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Universal Health Care

Dec 13th, 2006 at 1:25 pm by Susie

Sen. Ron Wyden gets it started. Let your senators know you support the concept, and then we can argue over the details.

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6 Responses to “Universal Health Care”

on 13 Dec 2006 at 1:26 pm1Sir Oolius

typo: [Wyden]

I’m a huge fan of his ever since I met him personally way back when I was in highschool and he was still a Rep for my district. Before I could even vote for him!
on 13 Dec 2006 at 1:54 pm2Maya

Susie, dear, you’re blogging an awful lot today for someone who’s taking a break!
on 13 Dec 2006 at 2:16 pm3Susie

Who, me? I just saw a few things I really wanted up there, that’s all. And some of them were written days ago.
on 13 Dec 2006 at 2:41 pm4John

This is a very good start to something that is needed but there is alot of other issues that will need to addressed to truly make the health care system one worthy of this country.

First off since this plan uses the existing private insurance plans you are stuck with the problems and profit motives of those plans. Just to use the Philadelphia market as an example since it’s the one I’m familiar with working in healthcare insurance and billing/collections for the last 10 years. Here you have one company, Independence Blue Cross, who controls over 60% of the market. So they set the reimbursement rates with little or no negotiation. Plus every year they raise their rates and yet are sitting on a surplus, called in insurance terms a reserve, of over a billion dollars. Now granted they need a reserve in case of large catastrophic event such as an epidemic. But how much of a reserve or is this a function for the government to take over?

Secondly you have to address what services are available at what hospitals. Right now you have a system where if one hospital has the latest MRI machine or the latest surgery all the hospitals feel they have to have it. You end up with a race as costly and wasteful as the arms race was with the old Soviet Union.

Those are just the tip of the iceberg of issues that will have to addressed to make universal healthcare truly work. But they are worth the time and pain since the outcome is worth it.
on 13 Dec 2006 at 6:57 pm5Kari Chisholm

Thanks for the post, Susie. I’m helping Senator Wyden with his netroots site on this - Stand Tall for America.

Obviously, there are going to be a lot of questions. Anything this big is going to be pretty complex.

I’d encourage everyone to actually head on over to the site and read about the plan.

As you can imagine, there’s definitely a lot of misunderstanding already appearing on the net… not to mention the usual trolls bad-mouthing everything in sight.

If folks have questions, I’ll do my best to answer them here.
on 14 Dec 2006 at 4:18 am6All Spin Zone » Universal Healthcare

[...] I’m not enough of a policy wonk to know which way we should go towards universal healthcare, but I do know that’s the direction we should be headed.Â Ron Wyden, as Suzie notes, has put together a plan.Â So I’m not going to judge it, but just note that it is about time someone worked to solve this problem.Â Healthcare in this country is too expensive and not serving enough people.Â There’s a bottom line for you.Â [...]