For those of you serious about the health care debate I offer you an array of opinion on my personal blog based on 47 years in employer based health benefit experience Check this out The Debate and this Health Care

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Quinnscommentary.com

1) Do you feel Health Care belongs in the hands of the Federal Government?

2) If so, to what extent?

3) Do you feel Health Care belongs in the hands of the State Governments?

4) If so, to what extent?

5) Do you feel Health Care belongs in the hands of the Local (City/County) Governments?

6) If so, to what extent?

7) Do you feel Health Care belongs in the hands of the People?

8) If so, to what extent?

9) Do you feel Health Care is a right, or something we should achieve?

10) Were you at, on, under, or near the Grassy Knoll the day Jimmy Hoffa assassinated JFK and disappeared with DB Cooper's money into the caves of Afghanistan?

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Global Warming is my favorite color.

I believe nobody should be in business to make a profit over someone else's illness. Too many drug firms are taking huge subsidies from the U.S. government (your taxes) to help defray the costs of developing treatments and cures for ailments, then they are gouging the very public that supported their research through exhorbitantly high prices to U.S. citizens that they do not charge citizens of other countries who contributed nothing to the cost of research and development.

They do not charge higher prices in other countries becasue those governments fix prices and in effect the US consumer is subsidizing development costs and the rest of the world benefits. In addition, a drug company has about 20 years of selling a drug to recoup all its costs before a drug can go to generic.

What is a real problem with drugs is the advertiusing which has increased demand and created pressure on doctors to prescribe warranted or not and that has to stop.

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Quinnscommentary.com

I believe anyone in the Healthcare profession, from slopping bedpans to inventing new hips, is entitled to make a profit from their work. Nothing wrong with that. I, for one, would be afriad of any medical care I got from an entire profession filled with people who weren't allowed to profit. Scary idea.

I agree here. The ONLY money that should go from my pocket to the Healthcare industry should be the dollars I voluntarily fork over for treatment I chose to have. Nothing more. No subsidies, no taxes, no nothing. Pure commerce only.

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Global Warming is my favorite color.

what do you think of the pnhp proposal for single payer health coverage quinn?


Physicians for a National Health Program - Health Care is a Human Right

The complete plan can be found on the link.

>>>I'm not Quinn, but the reason that health care is so expensive and quality so poor is that capitalists at every level of the system (including the boatloads of lawyers and accountants) are taking their own huge chunks out of it. They've had their chance. They blew it. Now it's on to single payor. I'm tired of buying Gulfstreams for these idiots.

Certainly there are administrative costs, but in the worse case they are a relatively small portion of the total cost. Medicare claims to have very low costs, but they do not include many expenses such as their own advertising, plus with so much Medicare fraud and now we find not monitoring the volume of care rendered wasting an estimated $50 billion in the last few years, perhaps more should be spent on the administration.

Single payor will solve nothing except the universal coverage issue and while that sounds appealing, unless we deal with the real costs, a single payor system will make things worse OR to control costs it will mean a fixed budget for health care and no more spent and that means some form of rationing.

It simply does not add up that we can have it all and pay for it all and go where we want when we want and to the doctor we want and think we can afford all of it. We can't, that is the simple truth.

So, where are the tradeoffs?

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Quinnscommentary.com

A single payor system is not going to pay for EVERYTHING. You want a tummy-tuck, you're on your own.

As I hear it, administrative costs are about 30% of the total costs in the private health care system. But you're right, we gotta get down to the additional "real costs". One of my peeves is the payouts by the drug companies to the generic manufacturers to NOT produce the drugs when the patents expire. These are huge payouts for doing absolutely nothing, and they run up the cost of drugs.

Additionally, the drug companies claim they have huge R&D costs when, in fact, most of the research is being done at the universities. The modus operandi is to have a university staffer do the exploration and testing and then buy the staffer and his notes when he comes up with something.

I have no faith in the private sector (or any combination of the goverment and private sector) to solve the healthcare problems. Look where they've taken us to this point. Single payor only and get down to the real costs.