As of today CA is now giving taxpayer money to illegals to buy houses with zero down and a 0% mortgage

To him? Nothing. He walks away with zero penalty. Let’s suppose he’s drunk and hits me. I’ll be fine battling my OWN insurance company who I’ve PAID to get fair compensation for what that unpunished criminal wrongfully did. It’s the Harris way for those of you dopes that like it. @Heartlander

@Heartlander
No CAT scans, no MRI's, very little technology, no Big Pharma pushing pushing exorbitantly priced drugs for everything, very few specialists; mostly GPs you hoped were somewhat up to date with latest medical knowledge. Yet it is insurance companies that caused all the problems, drove up the costs, and government doing anything will drive up costs more?

Army provided basic health care screening to make sure you were fit for battle, and their ability to scoop you off the battlefield to patch you up and send you back in became the model for our 911/paramedic trauma care system. But beyond that it didn't do much for the level of care or cost containment. In basic training they couldn't figure out why nearly half of each training unit came down with what was known at the time as the Ft. Ord crud. They would run us in full field care including jackets from the beach firing ranges the couple of miles back to the barracks, have us strip our jackets off, and do calisthenics in our sweat drenched fatigues as the marine layer and cold winds were coming in. Took an organized letter writing campaign to our Congressional representatives to get that changed. Once you were patched up, if you were no longer serviceable you got botted out and into the VA hospital systems which no one has deemed to call quality. PTSD treatment is a national shame.

@dancingtongue


And with all those wonderful advances we all should have leaped forward in life expectancy, childhood mortality, and the other assorted metrics by which we measure success and caught up with the rest of the world's life expectancy, but we didn't.

Let me guess why: because we have a health care insurance system that works like our car insurance and not health care that helps maintain us. We wait to have a heart attack or stroke to see a doc because all that front end health care maintenance stuff is often not covered by insurance.


A civilian version of that would be health care screening to make sure we are fit for life.

@Heartlander
Exactly. Which is why the Affordable Care Act required insurers to cover primary care, preventive care, health promotion services in their benefit packages in order to be able to participate. As with so much in the corporate world, how do you get corporations -- be they the financial industry or the health care industry -- do what is best for their products rather than their greedy bottom line without some regulation, some government involvement. I agree, too much regulation and too heavy handed government is just as bad, but turning it totally over to capitalistic bottomliners is not the solution either.

@dancingtongue Just based on my own experiences, on even the best insurance, you don’t get a free ride through the CT/ MRI scanner. To get that ride you first have to have a complaint, and then they just image the complaint part of the body. Meanwhile, enterprising diagnostic clinics advertise whole body imaging for just $250. So to take advantage of medical technology for healthcare you have to pay out of pocket so you can later justify the cost for seeing a specialist. But that’s only half of it, the other half is self diagnosis prompted by TV commercials by pharmaceutical companies. It’s like healthcare in the US is DIY to get beyond the 5 minutes it takes to check your BP and prostate before sending you to the lab. How many times I’ve heard from medical professional friends, versions of “I’d be dead if I didn’t know how the system works”.

@Heartlander Why you need to be part of an integrated prepaid health care system that is focused on keeping you healthy rather than running up costs or denying care to keep the insurance money. Complete CT/MRI exams are a waste of money if you are just on a fishing expedition: they are primarily designed for targeted examination of problem areas to determine what and/or how severe the underlying cause is, not some magical diagnostic tool. They are fully covered under my plan. Primary care and specialists should be working in concert as part of a team, not pitted against each other for what sort of bills they can run up. Mine work together with a shared electronic medical record.

Big Pharma's self-diagnosis commercials are adding insult to injury after pumping the prices as high as they can for U.S. patients but not the rest of the world.

@dancingtongue :) seems like
I know 5 or 6 widows and widowers whose spouses died from ruptured aneurysms. When I express my sadness for their experiences my expression tends to be “oh, no. Did they know they had an aneurysm?” The answer has always been “no”. We don‘t go into the part about how easily that aneurysm may have been patched with a stent. The same case can be made for multiple diseases. Like how many people don’t know they have cardio-vascular issues until they appear in an ER with a heart attack?

I’m no medical professional, but my understanding of human physiology is that our body tends to compensate for its own failures. So when our arteries start clogging it goes unnoticed until 80%+ occluded. So by the time we see a doctor to complain about how we’re exhausted after walking up 2 flights of stairs we are practically in surgical bypass territory.

:) I love this topic better than how California plans to drive the cost of housing highly. This is closer to home. Half of my high school classmates are now deceased. All of them from issues I just referenced.

You’re right. I had virtually no symptoms went to the catheter,lab was kicked out and heavily medicated until a CABG X 5+ was completed. Pure luck. @Heartlander

@Heartlander I understand your point although I'm not sure routine full body scans on a regular basis would necessarily detect all aneurysms. It certainly is a way to drive the costs of health care even higher, at how much benefit to society's overall morbidity/mortality rates compared, say, to primary care systems encouraging people to see health care providers who ask about reductions in physical abilities, nagging concerns, etc? Or health promotion services to encourage better diet and exercise? It's easy to lament the micro case of a sole individual or two, but what is the cost/benefit analysis on a macro level for the entire society & economy? Or do you prefer a jungle where only the wealthy have access to the best medicine can provide?

Using myself as an example, with no financial barriers to health care services and a pretty thorough understanding of the health care system short of being a health care provider myself from working in it for 40 years, no tests are absolutely 100% effective. I had high PSA rates in my blood tests for years. The PSA test is notorious for false positives. I had three follow-up prostate biopsies over the span of a decade, all of which were negative. The urologists decided to discontinue the biopsies, figuring I was one of those who just ran high PSA levels from the normal increased size of the prostate that comes with age. Why we begin peeing in Morse Code -- dots and dashes -- after we reach a certain age, without it ever being prostate cancer.

Then one day I couldn't pee at all, necessitating a trip to the ER for a catheterization, another biopsy that finally was positive, scans of all sorts showing Stage 4 prostate cancer which had begun to spread, and a tumor on the colon. Which led to robotic surgery to remove the tumor and a three day hospital stay, and biopsy of the tumor revealed Stage 3 colon cancer. I am on hormonal therapy for the prostate cancer and monthly blood tests, annual CT scans, and less frequent colonoscopies show that everything is pretty well in check and stable. (The cost to me, incidentally, has been the $5 co-pay on prescriptions.)

Now I could wring my hands and say if they had continued to do the biopsies they might have caught it at Stage 2 or Stage 1. The PSA results were unlikely to be very helpful, as they were running high for decades. Routine CT/MRI results would have been largely inconclusive as even the healthy prostate grows in our later years. Should we as a society be paying more into such extensive screening for the few or basic, health care services for all that will lower our overall morbidity/mortality rates?

@dancingtongue First, let me say that I hope you have smooth sailing through the cancer challenges.

My opinion, still, is that in an ideal world, universal health care would include periodic top to bottom comprehensive checks, to include dental and eye checks, magnetic scans, and whatever the cost would likely be offset by reduced complicated surgical remedies and other complicated remedies. Head starts on Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and many diseases can slow the progress and add years of a better quality of life.

Backing up a few steps to how to pay for universal health care, the Obama Affordable health care should be renamed Unaffordable Health Care. While it made health care affordable for some, it made health care unaffordable for many. And since many had to downgrade their health insurance to afford the rising cost of insurance, it means that for many the quality was also degraded.

Having dealt with five different cancers and one metastasis so far I understand your points. I do have a question. How much time elapsed between the last negative prostate biopsy and the positive biopsy. I’m no doctor but from what I know a prostate MRI often does serve productive purposes. Is that right? @dancingtongue

@Heartlander
I would be interested in seeing some factual comparisons to back up this anecdotal argument you frequently hear. Most often it is a comparison of apples and oranges. The more affordable previous coverage turns out to be essentially catastrophic coverage, little or no primary care coverage, high co-pays, and previous condition/mother may I loop-holes that made the coverage extremely limited whereas the Affordable Care Act required a basic level of benefits in different categories of coverage for easier and more accurate comparisons on real terms.