Agree completely Mr. President. Last year I learned how awful our healthcare system is. I suffered an acute urinary tract condition which sent me to the emergency room several times. Most of those trips were handled by nurses, but a couple of times I had to see a doctor.
In the months that followed I started getting bill after bill from doctors and other people who I never saw. The doctors I saw kept wanting me to get surgery, sell me drugs and undergo expensive, invasive diagnostics. I told them to get lost, and went to see a Naturopathic doctor in Denver. She told me to take zinc, quit drinking and change my bicycle seat. Cost about $20 and fixed me right up.
We need a healthcare system which is based around prevention and healthy living – not about making profit for insurance companies, doctors and drug companies. And no one should have their life ruined over medical bills. Our current system is broken, and has been for a long time.
Can we have clarification on the claim that Obamacare has been found unconstitutional? Who did it & what does it mean for American’s health care?
It is unconstitutional to force (at gunpoint) someone to buy something they don’t want to buy. You cannot force someone to buy a product (ie: healthcare/insurance)
Top link from this mornings Drudge Report:
https://www.denverpost.com/2018/12/14/texas-federal-judge-obama-health-care-law-unconstitutional/
I can’t prove it but i am 97% sure i read this exact same article when Reagan was President…
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-isolation-investigations-20181213-story.html
Best i could find was this one from 1982…saying that Reagan’s decisions were impossible to understand.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1982/03/22/reagans-decision-making-process-still-a-mystery/f1b95eb4-f54c-4f32-b3bc-e9ad337e04c3/?utm_term=.c189571c5b76
Great GOP Presidents are always portrayed as in a state of total chaos.
“Great” Democrat President leave an actual trail of chaos behind for great Republucans to fix…generations apart so we have to repeat the same mistakes every 30 years.
Not sure how you reached your conclusions re naturopathy. Saw a funny joke re the patient who missed his naturopathic medication, died of an overdose.
The advice seems safe.
You will reduce your risk of further UTI by the simple method of taking an extra glass of water 3 times a day with meals. This also reduces your risk of developing kidney stones by say 50%”.
Kidney stones can be a missed cause of UTI and can be picked up by several expensive tests. Plain abdo x-ray (misses non calcium stones), USScan ( misses some as well), CT scan picks up the most, costs the most and a lot of X-ray exposure.
If you change your mind and see a doctor a simple urine test for blood in the urine is an imperfect indicator of a possible kidney stone (and other conditions).
Being male and older another condition to consider is prostatomegaly which can trigger UTI.
UTI in male adults is associated with a 5% chance of an underlying abnormality, less for women. Doctors cannot take the chance of being sued for missing a 5% chance hence the push to cover themselves which is a perfectly normal reaction.
Your choice of course but while the system is broke the doctors trying to advise you might actually be trying to help you, not just trying to make money.
Apparently you don’t know what a naturopathic doctor is, nor do you know what my condition was.
Obamacare is shit because it was written from corporations for corporations.
That’s why the US healthcare system is the most expensive and worst in the western world.(and has the same effects as Nafta has and TPP and TTP would have had on the population,as it was written by globalists.
Same with the immigration reform of 1965 and mass import of illegals.
A real healthcare system is written by the people for the people just as other laws and documents.
It is even not necessary to create everything new- just take a look at countries which have a cheap but good system and copy the good parts.
That way health insurance can go down 50-80%.
So, just out of curiosity, which western country’s health care system would you rather be treated by. Mexico? Cuba? Venezuela?
What countries would that be?
Expensive? .. yes .. “worst in the western world” .. oh puleeez…
Name a single country with a better healthcare. Just one.
I agree. What the hell are we paying for with these expensive plans? Administrators and bureaucrats that’s who.
I’d like something that doesn’t cost an arm and leg just to protect me from bankruptcy should I contract a serious illness or injury.
The decision should not stand. The mandate is actually an income tax. There are thousands of things which give you a tax reduction if you purchase it. If something walks, talks, smells and operates like an income tax provision, that is what it is. Calling it a mandate does not make it one. If something is really a mandate you don’t file with the IRS for noncompliance – you get arrested and go to jail.
Under this law the United States government forced citizens to buy a product and fined those who didn’t.
To make it compliant with the Constitution, the SCOTUS had to rewrite a law passed by Congress. That is not constitutional regardless how many legal or logical pretzels the “progressive” defenders of the decision tie themselves into.
The constitution was amended to give the feds power to tax ALL of our income. A surtax was enacted which could be avoided by making a specified purchase – health ins. It is done like this all the time. They called it a mandate because the politics of calling it a tax did not play well at the time. FYI I am a libertarian. Learn to recognize the difference before popping off.
Wait, so you’re a libertarian who defends the idea of the judicial branch rewriting a law on the fly so that it can wiggle through and pass constitutional muster? You don’t sound like a libertarian to me. It’s an abuse of power. Every libertarian I know thinks Obamacare is a disgrace. It was the first time in our history that the federal government forced Americans to purchase a product at the threat of being heavily taxed if they didn’t. There was no way out of it, such as with auto insurance or life insurance or even homeowner’s insurance. Nothing like Obamacare ever happened before.
Why should the Federal government be involved in healthcare in the first place? I can’t find this in the Constitution anywhere. Our healthcare, especially insurance, was in dire need of fixing prior to the Federal government taking over and it has only gotten worse. Let’s get the Federal government out of this problem. Perhaps tort reform and competition across state lines may be the better way to approach fixing the system. How do we return to hospitals being not-for-profit organizations?
Do you want to live in a country that where everyone has access to adequate health care?
If you answered, “NO” then I’ve nothing to say.
If you answered, “YES” then you’re going to have to pay for it.
The cost of covering all those people who currently don’t have health insurance will be passed on to all of us. If there’s some other way of doing it, I’m interested in what that way would be.
Currently we pay for those people via the emergency rooms. Maybe that’s economically the most efficient.
They key is to bring the total cost of healthcare down
The differences in costs of various healthcare systems are the result of mainly two factors – physician/nurse pay and drug costs.
Physician pay in other countries is 30 to 50% less than the US. The same holds for drug prices. As the US system is currently constructed, I think that paying doctors 30 to 50% less is a non-starter. The best and brightest will not forfeit their 20s and early 30s and put themselves into punishing debt just to earn a marginally upper middle class income. The folks smart enough to enter medicine are not martyrs.
Drug prices are an area that could result in savings, but Big Pharma lobbyists and donations will kill any meaningful changes.
The demand for healthcare is unlimited, the supply of folks smart enough and willing to become doctors is small. This leads to increased costs for high quality care. If we lower the bar for medical school entrance and open more schools (I see this currently in pharmacy and dentistry), there will be more abundance of care available at a cheaper price. But that care will be of lesser quality since the folks performing those services are of lesser ability. Essentially you cannot have high quality, low price and abundance unless physicians are replaced by robots.
I think that paying doctors 30 to 50% less is a non-starter. The best and brightest will not forfeit their 20s and early 30s and put themselves into punishing debt just to earn a marginally upper middle class income. The folks smart enough to enter medicine are not martyrs.
Drug prices are an area that could result in savings, but Big Pharma lobbyists and donations will kill any meaningful changes.
Dropping drug prices below cost will do the same thing to the drug industry as you say would happen to the clinical medicine industry. Biochemistry PhDs don’t come cheap. If you reduce the incentive for the best and brightest to enter the field then the number of drug breakthroughs will drop commensurately. Keep in mind that pharmaceuticals are responsible for probably 80% of the US (and world) dramatic life expectancy increase over the past 75 years.
Western European countries used to have thriving drug and medical device industries. France especially was a leader in developing new drugs. But European governments taking over either the financing or delivery of health care dropped drug prices to the point that there is no longer an incentive to produce new and better drugs.
As a result the US has become the pharmaceutical innovation leader, the leader those EU countries depend on for their drugs. Don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Physicians are in short supply already. Cutting their pay will only exacerbate the problem.
If you wanted to rid the desert of sand, just put a government agency in charge of conserving that sand.
If you want to ruin healthcare, have government play an ever increasing role in healthcare.
Competition in a free market will help our healthcare. The more that government pays any of our healthcare costs, the more fraud and waste we will have and the higher total healthcare costs will be. Tort reform can help lower costs of malpractice insurance. At present, there are many needless tests being done because some doctors are afraid of being capriciously sued. Tort reform could also help decrease drug and medicine costs.
Those cases where patients contribute 0% to the cost of their diagnosis and care, encourages them to not think twice about needless tests or treatments. While some regulation may be helpful, government over-regulation can also needlessly increase costs. In numerous ways, the incentives in the US healthcare system are perversely wrong.
In the US students don’t start preparing for medicine until they’re about 22, they do an undergraduate degree in an unrelated subject for about 4 years. In other countries such as the UK the studies start with an undergraduate degree in medicine (MB). Consequently they start earning earlier and have a significantly lower tuition cost to repay.
Steve, first you must define “adequate” .. then you need to define “health care”
Until you have clarification of those things, you cannot even get out of the starting blocks.
I’ve had urinary tract issues. So I looked up zinc – I was surprised, it doesn’t get good reviews? Fluids and cranberry juice get honorable mention. Nothing about bike seats (-: Didn’t see an alcohol/urinary discussion but I don’t doubt that it’s an issue.
Twenty-five years ago sulfa did the trick – today it’s cipro. One troubling thing on my search was doctors are prescribing a wait and see on urinary issues. I know it when I have it, and waiting is stupid. I have a supply of Cipro if I’m out of town when it flares up.
I didn’t do a diligent search so maybe other websites give zinc higher marks.
Sorry to hear that it was bad enough to warrant a trip to the emergency room. I hope you don’t have to do that again.
The US is a very large, very ethnically diverse country. We drive a lot and get into car accidents. And since we don’t all look and talk alike we tend to get into more disagreements than people from more homogeneous countries like pretty much all EU countries, Canada/Australia/New Zealand, Japan, and the PRC. Sometimes we settle those disagreements with firearms.
As a result the US has a higher percentage of fatal injuries than other developed countries. No healthcare system is going to bring back someone with massive, instantly fatal injuries. Removing fatal injuries from the life expectancy calculation shows that the US has the best healthcare system in the world.
bring back 55! and prohibition!
No. I ♥ the high risk/high reward US. The EU countries in particular are boring in comparison.
https://thinkprogress.org/how-one-oklahoma-hospital-is-driving-down-the-cost-of-health-care-by-thousands-of-dollars-f507cdf32111/
can’t believe this was ever published at a site called “think progress”
‘We need a healthcare system which is based around prevention and healthy living’
Define ‘healthy living.’
Just how are you going to implement a system based on ‘healthy living’ (sic)? Someone who is not living healthily (95% of the people) can be denied treatment in your fabulous new healthcare system?
So if you get colon cancer (I hope you don’t), you are going to take zinc? Your positive experience with a Naturopathic doctor does not invalidate U.S. healthcare.
“In the months that followed I started getting bill after bill from doctors and other people who I never saw. The doctors I saw kept wanting me to get surgery, sell me drugs and undergo expensive, invasive diagnostics…”
I’m all for sending O-care to the dust bin of history, but to be fair this was the case before Obama came along.