Re: Republicans: BULLYING GRANDMA

"Annie Birdsong" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Big Bertha--Republicans--are now shifting their horrible gaze from
> muslims to grandma as they set out to pass a bill that Senator Edward
> Kennedy says would "privatize Medicare in return for a limited,
> inadequate, small prescription drug benefit."
>
Well...if Edward says it...it must be true.  ANNIE...You don't reply to
criticism of YOUR posts.  Thus, you are nothing but a monologuing blabber
mouth.  Into the killfile you go.  I don't even KNOW anything about this
bill.....and I certainly won't learn it from you here on the MISinformation
highway.  If you want to impress people...take a little more time with your
writing and cite CREDIBLE sources...not lying politicians dingbat.   So bye
bye.  Tweet. -Bob

> Why toss out a program that has been a glowing success to a system that
PS...we have something that is a 'glowing success' here?  Anything related
to medicare in this country is EXPENSIVE and INEFFICIENT.  Not a 'glowing
success'.  A sick mess.  The pharmaceutical industry loves it.  And you love
it.  Hmmm.  Interesting company you keep there annie.   What this country
needs is to 'PRIVATIZE' everything.  For instance, a person SHOULD be able
to graduate as a bone setting specialist in 2 years of college, and be held
accountable when there are complaints...and the complainers should be held
accountable when the complaints aren't valid.  That way, people aren't
wasting time of the watchdog...and if they do...they pay.  Meanwhile, a guy
who has learned ALL he needs to know to do his specialty work can open a
small office and make $60 an hour or like that for doing good work.
Everybody is happy...except the doctors who were previously charging a lot
more of course...but then maybe they can specialize in something that they
can charge a lot more for if they are really any good.
     Competition is a good thing.  Monopoly/pseudo monopoly things always
lead to corruption and high high costs.  That's the 'glowing success' you
are referring to. -
> has left a trail of suffering and death across the country due to
> spiraling health care costs?
>
> Medicare has done a "much better job" of cutting the cost of healthcare
> than the private insurance market, though Medicare has been insuring a
> "much riskier population" that is  "older and sicker" during the last 30
> years, said Mr. Frank Clamentay, head of Public Citizen's Congress
> Watch,  who was speaking at a briefing on universal health care
> sponsored by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the Congressional
> Hispanic Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus, May 1, 2001.
>
> To Dr. Marcia Angell, a former editor of the New England Journal of
> Medicine, who now lectures at Harvard University,  Medicare is the sole
> of efficiency and simplicity, with overhead costs of "less than 3
> percent."
>
> In comparison, she said at the briefing that our private health care
> system is "the most expensive in the world," and that we spend, on
> average, "twice as much per person as other developed nations."
>
> The reason for this high cost is "not because we're sicker or more
> demanding," asserted Angell, pointing out that Canadians, for example,
> "see their doctors more often than we do and spend more time in the
> hospital." And the reason for our high cost is not that we get better
> results, she said, since "by the usual measures of health, life
> expectancy, infant mortality and immunization rates, we do worse than
> most other developed countries."
>
> Explaining the high cost of private health insurance, Angell said there
> are estimates that "no more than 50 cents of the health dollar reaches
> providers, who themselves have high overhead costs to deal with the
> requirements of multiple insurers, often bent on avoiding payment."
>
> Much of the health care dollar in a private health care system is spent
> on administrative costs, marketing, profit, brokers, disease management
> and utilization review companies, drug management services, billing
> agencies, information management firms and so on, she said.
>
> Moreover, private markets compete, Angell said,  "by not insuring high
> risk patients, excluding expensive services such as heart
> transplantation, by  passing costs back to patients and by denying their
> claims, deductibles or copayments. ...  Markets are not a good way to
> distribute health care."
>
> So instead of dismantling Medicare, let's extend it to all citizens.
> The group Angel was representing, the Physician's Working Group on
> Single Payer National Health Insurance, said this would save us "at
> least $150 billion annually."
>
> Let's also pass a bill that would sharply control the costs of
> prescription drugs--as the Canadians did years ago.  We could then
> afford to pass a Medicare drug benefit without passing on a staggering
> debt to future generations.  We already pay $332.5
> billion per year just in interest.  What a sad waste of resources.
>
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