my platform as presidential candidate - what's yours?
POSTED BY: rue
UPDATED: Monday, June 3, 2024 14:50
VIEWED: 27072
PAGE 24 of 27
The original article in the NYTimes (above) was a hatchet job on Sanders. While not as obvious as the one done on Tulsi Gabbard, it was aimed at derailing Sanders, and more specifically, his medical plan. The medical plan that's favored? The #notmedicareforall one.
Here is the NYTimes article, restated, with unreferenced opinions removed, a straightforward timeline, and egregious misstatements of fact corrected.
Mr. Sanders describes his family as lower middle class. His father, an immigrant from Poland, was a paint salesman. He has said his parents frequently argued about money.
When his mother fell ill during Sanders' high school years, his family moved her into a charity hospital in New Jersey about 2 hours away. After a failed heart surgery, she died in March 1960, when she was in her mid-40s, shortly after Sanders graduated from high school.
Then, as now, Mr. Sanders avoided speaking of his mother’s death. On Sunday, he declined to discuss his personal life, but said that his family had “struggled economically, and that’s it.”
But in a 2006 interview with Vermont PBS, he offered a rare glimpse into how her illness shaped his thinking. “When you talk about money and family, how do you get the money for the medical treatment that my mother needed?” he said. “I won’t go into the whole long song and dance of it. But trust me, it was something that I also have not forgotten about — the right of people to have health care, which was a little bit difficult in our family situation.”
A high-school track and cross country star with an emerging political streak, Mr. Sanders had wanted to go to Harvard, friends said. But by his senior year, his mother, Dorothy Sanders, had become sick, her heart damaged from having rheumatic fever as a child.
During his college years, Sanders was focused on civil rights and took part in the Civil Rights Movement activities, but over the years and past college, extending his involvement to the peace movement. He graduated with a BA in political science from the University of Chicago in 1964.
After initially buying a property in Vermont with his first wife in 1964, traveling through Europe, and later divorcing and selling the property in 1966; Sanders permanently settling in Vermont in 1968.
Sanders ran unsuccessful third-party political campaigns in the early to mid-1970s. He ran as the Liberty Union candidate for governor of Vermont in 1972 and 1976 and as a candidate for U.S. senator in 1972 and 1974. As a candidate, he focused on issues like the tax structure. But one publication he saved from March 1972 was titled, “Health Rights News;” its slogan was “Health care is a human right.” And in 1972, when he was running for Senate as a candidate from Vermont’s left-wing Liberty Union Party, The Bennington Banner, a local newspaper, reported one quote: “There is absolutely no rational reason, in the United States of America today, we could not have full and total fre
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The M$M is doing a hatchet job on Sanders the same as the hatchet job on Gabbard, and the rest of the candidates appear to be virtue-signalling ninnies or establishment hacks ... NOT a group I'd vote for!
But aside from coverage of the 2020 campaign, what's YOUR take on the solution to our healthcare problem?
I did "run the numbers", and by adding up ALL the money spent on premiums (either individual or employer benefits), out of pocket costs, and all of the tax money spent on Medicare, Medicaid, and the various county hospitals, clinics etc we could easily extend Medicare to cover everyone and not spend an additional penny.
But I think we could achieve cost savings and even more effective healthcare, so I have a few ideas and some ??
Of course we could save a lot of money by having the Federal government use its bargaining power to lower drug prices. Medicare Part D totalled up to $95 billion in 2018; if the RXprescriptions in the USA were brought to average developed world prices, costs would be reduced by about 50%, resulting in a savings of approximately $45 billion per year.
https://www.kff.org/medicare/issue-brief/the-facts-on-medicare-spendin
g-and-financing/
https://www.drugwatch.com/featured/us-drug-prices-higher-vs-world/?Pag
eSpeed=noscript
And by eliminating the bean-counters and insurance executives we could save at least 15% of "administrative costs" in Medicare and Medicaid, so we could potentially provide Medicare for all and spend LESS money than we're currently spending now.
But Medicare seems to encourage inefficiency because it pays "per procedure" and not for treating the whole person. It seems lead to a system of disconnected specialists where patients are shuttled from doctor to doctor, often not getting a correct diagnosis or effective treatment. The approach which seems to work best is when a TEAM of involved doctors and nurses discuss a particular patient.
Also, my experience with HMOs has been less-than-stellar ... if you have what 85% of patients have you'll do well with their standard treatments but if you have something unusual ... heaven help you! And altho plans like Kaiser are "technically" non-profit, the doctors are incentivized to skimp on patient care because the doctors get to pocket the unexpended premiums at the end of the year. So I would not advocate an HMO-style system.
How would you reform Medicare reimbursements, KIKI, assuming that you thought it needed reform?
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
You idiots have been oppressing the entire sexual spectrum as long as you have existed. I can't wait for the day your kind is dead - WISHIMAY
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At the end of the day, insurance ponzi schemes are what have made medical care completely unaffordable. If doctors were only able to charge reasonable prices that people could actually afford to pay since the beginning, then the prices wouldn't be where they are right now.
Just look at the dental industry as an example. Most insurance, even the best private insurance people can pay for while working good jobs, don't cover much dental costs at all outside of 2 checkups and x-rays. Even when it does, it's usually not more than 20 percent of any procedures beyond a tooth pulling or capping.
Dentures for $3500 with all the teeth pulled out though?
Doesn't sound like a bad deal compared to a 5 minute ball massage with KY jelly in the early 2000's that cost me over $3000 out of pocket when I had a lump and was worried that I might have had testicular cancer. Wouldn't even want to know what that would cost in 2019.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:For whatever reason dentists still remain largely small practices which compete effectively with each other, not giant monopoly-style hospital-chain corporations.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
At the end of the day, insurance ponzi schemes are what have made medical care completely unaffordable. If doctors were only able to charge reasonable prices that people could actually afford to pay since the beginning, then the prices wouldn't be where they are right now.
Just look at the dental industry as an example. Most insurance, even the best private insurance people can pay for while working good jobs, don't cover much dental costs at all outside of 2 checkups and x-rays. Even when it does, it's usually not more than 20 percent of any procedures beyond a tooth pulling or capping.
Dentures for $3500 with all the teeth pulled out though?
Doesn't sound like a bad deal compared to a 5 minute ball massage with KY jelly in the early 2000's that cost me over $3000 out of pocket when I had a lump and was worried that I might have had testicular cancer. Wouldn't even want to know what that would cost in 2019.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Maybe the difference is that hospitals require so much more equipment: imaging equipment and laboratories and surgical suites and a phamacy that carries everything?
I dunno. Around here, most hospitals are giant complexes that sprawl thru multiple many-story buildings. The only one that I know is reasonable is (was?) a charity-based hospital started by the Catholic Church, it's still only one building and seems very well-run. But once you get past a certain size, then you need multiple layers of management to coordinate the multiple moving parts ... you need a director of pathology and a director of surgical services and the head of maintenance and the IT director and director of nursing services etc and THEY all report to the next layer up (chief officers?) which reports to the layer over that (hospital board, quality control...) and THEY report to corporate HQ... Seems like all I ever see nurses do is "charting". You can't have all of those moving parts w/o CYA paperwork!
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
You idiots have been oppressing the entire sexual spectrum as long as you have existed. I can't wait for the day your kind is dead - WISHIMAY
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Seems like the best way to reduce the amount of red tape is to have standard prices posted, and published hospital reviews. This business of hospitals billing different insurances, and different PLANS in each insraunce, different rates is insane.
It's hard to judge "performance" because some hospitals (in poorer areas) get patients who're sicker that other hospitals which leads to poorer outcomes, but there are some things directly under hospital control like hospital-acquired infections, patient comfort, and ER wait-times. Also, there should be a log of complaints against hospitals or against specific staff working there - missed diagnoses, etc. Maybe that would provide people with real-time info on where to get a procedure done.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
You idiots have been oppressing the entire sexual spectrum as long as you have existed. I can't wait for the day your kind is dead - WISHIMAY
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just assembling some facts
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Canada/ medical school tuition
https://afmc.ca/node/256
The highest annual tuition (citizen and resident) in Canada was at McMaster University - $27,241 (Canadian dollars)
The lowest annual tuition (citizen and resident) in Canada was at Université de Montréal - $3,507 (Canadian dollars)
US/ medical school tuition
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/the-short-list-
grad-school/articles/most-expensive-private-medical-schools
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/the-short-list-
grad-school/articles/public-medical-schools-with-the-lowest-in-state-tuition-and-fees
The highest annual tuition plus fees (citizen and resident) in the US was at Columbia University - $67,810
The lowest annual tuition plus fees (citizen and resident) in the US was at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center - $18,808
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https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/10/25/doctors-salaries-pay-
disparities-000557
In the United States, the supply of doctors is tightly controlled by the number of medical school slots, and more importantly, the number of medical residencies. Those are both set by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, a body dominated by physicians’ organizations. The United States, unlike other countries, requires physicians to complete a U.S. residency program to practice.
In recent years, the number of medical residents has become so restricted that even the American Medical Association is pushing to have the number of slots increased. The major obstacle at this point is funding. It costs a teaching hospital roughly $150,000 a year for a residency slot. Most of the money comes from Medicare, with a lesser amount from Medicaid and other government sources. The number of slots supported by Medicare has been frozen for two decades after Congress lowered it in 1997 at the request of the American Medical Association and other doctors’ organizations.
There are two parts to the high pay received by our doctors relative to doctors elsewhere, both connected to the same cause. The first is that our doctors get higher pay in every category of medical practice, including general practitioner.
The other reason that our physicians earn so much more is that roughly two-thirds are specialists. This contrasts with the situation in other countries, where roughly two-thirds of doctors are general practitioners. This means we are paying specialists’ wages for many tasks that elsewhere are performed by general practitioners.
And Medicare exerts little control over the fields of specialization in the residency slots it supports, largely leaving this up to the teaching hospitals, which have an incentive to offer residencies in specialties from which they can get the most revenue per resident. This means they are more likely to train someone in neurology or cardiology than as a family practitioner.
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Canada -
some doctors are hired directly by government, most are reimbursed by a fee-for-service schedule negotiated between doctors organizations and the government.
US -
https://www.ama-assn.org/about/research/employed-physicians-now-exceed
-those-who-own-their-practices
In 2018, 47.4% of practicing physicians were employed, while 45.9% owned their practices, according to a new entry in the AMA Policy Research Perspectives (PRP) series.
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http://www.canadaqbank.com/blog/2019/02/11/how-much-do-canadian-doctor
s-earn-in-a-year/
as of 2018, Canadian doctors earned an average of $307,482 a year (Canadian dollars)
https://www.medscape.com/slideshow/2018-compensation-overview-6009667
Separate data from Medscape's 8th Physician Compensation Report for 2018 states that the average U.S. primary care physician earns $223,000 annually. Meanwhile, medical specialists earn an average of $329,000, as of 2018.
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