Complaining About Obamacare is Ignorance of United States Healthcare

1996: What it looked like and what it still looks like. Except the ACA removed many of these lines and then allowed affordable health insurance for 17 million people, many who never had it before and more to come still. I made this abstract collage in 1996. If defines only in abstract what our current system still looks like. The ACA was an attempt to use what we had without greatly upsetting conservatives in our country and so maybe get a standard passed that insured millions and curbed the amazingly rising annual costs of delivery and health insurance premiums and also allow us to become more moral as a society.

Two questions that most Americans will still answer incorrectly based on their vast ignorance of what our so called “health care system,” in the United States was and what it mostly remains today despite the revolutionary changes made in the Affordable Care Act:

What is more economically more efficient and delivers better health care delivery to the most people at once?

1. For profit private health insurance companies.
2. Government managed health care delivery and financing.

Here is another question that most will get wrong based upon the psychology of denial:

Who would do a better job at economic efficiency and changes in health care financing and delivery to the most people at once?

1. Elected representatives who are accountable to taxpayers and all citizens.
2. Faceless for profit private health insurance company shareholders and executives.

If you hear someone complain about any aspect or any detail of current healthcare provided and blame it as the fault of “Obama Care” please ask them, “How was that particular situation before the Affordable Healthcare Act?” They won’t have an answer. They did not know how bad it was. They are learning just now of what they dislike.

The problems are not a causality of Obama Care they are a causality of being afraid of change for decades and of being afraid of facing complexity and of being afraid of admitting that the United States has failed at something.   

I predict that in 9 out of 10 of those complaints that that person will have no idea how that problem, or the problem that that aspect of delivery attempts to repair, was prior to the ACA. This a sure prediction because it seems very much that as we now scrutinize our health care delivery and payments in this country we do so with a new awareness, not an old awareness.

Those details of a vast and very confusing healthcare payment and delivery system (if calling was what before a “system” is even merited) are what most of this community is learning about now, at this time, after the ACA has been passed is new to a great many who cared not for understanding the mess that we had.

It was passed with no conservative support in this country as the best attempt liberals in this community could make to correct a tangled mishmash of disorder that was costing everyone of us an out of control fortune in precious life-saving money that we (liberals) knew could be better spent.

The healthcare system was out of control and costs knew no ceiling and tens of millions of people in our community had no access to even visit a doctor’s office. It was so out control that all of in my community the United States could expect that all health care costs would be at least 12% more expensive in the following year. It was an economic monster by any definition. It was literally killing us.

We had plenty of true systems to look at all over the world, but the conservatives among us thought that we were too different. Too good to learn from others. They thought that our so-called system was wonderful.

It was the profits. It was greed and bottom dollar corporate healthcare industry out of control. It was the cost of doing business or so we accepted it as. We were ignorant and we were all naive. It felt better to be blind to the complexity of a very confused “system.” Barely one conservative representative in this nation knew about those complexities. Barely one of them thought it was “a mess.” They would say things like “the best healthcare system in the world.” They were as children not wanting any change. They had the best healthcare system in the world: it was Congressional healthcare, it was a fast trip to Bethesda Naval Hospital or Walter Reed Army Hospital to be cared for by multiple doctors and nurses and get the best diagnostic technology within an hour of any complaint. They saw what they thought was our healthcare and so postponed making changes that would have saved the lives and the suffering of millions of Americans.

Now they complain the loudest when change is before them. They are the conservatives. A label for a political opinion that dislikes changes that favors the blissful state of ignorance of avoiding complexity and so maintaining a status quo. They think in naivety that the change should be easy. They  remain blissfully ignorant. The conservatives in the United States have no better solution for the mess that they allowed to grow and fester for decades.  

In 1994, I fought for a Single Payer healthcare system for the state of California. The industry steeped in money spent over $72 million to defeat the initiative and won. Californians lost-out on a great chance to show the rest of this country what could be. Here we are 20 years later and we finally have the first glimmer of a national program and we are hearing the voice of the ignorant who hate change once again. Now they want to repeal the ACA and “fix it,” but they have not a good plan to do so. They have learned what the dislike about changes that are really only the beginning.

There will be a unified and national program for providing our healthcare to a standard that surpasses all known standards of healthcare delivery and financing and payment known in the world. I know this because I have seen what the United States is capable of. I still have optimism we can do this after the all the ignorance and greed and disdain for changes that I have witnessed.  

We will likely call it “Medicare for All.” It will be an evolution of “Obama Care.” It will be the inevitable. Change is always wrought with complexities that often involve trial and error learning by large societies. If there was ever a change that we all had to bravely direct ourselves toward, in all the pain and through all the complaining, it is our healthcare financing and delivery “system.” We will one day be able to call it a genuine system of healthcare.

We will choose the current operations of the Medicare Insurance program because it already exists and provides health care financing and so the distribution of healthcare for over 73 million of us. So it makes sense that we should use it to be the most efficient method of financing and delivery of something every man and woman and child in our community will need through their whole lives.  

The next complaint you hear may come from someone who works closely with the complexities of management. They will likely blame it on “Obama Care.” It is the pain of doing what should have been done decades ago. It is the frustration with having change forced upon them. No one like changes that make us do work and causes us to be critical. That is human behavior. That is predictable.

Image: I made this abstract collage in 1995. If defines only in abstract what our current system still looks like. The ACA was an attempt to use what we had without greatly upsetting conservatives in our country and so maybe get a standard passed.

Here are a few other images from that battle decades ago to begin the changes needed to save lives and prevent much of the suffering we have been going through since that time:

All rights reserved: James Gray Mason, December 2015. http://JamesGMason.com

#JamesGMason #SinglePayerHealthcare #Medicare4All #UnitedStates #Healthcare #ObamaCare #AffordablecareAct #Medicare #USCongress #Youassholes

Doctors as Bean Counters

Wouldn’t it be nice if doctors stood out of the way, let consumers shape health care reform, and take what they get? After all they are supposed to be serving us, the consumers, right? Not the other way around. And they are supposed to be healers, not social scientists or economists, or “bean counters,” as the President recently exclaimed.

It should go without saying that doctor’s and all health care provider’s care given, should remain the same in quality and quantity, and only be allowed to get better under any new health care reform. Democratically appointed boards or committees of health care representation should see to that, and I don’t doubt that’s what we’ll see when health care universality is complete.

“But we are speaking for our patients! That’s why we don’t want government run health care! For our patients!” Say the doctor’s opposed to change. Gibberish I say. The truth is a doctor in America knows that if he or she takes Medicare recipients, that there is a cap, or a “ceiling” on reimbursement that is far lower than what private insurance pays for its own customers. And that is the measure the doctor’s use to analogize a newer system created by government. And so they fear a money reduction. The answer to how much reimbursement lay somewhere in between. An average perhaps. That average would truly speak for the patients. And in only the interest of the patients, economists and social scientists, who should be the only one’s creating a universal health care system, would be speaking for the people – speaking only for the patients.

We want doctors to live above the average pay line, far above it. We want them to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. We want them to have nice homes, multiple cars, country club memberships and exotic vacations. We don’t want doctors who earn millions. We don’t want them to grow used to mansions, limousines, second homes in foreign lands and luxury motor yachts and tax loopholes.

Single Payer Health Care - FAQ

Since monitory and other numerical figures vary by interest group whose sources vary by funding. Statistics and figures will be absent in the following FAQ. Instead the document will focus on the reasoned pro argument and con dispute.

1. Other countries that have socialized medicine have long waits for surgery and we do not. Why should we become like them?

Those other nations triage their patients in order of need so an average wait is going to be longer for elective knee surgery or rhinoplasty than for kidney transplant or appendicitis repair.

We don’t have to be like any other nation’s health care. Ours can be our own. The best of other nations’ health care systems and the creative new methods we are capable of, will make-up a new Single Payer Health Care system.

2. Why should my family and I pay for those who do not pay for their own health insurance? It doesn’t seem fair to me.

You already pay for their health care. Except that by the time those without insurance get to a doctor, or hospital, their ailments / diseases have progressed to their most expensive stages. Costing the taxpayers far more, easily surpassing funding enough to have bought them health insurance in the first place. So, the absence of coverage for the poor and middle class, who can’t afford premiums and deductibles, costs taxpayers a lot of money, billions.

What’s more fair to the taxpaying American, every single taxpayer paying for everyone’s health care at once, or allowing tens of millions of taxpayers (yes they all have jobs) without affordable health care access to enter the system upon charity conditions (taxpayer subsidies to hospitals) with their diseases advanced to a point of expensive post onset care? The latter is not fair.

3. What about fraud by doctors and hospitals and those equipment manufacturers and sales people?

Under and new SPHC system stopping fraud will have to be paramount. The ideology that we are all spending our own fortunes, our own hard earned dollars on each other will have to be understood widespread throughout the system, by patients who will be welcomed whistle blowers, by everyone from kitchen employees to the chief surgeon.

A new anti fraud division will be necessary. It must draw a balance between punishment and repercussions for just being investigated, so that those subject to investigation are not threatened should they be innocent.

Some of the types of fraud to watch for will be: over treatment (padding the bill) tough to prove, best discovered by the patient. Over billing for treatment (especially common now towards Medicare and Medicaid systems due to their absence of investigative funding). Equipment over billing and over production and over manufacturing: titanium wheel chairs are not necessary, carved / milled walking canes are a luxury and less sturdy than aluminum canes. Over medicating by physicians; doctors are susceptible to the influences of pharmaceutical company sales persons and their perks, i.e. vacations, flights, golf junkets. Doctors often pile-on medications to the point where side effects from one medication are masking the side effects of another, creating a dangerous situation for the patient. The alert patient is the best whistleblower for this type of fraud and abuse.

4. No one is going to want to be a doctor or nurse under this kind of strictly regulated and restricted environment?

If its strict and restrictive environments that doctors and nurses don’t like, they should leave now. Because, under the current system the greatest pain in the ass is the health insurance companies that determine if a procedure can be paid for – literally a faceless voice on the phone dictates to a nurse or doctor whether or not a healthful or lifesaving procedure can be performed. Some hospitals dedicate an entire floor or wing to desks of workers whose main job is to communicate with mega bureaucratic health insurance companies. Does that seem right?

Under a SPHC system the Administrative body or the SPHCA will allow any and all procedures deemed reasonable by the doctor in charge.

Quality should be rewarded with monitory bonuses and promotions to health care workers.

Under an SPHC system funding will be made available for health care professional higher education and even the building of new campuses dedicated to professional training in medicine.

5. Government sometimes seems to get things so wrong, I don’t trust it. Why would a SPHC system be any different than other government failures, with fraud, negligence and etcetera?

Democracy is the answer to the checks and balances needed to ensure that a SPHC system continues efficiently and without fraud. A hierarchy of councils which ends at the top in Washington D.C. at the SPHCA and a cabinet level appointed bipartisan committee members totaling 9 members (for instance – a tie breaking number of members i.e. the Supreme Court).

The SPHCA must be created via Constitutional Amendment. The main purpose of this would be to separate the funding from the U.S. Congress, which could be swayed by power shifts to functionally change the SPHC system by removal of funds. The second reason the SPHCA should birth via Constitutional Amendment is that the people should be behind it in unanimity. This will ensure an extended life of the program as generations will recall in memory why they created the SPHCA.

The accountability to the consumer should begin with democracy at the local level (as per Clinton Health Care Reform plan of 1995). A Health Care Regional Council District (HCRCD), several or more than one in each state depending on population and number of health care facilities, will be voted in by the local populace during each general election (every four years). This local council would review all consumer complaints. It would review all medical professional complaints. The council must contain a minority of medical professionals and a majority of non medical professional citizens, and this will require run off electioneering allowing election boards to chose second tier candidates to meet the mandate.

The spirit of competition does not have to die with SPHC. Consumer information plays a crucial role in maintaining and building the quality of a facility and its staff. Internet and mailing pamphlets must be prolific in each HCRCD ensuring citizen awareness and input. No citizen should have to be limited to receiving care in his or her own local HCRCD, this is the competitive edge maintained by the consumer/citizen. This edge raises and lowers the numerical value points of any given facility.

You must ask the question of yourself: Do I like democracy? Has America worked pretty well? What if I knew a full accounting of the quality and performance of the hospital in my local area? What if I never had to deal with a health insurance company again?

Visit SiCKOCure.org to learn more and become a part of the struggle for real universal health care.