Denny’s To Charge 5% “Obamacare Surcharge”

[Novaheart]

No, it's about petty people who don't care if they destroy the system as long as they can stick their noses into other peoples' wallets. 250 million Americans have coverage, and Obamacare doesn't cover most of the remainder. You piously claim to care about people without coverage, but your solution is going to destroy the coverage that the rest of us have, and itt will not even achieve your goal of universal coverage. You're the ones who cannot see beyond your petty agenda of envy.

ACA is an interim solution. NSP is the objective. How do you expect it to affect you?

[Rockntractor]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5Ha7RNpn24

Good video, has Nova addressed this yet?

[FlaGator]

There is nothing to learn there. The "mini-plan" is not comprehensive health insurance and doesn't facilitate preventative care. It pays for a broken wrist, maybe.

The goal here is not "some coverage". If that were the case, then Denny's could simply have an in house policy of paying up to $1000 for each employee and call themselves 100% insured. It's not acceptable.

I am planning on opening a barber shop and do some blood letting to treat the uninsured... being the humanitarian that I am.

[Odysseus]

Well gee, Adam. Let's just throw some crap against the wall and see if it sticks:

Why would you want the government to stay out of your bedroom, and then call the police when you see a burglar crawl through your neighbor's bedroom window? You can't have it both ways.

Bullshit.

Medicare pays for some things and not others, as does private insurance. The difference is that through elected officials we can tall Medicare what to pay for. By your definition, both ration and both interfere with your medical decisions. Of course, in both cases, if you have the cash to pay for it, you can make medical decisions in conflict with your insurance company or Medicare.

As I understand it, you are paying for a catastrophic plan right now. Soon enough, if you are lucky, you will be so old that your insurance company will send you a little packet saying, "It's been nice, enjoy Medicare, and by the way would you like to buy a gap coverage package?" Wouldn't it really have made more sense for you and the nation if you had been paying your premiums into Medicare all along?

No. Medicare is an example of how not to run a national insurance plan, because it isn't insurance, it's simply welfare, and a very stingy program, at least from the point of view of the providers. The fees paid to doctors and other providers are so low now that most doctors are not accepting new Medicare patients, and many are leaving the program entirely. The only way to ensure that doctors stay in the program is through coercion, which means that rather than just leaving the system, doctors who want to practice medicine for patients instead of for bureaucrats will end up leaving the nation. This is what happened to Britain after the NHS came about, and it's happening again.

NHS facing 'massive loss' of doctors overseas
The NHS faces “a massive potential loss” of junior doctors overseas due to plummeting morale caused by problems with training and the ongoing dispute over pensions, the British Medical Association has warned.

Dr Ben Molyneux, incoming chairman of the union’s junior doctors’ committee, said a “perfect storm” was eroding the quality of medical training which, with other problems, was resulting in a “brain drain” to countries like Australia, New Zealand and the US.

He said: “Huge numbers are going abroad after their first two years of foundation training.

“Significant numbers go every year and these numbers are increasing.

“Lots do come back but some don’t, and the risk here is there’s a brain drain to elsewhere, if we can’t retain our own workforce.”

The economic climate and the Government’s controversial health reforms had combined to create “a perfect storm for the potential erosion of high quality medical training”, he said.

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One example of problems was trainees in Kent, Surrey and Sussex being denied the chance to do the placements they wanted due to short staffing, he said.

Education and training had been “bolted on” to the Health and Social Care Act, he claimed, “and we are trying to make things fit”.

More and more “home grown” medical graduates were also failing to secure NHS jobs, he said, due to a long-term increase in medical students and a rise in foreign applicants.

He continued: “A recent BMA survey of junior doctors’ career intentions showed that half of those questioned said they were more likely to leave the NHS to work overseas after training compared to two years ago.

“This would represent a massive potential loss to the NHS.

“Continued pay freezes and the raid on doctors’ pensions will further demoralise a profession who face an intense and lengthy training programme.”

To train a medical student for five or six years, to the point they are ready for their first day’s work in hospital, costs the state about £250,000.

Dr Molyneux, a GP trainee, said morale was the lowest he had personally seen it.

“I love my job, but it’s very difficult when confronted day in, day out with another problem," he said

ACA is an interim solution. NSP is the objective. How do you expect it to affect you?

In other words, ACA is meant to break the system so that people will clamor to scrap it in favor of NSP. We get it. It's dishonest and despicable, but it's what we've come to expect from the left. And your other question, how I expect it to affect me, assumes that if it doesn't affect me because I'm on TriCare, then I have no right to an opinion. Unfortunately for both of us, it does affect me, and will affect my family as well.

I expect it to affect me by reducing the number of physicians available for my needs, and those of my family. TriCare has tremendous difficulty in attracting doctors who will accept its lower fees, so we have very few providers available. This means longer waiting times to see primary care providers and specialists, and it also means that the system has to make do with Physician's Assistants doing many of the jobs that MDs did. This means that the risk of misdiagnosis or other error is increased for everybody in the system. So, I can expect longer waits for poorer service, and eventually, when I retire, the private sector insurance will either be out of my price range, as costs are driven up by poor policy, or gone completely, in the ultimate act of stupidity, the enactment of NSP.

[Novaheart]

I expect it to affect me by reducing the number of physicians available for my needs, and those of my family. TriCare has tremendous difficulty in attracting doctors who will accept its lower fees, so we have very few providers available. This means longer waiting times to see primary care providers and specialists, and it also means that the system has to make do with Physician's Assistants doing many of the jobs that MDs did. This means that the risk of misdiagnosis or other error is increased for everybody in the system. So, I can expect longer waits for poorer service, and eventually, when I retire, the private sector insurance will either be out of my price range, as costs are driven up by poor policy, or gone completely, in the ultimate act of stupidity, the enactment of NSP.

Physicians Assistants are in greater use across the board, as they should be. Most of what a doctor does can be done by a PA.

If we need more doctors, then we need to dedicate more resources to turning out more doctors.

[Rockntractor]

ACA is an interim solution. NSP is the objective. How do you expect it to affect you?

we could just go with some of these.

[Adam Wood]

Well gee, Adam. Let's just throw some crap against the wall and see if it sticks:

Why would you want the government to stay out of your bedroom, and then call the police when you see a burglar crawl through your neighbor's bedroom window? You can't have it both ways.

I don't call the FBI if I see a prowler breaking into my neighbor's house. I call the local PD and tell them to come clean up the mess after I blow the guy away.

Newsflash: the federal government is different from the state government, and that's different from the county and/or city government.

Bullshit.

Yeah, the strawman you just threw up pretty much is bullshit.

Medicare pays for some things and not others, as does private insurance. The difference is that through elected officials we can tall Medicare what to pay for. By your definition, both ration and both interfere with your medical decisions. Of course, in both cases, if you have the cash to pay for it, you can make medical decisions in conflict with your insurance company or Medicare.

I have a choice as to what is and is not covered with private coverage. Not so with federal healthcare.

Regardless, Medicare isn't at issue here. Obamacare is.

As I understand it, you are paying for a catastrophic plan right now. Soon enough, if you are lucky, you will be so old that your insurance company will send you a little packet saying, "It's been nice, enjoy Medicare, and by the way would you like to buy a gap coverage package?" Wouldn't it really have made more sense for you and the nation if you had been paying your premiums into Medicare all along?

Who in the hell said anything about not paying their Medicare "premiums?" Where on earth did you come up with that?

[Apocalypse]

Who in the hell said anything about not paying their Medicare "premiums?" Where on earth did you come up with that?

What nova was saying, instead of paying your insurance company, wouldn't every one just enjoy paying your government the money instead? Then allow them the power to decide what will and will not be covered with no options.

[Novaheart]

No, it's about petty people who don't care if they destroy the system as long as they can stick their noses into other peoples' wallets. 250 million Americans have coverage, and Obamacare doesn't cover most of the remainder. You piously claim to care about people without coverage, but your solution is going to destroy the coverage that the rest of us have, and itt will not even achieve your goal of universal coverage. You're the ones who cannot see beyond your petty agenda of envy.

It keeps coming back to your apparent fear that if everyone has healthcare that you will get less health care. Rather like those who oppose across the board pay increases for civilian labor but have no problem with across the board increases for themselves.

[Odysseus]

Physicians Assistants are in greater use across the board, as they should be. Most of what a doctor does can be done by a PA.

Thanks for that update, Doctor Nova. Glad that an expert weighed in. Now, just what exactly is your expertise in medicine that you can make that statement?

If we need more doctors, then we need to dedicate more resources to turning out more doctors.

Oh, so that's all it takes? Wow, but you really don't understand economics, do you? We don't "dedicate resources" in order to turn out doctors. People go to medical school because they have the aptitude and desire to become doctors. You cannot increase people's aptitudes, and you cannot force them to go through the years of study, internship and residency required. They have to want to do it. The only way that you can create more doctors is to lower the requirements so that more people qualify for the standards. You can dedicate the entire federal budget to expanding medical schools, but unless you are prepared to drop standards, then you can mandate and throw money at the problem until you bankrupt the nation, but you will not produce a single doctor. If, OTOH, you simply mandate a greater quantity of medical school graduates, you will end up with a corresponding decline in the quality of those graduates, and the services that they provide.

It keeps coming back to your apparent fear that if everyone has healthcare that you will get less health care. Rather like those who oppose across the board pay increases for civilian labor but have no problem with across the board increases for themselves.

First, it's not my "apparent fear" that if everyone has healthcare I will get less, it's my very obvious fear that eliminating pricing as a mechanism for regulating supply and demand will result in less available services and poorer quality, and that is based on the experience of every other country in the world that has done it. It is also based on my concerns that disinterested bureaucrats are not the best people making decisions about what I choose to spend on my healthcare, and my family's. As for the second part of your statement, I have no problem with pay increases for civilian labor if the market will bear it, but I do have a problem with government mandates on labor, which are essentially a tax levied on businesses to subsidize wages, but because those taxes don't go through Washington, we don't see them that way. If the federal government has the authority to dictate wages and prices, then what liberty do we have?

Once again, you misrepresent my argument, provide a counter argument that is completely irrelevant and which is also a misrepresentation. Care to address what I actually said?