Howard Dean On Health Care-It's Wrong!

[Kathianne]

He argues for a 'public option', but other than that? He's sounding like Lieberman:

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[chloe]

Health Insurance companies have too much power in politics/government decisions. Ron Paul said it used to be health insurance, was just an insurance in case you did have to have a major surgery or something unexpected happened, now everyone expects it to pay most of the medical bill for everything which jacks up rates, Plus doctors bill 3rd parties at higher rates too. What would happen if everyone dropped insurance? Idf nobody had health insurance and still went to Doctors. If you didnt have a high premium to pay and something unexpected happened you work out monthly payments to the doctor and hospital.

Ron Paul said:

Over these years, there has been less competition in medicine and that has been gradual over a hundred years or so where people couldn’t enter the medical field without getting all kinds of licenses and protecting special groups. But if there’s more competition and there’s less insurance, actually costs go down.

If you look at some of the procedures provided by the plastic surgeons or the eye surgeons who do keratotomies and they’re not under coverage of the insurance company, those prices actually go down.


We don’t have insurance for medical care. We have distorted that word. Insurance is supposed to measure risk and you’re supposed to buy that protection. So if you want medical insurance, you would be insuring against bad accidents or major surgeries or against cancer or something like that. But today, people expect prepaid services. They want every penny taken care of. They want the drugs paid for and then that invites abuse. When third parties pay the bills, doctors, labs, and hospital, and everybody else, all of a sudden, they charge the most, not the least.

I experienced medicine before they had managed care and patients were always charged the least and nobody went without medical care. The churches and volunteer hospitals and other groups took care of the people, but now, everybody has to have this so-called insurance, which doesn’t do a whole lot more than boost prices and then cause shortages and then there’s a demand for what? For more government and that’s where we are today.

So we’re going from corporate medicine, which was deeply flawed and not working and now, the proposal here is to go to government medicine, which is socialized medicine. This has not really worked well any place else. People, yeah, they surely get care if they want to wait and watch, but today, even and in spite of our shortcomings, people come to this country still for top medical care, but that would soon change if we want to equalize everything by leveling it and making sure that everybody gets poor medicine rather than extra medicine, extra and better medical care.

But we could do better. What we could do is introduce the notion that patients do have rights. Anything that comes out of Washington here, and something will, what we ought to fight for is the fact that we have a choice. We shouldn’t be forced into a program. If the government starts a program, we ought to have the right to opt out of the program.

We should be very generous with tax credits. Give tax credits for the entire amount of money you spend on medical care, so you can be independent. The concept of medical savings account is a good concept and we should promote that and encourage that and we should demand privacy.

Ron Paul

http://www.ronpaul.com/2009-06-19/ron-paul-how-to-solve-the-healthcare-crisis/

[cat slave]

Yeah, it used to be "major medical" for hospital stays and the like. Office
visits and medications were paid for by the patient! It worked before the
entitlements became payments for votes.