Chart- Health care spending: U.S. v. Abroad

By GottaLaff

Tech issues fixed... Now, take a gander at this:

(click on image to enlarge)

H/t: Jdkidd81

To repeat, the CBO found that premiums go down under health-care reform

By GottaLaff

Dear Ezra Klein, thank you:

Commentary on the Congressional Budget Office report showing that a given health-care insurance policy will become cheaper under reform has gotten a bit confused. Fox News, for instance, summarized the report as saying, ‘CBO: HC Overhaul Likely Won’t Bring Private Premiums Down.’ [...]

First, the bottom line of the report is simple: The CBO says premiums will go down for the vast majority of Americans, and that the same insurance policy will cost less under reform.

The confusion comes in the CBO's analysis of the individual market, which serves about a tenth of the population. [...]

In other words, the change is driven by the subsidies, not offset by them.

To see this more clearly, imagine that the University of Florida decided to give incoming students who receive financial aid an $800 credit to purchase a laptop computer. You'd expect that the average computer purchased by students on financial aid would become a bit more expensive. But that wouldn't be because computers had become more expensive. It would be because people now had money to buy better computers.

So too for health-care reform. Premiums for the same policy in the individual market fall by 14 to 20 percent. But people in the individual market, who are largely low-income, will now have the opportunity to purchase better policies that cover more expenses and provide more security.

Ezra has a whole lot more to say here. Please go read, because, apparently, reading helps to clarify things, you see.

Health Care – How Will We Pay for It?

By GottaLaff

Mudflats rocks, plain and simple. Here are some excerpts from their explanation of how to pay for health care reform, but please go here to read all of it:

There are a couple conservative talking points that are being recycled over and over. This is because people can relate to them. They make sense on a very basic level to most people.

“How are we going to pay for this?”

This is the big stumbling block, they say. [...]

Now, of course, they don’t tell you where they and their outrage were during the Bush administration when this was all going on. The fault lies partly with the corporate media, who was quite happy with the Bush administration [...]

So, let’s say that all this fear over excessive government spending is a legitimate complaint, which it is. We can’t keep up the current rates of spending without suffering some major and very nasty consequences.

This brings up the other talking point, which is,

“You wouldn’t run your household this way!”

Despite the fact that most of America does, in fact, run their household that way [...] we do realize that we shouldn’t be running it that way. [...]

If it’s wrong for us, it’s surely wrong for our government. ... [L]ook at it from a common sense household perspective. [...]

Anyone I know would pretty much do whatever it took to make sure that their loved ones were cared for. Many people do. More than 60 percent of all bankruptcies in the United States are due to medical bills. People give up everything to provide care for the people they love.

And yes, the United States will spend about a trillion dollars in 2009 alone on “defense related purposes.” [...]

The military expenditure of the United States accounts for almost half (41.5%) of the world total.

We wouldn’t run our household this way [...] We would all like a balanced budget, but we all have priorities too. [...]

We have the money for universal health care. We have the money for lots of things. We just need to decide where our priorities lie as human beings, and start running our country accordingly.

Please go here for the unedited version.

More leaving hospitals against advice

Wonder how many of these left because of cost concerns?

ROCKVILLE, Md., Aug. 24 (UPI) -- There was a 39 percent increase from 1997 to 2007 in U.S. patients leaving hospitals against doctors' advice, officials of a U.S. agency said.

The report by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, part of the U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services, said the number of cases rose from 264,000 in 1997 to 368,000 in 2007.

(snip)

The report said:

-- 27 percent of the patients who left against medical advice were on Medicaid or Medicare.

-- Men were roughly 1.5 times more likely than women to leave.

-- Patients from the U.S. Northeast left hospitals at a rate of 2 per 1,000. The rate for the rest of the country was 1 per 1,000.