Wouldn't removing annual and lifetime caps on benefits be a huge giveaway to the doctors and

[RB TexLa]

hospitals? As well as serve to raise costs. I could never think I am so important that there would be no limit on what should be justifiably spent on my health costs.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

1. You'd change your tune if you turned up with a serious illness

Somehow other countries manage just fine without lifetime limits.

[RB TexLa]

2. No I would not. Being sick does not create egotistical thought.

[SharonAnn]

26. A cancer treatment that could cure you might cost over $500,000 in one year.

Or maybe more.

Is that too much?

A little surgery, some chemotherapy, some CT scans to monitor things. It all adds up.

BTW, you won't be getting a cancer cure for much less than half that. Some cost even more.

[Yupster]

32. This is the problem after all

A person works 40 years and makes $ 30,000 a year which is $ 1.2 million.

Then at age 84 he gets very ill and needs $ 3 million of treatments and fancy tests and equipment and procedures.

Is there an ethical question here? or is it just clear cut. We pay however much it takes to do whatever we can for every single person.

As equipment gets more and more sophisticated, it's only going to get more expensive.

Somehow healthcare is going to be rationed - like it is today. The question is just how it's done.

[emilyg]

30. Ha. Wait till you have cancer - God forbid.

[RB TexLa]

31. That would not change my position on it. Did you even think about how disgusting of a human being

you were accusing me of being to insinuate that would change my thought? Or did you really mean to be that insulting and degrading toward a stranger?

[emilyg]

38. Lighten up. When I had

cancer I was guilty of egotistical thoughts. Doubt that you are so very different. Sometimes the fight for life changes us.

[jwirr]

35. How about if you had a child who lives on her own but needs a life

time of care to have a halfway decent quality of life? Your choice would be letting her suffer in a terrible way or kill her?

[Gabi Hayes]

3. OK, genius. what, exactly, should the limit be on your insurance?

what exact value do you place on your own health.

can't wait to see

better yet, what monetary value do you place on the health of your closest loved one, and will you stand mute when that person's lifetime limit is reached and say, go ahead, wonderful insurance company. I won't stand in the way of your precious bottom line; it's clearly more important than the health of the person I hold most dear.

[RB TexLa]

4. A two to three million lifetime maximum is reasonable. I sorry if my arrogance and self

importance is lower than yours.

[bluethruandthru]

7. So if you got cancer at the age of 25

and needed 3 million worth of treatment.. that's it? You're done? Whatever happens for the rest of your life you're on your own?

[RB TexLa]

8. Probably die. I am aware of the fact that I will die, I know I will not live forever

did you honestly not know the answer to that?

[bluethruandthru]

11. I'm sorry, I just don't feel that someone's life or death should be

a matter of money.
I'm not a proponent of keeping people on life support or on prolonging the suffering of people who are dying. But I can't imagine what it would be like to be the parent of a sick child and to find out that we'd reached the lifetime limit on our insurance and could no longer afford treatment for that child...even if whatever condition the child had wasn't terminal.

[corpseratemedia]

34. +1 and IMO

all those childhood cancer victims who may relapse or develop another type of cancer later in life would be out of luck and have to die. Perhaps they would be "arrogant" to want to have more treatment if a relapse occurs in their 30's and they met their "limit" in childhood.

Welcome to Logan's Run, except if you are very wealthy or are a rep.

[Gabi Hayes]

13. jeeezusss. two or three million.

two million

three million

how much time have you spent thinking about this?

two minutes?

three minutes?

[RB TexLa]

14. Doesn't take that long when you don't suffer from an inflated ego

now go back to repeating the words "I deserve, I deserve, I deserve"

[Gabi Hayes]

19. you deserve unlimited psychiatric benefits

you deserve

you deserve

you deserve

you deserve

[RB TexLa]

20. No need for them

[bluethruandthru]

5. We should all receive whatever care we need to be as

healthy as possible. If it takes millions for one person...but only hundreds for another..that's fine. With Universal single payer we would all be entitled to the care we need. No one should ever have to worry about whether or not their care was costing too much..or reaching some arbitrary limit.

[Doremus]

6. Serve to raise costs? Seems to be doing a dandy job doing that all by itself, doesn't it?

Bogus argument seemingly for the purpose of trolling.

[varelse]

9. Think about where the money is going now

or maybe you're one of those bigtime executives who gets a cool couple million bonus every year?

I'd rather see that money spent to keep important people alive.

[LaydeeBug]

10. Well you should, and my GOD is this bullshit.

Just because YOU don't think YOU'RE important enough doesn't mean you have the right to project that on others. wow

[madfloridian]

16. Agreed. It did not take long. It was in response to this.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian/5375

Anything can and will be defended here now.

[Cleita]

12. In Canada, the health care providers and the provincial administrators

of Healthcare Canada meet on a yearly basis to hash out fees for the coming year and update in general the way they deliver health care and how much the government needs to pay out for it. It seems like a sensible way to do it.

[madfloridian]

15. Sounds good if one does not get too sick.

:shrug:

[Cleita]

22. Why would that be a problem?

You will get the care you need and the health care providers will be paid for it according to the agreed upon fee rates for that year. There is no limit to the amount of care, only an agreed upon limit for how much a doctor can charge for the care and procedures they initiate. I read a stat that doctors here in the USA have to see twice as many patients an hour as Canadian doctors do to make the same amount of money in that hour, so it seems Canadian health care is not only fair to doctor and patient but still costs half of what ours does per person because there is no insurance meddling in the middle of it.

[madfloridian]

23. If you say it is not a problem, then it is not a problem.

I am sure everything will be fine and dandy.

[Cleita]

24. Okay, read up on it.

Or just ask our Canadian DUers as to how much health care they are denied in their country. Every time I have done it, it's zilch. They get all the health care they need and they don't have to worry about going bankrupt with a debilitating chronic disease. All they pay is the percentage taken in taxes for it according to what they can afford. Even better than that, go rent Michael Moore's movie "Sicko". He spends a good lot of time in Canada showing how their system works.

[madfloridian]

33. We don't appear to be getting the Canadian system.

It appears right now what we will get will be very flawed, according to much that has come out today.

[Cleita]

36. We are getting the health insurance corporate welfare system.

Our taxes will be funneled to them and we still won't have decent health care. Doctors are already refusing to take insurance. This is such a slap in the face to the seventy percent of Americans who wanted decent health care access.

[cynatnite]

17. If you had a child with a chronic illness that needed treatment over a period of years...

maybe you would change your mind about that.

[RB TexLa]

21. I don't raise children, that is for other people to do.

[cynatnite]

25. So, say it's someone else's child...

do you feel the insurance companies would be correct in cutting off coverage because fighting the disease got too expensive?

[RB TexLa]

27. I'd have no problem with it being a purchase option.

but if it's every policy, you know doctors are going to be wanting to run 30 tests for a hangnail. Anyone objects, they'll tell them that the insurance company is paying for it, and to just shut up and let them get the money.

[cynatnite]

29. We're not talking about hangnails here...these are people's lives...

There are any number of diseases that can easily run well over a few million dollars. I know a child who was born with a chronic disease through no fault of her own and her parents know that at some point in her life their insurance will reach that limit. The insurance company will cut off coverage despite that little girl's needs for life-sustaining care.

You're acting like this is nothing.

It's one thing to look at the bottom line and to think logically, but it's definitely quite another to completely ignore the reason that lifting these caps are imperative. It's so that little girls like this can life full lives like everyone else.

[Bitwit1234]

18. CNN reported at about 8PM CST that

they removed the language that said unreasonable cost. In other words they removed the cap on yearly cost.

[ThomCat]

28. Are you calling people like me Selfish?

I have a permanent disability and several serious health problems and complications as a result. I require visits to several doctors every month, including expensive specialists. I require expensive medications that cost thousands of dollars a month without insurance. I'm likely to hit any cap.

Should I just stop getting healthcare because 2/3 of the way through every month because you think people aren't worth it? I have severe chronic pain. Should I just spend the last week of every month in a bed curled up in a ball screaming because I can't be the pain meds, muscle relaxers, migraine meds, and all the secondary care I need?

And because my care takes weeks to build up its effectiveness in my system again, I'd just start to get some relief each month when you'd cut me off again. Is that what I should have to deal with?

What about people with deadly conditions that are kept at bay? Should they just die because health care costs in the US are so inflated? In other countries their costs would be minimal, but because our insurance companies inflate those costs x10, sometimes x100, that makes any cap arbitrary. Should anyone who hits those arbitrary caps just roll over and die?

Your post is really thoughtless and offensive. I hope you never need the level of healthcare you're talking about denying to other people.

[ret5hd]

37. Your personal cost limits are no concern of mine, and I don't drink with you.

Quit shinning that light at me!

[AdHocSolver]

39. Medical costs in the U.S. are highly inflated as hospitals and clinics are run to maximize profit.

Several years ago, I worked for nonprofit hospitals which were headed by people with business degrees.

The hospital I am most knowledgeable about was run by a guy with a masters degree in health care administration (MHA). This guy and the rest of the management in this hospital were as greedy and downright crooked as the executives of any corporation I ever worked for.

Let me just say that this hospital was no stranger to waste and fraud when it came to making money, and this was at a time when medical costs and insurance costs were far less than they are today.

Back in the early 1980's, the government did a rather superficial study of fraudulent claims to Medicare. They easily found that Medicare was being billed fraudulently for over a billion dollars in claims. The study was done using medical codes for patients who remained anonymous. The researchers found, for example, hospitals charged Medicare for prostate surgery performed on female patients, and hysterectomies performed on male patients. I have no doubt that a more in-depth study of hospital billing practices would have shown many more billions of dollars in waste and fraud.

A few years ago, I had some minor work done at a local hospital amounting to a couple of hundred dollars. My insurance paid for most of it and I made a copay at the time of service. I didn't owe them one cent.

A couple of months later, I get this bill from this hospital claiming I owed them money, about a hundred dollars. I studied the paperwork and was satisfied that they had been paid in full. It helped me to understand the almost incomprehensible invoices by having worked in data processing as a computer programmer, including at a hospital.

It took me a couple of months of almost weekly phone calls to the hospital, after getting letters from them threatening to turn the case over to a collection agency, to convince them that I could cause them a lot more trouble by proving to any third party that they were, in fact, double billing me, than any benefit they could derive from harassing me.

I was calm, friendly, and insistent. I have no doubt, absolutely none, that these kinds of tactics are perpetrated on people all the time. The invoices are often incomprehensible, and it is difficult to make any sense out of fees and payments. People who are ill and recovering are usually in no condition to try to make sense of the obfuscation purposely built in to these invoices. Add the threat of having the invoice being sent to a collection agency, and most people will pay up money that they don't really owe just to get rid of the harassment.

[TheWebHead]

40. You are correct

the math is pretty simple. You cover everyone for everything no matter what the costs, you'll get an army of Ian Pearls invading the system, consuming $1 million/yr+ in healthcare costs. The idea of removing caps and removing pre-existing is a much larger threat to the entire system of insurance than a public option. Insurance is all about defining liabilities. You have defined liabilities with home insurance, car insurance, life insurance. Without defining liability, how does an insurance company determine how much money to hold in reserve? You combine this issue with continued innovation with new drugs, devices, stem cell research, and the potential pool of high dollar users entering the system threatens to collapse it. Having 1 Ian Pearl per 1,000 policyholders adds $100/mo in insurance premiums for the care of that 1 person to the other 999 people. You think about potential lifetime costs if there is a drug to tackle autism for example. When medicare was first introduced, most of the time a patient would hear take two aspirin or "I'm sorry, there's nothing we can do", which was an affordable care program for seniors, essentially being about pain management. Now, we've advanced and can provide better outcomes, but at a huge cost that is becoming less and less sustainable.

[gleaner]

41. Yes it would .....

Last year my husband nearly died. He was in the hospital for 14 weeks receiving care he could not have lived without. The cost of his room alone was $1,500,000. That is without tests, doctors, meds, bandaging or anything else besides the room. The costs are obscene, but you can't escape them. His life doesn't have a dollar limit as far as I am concerned, not should anyone else's. Can you imagine how fast his treatment would have ended with what things cost and with a yearly cap which I am sure will not begin to cover them? We still haven't been able to pay our share of what we owe the doctors. And he still needs treatment on an ongoing basis. No one knows if he will ever get any better. I'm just glad he is still here. We have been sold out from day one on health care. What should have been so easy to legislate and create has been turned into a bonanza for the insurance companies, and we are the big losers. I don't think there should be any limit on your health costs either. If you are sick you need to get well. The Hell with the cost. They can well afford it.

[spinbaby]

43. It's obscene what medical care costs

A simple trip to the emergency room for stitches resulted in a bill of $2198. For STITCHES! The insurance decided it was worth $778. We paid a $50 co-pay.

[gleaner]

44. That is typical .....

What astounds me, and not in a good way, is that the medical industries and practitioners drive the costs up to a level that no one can meet out of pocket without the help of the health insurance companies. Then the health insurance companies raise their premiums and refuse to pay most of the costs. They get rich. The health care complex gets rich and we are stuck paying a fortune in co-payments that we can't begin to afford. That is why I favor a simple single payer like medicare with premiums based on ability to pay with a large surtax on those individuals and corporations with incomes of $500,000 per year or greater. Medicare is simple. It is universally accepted, doctors and hospitals accept assignment if you don't have a supplemental policy, and you wind up owing some small deductibles which are affordable to most or can be paid in payments. Lyndon Johnson got the bill for the original medicare through congress in rapid time, and accepted no argument and no waffling. The program was up and running in eleven months. This time the program is already in place. It would not take that long to expand it, come up with a fee schedule and make it immediately available. It is not that the government can't give us practical, inexpensive health care. It is that they simply won't. It's up to us to figure out why. Maybe they think they will get even richer if most of the population base dies. If so, they're wrong. No one but the poor and middle class really pays taxes. I'd like to see them go on as they are without revenue. I guess you can tell I am very frustrated and bitter. Seems like a good time for it.

[dugaresa]

42. i hope that you or someone you love never gets a chronic illness

diseases like MS, lupus, etc have high costs of treatment and sometimes the flairs can put you in the hospital for a long while. Some cancers today are almost like chronic illnesses and you can survive them or live a much longer life (think Elizabeth Edwards).

1-3 million could easily be used up within a few years of a relatively healthy life with any sort of chronic condition.

[rucky]

45. Cost controls are sorely needed

so we won't be having these discussions.

[Canuckistanian]

46. What a cold-hearted way to look at the problem

In other words, if your illness costs too much, screw you because we can't let doctors make too much?

Shouldn't you be looking at WHY doctors and hospitals charge so much?

Here in Canada, doctors are limited in what they can charge because all services have been given a standard price - no doctor can inflate his/her prices just because they can. And I think we have a better system for it. People become doctors to help people, not become rich. It's given us a better class of physicians.

That's the problem with health care in America. All the same business and marketing "tricks" are used to artificially inflate prices by the usual means - monopoly, price fixing, collusion and even outright fraud.

"Market principles" should be banned from health care - there are too many ways to game the system in order to fleece a captive market. It's the reason why no other country in the world allows business entities to PROFIT from basic health care.

[MerryBlooms]

47. I was in a terrible car accident 3 years ago

I've spent 7 months total in the hospital (mostly in intensive care) - to the tune of 3.3 million so far, my out of pocket by the time I finish all my pymts is $370,000 (I only have 45,000 left to go, woohoo!) - not including the monthly cost of the two medications I'm on and my current $564 for insurance.

A split second changed my life forever. I'm thankful I was the passenger and not the driver, he was unfortunately, killed. You just never know what's in store. All my retirement, investments and most of my savings had to be cashed out to pay and I'm still paying. I'm not able to work yet, but I still have savings I'm living off of (thank goodness) but means I don't qualify for any sort of help. The insurance I now carry has a 2 mil cap - I keep my fingers crossed. If I were to get cancer or some other catastrophic illness, I'd be completely wiped out.

I understand your position, but I'm so thankful my family didn't think I was expendable because it was too costly to save my life. My sons have been there for me since the night of the accident and are still helping me with the daily tasks I'm not able to perform yet - but I'll get there. My life is different now, but I don't regret choosing life.