The blurb about Long Term Care insurance really got me thinking. It makes sense, if they are having trouble now what will it be like in 10 or 20 years. I think I am going to reconsider this coverage.

I do agree with have to go with a single payer health care system. It is getting ridiculous for everyone. People want this capitalist model for health care, but morally do not want to deal with the consequences which is people dying in the hospital parking lot.

Get ready for “lean and mean”, in the MSM, where you have been saying to have some humility… I was googling “unfunded liabilties”…
Looking Out for the Next Bailout

One of the lessons I have learned from the current financial crisis is that it is worth paying close attention to warnings concerning obscure, quasi-public agencies that are (1) known by their abbreviations, and (2) perform dull but critical functions. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are prime examples.

This leads me to write about the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, more commonly known as P.B.G.C.

Alan B. Krueger

Congrats on your Second Place.

Still did not get an answer—–who is 538

Went to their site and it shows some familiarity with graphs and charts. Thus (maybe) they automated their votes somewhat like Obamas use of the Caucus system.

It was a very lopsided win for an unknown. I thought I was reasonably familiar with the political lweb landscape. Quess I may have to go back to the book for dummies.

nice job.

I suspect that most voters really don’t study the qualifications of the person — and vote party lines.

Lots of good information — SHIBA — I’m looking at it now online.

Single Payer healthcare is more efficient and more fair, but there is now a much more pressing and crucial reason that Americans should be insisting on a Single Payer system.

Genetic testing has become much cheaper, faster and more reliable in the last 5 years, and each year seems to bring exponential advancements in its speed and efficiency and also in the research on genetically-linked diseases.

Unless Americans adopt a system that gives healthcare to everyone from birth to grave, millions of Americans are going to find themselves in an uninsurable sub-class. In a world where testing a single hair or micro-gram of saliva or even a few shed skin cells can give an insurer a cheap, reliable medical profile of an individual, it’s ridiculously naive to think that laws forbidding genetic prescreening will be any deterent to insurance companies. Also, they are already allowed to ask about family medical history, and the courts could very well determine that a genetic sample is merely a logical extension of allowing insurers to ask about family medical histories.

The greedy entrepeneurs in the medical system would have to work in areas that would largely remain the domain of the private sector, like plastic surgery, and the private insurance companies would switch to selling medical insurance for services the public insurer doesn’t cover, like plastic surgery or therapeutic massage.

As the system switch over, some hospitals and doctors could opt out or in, but not both.
They could choose fixed remuneration from a single payer, and thereby reduce their bad debts and collection agency costs to almost zero, and their administration costs by a huge margin, but they would be sometimes compensated at a lower rate than they now charge. Or they could operate exclusively in the private sector, and try to cherry-pick the most profitable ‘customers’.

In countries with Single Payer healthcare, there is often a problem with the private sector dumping their mistakes into the public sector. In other words, the tummy tuck is handled in the private system, but complications end up in the public system. But this already takes place in the USA in a much, much more nasty way. In the USA, most people have ‘lifetime caps’ on the amount an insurance company will spend on them, and the only route to public Medicare lies through the bankruptcy courts, with the resulting loss of house, car, retirement funds and kids’ college funds.

Write, phone and act for Single Payer healthcare!