Peter Jennings' Health Care Report

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=1323033

The report, last night on ABC, laid out the problem pretty well. But, although some people said that with America's resources, we could provide quality health care for everyone in the country "if someone could just figure out how." What no one, neither the late Jennings nor anyone he interviewed, said was that people have figured out "how." Single payer. Of course that would put all the health insurance companies out of business.

from stealing elections.

Repubs want all of the Proles to get sick to boost the bottom line for profit-making health Corporations.

If the Proles can't pay for health care, the Repubs will throw them in prison and then the public can pony up the big bucks for the profit-making prison system the Repubs have inflicted on America.

Sicker economics through Republican initiative. As usual.

Medicare they would be doing "administrative service only". Just about all the non-exec's would be employed with only a modest reduction in body count despite single payer being a huge reduction in forms to process.

The Ins companies make a living off of servicing Medicare now and this would be no different.

But the extremely high paid Exec's and the return on risk capital and the focus on not giving coverage to sick people would all be gone.

and they along with the state medicaid services would more than likely be able to handle the administration of a national plan...

it is by region...has been this way for some time...

There are four medicare regions, last that I recall....and they handle the payment of government money to providers....they are very very strict about it. I used to work in medical billing about 8 years ago...

I only got a chance to watch about 1/2 the program, but I was struck by the explanation of how insurance companies work: a large pool of contributors pays into a single pot. That pot is used to pay for the medical costs of the whole group, with the hopes being that most of the contributors will use less than they contribute so those who are sickest can be paid for.

It struck me that insurance is nothing more than a form of capitalized socialism. So we have Republicans screaming that a national health plan is socialism when, in fact, insurance is EXACTLY the same thing on a smaller scale. The only difference is that the current syatem allows for outrageous profit by the insurance companies.

Anyway, that's neither here nor there. What I saw of the program was pretty good.

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