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Now Aetna: This certainly doesn’t look good for Obamacare

Tide1986

Tide1986

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Tidewater said:
You may be right.
The two characteristics that separate the private sector from government are:
(1) inefficiency. The grim reaper of economic Darwinism is not going to come along and kill a grossly inefficient government agency like it does a grossly inefficient business and
(2) compulsion. GM can't force me to do anything. The government, especially the general government which admits no meaningful limits on its powers, is a loaded gun pointed at your head. Comply and you'll get along. Do not comply and watch the fangs come out.

When the government takes over health care, (which is inevitable at this point, I fear). we will see rationing (not denial, but rationing, especially by delay: "You can't get your bypass surgery until next October in you are still alive by that point.") and massive government intrusion into issues affecting health ("remove the salt bottles from the tables in your restaurant," or "have you run your quota of miles this month?" "do you have a gun in your house?")

The US health care system will soon become like the British NHS. It will handle the little, simple things well, and take enormous amounts of time to deal with complicated, expensive procedures. In every election cycle stories of grossly inefficient health care systems and workers, and the inadequacy of the NHS budget will dominate the news.
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Ultimately, nationalized health care is how the Feds will fix the VA problem. All Americans will have the same quality of care as veterans today. Voila! Problem solved! Veterans will no longer have substandard care since all care will be dumbed down to the VA level.

Edit: Those with sickly family members who have applauded Obamacare because of the momentary suckling it allowed them will soon learn to rue nationalized health care when their family members are allowed to die or otherwise suffer mercilessly under a fully nationalized system.
 
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rgw

rgw

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The VA use to be great but then we decided to fight two wars and didn't plan for inevitable uptick in VA usage. It is the same ol' self-fulfilling prophecy we're duped by the conservative movement with for decades.

Lets lower the taxes, not lower the spending, then point to the mess we made as a proof on why the government sucks and can't do anything right therefore we should lower the taxes even more.
 
Tidewater

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rgw said:
The VA use to be great but then we decided to fight two wars and didn't plan for inevitable uptick in VA usage. It is the same ol' self-fulfilling prophecy we're duped by the conservative movement with for decades.

Lets lower the taxes, not lower the spending, then point to the mess we made as a proof on why the government sucks and can't do anything right therefore we should lower the taxes even more.
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So... the VA could only get around to spending money to care for veterans after they had spent
$700,000 was spent on two sculptures at a hospital for blind veterans, the Palo Alto Polytrauma and Blind Rehabilitation Center.

A spokesperson for the Palo Alto facility told ABC News that it had more than $4 million in art contracts in 2013 and 2014, including for an installation on the side of a parking garage. The installation, meant to honor blind veterans, featured quotes by Abraham Lincoln and Eleanor Roosevelt in Morse code that light up. The irony, critics point out, is that a blind veteran would be unlikely to see the massive artwork that cost $280,000.

So the folks administering that budget said, "Look, as soon as we get the art work situation squared away around here, we will spend more money on caring for veterans."
(I'd bet that the story closer to the truth was one VA employee was sleeping with his supervisor and and the subordinate said, "I have a niece who is a really good artist, does things with morse code, and she'd really like a chance to make it big. I found $2 million in our budget and I'd like her to get the chance to decorate the parking garage with her art." To which the supervisor said, "Okay, but I hope the newspapers never find out about this.")

Or this: Veterans Affairs pays $142 million in bonuses while veterans are dying waiting for VA care.

And this is conservatives' fault in your mind? Sounds a bit like special pleading to me.

More to the point, do you honestly believe that the when the US adopt a single-payer system it will not act like the VA currently does? That the American Health Service will suddenly become paragons of virtue when it comes to handling the tax-payers' money?

The AHS will probably act more like this.
 
selmaborntidefan

selmaborntidefan

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rgw said:
The VA use to be great
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When???


rgw said:
but then we decided to fight two wars and didn't plan for inevitable uptick in VA usage.
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Oh, they planned for it. The plan was to LET THEM DIE WHILE WAITING!!!!

And it succeeded, too.


rgw said:
It is the same ol' self-fulfilling prophecy we're duped by the conservative movement with for decades.
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Oh don't come at me with that one. Dad retired in 1988 and the VA was a mess then...funded by....the Democrats who ran Congress in the House since 1954 and the Senate for all but six years since 1954.

And it was bad through BOTH Republican AND Democratic administrations.

In one case, a veteran who applied for VA care in 1998 was placed in "pending" status for 14 years. Another veteran who passed away in 1988 was found to have an unprocessed record lingering in 2014, the investigation found.


And besides, that doesn't explain how places like the DMV are so efficient now, does it?


Or maybe that failed Obamacare launch...

rgw said:
Lets lower the taxes, not lower the spending, then point to the mess we made as a proof on why the government sucks and can't do anything right therefore we should lower the taxes even more.
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When was the last tax cut?

And how does that somehow CAUSE the VA mess YEARS before AND years later?


Oh - and just to remind you, there's only one candidate in the race who VOTED FOR BOTH OF THOSE WARS....

And what's funny is that underlying your argument here is the same ole liberal mantra - "with just a little more money, we can make it more efficient."

And yet that never happens for some reason...look at our education system as proof.


Oh and btw, right after Obama and his minions took office, they turned right around and using Democratic terminology CUT VA benefits including the COLA. Don't try to tell those of us who actually experienced what did and didn't happen.
 
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selmaborntidefan

selmaborntidefan

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Tidewater said:
So... the VA could only get around to spending money to care for veterans after they had spent
$700,000 was spent on two sculptures at a hospital for blind veterans, the Palo Alto Polytrauma and Blind Rehabilitation Center.

A spokesperson for the Palo Alto facility told ABC News that it had more than $4 million in art contracts in 2013 and 2014, including for an installation on the side of a parking garage. The installation, meant to honor blind veterans, featured quotes by Abraham Lincoln and Eleanor Roosevelt in Morse code that light up. The irony, critics point out, is that a blind veteran would be unlikely to see the massive artwork that cost $280,000.

So the folks administering that budget said, "Look, as soon as we get the art work situation squared away around here, we will spend more money on caring for veterans."
(I'd bet that the story closer to the truth was one VA employee was sleeping with his supervisor and and the subordinate said, "I have a niece who is a really good artist, does things with morse code, and she'd really like a chance to make it big. I found $2 million in our budget and I'd like her to get the chance to decorate the parking garage with her art." To which the supervisor said, "Okay, but I hope the newspapers never find out about this.")

Or this: Veterans Affairs pays $142 million in bonuses while veterans are dying waiting for VA care.

And this is conservatives' fault in your mind? Sounds a bit like special pleading to me.

More to the point, do you honestly believe that the when the US adopt a single-payer system it will not act like the VA currently does? That the American Health Service will suddenly become paragons of virtue when it comes to handling the tax-payers' money?

The AHS will probably act more like this.
Click to expand...
It will be EXACTLY like the VA, only ten times worse since MANY more people will be using it.


Of course, when the VA REALLY wants to expedite the process, you get scandals like the one that landed a former co-worker of mine in prison for fraud.
.

That's the Louisville (KY) VA. But they DID learn from this. The scandal actually broke in November 2008, so I guess even though we can't blame Hillary for Benghazi, we can blame this one on Bush. Fair enough.

So Obama takes over and is President for SIX YEARS, and after the prosecution of the others, the VA becomes a left-wing bastion of morality and virtue.


About 13 percent of schedulers at the Robley Rex Veterans Affairs Medical Center say they were told to falsify or manipulate appointment dates requested by veterans, according to an audit conducted in the wake of the VA wait time scandal.

The "working draft" of the Louisville results, received this week after a Freedom of Information Act request in May, says 12.5 percent of local staff surveyed answered "yes" to the question: "Do you feel you receive instruction from the facility to enter a desired date other than the date a veteran asks to be seen?"


Now, while I don't for one second blame either guy, let's not pretend this is some right/left issue of efficiency. It's inefficient no matter who is running it.
 
rgw

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I'd point out that the problems I talk about with funding weren't good in 1998 either. We haven't had a true liberal president since maybe the 1960s. Each of the democratic presidents since the Reagan era faced a combatant legislature almost their entire presidency. And I don't think Clinton or Obama are all that liberal in the grand scheme of things. Since Reagan, all of them have been slightly right of center, firmly right of center, or all the way on the right pole. Liberalism in America has been dead since the working class revolt against the DNP in the late 1960s. Nixon might be the most liberal guy we've had since the 1968 election. But he also got us started down the path of the war on drugs quagmire, so maybe not exactly another FDR.
 
Tidewater

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rgw said:
I'd point out that the problems I talk about with funding weren't good in 1998 either. We haven't had a true liberal president since maybe the 1960s. Each of the democratic presidents since the Reagan era faced a combatant legislature almost their entire presidency. And I don't think Clinton or Obama are all that liberal in the grand scheme of things. Since Reagan, all of them have been slightly right of center, firmly right of center, or all the way on the right pole. Liberalism in America has been dead since the working class revolt against the DNP in the late 1960s. Nixon might be the most liberal guy we've had since the 1968 election. But he also got us started down the path of the war on drugs quagmire, so maybe not exactly another FDR.
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Interesting.
How do you define liberalism?
 
rgw

rgw

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Well it depends what kind of liberalism we're talking about. I don't think either party is particularly liberal in terms of classical liberalism. :D
 
Tide1986

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Another McArdle piece on this topic:

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-08-19/obamacare-s-public-option-is-no-longer-defensible

There are two unavoidable realities of making the American health-care system less costly: Americans must use less care, and our nation’s legion of well-paying, stable jobs in the health-care sector need to be both less numerous and less well paid. What no one can figure out is how to generate the political will to make this happen. The public option doesn’t fix that political problem.

The public option was best sold as a way to keep insurers from taking excess profits off of a customer base that was required to buy their product. But as it turns out, that’s the exact opposite of the problem we actually have. Which makes it a little mystifying that the public option is still seen as the solution. Somehow in supporters' minds, it has become a harmless homeopathic remedy that will cure any disease that ails you. In medicine, when we see such claims, most of us know that we’re looking at a useless quack nostrum. In policy, we should be similarly skeptical of miracle cures.
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NationalTitles18

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Tide1986 said:
Another McArdle piece on this topic:

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-08-19/obamacare-s-public-option-is-no-longer-defensible
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Americans must use less care, and our nation’s legion of well-paying, stable jobs in the health-care sector need to be both less numerous and less well paid.
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Good luck with that.

That may be what you do if you want to lower costs at any cost. It's not what you do if you want to have the best outcomes or even good outcomes at reasonable cost. It's not what you do if you want access to quality providers. It's not what you do if you care about quality at all. It's not what you do if you are one of the people who need care and are then told you can't access it. It is what you do if you are a myopic central planner who doesn't have to suffer all the inevitable consequences because you and yours are insulated from the devastation you have caused.
 
Tidewater

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seebell said:
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The Federal government has 900,000 armed police officers (counting state and county police which would inevitable be usurped by the Federal government in time of need) with guns aimed at my head if I don't like the future National Health Service decisions in regard to my health.

How many armed police officers with the monopoly on violence does Aetna have?
 
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seebell said:
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How do you translate this chart? FWIW, likely 75%+ that compensation is not in salary. My honest initial reaction (without knowing any details of the people) is, "Good for them. They've worked hard to grow their business, made a lot of people money, and got rewarded for their efforts." I don't begrudge people for making money. I don't get jealous over what other people earn. (If it turns out the people in question are criminals or otherwise doing someone shady, my opinion will certainly change.)

My second reaction is, "Wow. These guys are paying a ton in taxes. It's a shame to forfeit so much money (that could be used wisely) and give it to the government so it can be wasted."

Are these your reactions, seebell?
 
NationalTitles18

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NationalTitles18

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Bamaro said:
I'm sure Aetna has their panties in a bit of a wad over the Justice Dept ruling too
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And that explains 4$30 million in loses in the first half of this year how? That fixes the problem with the "ACA" how? That insures people how? That makes insurance more affordable ho? That increases access to care for people how? That makes this a better law how?
 
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