And welcome.

A key fear is that people who currently have insurance will lose something. They think they’re currently covered but they can afford the premiums.

For these people Baucus’ proposal will a) tax current employee benefits, b) provide no additional care, c) provide additional justification for insurers to raise their rates to compensate for their “losses.” Where’s the win in that scenario for someone with employer subsidized insurance?

The current CBO scoring suggests we need $25-100 billion a year to balance the increased cost of universal coverage. At the low end the assumption is that we can reduce cost of increased in Medicare reimbursement, as well as some efficiencies in waster, fraud & abuse.

Alternative: We can strip out $200 billion a year, at minimum, from what Americans are currently paying for health insurance (sic) marketing, bureaucracy, duplicate forms and profits – and not change a single medical reimbursement rate.

I invent medical devices and deal with reimbursement as part of our business planning. I would welcome explanations why Single Payer doesn’t make fiscal sense for the US.

and it won’t be by electing ‘more and better’ thats for sure.

3rd parties should be ready to catch the outraged, disenchanted populace after such a plan is enacted, and offer them and alternative, finally.

Just one of the horrible examples he gave were: employers must offer something to employees or face a penalty, but in a giveback to the insurance companies, there is a grandfather clause that prevents employees from choosing a BETTER, more affordable option from the pool. He cited WalMart as an example. Crappy insurance with high copays and premiums. Employees mostly opt out and use Medicaid now (which states pay 50% of ).

A lot of WalMart employees are NOT covered by them. They receive coverage because their spouse has insurance through THEIR employer (not WalMart). So, WalMart can say all their employees (or some high percentage) have coverage, but they do not provide it all themselves.

If there is a mandate that an employer must cover their employees, then there would have to be a large exception to let them out of that or else they would have to begin covering people they haven’t before.

Of course, WalMart also instructs many of their low-pay ‘associates’ to go to the local gov’t for poverty assistance instead of just paying them decent wages. They get away with a lot of crap because the economy isn’t employing enoug people and local governments are desperate for any employer of their size to move in.

We need more fundamental productive work and not just retail ‘associates’. Obama knows this.

125 million AMericans have 1 of 4 chronic illnesses – hypertension, heart disease, asthma and diabetes.

Those 4 illnesses are responsible nearly 75% of all medical costs.

1. Exercise, stop smoking, stop eating junk food processed sugars and refined grains and trans fats. Perhaps even teach some kids what to eat for nutrition & health (protein, fat, carbohydrates and fiber with variety for nutrients and vitamins).

2. Get insurance rate discount! Maybe even a company bonus to keep it up!

But, I think you’re forgetting long-term care for the elderly. It’s expensive. Then there’s pharmaceuticals which are terrific, but somewhat expensive too.

Oh well, start with what we can do cheaply: health care reform with 1 & 2 above!

We’re getting there and that’s good. There will be a final product and it will be much much better than where we are now. It will be a great day to celebrate.

Just one of the horrible examples he gave were: employers must offer something to employees or face a penalty, but in a giveback to the insurance companies, there is a grandfather clause that prevents employees from choosing a BETTER, more affordable option from the pool. He cited WalMart as an example. Crappy insurance with high copays and premiums. Employees mostly opt out and use Medicaid now (which states pay 50% of ).

In at least one of the House bills and the HELP bill, WalMart would be grandfathered in and since they offer insurance, their employees would be barred from choosing a better plan that is more affordable. Their choices would be WalMart’s crappy insurance or Medicaid (after paying a pretty steep penalty) which would shift the burden to the states and there is no cost control or guarantees that the Feds will cover the difference.

I suggest you read Taibbi’s article if you haven’t — it’s online and free now. Very eye-opening to me and it convinced me that crappy isn’t better than nothing. It is dangerous and could be a huge disaster. There’s a whole lot of crappy in all five bills if Taibbi is right. Forgive me if I misquoted here — I’m working at the same time that I’m reading FDL, LOL, and I don’t have time to refer back to the RS article right now.