You can clearly compare a GOP witch doctor to a Nobel Prize winning doctor who cured polio. But conservatives will swear that a vaccination for polio causes autism because Jerry Falwell sat up in his grave and told them so.
Do we really want another generation of children taken down by polio before they bury Falwell for good? These Republican are like vampires that have tasted blood. They’ve got a death wish for everyone else.
Yeah, well I’ve got a shitload of holy water and wooden stakes.
So bring it the fuck on.
Trump sure has his “best and brightest” in the Republican Congress and it’s making him look mighty pale. Maybe a Tweet will help what ails the President-Elect…or some electrical shook treatments?
Maybe they think that getting the elephant all riled up isn’t the best way to win this fight.Maybe there’s a way to help them save face so they don’t have to jump off the cliff. (Oh god, I hope!)
Don’t blame any of this insanity on an endangered species. Elephants would build space ships and get the hell off this planet away from Republicans if they had thumbs and walked erect.
Conservative human beings are at the root of all this evil. There has been way too much interbreeding among the filthy rich and paranoid Palin People.
The AMA says “Don’t do it.” The insurance companies and hospital associations say “Don’t do it.” Many (most?) states say “Don’t do it.” 75% of the American people say “Don’t do it.”
House Republicans: “Let’s do it!”
Allow me to simplify things:
The AMA is now, and ever has been, firmly in favor of doctors getting paid, as much as possible, as often as possible.
That is all.
True. Which makes their silence up to this point inexplicable. This is going to be hugely disruptive to their members, most of whom now work for large hospitals or health systems that are mostly going to be completely fucked by the undoing of the ACA. Yet this is the first we’ve heard from the AMA since its slobbering mash note to the good Dr. Price, a sterling representative of where physicians’ rational self interest might have been 50 years ago.
A ton of physicians hate the ACA and the HITECH Act. They were happy with fee-for-service medicine and they don’t want to be reimbursed based on patient satisfaction or hospital readmissions. But that stuff isn’t going to change. Whether the hospital they work for goes underwater very much depends on whether or not the Republicans nuke the ACA. And they will. And the AMA stood by obliviously until the last minute before issuing only the meekest of cautions.
As a nurse who has seen drastic cuts in staffing since the Bush Depression in 2008, the ACA has provided many with insurance to help with the red ink in my hospital. BUT, here in Indiana there are so many uninsured thanks to #notmyvp Pence.
My problem with healthcare is the patient bears no responsibility for their own health. The obese diabetic, CHF, renal failure patient who still smokes can be readmitted ever few weeks with no consequence, but the hospital is punished with less reimbursement because of a <30 day readmission.
“…the American Medical Association (AMA) came out against plans floated by Republicans to quickly repeal Obamacare…”
What the HELL do these east coast elites know about anything? Just SO full of book larnin’. I need facts I just talk to Bubba down in the food stamps line.
To anyone’s knowledge, does the AMA have any suggestions on ways of improving or replacing the ACA? I have heard of none, but I may have missed something. I hope their concern for a viable replacement for the ACA goes beyond the obvious concern of who is going to pay the doctors for their services. That’s all I see at the present; however, that is better than just keeping silent, as the AMA had apparently done over the last eight years.
Actually, it’s a truism, not a contradiction. And while truisms, like contradictions, are a species of statements that are inherently pointless, they are not pointless when they used ironically. Irony is the expression of one’s meaning by use of language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect. Here, both humor and emphasis were achieved by deploying a form of inherently pointless statement to make a point.
Sophistry is all you do.
Explaining that a word doesn’t mean what you seem to think it means isn’t sophistry. “Sophistry” is the use of fallacious arguments with deceptive intent. Possibly “pedantry” is what you were going for there.
While I understand your point, I don’t think that is what is the main driver healthcare costs. Just like uninsured patients using the emergency room as their primary way of receiving healthcare, or medical malpractice are often cited as drivers of high health care costs, which I think are also not major factors.
More broadly though I agree that people with chronic health problems are what is a major factor in rising health care costs. I thought I saw a statistic awhile back that indicated 80% of healthcare is consumed by 20% of the population.
My brother, who has worked in healthcare industry for decades said that a vast amount of healthcare is consumed by patients who are dead within a year. He first started as an x-ray tech in 1975, and said he had been ordered to take x-rays of people who were literally on their deathbed, and in fact many patients he x-rayed passed away hours later. He related to me he thought this was just a way to milk a few extra dollars from the insurance company before the patient expired, as well as to avoid lawsuits.
What I think people do not want to face, is that a lot of costs will have to be wrung out of the system to make it workable.
so In order to make universal healthcare possible, rationing care to the chronically ill, and those near death, or in the example you provide, people who exacerbate there medical problems with their lifestyle is almost certainly necessary.
BTW, Healthcare is already being rationed by the insurance companies.
So therefore I think a big cost savings can result from eliminating health insurance companies, which will likely displace about 3 million people employed in this endeavor. These are people that Obama referred to as “stakeholders” in the current system, and his plan was designed to keep them around. They need to go find something else to do.
Also, Healthcare professionals, medical supply companies, medical device companies, and pharmaceutical companies will need to take a haircut.
Healthcare professionals currently are making higher salaries than their counterparts in the UK, France, Germany, and Canada. In the case of Medical supply, Medical Device and pharmaceutical companies, they are far more profitable in the US than in countries with Universal healthcare.
While I don’t put myself forward as an expert, these are my opinions based on years of reading articles, too many to cite here, discussions with my Dad, who was a pharmacist for 50 years, my brother who has been either a X-ray tech or in Nuclear Medicine technology for almost 40 years.
These are all the reasons it is a very difficult problem to solve. Nobody want’s to take a pay cut, or profit margin hit, or put 3 million insurance company employees out of work. Nobody wants to be the one to say we will need to cut off expensive treatments for people who are literally dead within a couple of weeks.