How to fix healthcare in USA without Obamacare

You can read my ideas on my blog. I have to give you the link because it's too long to copy/paste.
http://makingitbetterblog.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/how-to-improve-healthcare-without-obamacare/


I'd like to hear your thoughts, and any feedback you have.

I'm talking about specifically American problems here, but if you read my suggestions, many of those problems exist even in countries with socialist systems.

Okay:

1) Eliminate everything Obama did and set the slate back to where it was.

2) Let the Republicans fix the economy.

3) AFTER the Republicans fix the economy, THEN have Democrats throw a fit about Capitalism.


Republicans are the ones that have been handling our capitalist economy for hundreds of years. THEY KNOW HOW TO FIX IT.

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Your idea covers the medical world, only. It won't fix the economy at all.

How to fix the economy, I wrote in here:

http://mythweavers.org/index.php/topic,449.0.html

^ You'll have to search the posts to find it. Just Ctrl+F "standard".

^ But only do this AFTER the Republicans do their deal.

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Healthcare is a stupid issue. All your points don't fix it. They only fix economics in the medical world. Healthcare itself has a problem based in modern medical science: that being, chemistry. Yes, chemistry. ONLY Chemistry. No Physics, no age-old working remedies, no Biology, just Chemistry and its pills.

Obamacare also doesn't care about Healthcare. It's just a tax. A very complex and dastardly tax, but still a tax.

What you're calling for involves both increased regulation (for transparency) as well as going head to head to major industries in the US. I think the only way to take down the big boys of Agriculture and Pharmaceuticals is to reform the political system in such a way to reduce their voice, but as you've mentioned they're very entrenched. Pharmaceutical companies, in addition to reducing competition for drugs in America, are also pushing for intellectual property agreements to sell overpriced drugs overseas. So they even affect America's (and other countries' !) trade policy. Obamacare's already happened, but what you're mentioning here is rusted deep into the American political system :(

I'm only addressing points 1, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 11, and 12. I'm not really sure about alternative medicines. Also I'm not too sure about the hygiene of drinking raw milk. Agriculture is industrialized, and pasteurizing is for our own good. Salmonella, E. coli and other contamination can occur no matter where the milk comes from. Also, organic foods can be sold in the US and are regulated with standards for quality control purposes - so nobody can sell you something with 1% organic ingredients and still call it organic. However, organic foods are inherently less intensive than "industrialized" agriculture and won't achieve the same economy of scale - it'll be more expensive.

I agree with Blah.

Plus, processing things as we do allows us to keep our food unspoiled for longer. Your ideas are like that of the UAE - which is a great country, but it doesn't operate under the idea of convenience.

We Muricans are so engraved into the Convenience Movement that we would be devastated if that convenience stopped.

For example, the only way to fix mass slaughtering of animals for meat is to criminalize Animal Capture For Food. Or, atleast, for their meat. This forces people to hunt for meat - which isn't a bad thing, and it'll make hunters think more about the importance of the animal rather than hunting being a sport. Supposedly.

But this also means less access to meat, which Muricans won't like since they're used to the convenience of getting it ASAP. I mean, hunters will still get meat during various hunting seasons, but they can't kill everything, so the meat will sell out fast - which means raising the price so that people will be less inclined to kill themselves over it in the shopping aisle.

007, dear...

Nearly every post I've read of yours has been so ignorant I swear....

WE HAVE MEDICARE. Obamacare exists to pretty much defy the Medicare system we have in place.

We didn't get Republicans in these past two terms because THE MURICAN POPULACE IS FULL OF IDIOTS.

They ONLY elected Obama because of the idea that a black president would be a great thing - that's literally the only reason. Don't believe me? Come in here and ask a large group of Obama voters why they voted for him. See what they say.

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We in Murica are far too taken in by propaganda. Then again, it's nothing to the amount y'all Australians take in... But it still influences everything - not facts, not statistics, just false propaganda.

And Cuba's healthcare MAY be better than the U.S.'s, but it is FAR from "Excellent".

I'll agree that there are a lot of restrictions on generic drugs, on getting new drugs approved, or imported or whatever, and that there may be some underhanded stuff going on at the FDA, but at least we don't allow companies to sell their drugs with no approval or regulation.

I'm all for practices that make people healthier, like having less corn syrup in our food, training more doctors and not forcing them to pay so much for medical school, but after all that I still think we need something at least like Obamacare, if not something better.

Rezilia said:

They ONLY elected Obama because of the idea that a black president would be a great thing - that's literally the only reason. Don't believe me? Come in here and ask a large group of Obama voters why they voted for him. See what they say.

Click to expand...

I voted for him because I wanted an intelligent, competent person who would negotiate and be fair and who genuinely seemed to care about people, but that's neither here nor there.

Yeah. Obamacare is about health insurance, about getting services available to people. You could make all of the changes noted, but they don't affect accessibility per se, even if they do it indirectly by reducing costs. And as mentioned before, some of these cut-reducing reforms are painfully prohibitive because of entrenchment of the status quo by those who benefit from it.

Also, I voted for Obama because no wait I'm not American...

How do you improve the healthcare of a nation? Higher taxes. Deal with it.

The US is an interesting case however, since they already spend much more money per capita on their healthcare system yet their coverage is far behind. Even if US taxes are on the whole low, healthcare spending is already out of whack.

Our taxes are NOT on the low. And even in disciplines where they are low - the natural costs are raised higher.

Obamacare will fail. We Muricans know this. We're just waiting for everything to fall apart.


Obama...competent? Really? Versus Romney, who actually had FULLY AVAILABLE documents noting TONS of his various SUCCESSES - even counting the Olympics. When the Republicans had an inkling of an idea of what they would do if elected, Obama's side was just defending - trying to turn the subject away.

You must not have watched the presidential debates. Even the Obama supporters in the room with me (it was a large viewing room) were facepalming at Obama's side due to his butt getting whooped by Romney's side every two seconds.

So you voted for Obama due to his COMPETENCE? Shame on you!

Rezilia said:

Obama...competent? Really? Versus Romney, who actually had FULLY AVAILABLE documents noting TONS of his various SUCCESSES - even counting the Olympics. When the Republicans had an inkling of an idea of what they would do if elected, Obama's side was just defending - trying to turn the subject away.

You must not have watched the presidential debates. Even the Obama supporters in the room with me (it was a large viewing room) were facepalming at Obama's side due to his butt getting whooped by Romney's side every two seconds.

So you voted for Obama due to his COMPETENCE? Shame on you!

Click to expand...

Please, take your red-tinted glasses away- most polls registered a plurality Obama victory in the second and third debates, which is far away from your personal anecdote. And yes, even if you can't understand it, some people (actually, most of the American population according to the latest polls) think Republicans are being even more incompetent with the small share of power they have and feel no desire to give them any more.

You can argue that Obama won his first term thanks to Bush being immensely disliked in the last year of his presidency and the world markets melting down under his watch so people wanted anything but another term of that and the Republicans didn't manage to differentiate themselves from Bush well enough. And the second term can be attributed to Reps moving too much to the right of the general population, which made them an easy target for wealthy-billionaires-who-don't-care-about-you ads (which Romney helped making with his 47% remarks) and a new demographic image the Democrats have fully embraced, winning all ethnic groups except white males- and seeing how whites are declining and half will be females (who also favour Democrats), it's not a wonder they are running with a headstart of over 240 electoral votes in the foreseeable future.

Also consider that the same way you think Obama is an incompetent disgrace, many people think Obama is a good president who has not been able to do anything more because he found an opposition party who didn't want to compromise and instead decided to vote no on everything supported by the President (even if, as Obamacare, it had been designed and supported by Republicans at first), pass all-for-us-nothing-for-you onesided bills in the House and filibuster everything in the Senate. Even Newt Gingrich tried to negotiate and passed a bunch of laws with Clinton after the Shutdown fiasco. Even he looks moderate in comparison now, and the problem is, most Americans would prefer to have a under-average President than give full power to the side that looks increasingly more radical with every passing day. That is, all the people who haven't been alienated firmly into the D side already.

There is a long list, specially in the Senate, of 2010+ Republican candidates who lost theorethically safe seats in red-ish and purple states because they were too extreme for the regular citizen. Maybe that's something worth looking into.

Also, Romneycare (which is Obamacare in Massachussetts) has worked pretty well. Uninsured levels in Oregon and Washington have plummeted in the last weeks. It's a bit too early to decide whether it's a failure or not.

InMooseWeTrust said:

You can read my ideas on my blog. I have to give you the link because it's too long to copy/paste.
http://makingitbetterblog.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/how-to-improve-healthcare-without-obamacare/


I'd like to hear your thoughts, and any feedback you have.

I'm talking about specifically American problems here, but if you read my suggestions, many of those problems exist even in countries with socialist systems.

Click to expand...

I agree with most of your points there, because it's what I have tried to point out to both "camps," it's not the insurance that needs reforming, it's the costs. The fact that insurance is needed for regular doctor visits and preventative measures that cost fractions of what they patient is charge to produce is one of the bigger problems that needs addressing. Also patient freedom is seriously lacking in this country, they expect you to live a long life, but don't care how healthy you are as long as there's a heartbeat.

Most medical bills that go unpaid are not from emergencies, though having insurance for those emergencies is a good idea, they are from preventative care. Many patients will go to the emergency room in place of general practitioners to avoid having to pay because they can't afford it any other way, and emergency rooms in most areas have to at least see the patient. Yes, there are a few who are just trying to cheat the system, but that's not typical really.

There is also a ton of waste in the medical system as a whole, administrators who will give themselves massive paychecks even though they do little to no work, nurses do most of it anyway. Machines that don't need replacing are often replaced just because of a change in the contract holders. Doctors not caring to actually check on major symptoms, especially primary symptoms, just because they don't match stereotypes leading to a patient needing emergency surgery that could have been avoided completely if they had just done one thing different out of the numerous times they had been admitted to the emergency for something that was clearly an emergency.

Yeah, that last one was a personal experience that, after discussing it with other people and a few decent doctors, I discovered was far too common. There is so much wrong with the medical system and yet all anyone can come up with is reforming insurance? Lame, I like your ideas better.