Comments about ‘The health-reform challenge’

The purported 46 million "uninsured" Americans "fact" is what the Left and the Obama fawning media want you to believe. The reality is that the real number is far lower. A large percentage are already eligible for Medicare and Medicaid. Another significant percentage are those earning over $75,000 a year and could afford insurance but choose not to have it. The largest percentage are illegal aliens. At least check the "estimates" before you take a position.

The actuall number of 'chronically uninsured' is closer to 8 million. It is much cheaper to let them get their healthcare at emergency rooms, than to let the Gov. screw up everyones healthcare.

Private sector can never solve the health dilemmna.
First of all they are not transparent, they are out to make a dollar$$$(lots of them) if you know what I mean. But MOST importantly they are the "Lobbyists" who lobby for biased legislation to favour their bottom line. Greed replaces Compassion
How can you have private sector resolve a failing system that has caused the failure by high insurance costs and premiums, excluding the less fortunate.
During the Great Depression it was CONGRESS who set up "Social Security" (the Government)cause the banks and private industry failed..the cause back then as it is now GREED. Shut up Goerge Bush..the American people have spoken at the polls! You have squandered the billions of the txpaers money for your enterprises (war and Enron) to name a couple. That equates to more patients (VA hospitals) and less money for the health of a nation

Our Constitution places the value of people as greater than any other concern. The phrase Justice for all in the pledge implies that people need to be treated fairly. The concern for fairness in business practices is not a part of the Constitution.

Some people believe that business is more important than people. Thus the statement Frankly, we fail to see how any public plan backed by the seemingly endless resources of taxpayers could ever compete fairly with private plans. It is the opinion of most of us that health care should not be a competitive factor in the Capitalist economy.

The statement Private solutions are better than public ones but only if the private sector, including insurers, is forced to truly compete in transparent ways is a true statement.

There are two ways the government can force fairness. One is to have many well enforced regulations upon the private sector, the other is to simply open up a competitive option that forces the private sector to emulate the public option. This writer prefers the second.

Deseret News and conservatives in general talk both sides of the argument. First, they say government is too inefficient, bureaucratic, and cumbersome to deliver an efficient health care system. Then they say that a government option will make it hard for for-profit companies to compete. Which is it?

The problem is GREED on both sides. Greed on the side of the insurers who want to make the almighty buck and GREED on the side of gov't who want the almighty power. Which one do you choose?

We the American people want to know the following details of the new healthcare plan is?

1) What the desired result will be? Quality Healthcare for all?

2) What date is set for Achievement?

3) What are the obstacles that are to be overcome to accomplish it?

4) Who are the people, groups, and Organizations to work with to accomplish it?

5) What are the skills and knowledge required to accomplish the goal?

6) What is the Plan of Action, Daily, weekly, monthly timeframes to implement it?

7) What are the attached rewards for achieving each part of the plan and attached penalties for not achieving them?

8) What are the benefits? What is in it for all of us?

Again, it should be a non profit program based on care, not on profits.

Real change will happen if we place a law on congress and elected officials that they are required to use the same healthcare that every american uses. One that is non profit based and have ethic controls.

The Deseret News editorial board misses the boat!

If cost is the basic problem, why are you proposing insurance as the remedy? Reduce costs! Get rid of outrageous malpractice awards, bureaucracies, expensive requirements for paperwork and tests, etc. If basic costs come down, insurance isn't such a big issue.

I am 29 years old and have suffered from an unknown illness for nine years. I have been in out of GP's and specialist offices and I see 3 problems with healthcare in this country. Two can of them fixed the other is dependent mostly on attitude.

1. My expierence with doctors have been rocky. They seem indifferent to me at times and almost like they do not care. They will run a few test. They call you back a few days later and say everything is normal.

They do not take your illness as a challenge to them. They essentially give up, maybe because they dont care or maybe their is no profit in going further.

2. Insuracne dictates certain test and treatments. A doctor told me they had to test for one thing before insurance would allow him to test for somthing else. My doctor also had to put me one drug to see if i would tolerate before she could put me on a drug that she was sure i could tolerate.

3. Healthcare and profit do not coinicide. What is good for shareholders is not good for you.

It's both. Government services are inefficient and wasteful, as I have witnessed first hand, AND the "Public Option" on health care will crowd out private insurers. Why? Because the Government can vastly subsidize its inefficiency and wastefulness with public money (i.e., borrowing against our children's future).

Dave's right. Using emergency room doctors on a stand-by basis provides medical service for the uninsured at practically zero marginal cost. To the extent that those services are paid for, that money helps maintain an excellent emergency facility for the rest of us. It is a win-win arrangement.

Do Americans spend more for medical care? Of course we do. We also spend more for autos, food, education, entertainment and news media. That one piece of data is irrelevant for determining whether government should provide or regulate those goods and services.

Do Americans get more for their medical spending? Yes, we do. For example, Americans with cancer are more likely to survive the disease than those in England and western Europe. Advanced treatment is more expensive than letting people die. We willingly insure for it, if the government will let us.

The Kennedy health bill would jeopardize the insurance that now works reasonably well for almost all Americans. And it would jeopardize our excellent survival rates. Read the details. There is no good reason to ruin our system just to change the way we treat the 20 million or so long-term uninsured.

We have been supporting an entire industry, the insurance companies, for many years. Why do we even need insurance companies? They are there solely to make a profit. We give them our money and they dictate to us what tests, medicines, etc., we can or cannot have. Makes no sense to me.

How about blocs of people (businesses, counties, states, etc) hiring negotiators who work for us and have our best interests at heart to negotiate with healthcare providers of all kinds, who in turn would negotiate terms with their providers. Rather than paying astronomical premiums to insurance companies we would pay a significantly smaller amount into health cooperatives run by us and then paid to providers chosen by us.

No insurance claims, fewer administrative costs, everyone is included without regard to preexisting conditions, and healthcare providers continue to make good money. Fewer layers of bureaucratic red tape mean better healthcare and better provider/patient relationships.

We all benefit because we're no longer supporting an unnecessary industry the insurance companies. We profit, and healthcare providers profit. Win/win situation.

Many people don't understand that when you take profits out of any enterprise, including health care, you also eliminate incentive. Without incentives, quality AND quantity of care will suffer. The result would be mediocre to bad quality and rationing.

Of course people who work in medicine care about their patients, but if it's 5 o'clock and the government has eliminated the profit in the job, most doctors will go home rather than see another patient.

So rant about the need for health care reform if you must, but stop telling us that we need to take the profits out of it.

We already have in this country an example of public verses private medical insurance. Medicare and Midicare Advantage. Medicare is a public option, Medicare Advantage is the private is the private option the lobbyists forced on us. Which of the two is heavily government subsidized. The private one. President Obama wants to cut 175 Billion of those subsidize. So much for the agruement that the because the public plan could get subsidizes the private sector could not compete. The private sector can't compete because of the hundreds of thousands bureaucrats they (really you)support. Those people who sit in high rise buildings with only one thing to do. Deny you claim. They can't compete because of the fat cat executives and lobbyists they support. You can bet a large part of what you pay for healthcare is to pay these guys.

Does not matter which plan is decided on. Bottomline is that no one wants to pay in either system.

Profit is greed? Businesses exist to make a profit, and health insurance companies are no different. It's not greed, it's how business must operate--no profit, no business.

Most health insurance companies are publicly owned, meaning your family and friends are probably owners.

That said, insurance is not the answer to the problem of COST. Reducing cost is the answer.

Is your health a commodity against which profit should be measured? I think profit is the wrong focus for any portion of the health care sector.

The reasons for the high costs and rip-offs is that private insurance is not sufficiently competitive. The inadequate competition allows for exorbitant economic profit, inflating costs to the breaking point. We need a public plan to keep the private industry honest and wring economic profit out of the private system, getting it down to an accounting profit level. A mixture of private and public is in my opinion better than single payer in that competition will be created and preserved.

Without the public plan, we will drown in excessive industry profit (economic), soaring costs, and a population which must go without health care. The Deseret News needs to put its dominant ideology aside and look at reality.

Brantley Thrasher, chairman of the Department of Urology at the University of Kansas, said it was "impossible to say" on the basis of the statistics whether a prostate cancer patient had a better chance of surviving under a "capitalistic" or "socialistic" medical system. American doctors tend to be more "interventionist" and more likely to advocate surgery than their counterparts in Britain or Canada, where greater emphasis is put on "active surveillance."

To "Bro Joseph | 7:44 a.m." you are wrong. The high cost of health care premiums is due directly to government requirements for what is covered. You forget that we recently had the Utah Legislature debating a bill that would have required Autism treatements to be covered by private insurance. You want government to fix problems that government creates. This is one fallacy that never works. Government creates problems, and when it tries to solve them with more government action it only creates more.