Medical care. Shelter. Clean food and water. Wamth from the cold.

If you deny any of these to a housecat, you go to jail.
If you deny them to a human, you get a bonus.

that this is unheard of in civilized countries; the U.S., which doesn't acknowledge health care as a basic human right, isn't civilized.

As long as we have a for-profit health care system, things like this, including allowing people to die because it enriches a CEO and shareholders, will continue to happen.

Republican GingrichCare won't stop this from happening.

100,000 people are allowed to die in the U.S. per year due to lack of health care; that's like multiple 9/11s per year. It's an ongoing medical emergency that needs to be dealt with before any more money is spent on wars of choice.

Single-payer health care is the way out of this, but the supreme court decided that the serial-killer insurance agencies must be kept in our medical care system.

Only when enough businesses get their heads out of their asses, and see that single-payer would not only help their employees, but would help them be competitive and bring costs down, and only when our rightwing govt. gets it head out of its butt and realizes that allowing 100,000 people per year to die, thus denying our govt. those tax dollars had they lived, will anything change.

"Employer-based health insurance has always been a bad idea. Your life should not depend on who you work for." -- T. McKeon

[font face="times"]"Any proposal that sticks with our current dependence on for-profit private insurers ... will not be sustainable. And the new law will not get us to universal coverage ...." -- T.R. Reid, The Healing of America[/font]

"Despite the present hyperbole by its supporters, this latest effort will end up as just another failed reform effort littering the landscape of the last century." --John Geyman, M.D., Hijacked! The Road to Single Payer in the Aftermath of Stolen Health Care Reform

Killing people for profit fattens the bottom line.

South Korea

Is it the hospital overcharging or the drug company? How much does the anti-venom cost the hospital? That's an insane difference. I know my cousin had insurance through work but the insurance company refused tests to determine damage to his heart. Despite having insurance, he had to pay out of pocket and the same tests that cost over $3,000 in the U.S. were only about $300 in Mexico.

USA, gouging for egregious profit is sacred and sacrosanct, the ultimate reward of a ravenous capitalistic system as practiced perhaps no where else. Gouge for profit and despoil the earth in the process seem to be the heart and soul of the RW mantra.

owns 40 hospitals and 150 ancillary care sites.


Dignity Health, formerly Catholic Healthcare West (CHW), is a California-based not-for-profit public benefit corporation that operates hospitals and ancillary care facilities in California, Arizona, and Nevada.[3] As such, it is exempt from federal and state income taxes. Dignity Health is the fifth largest hospital system in the nation and the largest not-for-profit hospital provider in California.[4] In 2012, the company's name changed to Dignity Health to better reflect their ministry, which is not an official ministry of the Catholic Church.[1] The company also changed its governance structure along with its name.

Catholic Healthcare West had three levels of management. The Corporate Members were the highest level of management and appointed the members of the Board of Directors. The Corporate Members are women religious, one from each of the religious institutes that co-sponsor CHW. The Board of Directors, together with the Corporate Members, appointed the Executive Management.[5]

Under the new governance structure, the Board of Directors is the highest level of management and a Sponsorship Council of members from the religious institutes has responsibility for the Catholic hospitals and care centers in the system.[5]

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

Sutter, CHW pay to settle overcharging allegations

Sutter Health has paid more than $1.4 million and Catholic Healthcare West has paid $875,564 to settle allegations that some of their hospitals overcharged the government for infusion therapy and lithotripsy services, U.S. Attorney Benjamin Wagner said Wednesday.

Federal officials found the two health systems overcharged Medicare, the government health care program for seniors, by:

Duplicate charging for the administration of infusion therapy.
Unbundling packaged infusion therapy services when the individual procedures should have been billed as a group.
Duplicate billing of lithotripsy services under separate revenue codes.

Twenty-five Northern California Sutter hospitals were involved in the matter; 36 CHW hospitals in California, Nevada and Arizona, according the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

http://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/news/2011/12/07/sutter-health-chw-overcharge-medicare.html


The non-profit structure is generally a set-up for fraud imo. From churches on down.

My mom works for a non-profit in my home state. The main hospital we'll call Hospital A is the one she works for now. Two hospitals in another town (the one I grew up in) we'll call them Hospital B and Hospital C were independent of Hospital A back when I lived there. Hospital C was actually a county hospital and Hospital B was a private hospital (whether it was non-profit I'd have to ask my mom because I can't remember, but I'd wager it was for profit). Hospital C had problems with funding (of course because it was county hospital) and Hospital A bought both B & C. Eventually both B & C closed (C was a mess due to lack of maintenance) and a new hospital D was built in the city where B & C was. Hospital A is now the parent company with Hospital D (in the other nearby city) and separate hospital, but part of A's non-profit company.

If I've confused you, then this post worked.

I don't think it will be soon, though. I don't know why, but the Obama administration seems to be against it. Republicans, of course, oppose any form of Medicare. So it may take another Democratic administration post-2016 to get us there. But I believe we will get there.

Vermont's Green Mountain Care Board has established a 3.75 percent annual cap on spending increases for hospitals as part of the state's new healthcare reform, according to a report from Vermont Public Radio and Kaiser Health News.

The GMCB is the regulatory body that was created from Gov. Peter Shumlin's (D) May 2011 law, which established a single-payor system. Although the board has established the cap at 3.75 percent, Vermont's 14 hospitals want budget increases of 7 percent for the upcoming fiscal year, according to the report.

http://www.beckershospitalreview.com/racs-/-icd-9-/-icd-10/vermonts-green-mountain-care-board-establishes-hospital-budget-cap.html

Vermont health care authorities issued instructions to the state’s 14 hospitals Wednesday to keep the increases in their 2013 budgets to 3.75 percent, an even tighter lid than the last two fiscal years whose Legislature-imposed limits were 4.5 and then 4.0 percent.

The cap was set by the Green Mountain Care Board, which under state law has the authority to establish hospital budgets. The action is a significant cost constraint for the whole health care system since the state’s hospitals and the doctors whom they employ deliver more than 60 percent of the care in the state.

“Keeping a tight rein on the 2013 budgets is an important step in our efforts to build toward a single payer restructuring in the state,” said Anya Rader Walleck, the chair of the Green Mountain Board. “The state’s hospitals have done an excellent job on cost containment in the last two years, and we need to keep moving in that direction.”

The board built the budget target from a baseline of a 2.76 percent increase in a federal market basket of inflation indicators and then adjusted it to 3.75 percent to account for increases in hospital costs due to aging of the population, growth in income and other investments, such as improvements in information systems. If the hospitals stay within the caps, the system increase for the year would be $78 million on a base of roughly $2 billion.

http://vtdigger.org/2012/04/19/hospital-budget-caps-set-by-green-mountain-care-board/

I just finished up getting a rabies series along with my two daughters... $6k per person... insurance picked it up but I thought it was pretty excessive...