http://www.rollingstone.com/nationalaffairs/index.php/2009/08/19/matt-taibbi-on-health-care-reform-sick-and-wrong/
Maybe I just like free content, but I hate the way RS plays hide and seek with their most important political content this way. The videos don't seem to work, so I therefore provide links to alternative information sources below. ASAP I will have the full text from some probably independent online source and edit it into this blog entry. Why? Because...
...WE STEAL CONTENT!
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The take-away (most of which occurs between minutes 6:00-7:15): Health Care Reform properly has two prongs that have been utterly gutted by the political process. The first significant thing you could do to reduce health care costs is to eliminate or radically reduce the administrative overhead (i.e. the amount of papers that get filed and pushed around from place to place, a.k.a. "chasing claims"); and the second thing that could be done is to create a public run plan that would force private health insurers to compete with the cost-cutting methods of the VA and Medicare and thereby force costs down across the industry.
Thirty percent of the waste in health care delivery arises from the administration of hundreds of different plans that simply don't need to exist between health care professionals and their clients. This simple goal could be accomplished by a single-payer system the terms of which could easily be understood because it's just one plan instead of hundreds; and can be easily illustrated as the difference between a walk down a single hallway versus being trapped in a labyrinth with hundreds of hallways and dead-ends.
The only real reform being contemplated now is regulation over the existing health care insurance system that prohibits these private insurers from dumping patients or from denying them the care which they have legally contracted to receive. In other words, the private health insurance industry will now have to play fair. If they intend to continue making the profits they make right now they'll have to hike up their prices instead of denying people care. But they get to continue to exist and go on their merry way if they can behave like tolerable corporate citizens even while their business model is bankrupting the whole country.
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OMG, Maria Bartiromo is a complete tit. She desperately needs a pink slip. If nothing else, just remember this moment the next time she tries to come across as sage.
Yes, the U.S. has the best health care system in the world and to which most people are denied access; or even when they have access they may still face bankruptcy due to astronomical prices. Wonderful...we should be so proud.
What kind of health insurance would Jesus carry?
