Bill raises an interesting point here...shouldn't there be some things in this country that are NOT for profit? And should health care be one of them?
When Congress breaks for recess, that's when I will be talking about health care. I've had some ideas bouncing around in my head but it took a few recent events in my own life to organize them to the point where I could articulate something worthwhile.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Good Question
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12 comments:
Is there something inherently wrong with profit? Not "excess" profit - but ANY profit. What is wrong with it?
Maher called those profiting from providing healthcare "vampires"; does that mean farmers are evil for profiting from hunger? Oh, and Maher lumped in Blue Cross which I'm pretty sure is a NON-profit organization. Maybe you should stop taking YOUR talking points from the left-of-center version of Rush.
Blue Cross Blue Shield is a franchise operation. Some of the companies involved are non-profit (they started out that way), but a large number are now for profit. Your confusion over this point is part of a growing trend that's at the heart of the problem.
As Maher noted, it used to be that you'd go to the local Catholic hospital when you got injured. All those non-profits are going out of business now because of competition from "boutique" health care operations. These are clinics like Tria in Minnesota, which handles only profitable things such as orthopedic surgery. Local hospitals are stuck handling uninsured gunshot victims in their emergency rooms, while well-to-do clients are treated at tony clinics in the suburbs.
Bill McGuire, the former CEO of UnitedHealth Group in Minnesota, received 1.1 billion dollars of compensation in 2006 when he left the company after a scandal involving backdating stock options. (He was forced by the SEC to give back hundreds of millions.)
This is the kind of soulless blood-sucking vampire Maher is talking about. A billion dollars would pay the insurance premiums for hundreds of thousands of people. It could provide thousands of heart transplants, or hundreds of millions of flu shots.
And that's just one guy. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, more health care CEOs pulling down million-dollar-plus salaries.
Men like McGuire provide nothing to the system. They are not doctors making people better. They run companies that exist to winnow out the least profitable clients from the system, rejecting anyone with pre-existing conditions. Which means someone with diabetes can't get insurance, which means they get sicker and sicker until they have catastrophic heart or kidney failure and wind up in the emergency room.
The standard operating procedure for many health insurance companies is to deny coverage for everything for the first through third times, just to see if they can outlast the poor consumer.
This, conservatives will say, is the service the insurance companies provide. They provide a cost control for the system.
In other words, they dictate what the doctors can charge, just like government bean counters dictate what doctors can charge Medicare. If you go to a doctor that charges more than your health insurance will pay, you foot the difference.
So, tell me why we need to pay some private company 71 billion dollars a year to tell us what we can and can't have? The government can do the same thing at a much lower cost. Without posh CEO corner officers and private jets.
"That would lead to rationing," you say. We already have rationing based on ability to pay. And anyone can be hit by it if they're unlucky enough to come down with an expensive condition -- you can hit your lifetime limit pretty fast with heart problems.
There's nothing wrong with profit. But insurance company profits come from insuring only healthy people and avoiding paying to care for sick people. When the CEOs are paid such obscenely high salaries for essentially denying health care to sick people, that's blood money. And that's where the blood-sucking soulless vampire part comes in.
OK. Leaving aside insurance, which vastly complicates health-care (mostly because it really isn't insurance like car or home or even life), is there a reasonable objection to profit existing in the health-care field? No or yes - and if yes, please explain the rationale. [I agree that there are overpaid CEOs - that isn't the question at issue. And I disagree with most of the left about what to do about it.]
Thanks for the update on BC by the way. Back when I actually used them they were a non-profit. The hospital I just visited my brother at is a non-profit too, not that you would mistake it for cheap though.
The standard operating procedure for many health insurance companies is to deny coverage for everything for the first through third times, just to see if they can outlast the poor consumer.
I've never had an insurance company that has done that. However, my wife had a state worker's comp claim and it was EXACTLY like that. If she had been a single mom depending on the state worker's comp insurance she would've been completely up shit creek. It was by far the worst experience either of us ever had with insurance - and it was the state program.
Personal experience tells me you have it seriously backwards.
http://www.factcheck.org/politics/obamas_health_care_news_conference.html
C'mon M - what is wrong with profit? You think Bill has a point, can't you back it up?
Something wonky is going on with blogspot. I posted a comment way before blk and it never showed up. WTF?
Let's see if I can remember what I wrote...
There is nothing wrong with profit. I am good capitalist, remember? And your point about farmers is interesting. But how is providing food making money off of misery? Some people might not like corn but they do like MRIs if they have had a coronary.
BLK answered the public-private snafu of Blue Cross Blue Shield.
I am not going so far as to say that I fully agree with Maher but I think he got to the crux of the debate. Should health care be for profit?
Yes, there is nothing wrong IMO with health-care being for profit.
Your take?
I guess at this point I'm not really sure. Being for profit I suppose is fine. Being for greed is not and it has been proven that America in 2009 does not know the difference.
Is it OK to make money on human suffering? Of course not but is that actually what happens with our current health care system? I haven't had many complaints about our system personally until recently. Next week, I am going to put up a post about all of this when I have more time and we can really get into it.
I guess at this point I'm not really sure.
That is apparently more honesty than the rest of your readers can collectively summon. Not one can stand up and unequivocally make the case that you quote Maher making - that profit is by definition bad in health-care.
Being for greed is not and it has been proven that America in 2009 does not know the difference.
Indeed, you yourself are unable to make that distinction, but you are sure it must exist somewhere; and perhaps, like porn you'll know it when you see it.
I hope you aren't left wondering as to why I should have serious doubts about what you prescribe to fix the system.
yep, he'll know it when he sees it. sounds just like the people he always criticizes.
Hmmm.... seems like Pope Constantine and the First Council of Nicaea tried something like this back in the day, with loaning money. All they accomplished was to drive the entire banking industry into the hands of the Jews, inadvertently setting up for the Holocaust in the process.
Is there a particular reason you think it would work better with healthcare? More to the point, why should it? Healthcare isn't magically created from nothing, it's people's time, labor and expertise. That is what Maher is saying should not be allowed at a profit.
So basically Bill Maher is coming out in favor of slavery, and you're at least partially agreeing with him, right?
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