beterwas
honestly misbehavingArchive for September, 2009
Eliminate Health Insurance Entirely?
How come I never heard of Congressman Anthony Weiner before today?
“The health insurance industry shouldn’t exist at all, because unlike a pharmaceutical company that is producing…at least they have someone doing research trying to make someone healthy. A health insurance company is just making money on the transaction, and really not contributing anything to the end product.”
So, basically the entire health insurance industry is just a big middle man. I guess I always knew that, but I never really thought about it in those terms. That being said, it makes me wonder why the right is so obsessed with preserving it.
Their big argument against bringing government into anything is that it contributes no value, increases costs and adds layers of beaurocracy. What’s the difference? Read the rest of this entry »
Sick & Wrong
Matt Taibbi does it again.
The system doesn’t work for anyone. It cheats patients and leaves them to die, denies insurance to 47 million Americans, forces hospitals to spend billions haggling over claims, and systematically bleeds and harasses doctors with the specter of catastrophic litigation. Even as a mechanism for delivering bonuses to insurance-company fat cats, it’s a miserable failure: Greedy insurance bosses who spent a generation denying preventive care to patients now see their profits sapped by millions of customers who enter the system only when they’re sick with incurably expensive illnesses.
The cost of all of this to society, in illness and death and lost productivity and a soaring federal deficit and plain old anxiety and anger, is incalculable — and that’s the good news. The bad news is our failed health care system won’t get fixed, because it exists entirely within the confines of yet another failed system: the political entity known as the United States of America.
Why doesn’t he have a Pulitzer, yet?
Read the rest of the story here.
