I think we are over-insured

The same argument supports why insurance should pay for routine pregnancy. Sure there is upfront cost but doing so avoids potentially huge further costs. By not paying for basic pregnancy care you risk the potential for crushing payments caused by unforeseen complications during pregnancy (e.g., hypoxia due to umbilical cord wrapped around neck, or cerebral hemorrhage due to preeclampsia).

Mtn Dew wrote:

I don't even think a routine pregnancy should be paid by insurance. Insurance is for things one has no control over.

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You do realize I hope that after the USA the biggest and most profitable market worldwide for McDonalds is France, right?

Sagarin wrote:

Ummm, yes, they do eat rich food, but they also eat fish. They do eat olive oil, and, frankly, and here's the BIGGIE... they don't eat HIGH-FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP-laden PROCESSED food. Their diet is much more natural than ours and contains more natural fruit and vegetables.

UsedToBeKnowItAll wrote:

Sagarin wrote:

Ummm, yes, they do eat rich food, but they also eat fish. They do eat olive oil, and, frankly, and here's the BIGGIE... they don't eat HIGH-FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP-laden PROCESSED food. Their diet is much more natural than ours and contains more natural fruit and vegetables.

I agree. So what is the reform that changes this?

Well, you can (shudder) tax these foods to the high-heavens, but the FDA and their lobbyists are so powerful, that the status quo probably remains intact. I was in Norway, and they feed their kids roe (fish eggs) out of a little tube of toothpaste. The adults eat the "adult-version." I tried the "kid-version," and just about puked it was so disgusting. In other words, you set the palate pretty early in life. And we do it with HIGH-FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP PROCESSED FOOD. It's going to take some serious educating and undermining of the counter-lobbying.

Not that we would all eat "raw," but check out some studies on raw diets. They have successfully reversed type 2 diabetes in some cases. An endocrinologist I shadowed some 18 years ago was using diet and exercise as "treatment," and was totally scoffed at by her old-school peers, all of whom treated with insulin and the FDA's food pyramid pamphlet. Friggin joke.

I eat 50% raw. I eat a lot of buffalo meat (buffalo don't get cancer) and fish. I eat a lot of salads and nuts. I dropped my cholesterol from 300 to under 200 for the first time in my life with diet, SHOCKING my cardiologist who told me that I could eat nothing but lettuce and not drop cholesterol more than 10%. Not true for everyone, but it is true for 90%. They just don't know it yet. If people can't see the health storm brewing "down the road," then they are utterly clueless or just simply don't care.

My $0.02 wrote:

Sagarin wrote:

Ummm, yes, they do eat rich food, but they also eat fish. They do eat olive oil, and, frankly, and here's the BIGGIE... they don't eat HIGH-FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP-laden PROCESSED food. Their diet is much more natural than ours and contains more natural fruit and vegetables.

You must have visited a different France than I did. My experience with French cuisine is lots of meat, lots of bread, lots of butter, lots of cheese, and very little by way of vegetables (fruits are a different story). They do eat a lot of fish, though.

This is very different than the traditional Med diet which is lots of vegetables and spreads with olive oil, lots of fish, and very little butter or meat.

I never said France ate the Mediterranean diet. That's not what I said.

Just a thought here wrote:

You do realize I hope that after the USA the biggest and most profitable market worldwide for McDonalds is France, right?

Yes, and that's a problem. We are exporting our food habits all over the world. And,many leftward European economies are starting to move rightward at the very time we are doing the opposite, because they see the economic fallout of many errant policies.

You know your comments would have a lot more sense if you were fully informed; insurance companies do not pay the costs of the under-insured.

First, they use every means ethical and unethical to not pay anything if they can get away with it. Second, they have no legal obligation to pay for under or non-insured.

What is true, is they are a profit machine, they sell a product that is not tangible, and like some kinds of insurance, you ain't getting any money back unless you get sick.

Every bill they can avoid paying, they will.

The actually teach their employees the statistics of how many times of refusing a claim before the average customer stops submitting, requesting, fight.

They also teach them to lie, flat out lie, to tell you a check is in the mail, when it is not, etc.

They take nice college graduates, and teach them to lie and cheat and screw people over.

It is an industry that has become more disgusting as time has gone on, and society, and bean and profit counting people's morals have gone down.

I still agree with what you're saying, but I'm not seeing a pragmatic solution to the problem in what you're writing. From what I can understand, we have stupid doctors, stupid citizens, and powerful lobbyists that want us to maintain our bad habits. Sounds pretty hopeless to me.

If by insurance you mean something called natural selection

Just a thought here wrote:

The same argument supports why insurance should pay for routine pregnancy. Sure there is upfront cost but doing so avoids potentially huge further costs. By not paying for basic pregnancy care you risk the potential for crushing payments caused by unforeseen complications during pregnancy (e.g., hypoxia due to umbilical cord wrapped around neck, or cerebral hemorrhage due to preeclampsia).

Mtn Dew wrote:

I don't even think a routine pregnancy should be paid by insurance. Insurance is for things one has no control over.

Except that preeclampsia and an umbilical cord wrapped around the babies neck are not totally or not at all controlled by genetics. Thus they are not directly influenced by natural selection.

evolution at its finest wrote:

If by insurance you mean something called natural selection

Just a thought here wrote:

The same argument supports why insurance should pay for routine pregnancy. Sure there is upfront cost but doing so avoids potentially huge further costs. By not paying for basic pregnancy care you risk the potential for crushing payments caused by unforeseen complications during pregnancy (e.g., hypoxia due to umbilical cord wrapped around neck, or cerebral hemorrhage due to preeclampsia).

Well, I'm guess I'm saying that it starts with education, both at home and at school, though the public-school system is a notorious money syphoner producing worse and worse results (though some of that goes back to poor parenting and DIET, I guarantee it -- my neighbor's kid is on ADHD meds, but his dad admits that they're never home because they're trying to fund a two-income lifestyle while particpating in their kid's extracurricular activities, and they eat nothing but microwaved or fast food junk as a result). After education comes PERSONAL ACCOUNTABILITY. I mean, we can't just fund multiple stent operations, and bypasses, and statins, and anti-depressants, and insulin shots for a demographic that's moving hypersped toward it. We simply CANNOT afford it.

I would rather see a government held to the same efficiency standards as the private sector LONG BEFORE I would advocate raising taxes, BUT, I am ok to raise marginal taxes (not corporate or cap gains) to fund those who simply CANNOT get themselves access. For those who WON'T I'm more ambivalent on. Personally, I would favor a consumption-oriented tax that perhaps exempts nondiscretionary items like healthy FOOD for poor people. That way, you could "soak the rich," and capyure a lot of black market revenue.

The funny thing is, when you go about a month without something, you really no longer crave it. I'm eating a salad made with kale, spinach, broccoli sprouts, pepper-jack goat cheese, guacamole, and turkey bacon with an olive-oil vinegrette dressing as I write this. Sounds gross, but, the ice cream sundae my mother-in-law had for her birthday last night didn't appeal to me at all, because I've lost the sugar craving. I do eat my share of fruit (mainly berries) and dark chocolate (bioflavanoids) though.

*I* guess.... how ironical

Actually, natural selection is more of a social spin of what Darwin documented. However, either way, to suggest something such as preclampsia, which may be caused by specific deficits or defects in receptors (or even immune functions), is not caused by genetics is absurd.

An umbilical cord wrapped around a neck may be due to genetics, but a lot less likely, as proteins probably don't have the ability to just twist until the point they wrap around a neck.

Japan, Canada, Germany and France are some of the first countries to emerge from the recession and post positive growth. Much of the economic growth is tied to exports. What do all these countries have in common? Some sort of single payer/socialized health care/insurance system. Private health insurance paid by employers is a major drag on US business and a major barrier to being competitive with other countries. That is why Ford is a big supporter of single payer health care.

Single payer, socialized medicine and variations on the two deliver quality medical care for far less than it costs in the US for our private health insurance system. The only reason the private health care system persists in the US is because a small group of people make piles of money off of it.

And the best way to change American's diet and health habits is through a single payer system. In our current private system, the economic incentive is to have more sick people. There aren't any profits in healthy people (at least not in the health care system). In a single payer system, there is a major incentive to have a healthy population. It keeps the cost of health care down, which keeps taxes that pay for health care down. And universal access means that people get to see the doctor and get treated before conditions become serious.

Single payer is the only system that really works. You can tweak our private health insurance system all you want and you will never fix it.

Sagarin wrote:

I never said France ate the Mediterranean diet. That's not what I said.

Curiously, the French drink a lot of red wine too, which not only has bioflavonoids but longevity-increasing and immune-enhancing resveratrol. Not that you get much from a glass, but over a period of time...

I take your point about "peer-reviewed" studies, but I've had enough personal experience with allopathic physicians, as well as alternative-medicine "quacks," and I've seen the results, however anecdotal, in my own and extended family. The study I'd like to see is one that controls for formula-fed babies, kids who eat primarily processed foods, and kids who were hyper-vaccinated. But how in the heck do you partition that out, and who's going to fund it, because it would have to be massive in scope? For that matter, let's control for kids who get dumped into daycare early in life and are chronically sleep deprived and exposed to an overwhelming amount of "bugs" very early in life, in addition to hyper-vaccination. I think the results some 30 years out would be devastating. But who's going to do that study?

Precious Roy wrote:

Japan, Canada, Germany and France are some of the first countries to emerge from the recession and post positive growth. Much of the economic growth is tied to exports. What do all these countries have in common? Some sort of single payer/socialized health care/insurance system. Private health insurance paid by employers is a major drag on US business and a major barrier to being competitive with other countries. That is why Ford is a big supporter of single payer health care.

You are making a spurious correlation. One does not necessarily cause the other. And you undo your argument when you comment on exports, which, largely, are tied to monetary policy and currency valuation. Europe has a different mandate then we do -- price stability. Our mandate is dual; price stability with maximum sustainable growth. It's ludicrous that you would use this myopic, two-year example to advance your argument. Moreover, the US has likely emerged from recession as well (for now), even though our credit problems were MUCH deeper within the past 18 months than those countries you cited (we were the epicenter despite the problems with foreign banks). As for Japan emerging from recession because of socialized health, puhleeze. Japan has been mired in a deflationary spiral for some 20 years now. Where have you been? Speaking of Japan (and, remember, we are much more unhealthy, on average than Europe or Japan):

Yeah, I agree with you, but because of the political difficulties in solving these problems, I think we are doomed financially, in the long term. I don't think any health care reform will save us in the long run.

And by the way, I'm not disagreeing with pulling the onus away from corporations and increasing portability, but not in the manner you are advocating. Gotta balance the balance sheet. Liabilities (increased demand, lots of fat-asses and kids who were never properly fed or reared, smokers, etc.) = assets (price transparency, competition between providers and insurance companies across state lines, higher copays and deductibles, particularly for those who demonstrate complete negligence with regard to health, less tort litigation, more incentives for eating correctly/exercising, etc., etc.).

Wyden-Bennett, not perfect, but better than anything else out there.

Sagarin wrote:

And by the way, I'm not disagreeing with pulling the onus away from corporations and increasing portability, but not in the manner you are advocating. Gotta balance the balance sheet. Liabilities (increased demand, lots of fat-asses and kids who were never properly fed or reared, smokers, etc.) = assets (price transparency, competition between providers and insurance companies across state lines, higher copays and deductibles, particularly for those who demonstrate complete negligence with regard to health, less tort litigation, more incentives for eating correctly/exercising, etc., etc.).

Precious Roy wrote:

And the best way to change American's diet and health habits is through a single payer system. In our current private system, the economic incentive is to have more sick people. There aren't any profits in healthy people (at least not in the health care system). In a single payer system, there is a major incentive to have a healthy population. It keeps the cost of health care down, which keeps taxes that pay for health care down. And universal access means that people get to see the doctor and get treated before conditions become serious.

The economic incentive is to make a profit. If every insurance company had all their clients live like I have they would have a lot more money. I haven't had a surgery, broken bone or anything in over a decade. Blue Cross is getting rich off of me, I pay them a couple hundred bucks a month and they haven't had to pay more than $200-300 bucks a year at most out to me. If I was sick they'd get screwed. My brother, for example, had his colon taken out (thank God we live in America or else he would STILL be waiting on the surgery like the people he knows in Canada). My brother's surgeries cost about $30,000 or so. He hasn't paid that much to Blue Cross so to them he's a negative.