Lex's Health Care

Yeah Dan, I'm willing to call it a wash too.

As for a good reason for the AMA to support the bill, I'm sure there is a nice $$ trail attached to it like pretty much every thing the government and their lobbyists decide are "good for us". :) The AMA represents less than 1/3 of all doctors and half of those are retired. It's pretty silly how we think this historically conservative group speaks for all doctors. In the end, doctors are split as evenly as the population.

Here's my suggestion for healthcare reform...Just to temper: I don't parrot any one party. I vote people not party.

My suggestion for reform would be to first repair Medicare/Medicaid. Every year nearly $30billion is lost to fraud and abuse Let's get these two potentially great socialized healthcare programs working properly. Let's limit the abuse of the system and keep our poor and elderly healthy with good doctors...not just those doctors milking the system by billing patients for 24hrs of "care".

"According to a national CAHPS survey conducted by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in 2007, 56 percent of enrollees in traditional fee-for-service Medicare give their "health plan" a rating of 9 or 10 on a 0-10 scale. Similarly, 60 percent of seniors enrolled in Medicare Managed Care rated their plans a 9 or 10. But according to the CAHPS surveys compiled by HHS, only 40 percent of Americans enrolled in private health insurance gave their plans a 9 or 10 rating." -Based on CAHPS scores 1997.

So, the public system is enjoyed by those on it...why not get some oversight in there to shore up the fraud? If the government would put forward a plan that would severely punish everyone that abused medicare/medicaid and that showed positive results in three years, I think we would one step closer to fixing the broken systems. At that point, I would suggest a 5% tax on all private insurance users to infuse more money in to the two systems. It would be easier to do, if people believed that these socialized systems worked efficiently. Most Americans, are not opposed to helping the poor and would gladly pay a little more to do it. If we focus solely on the people who are uninsured and truly can't afford it, we have 20million people uninsured that we could insure with a better operated program. Heck, we could even give illegal immigrants some type of balloon healthcare so when they show up at the Arizona hospital ER suffering from exposure due to illegally crossing, they will be covered by some general fund.

Sorry about the length. Hope you get a chance to click the links I added and take a gander.