Guaranteed Healthcare

I'm soooooooooo proud of you. Just got here from dKos.

I almost feel like a proud mama.

And on my high horse -- there's a relationship between the health of Americans and what they eat.

The biggest health-care expense in our nation is due to the industrial food-stuff we eat. Heart diesase, cancer, diabetes. . .refined sugar, high fructose corn syrup, food colorings, preservatives, insecticides, nutrientless foods.

You can't fight one battle if you don't also tackle the other.

AP has a video up about the rising cost of living and debt is CAUSING RISING HEALTH PROBLEMS and these problems can lead to heart attacks, stroke, and death.

http://www.yahoo.com/s/896589

This video made me wonder what would happen if we brought out our video cameras and talked to people in our neighborhoods about their comfort level in the economy and if they feel they have the right health care plan. We should also ask them about the Cadillac insurance that we pay for our elected officials to have.

Then we should post these videos on Youtube, Yahoo video, Google video and send them to ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSGOP, and Fox. (I'm suggesting sending it to Fox so that they can get heart palpitations from seeing the people's uprising against their corporate agenda!)

nycEve,

I've been thinking about what you've written above.

You're right that the short, rapid fire debate styles that the media likes to treat hard issues with is the WRONG way to practice good democracy.

I watched that clip and neither participant had a chance to even spit out an answer in any detail about such a serious subject! I do not blame Kerry or Graham because they are not allowed to dictate the substance of the interview or the time frames allotted. The format of the show sucks, everyone is really just racing the clock!
They should devote a whole debate on healthcare; it’s a major issue! But in this case, they chose to allot 5 minutes to a rapid debate that was about ALL the differences between the two candidates. The main thrust of that debate was about the vote differences between Obama and McCain. Healthcare is a part of that. They should have devoted the whole thing to just healthcare. But to debate everything in 5 minutes, foreign policy to healthcare, to veterans and back, means you get just the basics, if that. But, in 30 seconds, you can say that Obama (and JK and most Democrats) is for affordable healthcare for all Americans.

However, it should be clear in an extremely obvious way that Obama, and Kerry, want universal coverage. McCain does not. JK has fought for health care for us for a number of years now! Yes, even since “Hillary-care” JK has been fighting to give us high-quality healthcare. (Just like he’s fought for better Veteran’s Health-care too! Unfortunately, those in the pockets of lobbyists in the medical and phamacuetical industry have made this a battle!) Nonetheless, Jk has consistently tried to reform health care. He agrees with Obama that the American people should have access to the same health care their Reps and Senators in Congress get. That is the goal.

The problem is the detail of how you get there and that type of discussion can not be handled in a 30 second rapid-fire debate!

Details: McCain believes health care should be a private concern and that individuals should pay for it. He likes the Republican approach that people should open HSA's. The Ownership society means that everyone "owns" their own health care and if you can't afford it, well, too bad. He believes that corporations can battle for costs and that by doing so, they will lower the costs of medical care. Of course, you and I know this is laughable. All you have to do is look at the rising food and gas costs to see that flawed argument.
The Democrats believe, generally, in a shared system of paying in. Sen. Kerry had a proposal that Obama adopted that catastrophic coverage be handled by the government on expenses over $50K. $50K is what triggers a federal payment. The expenses under $50K can then be covered by insurance plans. This gets a hell of a lot of people covered.
And remember JK and JRE have pushed Obama more towards the left on this. In studies, it was shown that Obama’s, Clinton’s, and Edward’s health care plans were not drastically different. Only Dennis Kucinich presented single-payer-universal-healthcare. And yet that seems too radical for a real debate on these tv shows!

The bottom line is that 30 seconds gives nobody time to say anything except the bottom line. And then Stephanopolous can go in and spin the bottom line. That’s not a real forum on healthcare! And so I encourage all of us to invite your senators and Congressmen to local town halls. This doesn’t have to be about Obama, Kerry, and McCain or other pubic figures. It’s about all of us and the Senators and Representatives who are suppose to look after the COMMON GOOD of this country—not the common good of the international corporations!

It's a question that I find myself asking more and more often as the talking heads on TV and radio continue to obscure any and all actual information on any topic, regardless of the effect on the people who need that information.

I'm scheduled for surgery tomorrow. It will cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $20k. Where would that number fall relative to my "budget" under McCain? I imagine it could be the typical allowed budget for a family of 4, but would that mean I'd use the entire family's annual budget? And why should we be putting one more penny into the greedy clutches of the financiers who have architected the collapse of our economy by investing it in some managed "savings" plan that they manage? What if they mess that up the same way they messed up "same as cash" mortgages? What if I needed something that wasn't minor, and thus cost more than several years of "budget"?

My experience last not long ago made the absurdity of consumers "choosing" economical health care vividly clear, how, when lying unconscious on the floor due to a bad reaction to an antibiotic, was I supposed to make sure that I chose the more economical ambulance service? Or was I supposed to unconsciously choose not to go to the hospital? That little trip and its accompanying hospital time cost $8k. Was that within my medical savings limit? Of course, I don't know, because I'm not saddled with the kind of health care McCain wants to saddle me with.

I do know, however, that MSAs currently offered by employers (which we DO have to supplement the regular insurance) are limited BY THE EMPLOYER to what the company feels they can cover should the employee's employment be terminated before the end of the year. There is a maximum you are allowed to contribute, and that's it. We chose the max to cover our share of the kids' braces, though now the younger one will get to wait, because our out-of-pocket from tomorrow's surgery will use more than the total.

And then there's the process of submitting receipts before they'll actually pay. They give you this little debit card to make your out-f-pocket payments with, but can apparently revoke the payments unless you submit your receipts from the provider who billed them to prove that ... well I'm not sure. Having put together ecommerce systems I know that the info they get from the providers shows exactly what you've just paid for. I guess they want you to prove that they can make you jump through hoops like a good little medical puppy.

Hi nyceve, congrats on the new site. Good going.

Got a bone to pick with you, though. Please don't get carried away with labelling all journalists as "morons." I'm one and I sure don't think of myself that way. You'll have better luck reaching out to journalists (especially print journalists) if you take the tack that you can educate them (quickly) on the issue so that they can ask intelligent questions of policy makers when they get a chance.

(By the way, George S. was never a journalist. He went from being BC's mouthpiece to a "face time" job at ABC. In TV, producers do most of the fact-collecting, so that's who you need to reach.)

Print journalists only have specialized beats, such as healthcare, on the largest newspapers, the ones with a national reach. All the others have a "catch as catch can" m.o., meaning that today's healthcare story goes to the first reporter to cross an editor's sightline. The vast majority of print reporters are generalists, not specialists -- that's where you and the Guaranteed Healthcare site come in. You can be the educators that raise the level of discourse about how broken the healthcare system is and what we can do about it.

You can also vet the candidates' proposals, dissecting them so the general public can understand their ramifications.

This is a great opportunity for you and I know that you're smart enough to make it work in your favor. Best of luck. Get out there and be a voice for all of us who desperately need a healthcare revolution in America.

Healthcare cannot be a private concern - Mccain is simply wrong. The health of the nation affects everyone. When I was attempting to move to the US with my US family, I had to go through all sorts of often humiliating procedures (including 'a check in your knickers just to make sure you really are a gal') but by far the most illuminating was the reaction of my GP to the required immunizations - 'My God, I don't want to have to give you these! We haven't had that disease in the UK for forty years now!'

Trouble is, there is no shortage of Americans who will tell you that US health care is 'the best in the world' - including all my extended family! Tell them that the US is actually 37th in world terms, and they will say 'That is only because we pay for it' - tell them that actually it is based on things such as recovery rates after operations, and they change the subject. Ah, America - your wonderful sense of uniqueness and chosen-nation status! It's a bit like that famous glass ceiling - UK had a woman leader 25 years ago,ditto India, Ceylon, now Germany etc etc...but of course they don't count!