if it comes down to a choice to pay for either parkinson's treatment or abortion which would you do?

[The Straight Story]

Viagra or pancreatic cancer? Helping a senior get a few more years or experimental treatment that may help a six year old to beat leukemia?

If there is one thing I have learned here over the years is that your choices in life affect others in a monetary way (you smoke, why should I pay for your care, etc and so on). So if we expand that out we get down to the nitty gritty of health care: You get pregnant and don't want the child, why should I pay for it (you had a choice right)? You are old and want a kidney transplant? Well that will cost more in the long run and why are you being so selfish and trying to extend your life (and don't we have too many people here anyway? If old people would just die younger we would be better off).

You need a new liver? Well let us examine where you spent your money eating and what you drank.

Now that we are going to pool our money (as we have done anyway but in a private sector way) am I gonna have a say over your life and choices if I can show it costs me more dollars? Is your life now nothing but a financial statement to me and others?

Are you now willing to SELL me your freedom for health care/etc? If I can give you unlimited health care are you going to give me control over your body and the ability to punish you if you don't live a sinless life...err perfect life (can't mention sin, that implies religion - we can adopt all the things religion do and their puritan ways as long as we don't mention a bible, god, etc) as far as the rest of us judge it?

I am ALL FOR a new national health care plan. I will pay more taxes for it.

But aren't you in the least bit worried how some will use this to push their religion/values/ideals/lifestyles on you by pushing 'studies' showing how that if we force people to do X we save Y? Have you become a Dollar symbol? Has your freedom become a financial instrument to bargain with?

Give me universal health care (or whatever you want to call it) and give me freedom as well.

I won't sell my freedom. I would rather pay more for people to have choices even if it costs me more.

Are you?

[ingac70]

1. Private insurance already does that.

A lady that worked with my grandfather got pregnant and her insurance refused to cover the labor an delivery because she wasn't married.

So its all a matter of whether you want it cheap or expensive.

[robinlynne]

2. um. all service men and women, public servants, and retired people are currently

using government sponsored single-payer healthcare. Apparently it is not an issue. It IS an issue however, under the "free market system" where insurance companies are making the WRONG choices, again and again.....
so save it.

[MercutioATC]

7. WRONG

Civilian Federal employees do NOT have single-payer.

We have FEHBP.

[robinlynne]

12. what is FEHBP?

[MercutioATC]

13. It's the health insurance plan that all civilian federal employees have

(including Senators)

http://www.opm.gov/INSURE/HEALTH/

[EFerrari]

3. Even if we got single payer tomorrow, you and I would still be free

to go to private providers if we wanted to do so.

[abumbyanyothername]

4. I don't see how making the USGOV the insurer

affects your argument.

In other words, policies today are already excluding and including. These decisions are being made on a mass/society wide basis. They are just being made by people driven by (short-term) profit motive.

[gmoney]

14. Right, and in all those comparisons, insurance co's would prefer NEITHER

No, we won't cover an abortion, no we won't pay for Parkinson's treatment, no we won't pay to get a cast on your broken leg, no, no, no, no...

Where's the profit in THAT?

So, things are getting closer to no approvals, with this practice of researching your background and determining you saw a dermatologist when you were 14, so that precludes you from cancer treatment because you didn't disclose the pre-existing condition.

I think universal NON-coverage is a lot closer to universal coverage.

[sandnsea]

5. You have to qualify for a transplant

They put you through a whole battery of tests, physical and psychological. They don't necessarily care how you got in the mess you're in, they do care that you are going to change your lifestyle after the transplant. Reason being, you'll die very quickly if you don't.

A lot of this stuff is already done between a doctor and patient, privately, the way it should be done. I don't know why some people choose to live in denial about it.

Oregon has had assisted suicide for around ten years. We aren't the state with the "death panel", George Bush's Texas is.

[abumbyanyothername]

6. Rec rec rec

In the first election, I refused to vote for Bush because of his capital punishment record.

Well, I did call him a murderer. And I still believe it to be true.

[sandnsea]

10. I'm not talking about capital punishment though

Not sure if you knew that. Texas has an Advanced Directive law that allows hospitals to remove people from life support if the hospital decides there is no hope for recovery and they will just lay in a vegetative state endlessly. Even if the family disagrees. The Texas right-to-life group helped get it passed.

[nosmokes]

8. No, I'm not worried. Maybe I missed my paranoia dose today?

[frazzled]

9. False choices

Jeebus, you are buying into the right-wing scare tactics. Doctors have an obligation to treat all illnesses and problems when they take the Hippocratic oath, and new insurance regulations will mean that private insurance companies will have less, not more, discretion to deny payments to people.

Saving money in the system does NOT equate with limiting treatment. It means smarter, more efficient treatment.

Now stop with these sorts of hypothetical scare tactics.

[wickerwoman]

11. I would scrap the F-22 fighter and pay for both.

Health care is a basic human right.

Would we save money by not providing universal, free education to the age of 18? Sure we would. Lots of people barely use anything they learned past the age of 11.

It would be a lot cheaper if firemen only responded to fires that were genuinely accidents not caused by stupidity and only people who drove paid to maintain roads and we had a single state-sponsored media instead of freedom of the press and we didn't bother providing low income housing or food stamps...

But government isn't about what's cheapest or even always what's most efficient. It's about protecting everyone's right to live a long, healthy, safe, productive and free life.

Nobody's talking about a complete government takeover of the health care system. Researchers will still be able to work on any topics they want and will be able to find private and public funding. The only thing I've seen proposed is providing a public option for the millions of uninsured and marginally insured Americans who are shit out of luck if they get sick at the moment.

I don't have health insurance. If I got sick tomorrow, at 32, I would die because I have no way to pay for any treatment. I know two people who have already died (one was 23, the other was 27) because they couldn't afford health insurance. Even if I had the money, I still couldn't get health insurance because I have a bullshit pre-existing condition (a heart murmur) and both my parents are diabetics. I could already be sick... how would I know? I eat healthy and exercise but I haven't had a routine check-up in six years. If I have aches and pains, I suck them up.

It's simply fucking wrong that my friends are dead because they live in America instead of the other 99% of industrialized nations which provide universal health coverage. It's wrong that I could die tomorrow because I had the bad luck to be born in the land of the free and the home of the brave.