My personal stories on big bad health care!

Posted by Marcus on 8/3/2009, 7:46 pm, in reply to "Re: The time is NOW for Health Care Reform"

Do you really want a single-payer system with the government in charge? Because that's what you'll get! If there's a "public option" that doesn't have to make a profit it will eventually kill all the private options. Then all that will be left is the government! That's how it unfolded in Canada.

By the way, Medicare is different because it only serves a portion of the population. The private sector is still there for the majority of us. What kind of new innovations in health care do you think we'd have if we all had to rely on...gulp...Medicare.

Never trust the government to do anything as well as individuals.

Re: The time is NOW for Health Care Reform

Posted by radioman on 8/3/2009, 8:37 pm, in reply to "Re: The time is NOW for Health Care Reform"

The problem is, your mantra, "never trust the government..." instead suggests we trust corporations who we have no recourse against. The GOP and big business counts on that mantra as they try to keep things as they are, with corporations controlling our health care.

When my mom died of an acute, painful, fast moving cancer in 1999, Medicare paid what they owed always. No hassles. We never even got a bill. But it was her KAISER supplemental policy -- the minority payment policy -- that called the shots. She saw Kaiser doctors at their clinic, and when she went in, dying after NO care, she got Kaiser doctors handling her case at Research. They said it was too late for her so they sent her to a nursing home to die.

During her final 2 weeks, they did NOT provide her proper hospice care and at the very end, did NOT give her enough morphine so she would ease into death without the agony of not being able to breathe. They did NOT properly give her hospice care, they CALLED it hospice care, but when I came by after work and she was gasping in panic, hours left, there was no doctor around, no orders arranged, and in fact her doctor was an INSURANCE COMPANY doctor who just couldn't be reached on that Saturday afternoon.

My mom was gasping for breath. I had to threaten the head nurse with calling Channel 5 to force her to give mom her final dose of morphine an hour early. That was in 1999...I can't get it out of my mind after all this time. After that tantrum, I was with Mom as she relaxed into her last peaceful breaths. We were past goodbye of course. Thank god I was there to intervene, but I'm still angry with them and feel some guilt for not having been there earlier, myself, even though she was in a hospice nursing home where, presumably, it was THEIR jobs to assure she was comfortable for her last days.

The big companies are quick to bring in some horror story from Britain or Canada -- people who have to come to the US for treatment to suggest we should NOT have government health care. They don't mention that many Americans also fly to INDIA to get surgeries for a quarter of twhat they cost HERE. And they don't mention that drugs cost vastly less in Canada than they do here... and Big Pharma fights to make sure we can't buy their same drugs there, vastly cheaper. With the Pharma companies, it's always about the money.

Like with my mom, trust me, it wasn't MEDICARE that said "no." It was Kansas City's Kaiser Permanente and THEIR doctors who were calling the shots, to treat my mom at the least cost as possible!! A goddam 'supplemental Medicare policy!' SUPPLEMENTAL!!! Not even the main insurer which was the evil Medicare itself! ! I will never forgive Kaiser for that. I had to scream to get her the pain med to ease her into peace...I had to create a scene on my mom's last evening!

No, you don't want insurance companies running coverage any longer-- they are ALL about profits. You want YOUR doctor calling the shots, not their accountants.

Medicare has never been into profits on a case-by-case basis like insurance companies are. Obama's not talking about taking over health care, just taking the PROFIT MOTIVE out of it...where the more we spend, the more everyone makes. He's offering an option WE KNOW, and INSURANCE COMPANIES KNOW, makes more sense, more real. That's why they fear it and will spend MILLIONS of our own premiums and hospital overchanges to stop it! They are DESPARATE to keep the government out of their good thing!

GOVERNMENT HEALTH CARE SAVED MY DAD's LIFE!

By the way, and this is PRETTY COOL, government-paid VA hospital saved my dad's life in 1966... after he could not get insurance. In 1965, he had an adv agency but his insorance company canceled his small agency's group policy after he got lung cancer which they paid for. But a year later, now uninsured, he got brain cancer. Yeah yeah, it was a very small group... probably 5 or 6 employees but they canceled the policy because of my dad;s history of lung cancer! . He had brain cancer about a year later, but no hospital would take him because he had no more insurance. They cancelled his whole company policy a year before, remember?

As he was resigned to dying untreated, having intense headaches caused by a growing cancer, my great aunt called an ambulance. She just couldn't take care of him any more. She told the ambulance driver, 'Take him to the VA.'

She was too old to handle his dying, but he was a WWII vet so she'd sent them THERE. The VA operated on him and two days later, the cancer was out...and he was up and around! Headache finally gone.

Thanks to the big KC Veterans Administration Hospital and one surgeon, he went home in a week and lived for thirty more years--long enough to see his unborn granddaughter grow up and even graduate !

A VA surgeon saved him! 1966. I wasn't even 20 years old then! True story, I swear it. You have no clue...you've been reading the GOP/big health care propaganda. You just haven't fought with insurance companies enough yet. If you had, you wouldn't have posted that message, friend!

I can't tell you how STRONGLY I FEEL about the Obama plan. I was devastated it didn't pass under Clinton. But the time is NOW, finally that Bush is out of there! It's why I voted for the O'man!

DO NOT fall for big industry lies. Write your congressman... Tell em to pass it or lose their cushy jobs! No matter what dirty tricks the insurance companies pull. They're not in it for fathers and daughters. They're just in it for your MONEY!!