<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Originally posted by Gardiner
How can The Rich pay $1,000,000,000,000 for Kerry's health Plan?<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
I'm not contesting who Kerry wants to pay for this, I'm curious about how this number was determined.
If it's the number that is currently being paid for health insurance - does it really matter who you pay if you get the care you need?
This is a "generated" number, someone needs to back it up. Where did it come from, who made it, and how did they determine it? This number is very much suspect, unless that's the current cost of healthcare in the US today (in which case it's an irrelevant number designed to create fear); I would imagine it includes costs for optional surgeries (ie, implants) that wouldn't be covered and then factors these costs across the breadth of people who'd never get them in the first place.
This is the problem with numbers, statistics, etc. They can be manipulated to show anything you want. I wish I could remember what movie it was, but to massacre a quote from it - with enough research, a scientist can prove that an elephant can hang over a cliff from daisy.
The point is, you can take numbers and throw them out there to scare people, why not sit down and look at it in the light of reality and see what the result would really be? We know that people with insurance end up costing less money (out of pocket *and* insurance covered) than those without - the office visits and ability to get care before a problem expands significantly reduce overall costs.
We also know that many non-profit (and some for-profit) hospitals are reeling under the load of un-insured patients who couldn't get basic care and require dramatic surgery or other care to recover from what could have easily been corrected in an early stage. Whatever the case, we (the well-to-do) are paying for it, whether it be a surcharge on our doctor's visits that the local offices charge to make up the difference, a fee from hospitals for any surgery to cover debt payments, increased taxes to fund local non-profit/community hospitals, or reduced scientific/health funding to cover increasing operational costs.
If properly executed, I would support a nationwide health plan. I believe that basic healthcare should be given to all people; those who can afford more than the basics should be given the opportunity to spend their personal wealth to get the additional care they desire.
That was a bit of a digression. Heh.
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