Do you believe that Washington is above this?

I suppose I need to repeat something here.

In addition to simply taking $500 B from Medicare, cramming down provider payments that already are known to be deficient often, and threatening to get providers and pharmaceutical companies to Do More (as Pelosi has said) in the future — don't you realize Medicare cost-shifts to private providers now?

http://www.cms.hhs.gov/Manuals/IOM/itemdetail.a…

http://www.cms.hhs.gov/MEDICARESECONDPAYERANDYOU/

No wonder they want to keep the private providers now (to cost-shift as part of “reducing costs” they don't spend a lot of time telling you about) while continuing the effort toward eventual replacement.

(And in case you finally are led to guess, yes, Washington already has flirted with extending the period during which others pay for medical care first.)

That is aside from keeping the lawsuit gravy train rolling strongly (which could be aided by “reform” measures that include mandatory malpractice insurance with ratcheting-upward liability minima), and to avoid the public rejection of 100% federal takeover now, as reasons for remaining partially private.

The lawsuit gravy train's health may not be neglected currently, either. In addition to the sinister nature of defining standards or “appropriateness” of care insofar as future rationing and denial is concerned, what about this, which was attempted in regards to Medicare Secondary Payer (at least)?

http://www.american.com/archive/2009/august/tri…

Feingold, Kucinich, Paul, Sanders I know there are more republicans like this as well I just cant think of them for the life of me right now and Spector was one of them but I am not as sure now that he flipped. Anyways these are good mean, agree or disagree with them they are fighting the good fight and doing it lawfully and with great honor. I think Gregg is a pretty good man as well from what I have read and seen.

Feingold and Sanders, yes honorable men; Paul is well and maybe Kucinich as well maybe but both have spats of being bats**t crazy and so are hard to hold up as rolemodels, although I certainly admit to liking some of Paul's ideas.

If you want to look at honorable Republicans I'd put forth John McCain, Jeff Flake, Tom Coburn, Jim DeMint as examples. You might not agree with their position on issues but there character is honorable.

Of course- but the magnitude of that episode in France was startling, and was much worse than in neighboring countries that had similar weather conditions, and everyone- including the French govt- recognized that there were problems with their healthcare system that contributed.

If the Republicans had seriously taken up health care reform during the first 6 Bush years,

They would be Democrats.

There are obviously problems in France's healthcare system which can, and have, resulted in deaths too though, DQ.

What ever problems they have, they don't have 18,000 people dying every year due to lack of health insurance.

Remember this one? Heat waves are potential humanitarian disasters no matter where they happen.

There's some truth to this.

Most everyone, I think, understands that the health care system in the US is not… umm… working optimally. If the Republicans had seriously taken up health care reform during the first 6 Bush years, there'd have been at least an opportunity for bipartisan reform, because the Dems are highly invested in this rolling catastrophe.

OTOH, it might have gone immediately into the screaming bowels of Partisan Hell, as happened to immigration reform.

I do think it's fair to say, though, that the Republicans frittered some very important opportunities.

Remember this story?

France, as we all know, is in Europe, where health care is better than ours at half the cost. Everyone loves the system, and the government prevents cost increases through its single-payer negotiating power. Or, if that fails, by drowning them in Bordeaux.

At least in France they don't have 100,000 people dying every year due to a lack of health-care.

France, Japan and Australia rated best and the United States worst in new rankings focusing on preventable deaths due to treatable conditions in 19 leading industrialized nations, researchers said on Tuesday.

If the U.S. health care system performed as well as those of those top three countries, there would be 101,000 fewer deaths in the United States per year, according to researchers writing in the journal Health Affairs.

Researchers Ellen Nolte and Martin McKee of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine tracked deaths that they deemed could have been prevented by access to timely and effective health care, and ranked nations on how they did.

The GOP leadership certainly should be faulted for not putting more emphasis on conservative based reforms, but as for where these reformers have been when the GOP was in the majority, they were in the trenches, plugging along.

As I remember the years from 2000 to 2006, the Repugs had the house, the senate and the presidency, they had no problems giving tax cuts to their supporters, starting wars against defenseless countries and passing any other legislative agenda they wanted to. The Hammer made sure that all Repugs followed the party line and damn near every bill they passed got 90 plus percent support from the Repug Caucus. The repugs did not pass any health-care bill because they didn't want to and couldn't give a damn how many death could have been prevented.

The Repugs had six years in power and they didn't do a damn thing about health-care.

France, as we all know, is in Europe, where health care is better than ours at half the cost. Everyone loves the system, and the government prevents cost increases through its single-payer negotiating power. Or, if that fails, by drowning them in Bordeaux.

You surely must have meant Florida, where greedy capitalists prey on frail citizens while Governor Sarkozy tries to accumulate enough Bordeaux to drown them.

If they really think this is headed off a cliff and they do not try to strike a deal they are just as responsible for the outcome in my opinion as the Democrats that actually believe in it. The believers are expected to muck stuff up every now and again, that is why this country fears them in all their forms but to step in and make a deal that fixes the problem bolsters the image of your party to those on the outside and if it goes south it still a Democratic bill. The populace knows what party is in control, if they join the process and make deals they get to start down the path of not looking like the crazy obstructionist party which is problematic image wise.

If things go badly with health care though and Republicans stayed out of it completely people will still want to know why they didn't try to do a damn thing as the country went down in flames. The problem is that it has been so publicly offered for them to join the process so many times that anyone paying attention knows that they refuse to get involved, is that in their constituents best interests? They chose to squeal and kick over co-ops and they will have to realize that they are not the party in power anymore, but they still need to do their jobs.

It looks like we will have a Dem only bill though which will shift the debate in this country for the next half century to expanding coverage or taking coverage away and that is why they fear the electoral consequences as they will at most have to shift to being maintainers and waste eliminators which would mean an entire change of identity for the party. They may just find themselves in the same situation they did after the new deal.

They're not in the Dems' bills (in fact most of those will explicitly phase out HSAs through other policies that they'll put in place (the exchanges.)

They're in the GOP bills that are languishing in committee.

As for Mackey, I'll have to go back and reread his op-ed but I'm pretty sure he's covering most of his part timers too.

And what that dentist is doing doesn't make a whole lot of sense under current tax laws. The money would go a lot farther for them if he'd buy the health insurance for them because it's tax exempt on the employer side. Maybe what he's saying though is that he'll either buy the policy or give them the cash portion (which would be after taxes) if they prefer.

They vote their values, and they have giant bouncing balls of steal for some of the things they have resisted. Sadly many more though are pretty slimy in either party but that in my opinion is what happens when money enters politics. The day I began to hate Rush was the day I realized that he was throwing the primary for Bush. I was a McCain voter, but then he sullied by making all that I liked about him look like a political calculation.

The reason they don't qualify is because they aren't given enough hours. It's not that they don't want the hours, the stores won't give the hours to them. The way WalMart shows high coverage numbers is by hiring people that already have insurance from another source.

This is how you get people working “3 jobs” and no benefits.

In this case, they wouldn't qualify for the HSA money either unless they put in 100% of the money and since the retail jobs pay so poorly, that is unlikely.

MacKey contributes $1,800 of the $2,500 per year, but only to full-time employees. He admits that he, too plays the hours game with some of his employees, so I wonder if he isn't playing with the numbers the way WalMart does, too.

BTW, I don't understand why the Repubs keep saying that they can't buy insurance from other states. There are lot's of insurance companies that sell health insurance in lots of states. All they have to do is get a license in the state they want to do business in.

As I said before lack of capitalization is the number one reason companies are turned down. You don't want undercapitalized insurance companies just like you don't want undercapitalized banks. Unless You think the whole TARP thing was a swell idea that we ought to do every 10 years or so when the next bubble bursts.

The reason you hear Republicans 'going on and on' about this issue is because the Dems ideas of health insurance reform will wipe out HSAs/HDHPs, and that is moving in the opposite direction that conservatives believe is necessary for real cost control without centralized, top down rationing. The HSA/HDHP model makes healthcare consumers more accountable for their own healthcare spending, and can be subsidized for low income earning individuals as necessary.

Aside from the distinction between the insurers and others lumped into a broad “financial sector” category, and between nominal “insurance” and health care (of which the HMOs acquired by many insurers at least were honest about their purpose), again, misconduct which makes news headlines, and similar actions that don't, have never been “caused” by and normally do not accompany in anywhere like the degree which would make the words synonymous, deregulation.