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| Newmanstown, Pennsylvania - I laugh when I read about the public resistance to the government offering its own health care insurance as an alternative to for-profit insurance. Of all the problems with HR. 3200, the least is this public option.
By way of background: I have been practicing medicine for 35 years. For 20 years I worked at a non-profit hospital. For the last 15 years, I worked at a for-profit hospital 20 miles away. I know what goes on.
I ask you two questions:
How can a for-profit hospital offer quality care equal to the non-profit when the for-profit hospital : a. gives huge bonuses to their executives based on stock price b. pay their nurses less than market rate c. pay their stockholders a dividend AND a expanding return on capital, (d) have a nurse/patient ratio 2/3 of the not for profit down the road and (e) pay income and property taxes when their non-profit competitors down the road pay nothing (f) have obsolete equipment they refuse to replace?
Second: Every dollar a for-profit insurance company pays you or your doctor is a dollar of profit out of their pockets. Do you really think they are going to take care of you properly when to deny payment keeps money in their pockets? Do you not see their conflict of interest? Do you want to place your health, your LIFE, your family's lives, in the hands of people who are so conflicted?
Get real. Good medicine comes from good doctors, good nurses and good techs who are well trained and work hard. They deserve to be well paid. The rest of these people, administrators and corporate drones, are leeches.
Any entity that makes a profit on health care today is stealing care from the people who deserve it and is stealing from the people who provide it.
Anyone who wishes to preserve this status quo is shooting themselves in the head. Mr. Metcalf and I agree on that.
Where we disagree is on the solution. Turning the provision of health care over to the GOVERNMENT, a government which can't even handle a cash for clunkers program, is a recipe for disaster that only a genuinely gifted moron would consider.
Mr. Metcalf: you are half right. Profit has no place in medicine.
Mr. Metcalf: you are also half wrong. The government is NOT the solution. It will make matters much worse. Look what they have done for HOAs.
The solution?
To follow..... |
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