t find it at first, so I suggested that they look under “Freedom Roast”.
One of them got it. The other looked extremely puzzled.
YellowJournalism
I don’t know what blog I was on, but one of the commenters there posted something as equally inane: “Would you rather your body be property of the state like Obama wants or would you rather remain an individual?”
How do you respond to something so stupid?
AhabTRuler
@YellowJournalism: .357 hydrashock, for the good of the gene pool
Wile E. Quixote
@asiangrrlMN
Oh yeah, they’ve had gay coffee for years in the larger and more tolerant markets. I mean when I go to Starbucks every day I tell the barista that I want a quad shot venti mocha with no whip cream (it’s good for washing down my amphetamine based ADHD meds) and then they ask me “gay or straight?” Most of the time I go with straight, but hey, sometimes I’ve been listening to showtunes and feeling fabulous and figure “what the hell, take a walk on the wild side.” If I’m in a metrosexual mood I go half gay, half straight.
As for Ronald Reagan Jr. it’s an interesting argument in the nature v. nurture debate as to how Ronald Reagan’s namesake and biological son by Nancy Reagan is a flaming liberal (although not, as Tony Kushner implied in Angels in America, a flaming homosexual) while his adopted son with Jane Wyman, Michael Reagan, is a flaming wingnut.
Old Gringo
@ Wile E. Quixote
Reagan was a Democrat, until, as he told it, the party left him.
AhabTRuler
If it’s adderall, there ain’t no “based” about it, just Amphetamine Salts HCL.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Wile E. Quixote:
Years ago Herb Caen in the SF Chronicle had an item I loved, about a San Francisco woman who went on vacation to France and asked for an extra-hot, low-foam, non-fat, decaf, soy milk cafe au lait, and the Parisian waiter finally replied “Madame, this a cafe, not a pharmacy”.
Mike G
Reagan was a Democrat, until, as he told it, the party left him.
If by “the party left him”, you mean, “he bitched about paying high taxes once he started earning gobs of money as a movie star”.
Steeplejack
@asiangrrlMN:
Juice Jones! Awesome. I haven’t heard–or even thought about–that song in years.
For some reason, God forgive me, it always makes me think of this one. And also one called something like “Drive My Mercedes, Boy,” which I can’t see to find.
Oh. OT. Also.
asiangrrlMN
@Steeplejack: I have never seen that before. Now, I cannot un-see it. I can’t stop watching, though. By the way, there is now an open thread.
P.S. Do you mean this video?
Old Gringo
@Mike G
Reagan was anything but a “true conservative” when it came to gun control in California. He signed The Mulford Act in 1967. All those Black Panthers running around with guns scared him, and David Horowitz, too.
asiangrrlMN
@Wile E. Quixote: I missed this earlier. That is an incredible story, and I am glad you made it through. The board wouldn’t be the same without you.
You’re damn right that you shouldn’t have had to fight like that–it’s great that you had the hospital and your sis-in-law on your side.
dlw
I work for a large blue insurance company in California. I’m a small cog in this machine. I really don’t see how a government bureaucracy could be any worse than this place.
Management’s only real rules are ‘cover your ass’ and ‘make the numbers look good’.
Every decision is made by committee so that any shit that comes down due to the decision made is spread out amongst a group of people.
In my 5 plus years here I have only met one person at supervisor level or higher that I would trust to walk my dog.
Steeplejack
@asiangrrlMN:
Damn, girl, you nailed it! I think I’m in love. But, but–you must have been about 12 or 13 back in those days.
Jess
@Wile E. Quixote:
Not to sound squishy, but thanks for sharing this. I’m glad you recovered. I’m still bitter about Aetna refusing to pony up for the resuscitation attempts when my step-father died of a heart attack. Bastards claimed it was “unnecessary treatment.” I hope we’re all doing what we can to put pressure on congress to pass some meaningful reform, i.e. a single payer system.
asiangrrlMN
@Jess: Wow. That’s really, really cold. I am so sorry you had to deal with that.
@Steeplejack: Um, that video was in 1990. I was nineteen then. I’m not that young. You?
Jess
Thanks, Asiangrrl. I think we all have a story like that by this point, or will have one soon. In my stepfather’s case, it wasn’t the money so much as it was the petty greediness and gross insensitivity. It’s that as much as anything that fills one up with the desire for revenge. I can’t wait till we’re in the position to tell these companies to DIAF–and no doubt they know it, making them all the more determined not to allow us any other option. Time to fight.
asiangrrlMN
@Jess: Damn right. It’s also why they are starting to acquiesce on certain points. They know if there is a government choice option, then the public will say, “Fuck you” to the private insurers.
Steeplejack
@asiangrrlMN:
I see the song was originally from ’88. I was thinking more like ’83-84. And you said recently you are 38, if I remember correctly, which puts you born in ’70-71. I was born in ’52.
But kudos to you for dredging that up. Ah, the memories . . . Now must go look for Paul Hardcastle’s “Rain Forest.”
And transfer to new open thread.
asiangrrlMN
@Steeplejack: Ohhhh, very nice. I haven’t heard this one before, either. Yeah, I was born in ’71. You were born in ’52? Cool. I like older people. You can still admire me in a broody way from the rain.
Comrade Luke
@Wile E. Quixote:
In a previous thread I said when Republicans start bullying we need to just punch them in the face. Your story is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. I’m glad you made out ok, though it sounds like you still might be recovering? Hope all is well.
BTW, did you happen to work for a large, multinational corporation that specializes in desktop software? I just left said company and pay roughly what you did for COBRA.
Weirdly, I was considering getting a motorcycle. I think you talked me out of it :)
John
Two years ago I was diagnosed with a 100% blocked right coronary artery. Via Blue Cross website, I made sure I had a surgeon and hospital that were in network and scheduled the bypass surgery for the following Monday morning at 7am. On Saturday afternoon in the mail came a letter saying BC was not going to treat the doctor and/or hospital as in network and I would have to pay much, much more for the surgery. I immediately tried to contact Blue Cross, but they have no one working from early Saturday till Monday morning (don’t remember if they open 9am eastern or pacific). I contacted my doctor and the hospital. They tried to find some way to sort out the problem, but eventually they just had to say it couldn’t be done till the company opened on Monday. BC just had no one available who had any authority to do anything till then.
I had to cancel the surgery and wait to hear back from the hospital on Monday. I get the call and they said BC said the reviewer/processor must have hit a wrong key and that the doctor and hospital were in network. My doctor was able to fit me in for surgery on Tuesday. But the Saturday/Sunday/Monday was sure nerve racking while trying to not get stressed about the problem and trigger a heart attack.
Blue Cross is a huge company and they can’t even come up with the money to make sure customers who are in very precarious situations have someone (even one person!) to help them on the weekend. Somehow I doubt the government could be worse than the insurance companies.
Comrade Kevin
@John:
It’s not a case of “can’t”, it’s a case of “won’t”.
Comrade Luke
I’m still flummoxed by the “give me one reason why insurance companies should exist” question.
I’ve never thought of that, and I don’t have a good answer.
Wile E. Quixote
@Comrade Luke
Thanks for your good wishes. It’s been six years and short of my left leg and right latissimus dorsi (it was removed for a muscle graft) growing back I’m as recovered as I’m going to be. I could even ride a motorcycle again if I wanted to but don’t because I’m afraid I’d freeze up in traffic and also because I don’t want to make my Mom and Stepmom cry (they cried enough). I have to say that if you’re going to lose a limb, the left leg below the knee is probably the easiest one to lose, and it’s not all downside, I mean the parking is nothing short of fabulous (I love parking in handicapped spots with my bike rack on the back of my car. OK, I know, I’m a dick sometimes.) and losing a sock in the dryer no longer bums me out the way it used to. Plus my pirate costume got a lot of compliments at Halloween.
No, the job that I left was at a large multinational electronic retailer based in Seattle and named after a large South American river.
Don’t let what happened to me fuck it up for you, motorcycles are a lot of fun and I have friends who have ridden for years without having an accident. I hate, hate, hate, hate it when I tell someone what happens to me and they give me a big lecture on how dangerous motorcycles are. Whenever this happens I point out to them that it wasn’t the motorcycle that caused the problem, it was the truck driven by the 83 year old man that ran into me that caused the problem. I mean if you were sitting around the house eating brussels sprouts when a giant asteroid crashed into your house because Dick Cheney wasn’t in charge nobody would say “Oooohhh, brussels sprouts. The cruciferous vegetable of death!” Well I would, but that’s because I hate brussels sprouts and wouldn’t hesitate to use a horrible tragedy to make a cheap point at their expense, but you know what I mean.
someguy
Good point. Obviously they’re a stupid idea and it’s government’s responsibility to take care of you in case anything bad at all happens to you, like a car accident, flood, fire, tornado, hurricane, mudslide, theft, or a tree falling on your house.
Bring on SuperFEMA.
I don’t see how this could possibly go wrong.
Notorious P.A.T.
Huh? ! ? Which of your examples would not involve a government response (police, fire department, national guard, etc). Are there private companies that help people survive, say, a hurricane, like Emergency Inc?
Notorious P.A.T.
I could be wrong, but here goes: insurance companies exist to spread risk among a pool of people. This month you help pay for someone else’s disaster, next month everyone else helps pay for yours, etc. But if it’s a for-profit concern it includes only a tiny amount of people in its pool to decrease the chance it has to pay anything out at all. A government health plan would not care about profit so it would include everyone. And if anyone truly thinks conservative opposition to government health care springs from anything else whatsoever they are dreaming.
Health care, unlike your car or your house, is simply too expensive and too important to rely on private insurance.
bob h
While conservatives are less intelligent and less attractive than liberals, they do get sick and go bankrupt from medical bills at the same rate, I am sure. They are on the short end of the stick when dealing with the insurance companies over serious illness in the same way liberals are. Yet this is somehow acceptable to them. They have to suffer for the greater good of having a free enterprise healthcare system.
someguy
@ Notorious P.A.T.
Sorry, that was my attempt at sarcasm. My point was that I don’t feel like bailing out California, much less bailing out people who chose to live in Tornado Alley or a flood plain. Insurance exists for people in a given risk pool to pool risk and arbitrage each other’s losses.
Make no mistake about government health care – 75% of the costs of health care stem from fatal illnesses. That means end-of-life care along with the decision about when a terminal illness is occurring will be in government hands. There will be rationing, otherwise terminally ill people will wind up using most of the resources in the system. Instead of economic triage determining your level of care, medical triage will do so. Tough titties if they make a bad call on whether your cancer or brain injury would have been fatal. Instead of griping about having to get a lawyer to get chemo, we’ll be griping about having to get a lawyer to get compensatory damages for wrongful death. I really don’t care at this point – it’s just going to be a different class of people victimized by the system. I’m more comfortable with the government making that decision than some rapacious corporation but under no illusion that it will be better. It will be different, that’s all – a new system of FAIL for us to try now that we’re tired of the old system of FAIL. To paraphrase the wingers, the dying will always be with us.
@ bob h
You forgot ‘of less utility to society due to their institutionalization of selfishness as political and religious dogma’ but I’ll forgive you this once.
DecidedFenceSitter
Quixote – damn. Thank you.
And Some Guy – what makes you think that the insurance companies are in such a hurry to provide end of life treatment? That they don’t ration it out and hope to run out the clock? I’ve heard enough stories from various people with different insurance companies, seen enough whistles blown on the news, to feel that this is the case.
With the insurance company, I have little recourse, expensive and long winded lawsuit against a far more advantaged organization, and we all can’t be Rudy Baylor.
The Other Steve
My favorite was the nasal spray my allergist prescribed me. Now I don’t like to use it, and only do so when things are really bad maybe one week a year. But I like to have some around the house.
Anyway I go to fill the prescription. Insurance company kicks it back, they want some confirmation from the doctor that it is really needed. Apparently it costs $90 or something.
But here’s what pisses me off. I have an HSA! The insurance company doesn’t pay shit for my prescriptions, they all come out of my HSA money. It’s MY MONEY!
The Other Steve
@someguy:
You know what. Sometimes you just have to let people die. This narcissistic attitude that we don’t want anybody to die, please please do what you can have to keep them around because I don’t want to be lonely is a mental health issue that needs to be addressed.
Old Gringo
@Comrade Luke
Life, home, auto and boat insurance, to name just a few. If your house burns down or you ran some poor pedestrian over while texting someone, well let’s just say you’d be glad they existed. Health insurance, not so much.
Old Gringo
If that’s what they want, I’d agree. We have living wills for just that purpose, or defer to the spouse or parents or adult children in cases where a patient can’t tell you what they want. I don’t think any of us want to have that choice made for us by just anyone, let alone a corporate or gummint bureaucrat or bean counter.
someguy
@ The Other Steve
I’m not disapproving. I’m just nictitating a little bit of realism onto the unicorn and faerie dust of the health care-flavored Cheerios. Oh well, at least we will be able to still blame stupid Republicans for either obstructing the perfect solution, failing to contribute their estimable wisdom in a bipartisan manner (thus creating the disaster) or watering down whatever the Gutless Democrats (that would be a good name for the party if Michael “The Human Fumble” Steele really wanted one) happened to put forward.
Shell Goddamnit
“I hate, hate, hate, hate it when I tell someone what happens to me and they give me a big lecture on how dangerous motorcycles are. Whenever this happens I point out to them that it wasn’t the motorcycle that caused the problem, it was the truck driven by the 83 year old man that ran into me that caused the problem.”
Well, yes, but a person on a motorcycle is inherently more vulnerable, being not surrounded by a steel cage & all. You can minimize your risk, but there is risk. I’m willing to take that risk. Still. Every day, pretty much. But there it is.
Tangentially: Somewhere online there’s a horrific series of pictures of a horribly injured person chronicling their injuries & recovery from “a motorcycle accident.” The motorcycle accident turns out to have been being hit by a truck while standing next to the motorcycle on the side of the road. Why this is a motorcycle accident as opposed to a truck accident is left as an exercise for the reader, I guess…
Trucks are so dangerous! Stay away from them!!
Notorious P.A.T.
Well, technically, most of what we pay right now goes to insurance company drones who scurry about trying to figure out ways to not pay for treatment. If we eliminated that, then yes, most expenses would be for fatal illnesses (unless we reduced the number of those with preventive care that insurance companies don’t like to pay for). But what is the choice? I guess we could put the old and the sick on an ice floe and sail them out to sea.
Which brings us back to the theme of this thread: how is not seeing a doctor because of rationing by the government objectively worse than not seeing a doctor because you can’t afford health insurance?
You should know that every other modernized country in the world has government health care that works just fine.
omen
we need a vietnam wall that lists all the names of victims who died because their insurance carrier denied them treatment.
jcricket
Let’s be clear, not just fine, better than ours, by a mile, including the least funded system (Britain) and the best (Switzerland), which still costs less than 1/2 of what we spend overall. Better health outcomes, lower cost, covers everyone, higher satisfaction.
Even the system with the “lowest” (relative) satisfaction rates (Britain) still beats ours. And when people critical of the system in their country are asked if they’d rather it be replaced with an American-style system, 90%+ say “No way”.
Yes, no one has figured out the perfect mix of tax rates, rationing, doctor pay, patient health incentives, etc. to make the system perfect. But we could hardly design a worse system than ours if we tried. Oh wait, I forgot, the original “McCain care plan” would be worse (throw everyone in the individual health care market), as would any Libertarian “plan” (i.e. you become your own doctor/review board/medical comparison shopper, ???, perfect healthcare system).
The time has passed for debate with the idiots who oppose a public plan as an option. And whether we eventually end up with a single-payer system or something like France/Switzerland’s public/private mix, I’m sure that sensible people can figure out something that works. The key is “sensible people”, meaning “no Republicans”.
Interrobang
Wile E. Quixote: Your story is horrifying and really turned my stomach. I’m a big old flaming bleeding-heart pinko from Canada, and…urgh…
This whole “rationing” thing makes no sense to me. I live in Ontario and I’ve never been denied healthcare for anything. Never even had to pay for anything, despite various stupid right-wing governments “delisting” various (small) things, because we have this interesting phrase in the law here, which is “medically necessary.” If you have a sympathetic doctor (and most of them are) just about anything can be “medically necessary.” I had a mole taken off my back, for which I was perfectly prepared to pay the $50 clinic fee for a delisted service, but I wound up not having to pay because the doctor judged that the mole in question was a significant enough cancer risk (true, probably) to warrant the provincial health service paying for it instead.
Likewise, just to smash up another piece of FUD, no bureaucrat, government or otherwise, has ever told me which doctor(s) I can see; I’m perfectly free to see any general practitioner who’s taking patients (or any at a walk-in clinic or emergency care centre), and I get referred to specialists by my general practitioner. (I even know one person who, while he was in the hospital recovering from having an industrial fridge dropped on him, fired his doctor.)
Interestingly, GPs here do more than they do in the US. For example, despite having the required equipment that needs the requisite tune-ups, I’ve never seen a gynecologist; my GP takes care of the routine maintenance and stuff, and our GP at the time delivered my sister. Other than that Sis is a crazy woman, there’s nothing wrong with her. :) I bet that saves the province much buckage.
jcricket
@Wile E. Quixote: Wow, that was a terrible (but ultimately positive) story there – and I’m in your neck of the woods (live in Seattle). Although it’s not surprising. Do you remember the referendum that passed a few years back, that basically allowed for increased damages if it was clear the insurance company was denying treatment as a matter of course?
Insurance companies were all like, “that’s not necessary, blah blah blah” – but sure enough there were countless cases of them using “deny” as the standard response, and hoping that people didn’t fight them, just to increase their profits.
The “health insurance” model in this country is fundamentally, irretrievably, undeniably broken – and it needs to end. Every other OECD country has figured this out, we’re just too stubborn and stupid to admit we’re wrong.
Chris Johnson
I think part of the problem is the capacity for our corporate, wealthy medicine system to do its thing and come up with scenarios like, “Hey, we can make you live to 180 at a cost of just 6 billion dollars a month! Let’s ALL have some of that!”
There are common sense ways to resolve these things, but the trouble is they require adult thinking and we as Americans have to get back into the habit of that.
Part of the objection is, “If I need to be the lottery winner and get 6 billion dollars of health care to live to 180, the gummint would probably say no”. Yeah, ’cause your instinct tells you that’s unreasonable, and that not everybody could get that. People don’t want servicable and sane, they want a chance at ‘the greatest medical care in the world’.
Anne Elk (Miss)
@Wile E. Quixote:
I work in a doctor’s office. My dad is a 75+ year old amputee.
You rock, dude.
HyperIon
@Interrobang:
but they MAKE less.
the greedy docs in the US are obviously not going to concede gracefully.
it’s all about the $$ here. i don’t understand.
Shell Goddamnit
“we need a vietnam wall that lists everybody who died because their insurance co denied them care
Yes. This. This could be done. This would be effective & affecting.
chrome agnomen
Wile E. Quixote
@AhabTRuler
Interesting, when I tried posting the name of the med here it was automatically flagged as spam. It’s great stuff, 15mg of it will make me sit still in a way that not even 50mg of Oxycontin could.
@someguy
Damn straight! I’m sick and tired of the way the government has imposed a single payer police department, a single payer fire department and single payer Department of Defense on me. And what has it done? Do you know what the wait times are like when you call the police to complain because a bunch of damned kids won’t get off of your lawn? And when the Russians invade do you want your military response to be determined by some faceless bureaucrat in Washington, D.C.? I think we all saw how well that worked out in Red Dawn. Wolverines!
Wile E. Quixote
@AhabTRuler
Interesting, when I try posting the name of the med here it’s automatically flagged as spam. It’s the only thing I’ve ever taken that can make me sit still, I mean even jacked up on opiates I still bounce my leg up and down, just more slowly than I would otherwise, not on uppers though, they make me really calm. The stuff works but I still feel that taking it is kind of messed up.
@someguy
Damn straight! I’m sick and tired of the way the government has imposed a single payer police department, a single payer fire department and single payer Department of Defense on me. And what has it done? Do you know what the wait times are like when you call the police to complain because a bunch of damned kids won’t get off of your lawn? And when the Russians invade do you want your military response to be determined by some faceless bureaucrat in Washington, D.C.? I think we all saw how well that worked out in Red Dawn. Wolverines!
Wile E. Quixote
@omen
Yes, and we can build another wall, much smaller, much, much, much smaller that lists all of the names of insurance company claims representatives who lost their jobs for denying medically necessary treatment for their policy holders. Or maybe just use a couple of small, pink sticky notes.