My take on the current health care reform offered AKA Obamacare. 6-2012

  The idea of mandating health care insurance for everyone or charging them a tax penalty sounds like what I experienced in Massachusetts.  I don't know when they started this practice but these are the results from my point of view.   Every person in Massachusetts has insurance or gets fined on their income tax, I paid the tax the first year I was there, about $400, much less than the least expensive   insurance I could find, about $150 a month.

  If an employer is going to do business in Massachusetts they must provide health insurance, but can and do charge you for it.  If you are self employed or a contract worker (my situation) you can apply to the state to have an endless line of insurance salesmen call or visit you selling a bewildering verity of insurance, most of which will help you not at all with an occasional visit to the doctor for a cure for the local crud, or pharmaceuticals.  But is offered to cover catastrophic hospital stays and the like and satisfies the government mandate.  I'm sure this law makes the local hospitals very happy. 


  If you are unemployed you can apply for state sponsored insurance, which is a pretty good deal and will cover your dependent children for only a few dollars more a month.  By far the best benefit of this program.  The poor and unemployed  benefit the most from this program.  The healthy working  class are funding this through taxes and insurance premiums.  The wealthy have access to the best care and pay for it.  The healthy lower middle class, which is where I fell, gets the worst of it, not qualifying for Masshealth and having to pay insurance that I never benefited from.



  Socialized health care, as many in Europe have, seems to be working.  I envy those in England where the hospitals don't even have a billing dept. you see the doctor and go home.  As opposed to America  where the first step upon entering is admissions, where you must produce a method of payment and the last step is admissions where you actually pay.  Other examples as in Soviet Russia were horrible failures for poor urban communities.  I just googled communistic health care and was surprised at the number of anti-Obama articles I found.



​In a consumer driven capitalistic health care system a doctor benefits from a good reputation, he/she can expect a good income for achieving high status in education and practice.  Pharmaceuticals manufacture produces huge profits for successful medications and promotes research.  Well managed hospitals are money makers and provide lots of services in urban communities.  In America this is largely funded by insurance companies.  These insurance companies provide no health care, just a means to distribute and regulate health care in a profitable manor, along with jobs and capital investment.  Insurance companies need large amounts of capital to cover the possibility of  large losses.



  The capitalistic approach to healthcare suffers from the profitability of the insurance companies and other non-healthcare providers.  We (health care consumers) are paying for insurance profits.  We are also paying for the lobbyists from all these industries that are sent to Washington that are lobbying for a profitable atmosphere for their business, one online source reported 8 healthcare or pharmaceuticals lobbyists per congressman.   The largest health insurance company is United Healthcare Group. It employes 78,000 people, the CEO Stephan Hemsley is paid $48 million a year.  And this is only one of many insurance companies.  If everyone in America has insurance and the cost of healthcare are known it is an easy equation of cost divided by people to arrive at cost per person of providing healthcare.  I know it is not this simple, costs are higher in New York City than they are in rural Missouri, some people can not afford any insurance, along with other factors that maybe I don't perceive.  But do we need dozens of companies and CEO's being paid billions of dollars to figure this out?  Do I want these people regulating my access to healthcare based on turning profits?  One single government regulated insurance company is a scary proposition also with the history of government waste and corruption.    
  Maybe the solution incorporates a tax on health insurance companies, and the proceeds are used to subsidize those who can not afford the insurance premiums. 

 Two firsthand examples of consumer driven healthcare without insurance. 

I've not had health insurance for the last couple of years and have been to the doctor once for a painful eye condition, I arranged payment in cash before the seeing the doctor.  I did receive service at an extreme discount over what it would have been if I had had insurance, $40 cash as opposed to $90 for an insured office visit, and I received sample medications.  The end result was $40 total for treatment, and if I had insurance I would have paid about $30  in co-pay for office visit and co-pay medication based on my previous insurance, which cost over $200 a month through my employer.   At another time a friend needed an MRI, she had no insurance, about $2000 and more were the original quotes based on insurance,  I got on the phone and called many labs offering MRI's and found one that would perform the test for $350 cash if I could be there at a certain time.   

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Second hand description of communistic healthcare in isolated native tribe in Canada.

Well trained and caring doctors functioning with minimal access to facilities and medications.  I've talked with one of the doctors who practiced a holistic approach to the health of her patients.  All the people had equal access to healthcare and generally were in good health, isolation and extreme cold reduces infectious diseases, a difficult lifestyle and little access to junk food reduced other health problems.   Serious and traumatic cases could be airlifted, if they could survive for a few hours.    Glaucoma patients and other non life threatening conditions could be transported periodically to a hospital.  Serious conditions like cancer generally stayed put and died from their conditions.  Everyone helped to provide money for medicines and the like, also the state helped with the supply.  It was common for the elderly to wander into the woods to meet the Creator.