health care

[mad-mommy]

I have been thinking about health care and lack thereof. I have heard from employers that health care coverage has become an increasing burden for them, and they just can't afford it. It is true, that the premiums keep going up and up. But do you think they don't provide decent plans, or provide no plans at all due to the cost, or due to the fact they are afraid it will affect their own interests? I'm talking greed here. I can't buy my second vacation home if I provide this plan, so...

I'm not talking about small business people, though I have seen some greed there, I'm talking about large corporations.

[Warpy]

1. The problem is the real inflation rate

and I don't mean the one that's been kept artificially low by offshored manufacturing and mechanization at home.

Health care and housing are the two things made completely here by US workers being paid in dollars. Look at those two things to see what the real inflation rate is.

Now look at wages.

Wages haven't even kept pace with the diddled inflation figures Greenspan presided over. We have never come back to the purchasing power we averaged in 1970. Back then, people could easily afford simple illnesses out of pocket. Now a simple illness can break a family, especially if it involves an emergency room visit.

The whole thing has gotten so grotesque that car parts manufacturers have shut plants in Michigan and opened them in Ontario. The pay is the same for the Canadians, but the companies don't have to pay those cripplingly high insurance rates. Canada has national health insurance.

We have gotten to the point where our ridiculously unweildy and overpriced for profit health care system can't be salvaged. There is no way we can tweak such a grotesquely cruel system that puts profit ahead of delivering care.

One of the things our economy will depend upon is national health insurance, cutting the insurance giants out of the health care business because they simply don't belong there any more.

I don't think the smaller business owners are greedy when they say they are being crippled by insurance costs, I think they're being absolutely truthful.

[mad-mommy]

2. do you think we'll ever see national cov'g here ?

[pooja]

3. We have to. Jobs are too low paying to pick up med. insurance tabs.

And we have to look at preventative medicine. What is better? Getting a physical every year to monitor health, OR waiting until diabetes or heart disease is the diagnosis. My husbands cholesterol was high... he went to the Dr., they have managed a plan.. and now his cholesterol is way down (and it is thru flaxseed--he can't take statens, they caused horrible side effects on him).