Double post because this is damn important:
My girlfriend recently did some research and found some stuff that I find quite compelling, including an amazing interview with Maggie Mahar on NPR, who actually is one person who took the time to read the 1000 page bill! Here's an excerpt:
Quote:
I invite you to take a listen to the near 20 minute discussion that Terry Gross of Fresh Air had with Maggie Mahar, a Century Foundation fellow and author of Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Healthcare Costs So Much, as well as former financial journalist for Institutional Investor, The New York Times, Barron’s and Bloomberg, writer of the Healthbeat blog, a Century Foundation project, and contributor to Dartmouth Medicine, covering Medicare spending and the possibility of reform. Here is a link to the npr interview: The Costs Of Health Care, Political And Financial : NPR
I’ve included a few key points from the interview that I found worth sharing. The most prominent of which was Ms. Mahar’s response to why, in her opinion, health care doesn’t work when left up to free market capitalism, as most of our society here in the U.S. is. She says,
“In health care, market forces don’t bring prices down. We’ve seen that everything becomes more expensive every year: drugs, hospital stays. In other markets, the consumer has the power to bring prices down as producers compete with each because the consumer can say, you know, that laptop is a little expensive. I’m going to wait until a competitor, a rival, comes out with a less-expensive laptop that will meet my needs.
When you’re sick, you can’t say I’ll wait until a less-expensive cancer drug comes out. Eighty percent of our health care dollars are spent on patients who are seriously ill, suffering from chronic diseases like cancer. They don’t have the choice to wait.
They need what they need at that moment, and so they can’t help bring prices down by comparison shopping, by putting off the purchase, by any of those things. They essentially have to take whatever it is that the doctor or the hospital tells them that they need at that time.”
Ms. Mahar, also stressed that we need a shift from quantity of care (which is the current system, because it determines how much income doctors, hospitals and drug companies make) to one that emphasizes quality which she defines as “ good outcomes.” She says that in the quantity model tests and treatments are ordered that “provide no benefit” but expose patients to risks. She reminds us that “Up until now, insurers have largely focused on keeping their costs down, and not so much on encouraging the highest-quality care from their providers. But that is going to have to be their focus if they want to compete with the public sector option and survive.”
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I didn't know it included Dental and Vision, did anyone else? Listen to the interview, I'm sure it will help many understand a) how this is a legitimate problem and b) the proposed bill is not as bad as some media outlets are making it...and this woman actually wants real reform...not like that dude in the video who obviously went into the entire situation on a mission to
try to find fault in universal health care (and hey, guess what he found!
).
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To those poor souls who dwell in night;
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