Healthcare Question: If we don't force people to get coverage....Who pays if they get sick or injured??

Man, you are such a typical lib! Won't do any work yourself and just want to freeload off of others blood, sweat and tears. Well, I am not going to spoon feed you everything! If you look into the methods behind the ranking of Economic Freedom, Healthcare systems / policies in the various countries factor in--there is a 2011 article in the Atlantic where this is discussed, you can look that up yourself.

Here is a link explaining that we brilliant GOPers KNOW that Government run healthcare is a disaster and that the ONLY solution for our healthcare ills is FREE MARKET reform....

....I made this easy for you, you only need to read the first paragraph in the link.

Now, if you simply do a google search you can many, many quotes from GOP members of congress explaining the FACT that healthcare in countries with government run systems are terrible for the economy and for general health. There are even quotes from Trump (praise be upon him) saying similar things about other countries healthcare systems.

Thus, I have established the FACTS that 1) Healthcare factors into the economic freedom ranking of countries by the prestigious and conservative Heritage Foundation which is linked to above 2) Brilliant and thoughtful leaders of the GOP understand that ONLY free market reform can make healthcare work and that government involvement in healthcare hurts economies and health.

Now little libbtard all that you need to do is look at the rankings, look at the countries ranked ahead of the US, and google the healthcare systems in those countries. I'll help you--look up the systems in Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Canada (all ranked ahead of the us in terms of Economic Freedom) and you'll see that these systems are all 100% pure free market systems. FACT!

This is the empirical basis of the well-thoughtout, detailed and realistic plan that the GOP has had in their back pocket all along. The brilliance of their well-thoughtout plan--which they clearly have had for YEARS and had ready to go the 60+ times they voted to repeal OBUMMERcare--is based on these economic realities spelled out in the Heritage Foundation rankings.

#MAGA

#unpresidented

#whoknewhealthcarewassocomplex

so rather than defending yourself and actually being able to explain the physics behind MRI and "the differences between scanners" you resort to calling me crazy. face it, you don't know what you're talking about. I was looking forward to tearing you apart to show you how little you actually know, but you couldn't even give me anything to work wtih. you're a fraud, you don't know anything. admit it, you lost.

DiscoGary wrote:

join utah wrote:

so you consider yourself an expert and this is all you can say about the differences between scanners "more powerful scanners with more detectors can scan faster and get better resolution than less powerful machines"? do you post drunk as well as drive drunk, chief? no comments on what makes a scanner more powerful or how that impacts resolution. this post, as with all your other posts, show what a fraud you really are.

I think I'll just rake in this pot, and leave the table before the crazies get out of control. I don't like playing with sore losers.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

You are the ULTIMATE loser. You don't know jack shit about ANYTHING. EVER!

I just love this:

"In 2005 20% of the world's CT scanner's image reconstruction hardware was designed by me.

You picked the wrong time to call my bluff."

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!

ROFL!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Dude - Please get a clue.

GOP deep thinker is Flagpole - a well-know liberal.

Please wake up, smell some coffee or something.

#toopainfultowatch

Doctor Watson wrote:

Gotta ask... wrote:

Since I am a 'typical lib' please tell me where this link says anything about the health care exiting for all in these countries? And where it speaks about what their specific systems are?

I mean you are such a deep thinker and all.

Dude - Please get a clue.

GOP deep thinker is Flagpole - a well-know liberal.

Please wake up, smell some coffee or something.

#toopainfultowatch

LOL! I love how one can put the phrase "brother" in any post and brilliant faux-conservatives like Dr. Watson assumes you're flaggy! Your powers of deduction are amazing Dr. Watson you closeted lib you.

#MAGA

PTF wrote:

Educated Guy...many thanks for your posts here. I've never seen such a good explanation of why the whole healthcare thing is such a mess...and what can be done to solve it. Brilliant!

Unfortunately...as you say...the very last thing those in power want to do is fix it.

I've studied the health care industry from an economics perspective for both school and leisure.

How anyone can defend a system that is EITHER fee-for-service OR employs a third party payment system (just one of the two) is beyond me.

But how anyone can defend a system that is BOTH fee-for-service AND employs a third party payment system... wow... I mean, that blows my mind. And it doesn't matter how many people pay into the system; the basic foundation of how the system operates needs to be efficient. You can't have a bunch of people skimming off the top, with unlimited funds (because "everyone's paying in") and expect to keep costs in check.

The solution isn't based on any Left/Right politics either; it's rooted in basic economics and incentive structure. Anyone including politics/political references in their responses are not to be taken seriously when discussing health care reform.

DiscoGary wrote:

join utah wrote:

so you consider yourself an expert and this is all you can say about the differences between scanners "more powerful scanners with more detectors can scan faster and get better resolution than less powerful machines"? do you post drunk as well as drive drunk, chief? no comments on what makes a scanner more powerful or how that impacts resolution. this post, as with all your other posts, show what a fraud you really are.

I think I'll just rake in this pot, and leave the table before the crazies get out of control. I don't like playing with sore losers.

While I think he exposed you as being completely full of it, I think we all appreciate you not torturing us all with a discussion of scanners.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA wrote:

DiscoGary wrote:

I think I'll just rake in this pot, and leave the table before the crazies get out of control. I don't like playing with sore losers.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

You are the ULTIMATE loser. You don't know jack shit about ANYTHING. EVER!

I just love this:

"In 2005 20% of the world's CT scanner's image reconstruction hardware was designed by me.

You picked the wrong time to call my bluff."

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!

ROFL!!!!!!!!!!!!!

For CT scanners it is ILLEGAL to lose data if the patient is being irradiated. How many people on the street know that? Imagine the extra cost of building hardware that can't be allowed to fail by law, not mention the pressure of having to answer for any failures in the field, which I never had to do. It's actually impossible to build hardware that never fails, but a best effort was made to honor the requirement and that doesn't come cheap.

No one ever came up to me and said "Gary, that part costs too much. Could you put something cheaper in it's place?" That should make you feel a little better about getting in one of those things, although my hardware did not control the X-ray source, which is the thing that could kill you. Well, once the production floor swapped out a part without asking me so they could save $10 dollars on a multi-million dollar scanner. The new part blew up during testing (fortunately, that was way better than blowing up after shipment), and after a very tense meeting with all concerned my Bill of Materials was never questioned again. For the hardware geeks out there wondering how a part could blow up, it was caused by replacing a high-surge current capacitor with a cheap low-surge one. BANG!

I actually did what I said, but what does it really matter either way? In the valley of the trolls ideas have to stand on their own merits without the weight of credentials behind them.

You'll notice how he didn't disagree with my analysis about how different machines are needed for different medical cases and how the most expensive machines are purchased primarily for their showcase appeal and usually get used for cases where a much less costly solution would work, which is the only part of the scanner issue relevant to the discussion.

mellow seeds wrote:

DiscoGary wrote:

I think I'll just rake in this pot, and leave the table before the crazies get out of control. I don't like playing with sore losers.

While I think he exposed you as being completely full of it, I think we all appreciate you not torturing us all with a discussion of scanners.

Too late.

DG are we suppose to take the above post as "knowledge" of "scanners"? If I am not mistaken, you were suggesting in earlier post that you have "knowledge" about the appropriate medical use of scanners...i.e. sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value of the various "scanners" for myriad medical conditions. You seem to have been implying that you have extensive medical knowledge about the appropriate use and limitations of these various technologies.

Your above post just tells us that you are a glorified mechanic with really no knowledge of actual medicine and the use of various radiographic techniques in the diagnosis and evaluation of disease. Am I missing something?

Um, what was that? wrote:

...

DG are we suppose to take the above post as "knowledge" of "scanners"? If I am not mistaken, you were suggesting in earlier post that you have "knowledge" about the appropriate medical use of scanners...i.e. sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value of the various "scanners" for myriad medical conditions. You seem to have been implying that you have extensive medical knowledge about the appropriate use and limitations of these various technologies.

Your above post just tells us that you are a glorified mechanic with really no knowledge of actual medicine and the use of various radiographic techniques in the diagnosis and evaluation of disease. Am I missing something?

You are missing the entire point, but that's not surprising.

In the context of the discussion where the cost of the latest, most powerful scanner is always used to justify the rising costs of health care and is used to show how the average guy could never afford to access something like that, I was pointing out how the most powerful machines are only needed for rare cases, and in most cases one of the older, cheaper, less powerful machines would do the job just fine for much less cost.

THAT is what I was referring to when I said I knew well how these things get used. NO ONE HAS CHALLENGED THAT ASSERTION.

Do we have any doctors, algorithmic PhD's, or glorified mechanics out there who disagree with that? No. Of course not because anyone anywhere near the industry knows it is true. And I was close enough to know.

Furthermore, this kind of thing goes on across the entire health care field, where expensive solutions are pushed over more reasonable ones because the 3rd party payer system doesn't provide enough push back.

That was my point.

Now, if anyone wants to find out how well I can explain how a stronger magnet and more detectors sampling at a higher frequency both drive up the cost while increasing speed and resolution, I can give it my best shot, but that's not what this discussion is about.

To bring all this back to the original post. If we followed Educated Guy's advice and allowed market forces to work in the health care field, then prices would be driven down across the board, and even catastrophic health care costs wouldn't be so catastrophic.

The high costs we see today are not fixed. Instead of focusing on how we can throw more money at the problem, we should be focused on how to drive down costs.

DiscoGary wrote:

To bring all this back to the original post. If we followed Educated Guy's advice and allowed market forces to work in the health care field, then prices would be driven down across the board, and even catastrophic health care costs wouldn't be so catastrophic.

The high costs we see today are not fixed. Instead of focusing on how we can throw more money at the problem, we should be focused on how to drive down costs.

It is completely unrealistic to expect prices of extremely expensive treatments to ever come down to prices that an ordinary person could afford. Some surgeries cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Please show me where you could suddenly get cheap human hearts from ethically, for example.

Every new treatment or drug that reaches the market will be expensive and the costs tied up in research need to be covered or there will not be any further medical research. It is completely necessary for companies to have exclusive rights to their drug for 10+ years in order to keep the medical research cycle going. That means no competition.

If those medicines/treatments/operations are to be available for ordinary people it will take time for each one to come down in price as competitors get together a rival product/service and the exclusivity to expire.

GOP deep thinker wrote:

Doctor Watson wrote:

Dude - Please get a clue.

GOP deep thinker is Flagpole - a well-know liberal.

Please wake up, smell some coffee or something.

#toopainfultowatch

LOL! I love how one can put the phrase "brother" in any post and brilliant faux-conservatives like Dr. Watson assumes you're flaggy! Your powers of deduction are amazing Dr. Watson you closeted lib you.

#MAGA

Good one, Flaggy, you (not very well) closeted lib!

Doctor Watson wrote:

GOP deep thinker wrote:

LOL! I love how one can put the phrase "brother" in any post and brilliant faux-conservatives like Dr. Watson assumes you're flaggy! Your powers of deduction are amazing Dr. Watson you closeted lib you.

#MAGA

Good one, Flaggy, you (not very well) closeted lib!

I swear I am not Flagpole, brother.

#MAGA

GOP deep thinker wrote:

Doctor Watson wrote:

Good one, Flaggy, you (not very well) closeted lib!

I swear I am not Flagpole, brother.

#MAGA

Will you also swear you are not a liberal?

Utopian wrote:

Every new treatment or drug that reaches the market will be expensive and the costs tied up in research need to be covered or there will not be any further medical research. It is completely necessary for companies to have exclusive rights to their drug for 10+ years in order to keep the medical research cycle going. That means no competition.

If those medicines/treatments/operations are to be available for ordinary people it will take time for each one to come down in price as competitors get together a rival product/service and the exclusivity to expire.

You mean the dangerous drugs backed by industry-funded safety studies that get the blessing of the FDA?

"FDA-approved" correctly prescribed medications now account for 100,000+ DEATHS and 2.5 million SERIOUS adverse events annually in the U.S. 😠. And 1.7 million of the annual 2.5 million people who suffer from the serious drug side-effects require hospitalization! Consider the cost of treating these people that suffer damage from correctly prescribed medical drugs! Medical-drug destruction to say the least:

And to add to the problem, doctors view modern medicine as unassailable science—they cherish all the official science, no matter how deep the publication bias goes. Industry-funded safety studies polluting the journals they worship and many could care less - they have become merely foot soldiers for the pharma industry! 😔.

And while our illustrious members of Congress bicker about what type of plan should replace the ACA, they completely ignore the other "elephant in the room:"

And the late & renowned researcher Dr. Barbara Starfield of JH also compiled some very sobering data on the state of the medical system:

The findings by Barbara Starfield, MD, of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health:

12,000 deaths from unnecessary surgeries;

7,000 deaths from medication errors in hospitals;

20,000 deaths from other errors in hospitals;

80,000 deaths from infections acquired in hospitals;

106,000 deaths from FDA-approved correctly prescribed medicines.

The total estimated number of deaths caused by medical treatment in the US every year is *225,000.*

Once again; 100,000+ deaths & over 2.5 million serious adverse events annually from *FDA-approved* correctly prescribed medications!

But all is well & good with the medical cartel...business as usual.

Helluva rant bruh. So, what exactly are you saying congress should do? What's the solution to our healthcare mess?