Real example of implemented obamacare

[zebra24.livejournal.com]

Obamacare - so advertized "no patients left behind uninsured" system.
Real example from Russia.
Every year 500 000 new registered patients with cancer.
1/3 of them dies in 12 month after it.
Drugs benefits covers usually much less than needed, so poor JUST dies. And no hope to raise money in poor country. System is broken and even charity can't fix 1% of it.

F.e. breast cancer cure rate in USA is 98%, in Russia is 63%. And many dies without diagnosis.
Here is source in Russian (you are welcome to use Google translator, if you are interesting in)
I remember last emotional call here - ahhh... Obamacare saved one kid.

Saving one kid's life is important, but using wrong economical approach could result destruction of the system that saves hundred of thousands of lives each year in USA.

Surely you can argue about underdeveloped Russia and so on, but Russia is underdeveloped for reason and this reason is very clear - socialism in all areas for many decades.
And main reason for obvious failure of "universal health care system" is underfunding and unfair funding.

When you are talking about removing life limit and forbidding using patient's precondition to calculate insurance cost, you are surely going into same hole Russia lives in for decades:
you are exhausting medical funds, which leads to DENY OF SERVICE.
And that's cost is tremendous: hundreds of thousands dies for this reason, including tens of thousands of kids!
You can easily broke the system that saving lives, it's never easy to bring it back to normal.


Can you imagine buying home insurance without insurance agent assessing real risks?
Buying auto insurance right after incident, and hoping insurance will pay?
That's really what "precondition" in obamacare means.
It means unfair funding. And as a result - underfunding and theft.
For realistic insurance companies that law means - insurance payments must be few times bigger to fund all those requests.
But more than half of the states already dictates rates increase for insurance companies.
Can you imagine this kind of "free market" with states doing VETO on pricing??
And this is even before abuse of system started.
Insurance premiums and total cost is constantly rising at least 6-7% p.a., it means it doubles in decade. And 7% is good, it could be double-digit numbers, enough to bankrupt many small businesses, or cancel medical benefits for their employees at all.
In average premium is only 18% of insurance cost. Rest 82% paid by employer.
So rob the rich and that's all?
No, today - you rob the rich, tomorrow everybody became poor and broken.
No chances that system which ruined health care in Russia will work better in USA.

Comments

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Hasn't Massachusetts seen some improvement of several statistics since Romney care went into effect?

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

We have improvement of the number of uninsured.

It's illegal to be uninsured.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

That's nice, but other things have improved too accorded to Charles Courtemanche and Daniela Zapata's research paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research. (http://papers.nber.org/papers/w17893#fromrss)

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

Not that it's anything I can read, so I don't know what it actually says.

Costs are still sky high (http://www.patriotledger.com/business/x1336254386/Massachusetts-struggles-to-rein-in-health-care-costs), though, and the death spiral has begun (http://articles.boston.com/2012-04-06/news/31300922_1_providers-health-care-lower-costs).

This state has done some terrible things in my lifetime, and this health care bill is right near the top.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Costs are still sky high.

So is rent in NYC......

However the rate of per capita health-care spending growth slowed in Massachusetts both in absolute terms and relative to the national average.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

Yet still faster than average overall (http://reason.com/blog/2012/02/28/is-romneycare-working). That slowed growth is thanks to one year at the height of the recession - it's what we might call "expected."

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Strange that the national recession only explains that situation for Massachusetts (i.e. a slowing rate of health care costs), but it has nothing to due with Romney Care, huh?

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

Strange that the only time costs slowed was during a recession? Not surprising at all, no.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

I guess you missed NATIONAL in the earlier comment. If the national recession is the sole explanation for circumstance in Massachusetts, then why it didn't do the same for other states? Why was Massachusett's singularly different then? Please Jeff, even your linked editorial makes acknowledges that "a recession" isn't enough of an explanation for this circumstance, and tries other ways to do it. Albeit not very compelling explanations, mind you.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

Who said it didn't?

[zebra24.livejournal.com]

What kind of improvements are you talking about?
Consider Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, got very nice statistics too right before they were bailed-out.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Eh?

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

Do you even know what "Obamacare" is?

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

Heh, let's not spoil a well poorly crafted narrative with pesky questions.

[zebra24.livejournal.com]

That's a magic, which allows you to pay nothing to greedy insurance companies and cure all the poor kids... and adults?

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

No, it's a law which makes you pay for insurance instead of just going to the emergency room.

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

When you put it that way, it's....not any better.

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

Hey, if you'd rather that instead of having emergency rooms, feel free to advocate for it.

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

Emergency rooms aren't free.

True.

They're still paid for by tax payers.

Sort of. Only when the person being treated can't pay.

So what do you have against emergency rooms?

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

Yes, I like replying to sarcasm with seriousness.

[squidb0i.livejournal.com]

THE DEVIL YOU SAY

[chessdev.livejournal.com]

They know what Fox News told them about it...

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

Actually, it was the other way around. Mass privatization lead to hyper-capitalist practices and any attempt at socialism was decried as a return to the Soviet Union, so now you have a bunch of for-profit models in place in the 1990s but few pieces of legislation in place to prevent exploitation, fraud, protecting the rights of worker, and whatnot. Most people who lived through communism will tell you that they had better lives before the break-up, and while I don't in any shape or form support going back to communism, their feelings speak volumes about how life was like after communism. While we were celebrating here in the US, they were suffering in Eastern Europe. Many of those countries even today haven't recovered from the sudden shift in economic policy.

So if you're preaching a mentality and policy that has literally impoverished hundreds of millions of people from the early 1990s then I don't give a single goddamn what you have to say. You're stuck in the past.

There's also no point to responding to you about the ACA if you think there's any comparison to Russia.

[zebra24.livejournal.com]

Let me be clear: first cancer clinic was built in Russia after tragedy in Soviet Union leader's family in 1980s.
So - Mass Privatization led to increase in cure rate from 0 up to 63%.

There was clear message - "free of charge healthcare is dangerous".
Even poor people understand that and pay bribes to the doctors.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

Single-payer healthcare is not free, you pay for it, just not at the point of service.

[dwer.livejournal.com]

even poor people understand that there's no such thing as free health care. It's even in the name:

Single Payer.

[chessdev.livejournal.com]

And this is why you dont understand the issue enough to criticize it.

Noone is saying its free or unfunded.

[adrunkencadence.livejournal.com]

The USSR is not The Russian Federation.

Dredging up 'the first cancer clinic' and jumping twenty years into the future to imply a steady, linear, upward trend from 0% to 63% is absurd. What was the treatment rate in the interim time frame? Before and after the Soviet state fell?

For good measure: Tsarist/ Imperial Russia is not The USSR is not The Russian Federation.

[dwer.livejournal.com]

so Obamacare = Russian health care?

No, I think not.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

I was waiting to see the actual empirical comparisons between our system and theirs, but NOPE! It was just the usual laundry list from somewhere like freerepublic.org of only our system and nothing else.

It's like he was just invoking SOSHULIZM and hoping that would incite enough terror to deny people coverage.

[zebra24.livejournal.com]

What kind of comparison do you want?

1. You are forced to be insured, and taxed for it.
2. You can't quite control insurance quality yourself, you are still able to select insurance companies, but they are forced to provide SAME level of coverage, so no competition in that.
3. Can't really choose the coverage
4. You can claim tremendous benefits even if you haven't paid a dime.

Real difference is in ECONOMY size and money invested into this area. But Obamacare strikes into this as well.
Another major systematic difference - is doctors paid by one-payer in Russia, but after the Obamacare and Medicare financial collapse I can assure you doctors will be forced to use fixed government rates for their service. So this change is yet coming, but first they going to kill competition in Health Insurance Market, so nobody will be able to defend doctors.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

Yeah, right after that "Obamacare and Medicare financial collapse," whatever that means. I'm also waiting for Germany's health care system to collapse after 150 years as well.

[zebra24.livejournal.com]

Sadly, this takes some time to recognize it, but fundamentals the same: "single payer system".

[dwer.livejournal.com]

ACA isn't a single payer system. Would that it were.

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

I like Israeli-style universal healthcare - don't compare first world industrial powers with your own corrupt Russian system.

[the-s3ntinel.livejournal.com]

It's like reading a bunch of youtube comments.

[usekh.livejournal.com]

Works just fine in much of the Western World, no surprise that Russians can't get it right however.

[nahele-101.livejournal.com]

Oh wait, that is right...insurance companies never deny any coverage ever.

*rolls eyes*

[eracerhead.livejournal.com]

breast cancer cure rate in USA is 98%, in Russia is 63%.

http://www.webmd.com/cancer/news/20080716/cancer-survival-rates-vary-by-country

So since Japan and France both have "socialized" medicine, where is the correlation?

Surely you can argue about underdeveloped Russia and so on, but Russia is underdeveloped for reason and this reason is very clear - socialism in all areas for many decades.

That's an over simplistic view and not particularly true. It was more a failed implementation of communism mixed with autocracy. Socialism is implemented to varying degree in both communistic and capitalistic economies.

And main reason for obvious failure of "universal health care system" is underfunding and unfair funding.

If the resources are not available to provide adequate care, they won't be there whether you have universal health care or private health care.

Obamacare is not single payer coverage like in most other countries, so to compare it to these is apples vs oranges. This is "Obamacare:"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Protection_and_Affordable_Care_Act

So which parts of this do you disagree with?