from Gateway Pundit:
Monday, December 14, 2009, 6:23 PM
Jim Hoft
This won’t end well.
A full 20 states have now cut funding for mammogram screenings for low income women after a government task force last month made its recommendations that women in their 40s should stop routinely having annual mammograms.
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December 15, 2009 at 5:13 pm
gumply
It would be nice to know what states they are. It is dispicable action on the parts of those states but it is a good peek into what is about to hit us through the Obamacare bill.
It is hard to believe that people would be so callous about someone else’s care but they can thank all the people that voted for the Liar in Chief. I would imagine that a lot of women are aghast at the decision that has been made and I wonder and would like to know what percentage of these same women voted for the jerk.
The people that put out these lies are the same kind of people that have been cheering the dems to go full speed ahead on the healthcare bill and the death panels that they have already passed secretly in the stimulus bill. You can believe that this decision is a death panel decision putting $’s before safety.
December 15, 2009 at 8:47 pm
JAMES
As the economy falters and more people go without health insurance, low-income women in at least 20 states are being turned away or put on long waiting lists for free cancer screenings, according to the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network.
In the unofficial survey of programs for July 2008 through April 2009, the organization found that state budget strains are forcing some programs to reject people who would otherwise qualify for free mammograms and Pap smears. …
At least 14 states cut budgets for free cancer screenings this year: Colorado, Montana, Illinois, Alabama, Minnesota, Connecticut, South Carolina, Utah, Missouri, Washington, Ohio, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Arkansas. …
The issue of when women should get mammograms erupted into controversy last month when the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommended that the exams not be given routinely until women are 50, and then every two years.
That broke with the Cancer Society’s long-standing position that women should begin getting mammograms at the age of 40 and annually thereafter; the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends mammograms every one to two years for women in their 40s and every year after age 50.
December 16, 2009 at 7:43 am
HistorianDude
You guys are confusing.
Isn’t this exactly what you guys have been supporting? The denial of health care to people who can’t afford it?
December 16, 2009 at 7:50 am
JAMES
Not so. No one is denied healthcare in this country.
December 16, 2009 at 2:56 pm
HistorianDude
Exactly!! Now you are starting to get it.
Nobody is denied healthcare. But, since we do not have “universal healthcare” in this country, the healthcare that “nobody is denied” is the most expensive healthcare possible delivered in the most expensive venue possible… the emergency room.
And those of us who do have health insurance pay for it in the form of cost shifting. You know… those $25 dollar aspirins? Those $10 tongue depressors?
Universal healthcare has been repeatedly proven in the industrialized west to deliver the highest quality care at the lowest corresponding cost. This is not theoretical.
And it’s not (as Interested Bystander seems to think) giving stuff away to lazy people who don’t deserve it.
December 16, 2009 at 5:04 pm
JAMES
I have been informed by my insurance carrier that if the Obamacare passes, my plan will be done away with, and the replacement (if they are allowed to move me to it), will be 30% more costly after their increase. And the plan is not the quality plan I presently have. That’s called fairness?
December 16, 2009 at 6:29 pm
gumply
Look, in this country we have people that work hard and pay their own way and if they hit bad times they work harder and longer or get another job or someone else in their family gets a job, they do without, tighten their belt and sacrifice. Then we have the ones that think the world owes them something or everything.
I worked in a hospital for twenty years and I can tell you anyone that came into our hospital for what ever reason they were taken cared of whether they had insurance or not. The ones that didnt have insurance and were not eligible for medicaid or wouldn’t apply for medicaid the hospital either wrote it off or turned it over to collection. But no one was ever refused care whether it was in the emergency room or as an inpatient. Some people lied and said they did have insurance but when we found out there was no insurance they were not kicked out of the hospital and they got the same care as the person that had insurance. The ones that got turned over to collection was eventually returned to the hospital as an uncollectible account.
It is sickening to me to listen to these politicians screaming that people die every day because they can’t afford insurance or don’t have any. I am sure people do die every day but there are other reasons than no one will take care of them. I worked in the Patients Accounts department so I saw all the bills and who paid them and if they got paid and by who.
December 16, 2009 at 7:45 pm
JAMES
Gumply– HD is trying to make the point that we are all paying higher medical costs because of those write offs, etc. I think the problem isn’t from that angle, but from the change in how we view our medical coverage. Seems to me that when I was younger, my parents paid for our doctor visits… insurance was for the catastrophies… major medical. I agree with your synopsis.
December 17, 2009 at 11:26 am
HistorianDude
They do not die “because no one takes care of them.” They die because pneumonia is a more serious illness than the flu, because a stroke is a more serious illness than hypertension, because a heart attack is a more serious illness than high cholesterol.
They die because the healthcare they receive is too late to keep them alive. Yet it ends up being more expensive than had we just treated the illness in the first place.
Example: The cost to provide an indigent mother with neonatal care is roughly $15,000 (to include substance abuse intervention). The cost to treat her crack baby is roughly $378,000.
If we prevented a single crack baby by giving neonatal care to 25 indigent mothers, we’d have saved money.
December 16, 2009 at 9:34 pm
gumply
Most hospitals that are medicare participants which is almost all of them or if they get any other money for anything from the government they are obligated to give so much health care away for gratis. With the government there are always strings attached. In a hospital there is a fee schedule for everything and it is governed by a board. You can’t arbitrarily raise prices to whatever you feel like. And everyone gets the same charges.
As for writeoffs, every industry in our country has writeoffs only they call them mark ups, and we all pay for it. I once worked part time for a department store and I had a good friend that worked in receiving. That was interesting, you should have seen the mark ups(write offs) in that area. It covered everything but the kitchen sink. Shop lifting, insurance, damaged, returns, shelf life etc. It was ridiculous. The mark up on clothes was 1000%. How do you like that. The mark ups were passed onto the consumer just like the write offs are passed on the the consumer. What’s new? Whats new is that because we are having this healthcare situation blowing up in this country we are talking out loud about write offs because it is convenient. We aren’t interested in mark ups right now and may never be, who knows.
Somewhere in our past history the government and business decided that there would be no chance for any type of loss no matter what. When this country was being formed commerce was pure. You grew something, made something in your kitchen or your barn or shop you priced it accordingly and sold your wares for a fair price. But somewhere along the line we became greedy and wanted more and more profit and decided that we, as in business, would not have to suffer any loss. Now we are at a time in our life that everything a business does is priced according to the idea that we can not and must not fail or show a loss. So the consumer picks up the tab for the government and the business population wherever it happens to be. No one wants to pay the price except the consumer and we don’t have a say in anything. Think about cap n tax. Business will pass on the fees they will get charged and everything that we buy will go up because everyone will pass on to us whatever would be a loss to them. Aren’t we lucky.
My husband just went into the hospital to have a test, We got our copy of the bill it was $2500.00 medicare approved $650.00 of that charge and paid 80% of the $650.00 which came to $520.00. Our secondary insurance picked up the remainder which was $130.00 and our bill was paid in full. The hospital wrote off $1,850.00 which is the difference between the price of the test and the the amount they approved according to the medicare fee schedule. Now when you think about that descrepancy between the test and the approved amount for the test and then you think about the fact that the medicare is in the red right now for almost a billion dollars that it has accumulated over the years since its inception what do you think is going to happen when Obamacare gets passed?
It strikes me as rather unusual that right in the middle of this healthcare nightmare we are told we don’t need to get mammograms at an ealy age as it is unnecessary and the next day we are told that we are probably starting pabst smears to early to. Today they came out with a story about the overuse of cat scans etc. It seems to me that all these committee’s are priming us to think in terms of less is best, getting us ready for no services at all especially at my age and my condition. I am a 74 year old diabetic that also has asthma. I have two out of three conditions for the death panels so I am a candidate to sit home and take my pain pill and wait to die. This country is really mixed up I am not sure if it will ever get straightened out.
December 17, 2009 at 11:27 am
HistorianDude
There is no such thing as a “death panel” under any healthcare proposal that has been made at any time during this process.
December 17, 2009 at 11:28 am
HistorianDude
Your insurance carrier is making all of this up.
December 17, 2009 at 11:30 am
JAMES
My letter says Plan X will no longer be offered. You will be moved to Plan Y. Not making this up.
December 17, 2009 at 11:51 am
gumply
Historian Dude,
I am sorry to tell you this but you don’t know everything. I received a Health News Letter authored by Dr Russell Blaylock, called the Blaylock Report. In part 2 of the 3 part series that he wrote concerning the healthcare bill he stated, “Everyone should realize that the legislation for controlling the practice of medicine has already been passed—–to a degree.
It was secretly inserted in a stimulus package bill as an electronic medical records data system.
Within this legislation is a provision for the development of treatment protocols. These protocols give the administration everything necessary to deny care to selected populations of people, such as the elderly and those with chronic diseases and presently incurable diseases.
It is this 5 percent of the medical care population that consumes half of the healthcare dollar. Rationing will be targeted toward them.” End of Quote.
To add to that twice Glenn Beck has had this information on his afternoon show on Fox. One of the times it was discussed they had another physician on that confirmed the story by doctor Blaylock and went further to state that they already have the committee’s formed and the vehicle to deliver the service.
If you remember rightly when everyone was tallking about death panels all the liberal’s in and out of Congress including the Liar in Chief were very adamant that there was no death panels in the healthcare bill, and guess what they were right because they had already passed it in the stimulus bill that no one was allowed to read, ironically they forgot to mention it while they were denying it.
That group that calls themselves democrats, blue dogs included and their lying leader do not care what they do to anyone, they have one motive and that is to destroy this country and turn it into a communist, facist, marxist utopia according to our fearless leader.
Everyone can make a mistake including you and your last posting was a huge one.