Jonesy

This is incorrect. If doctors didn't require so much training, health-care would be more affordable. Do you mean currently it is the only method? And no, I don't support authoritarianism. These 'mandates' create a parent-child relationship between government and populace. Government is supposed to be a servant, not a parent.

W.M.DEEEZ

Ummmm....I think I want my doctor to be overtrained, if anything.


The cost of prescription drugs, and the "all too quick to prescribe them" doctors, are a large part of the problem.


Add to that the billions in payments from pharma/ins. lobbyists, the same amount in parties, and "conventions". There is a lot of fat that can be trimmed from these two industries.


Of course, our country's leaders wouldn't see the same return on their investments.

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Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got til it's gone

Jonesy

What exactly is this 'healthcare' anyway? I never go to the doctor. It costs 0 amount of dollars if you don't go. Does this healthcare thing include stuff like dentistry, orthodontics and optometry? Those guys are nuts... if you have insurance, they give you like the most expensive possible stuff just because. You don't even need the stuff, but if you have insurance, they'll take as much of it as possible.

poetrychic

first of all universal health insurance is not the same as universal health care, the candidates are promoting universal health insurance and calling it health care...the insurance industry has nothing to do with your care other than whether or not it's going to be paid for...

second of all, mandates = fines if you cannot nor do not participate in the system, see massachusetts, one year after they introduced mandates they are having all kinds of problems...people don't like to be forced to comply, especially with something they don't agree with or don't think is a good idea...


thirdly, on the surface it may appear those countries you listed have mandated insurance, but that's simply not the case...those countries provide health care to their citizens, not insurance to help pay for health care...our problem is we view the two as the same thing when they are vastly different, we also view health care as a commodity and those who can afford it get it and those who can't, well, tough luck...health care should not be a commodity, it is a necessity not something you should decide to skip if you can't afford it the way some people choose not to go out to dinner two or three nights a week and opt for once a month instead...

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RK77

EXACTLY!! Obamas plan however, does begin to address "Universal HealthCARE"! He proposes monitoring systems to TRY to insure that everyone gets a base CARE level.

ALSO--- NOTE that Hillary keeps talking about UNIVERSAL care (insurance) but not NATIONAL care.

There is a HUGE difference!

All cost savings proposed by MA (last I checked) have been devoured by the fact that the coverage has NOT been "universal".

As Obama tried to point out in one of the early debates----Hillary and Edwards proposal are not MANDATES that this NATION ascertain that everyone have coverage. It is a MANDATE that people buy coverage.



No other system is a citizen mandate! The systems are government mandates or insurance industry mandates and/or provider mandates!

The Beveridge Model mandates that the government provide access to providers and pay those providers. BUT in many instances it allows the government to decline to cover items used in care----dressings, canes, walkers, wheelchairs, nursing etc....


The Bismarck Model is a insurance industry mandate.

The National Insurance Model is a government mandate.

Medicare is not MANDATED----where in the WORLD did you get that idea??

Only part of medicare coverage is GIVEN to the patient. For Seniors they are automatically eligible for Medicare at age 65. They do not AUTOMATICALLY receive it and they can opt out (in which case pensions covering health may automatically cancel them).

Disabled have to wait two years from the declaration of disability to be eligible for medicare.

ONLY Part A of medicare is without cost to the patient. That covers ONLY 80% of hospitalizations (be mindful that this DOES NOT COVER physician fees while in the hospital) up to a certain number of hospital days (I believe that is 90 days). There is an annual deductable.

Part B of medicare covers physician reimbursements and other things like out patient lab and xray fees, home nursing, medical equipment etc.

It is NOT free----NOR IS IT MANDATED. The patient ops to pay it and that fee can be automatically deducted from the social security check.

It covers 80% of services, it has it's own deductable, and it costs almost $100.00 a month.

Medicare Part D plans are NOT free either. They cost $30-$100.00 per month. They are optional----NOT mandated!

Because Medicare plans leave a 20% GAP in coverage----there are plans called MEDIGAP plans that are purchased (or for VERY low income provided by Medicaid). These Medigap plans are optional and cost $90.00-$200.00 a month.

Full autoinsurance coverage is not "MANDATED" in every state either. States like Michigan are "no- fault states.

HOWEVER, just as auto insurance costs were DRIVEN UP by mandates without stiff regulation --- citizen mandates to purchase insurance have a rat's chance in hell of lowering the cost of health insurance! Forcing companies to administrate plans for the 30% of the population that does NOT require chronic medical intervention is NOT FREE!

Obama mandated coverage for children because there are programs available presently to cover virtually EVERY child in the USA at free or low cost.

If a parent does not feel that they can afford to cover their child they need to present to some part of the system so that their child can be entered into a program.

Hillary's plan to force people to pay her friends to manage their healthcare is tantamont to a plan to force you to help someone kill you!

She has NO specific indicators for cost controls----IN OTHER WORDS she set up no paradigm to determine what costs were reasonable and what costs were excessive.

Only a mentally defective fool who had no comprehension of a damn thing about any aspect of health care could possibly have been deluded into thinking that what Hillary was offering reflected anything but a malicious negative assumption about the citizens of this nation.

Any ass who cared about Health CARE and NOT about the insurance industry would have been asking themselves basic questions by now like---WHAT DO INSURANCE COMPANIES ADD TO THE CARE?? Do they take your temperature? Do they change a dressing? Do they perform a surgery??

If NOT---they WHY should they have access to your healthcare dollar??

What Obama sees is that a step wise effort has to be made to move the insurance industry out of the business of injuring peoples lives.

When Hillary talks about "cost controls" everything her plan indicates is an effort to suck more of the healthcare dollar away from the patient and into the hands of industry.

Obama's plan suggests that NO LONGER can anyone in healthcare continue to expect to be paid for bad care or NO care.

Hillary gave less than a damn! She rallied a bunch of retarded crazed "women" behind a lunatic idea--- whipped them up into a mass hysteria about words they cannot understand (although MANDATE should have been simple enough) and called herself doing something!

She copied Edwards plan (which he had copied from Romney) and ran with it. Typical!

PursuitOfHappinessParty

All UHC plans given by the candidates are pro-corporation. Mandating you buy insurance from a private company is corporatism crap plain and simple.

Until the whole medical system gets away from its billing nightmare and insurance is taken out of the equation, UHC will remain an expensive joke on the American people.

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RK77

Dental care is NOT covered under medicare although some of the PPO's and HMO's offer some very basic dental coverage in an effort to make the patient's feel they are getting something MORE.

Orthodontics are covered in medically indicated circumstances under the care of a licensed Oral surgeon but NOT for cosmetic purposes (which is a huge part of the business of an Orthodontist)

Ophthalmic care (recall Ophthalmologists are physicians Optomistrists are not) is covered under medicare. Optometry is focused on the production selling and fitting of eyeglasses. EYEGLASSES are the problematic issue. They are only covered in limited quantity.

RK77

All of the plans are shit as far as I am concerned, HOWEVER only Obama's plan is a plan designed to head us in the necessary direction and to CHANGE the way we THINK about healthcare.

Most NOTABLY he spends at least a BRIEF moment to address the issues of the care itself!

Universal Insurance Coverage is ALL that Hillary is pushing--and that ultimately does nothing for the 110,000 people who died from medical error last year.

julia

Yeah, well, that's as far as I bothered to read.

Pity you did not bother to look up the problems in Mass over mandates for health insurance.

Please look up what mandate means and maybe ppl will bother to post to you.

I thot most level-headed Hrc supporterts were at the acceptance stage like she is so good luck with that.

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The candidate does not speak for the campaign.

Insipid

Hillary's plan is nothing like the Massachusetts plan in that it calls for people to be able to buy into government sponsored health care as well and it calls for insurance premiums to be based upon your income. Again, the English system calls for private insurers and also allows people to purchase the government insurance. This helps to insure that private insurers MUST keep their costs low because government insurance runs at a much lower overhead.

Mandates are used succesfully all the time without people resenting it. Social security and medicare are both mandates. Do you propose that we only let the people who feel they need it pay into it? Young people who see their old age as being 1000 years away will opt out, some middle age people will opt in and the elderly will all pay in. It would go broke in days.

When you have mandates, coupled with cost control, government competition, and supplements for those who cannot afford it, you have a system that covers everyone and a lower cost to everyone. Again, without mandates we'll have the rich, and the young opt out of the system. In the long run, that will INCREASE the cost on the young because they too will, inevitably get sick one day.

From Paul Krugman's Ny times column:

The principal policy division between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama involves health care. It’s a division that can seem technical and obscure — and I’ve read many assertions that only the most wonkish care about the fine print of their proposals.
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But as I’ve tried to explain in previous columns, there really is a big difference between the candidates’ approaches. And new research, just released, confirms what I’ve been saying: the difference between the plans could well be the difference between achieving universal health coverage — a key progressive goal — and falling far short.

Specifically, new estimates say that a plan resembling Mrs. Clinton’s would cover almost twice as many of those now uninsured as a plan resembling Mr. Obama’s — at only slightly higher cost.

Let’s talk about how the plans compare.

Both plans require that private insurers offer policies to everyone, regardless of medical history. Both also allow people to buy into government-offered insurance instead.

And both plans seek to make insurance affordable to lower-income Americans. The Clinton plan is, however, more explicit about affordability, promising to limit insurance costs as a percentage of family income. And it also seems to include more funds for subsidies.

But the big difference is mandates: the Clinton plan requires that everyone have insurance; the Obama plan doesn’t.

Mr. Obama claims that people will buy insurance if it becomes affordable. Unfortunately, the evidence says otherwise.

After all, we already have programs that make health insurance free or very cheap to many low-income Americans, without requiring that they sign up. And many of those eligible fail, for whatever reason, to enroll.

An Obama-type plan would also face the problem of healthy people who decide to take their chances or don’t sign up until they develop medical problems, thereby raising premiums for everyone else. Mr. Obama, contradicting his earlier assertions that affordability is the only bar to coverage, is now talking about penalizing those who delay signing up — but it’s not clear how this would work.

So the Obama plan would leave more people uninsured than the Clinton plan. How big is the difference?

To answer this question you need to make a detailed analysis of health care decisions. That’s what Jonathan Gruber of M.I.T., one of America’s leading health care economists, does in a new paper.

Mr. Gruber finds that a plan without mandates, broadly resembling the Obama plan, would cover 23 million of those currently uninsured, at a taxpayer cost of $102 billion per year. An otherwise identical plan with mandates would cover 45 million of the uninsured — essentially everyone — at a taxpayer cost of $124 billion. Over all, the Obama-type plan would cost $4,400 per newly insured person, the Clinton-type plan only $2,700.

That doesn’t look like a trivial difference to me. One plan achieves more or less universal coverage; the other, although it costs more than 80 percent as much, covers only about half of those currently uninsured.

As with any economic analysis, Mr. Gruber’s results are only as good as his model. But they’re consistent with the results of other analyses, such as a 2003 study, commissioned by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, that compared health reform plans and found that mandates made a big difference both to success in covering the uninsured and to cost-effectiveness.

And that’s why many health care experts like Mr. Gruber strongly support mandates.

Now, some might argue that none of this matters, because the legislation presidents actually manage to get enacted often bears little resemblance to their campaign proposals. And there is, indeed, no guarantee that Mrs. Clinton would, if elected, be able to pass anything like her current health care plan.

But while it’s easy to see how the Clinton plan could end up being eviscerated, it’s hard to see how the hole in the Obama plan can be repaired. Why? Because Mr. Obama’s campaigning on the health care issue has sabotaged his own prospects.

You see, the Obama campaign has demonized the idea of mandates — most recently in a scare-tactics mailer sent to voters that bears a striking resemblance to the “Harry and Louise” ads run by the insurance lobby in 1993, ads that helped undermine our last chance at getting universal health care.

If Mr. Obama gets to the White House and tries to achieve universal coverage, he’ll find that it can’t be done without mandates — but if he tries to institute mandates, the enemies of reform will use his own words against him.

If you combine the economic analysis with these political realities, here’s what I think it says: If Mrs. Clinton gets the Democratic nomination, there is some chance — nobody knows how big — that we’ll get universal health care in the next administration. If Mr. Obama gets the nomination, it just won’t happen.