[rolling eyes] If this thread was on Digg, I think "These comments suck" would fit right in here.
Okay, so let's see…boy, what a piece of work this is.
First of all, the health insurance industry is one of only TWO industries that are not subject to the anti-trust law: professional baseball is the other one. That I can live with because life can be maintained if baseball is a giant monopoly.
Second of all…the health insurance industry has been utilizing discriminatory practices that would get them sued off the face of the planet if it happened in any other service-oriented industry. One of the bigwigs from Cigna just came out and said Michael Moore's movie "Sicko" hit the nail on the head and the industry actively worked to discredit and cover it up to save their own vampiric asses. Never mind that at a moral level, the CEOs were corrupt as a week-old corpse in the Louisiana swamps, gleaning profits off the suffering of the people they wind up kicking to the curb. And eating their power lunches with gold-plated flatware. You want to talk about ivory towers? I'm sure they'd build those too if it weren't internationally illegal — and the Conservatives would *still* defend their right to do so. [rolling eyes, pt. II]
Thirdly — those guys are running a Ponzi scheme. They hand-pick their clientele, fleece 'em for hundreds apiece month after month, then should their clients actually need to collect it is granted grudgingly at best — and then either dropped like a lump of semi-congealed lava or the premium is jacked so high as to force the claimant into bankruptcy (the rate of medical-related bankruptcies in this country hovers somewhere between 50% and 75%, depending on who you ask). The Goblins in Harry Potter aren't as greedy.
Health insurance agents and pencil-pushers forced out of business? Good, they mooorrrrrrrrrre than had it coming. Welcome to the rest of the world, ice-hole.
But that's neither here nor there. The current public option being discussed won't put anyone out of work.
Go ahead. Give your Internet Asperger's Syndrome a run around the track and tell me those who lost their jobs and those who can't afford health insurance deserve to die in the streets. It's the 21st Century, not 1800s London, but here we are, losing one fellow American every five minutes because they can't afford either the premiums or the deductibles or are shown the door on account of pre-existing conditions. Call ourselves a civilized country?
[taking breath]
OK, I've read a few pages past the first page. Which really frosted my cake and inspired the above rant. Let me elucidate from a less angry stance…
I can't comment on the lethality of pelvic fractures in the elderly, but I can offer two equally-serious medical scenarios that happened in real life.
Story 1:
A few years ago, on Christmas Eve, my mother suffered a heart attack. She came into my room and told me, and I called 9-1-1. They were there five minutes later. She was under anaesthesia and being operated on an hour later. This is California, where every citizen in the state has to carry health insurance by mandate of Governor Schwarzenegger.
Story 2:
I live in Oregon. I was down at Mom's for the holiday.
Anyway, I lost my California health insurance when I moved to Oregon, and since I was overweight I couldn't get health insurance here. So shortly after I moved here, I started producing stools with blood in them. The doctors said it was celiac disease, stop eating nuts and whole grains. Stopped, kept getting sick. It's colitis, drink more water. Insurance industry saw a colitis diagnosis and wouldn't touch me. Drank lots of water, kept getting sick. Damn, colitis won't go away. Finally met a doctor that had the backbone to scope me and whaddaya know? It's Stage III colorectal cancer that'd been growing for about five years.
Short story: I qualified for the local hospital and cancer clinic's indigence allowance and my cancer surgery, treatment and hospital stay were forgiven. I figure I costed the taxpayers of Oregon about $50,000, which sucks. But if the health insurance industry hadn't practiced exclusionary policies and accepted everyone, regardless of health history, it would have been taken care of.
Let's look at America. 305 million people. Let's say all of those people throw $1-2 a day into a central pot for health care. Do the math and see how much that'd be over a year's time. Federal employees pay $75/month for their health coverage. Yep, your mail carrier's a stinking pinko, mmm-hmmmm. When's the last time you saw a USPS delivery person goose-stepping through their daily schedule?
