Health Care Bill Would Allow Feds To Snoop in Your Checkbook

The feds can find out whats in anyone bank account anytime.

Try putting a elderly family member in a nursing home and then check there bank account to see if anyone has checked to see how much is in the account.

You will find that the nursing home has done a credit check to see how much they can get for the family members care.

They want to know how much is in the account so they can make sure that there bills empty the account before the family member dies.

If the guess wrong you may find a very large padded and sometime bogus bill right after the family member dies

reply to post by Sestias

I get Medicare and I'm pretty satisfied with it. I haven't met a doctor yet who won't take it although they don't get as much per visit as some insurance plans pay. I haven't ever felt like I was being discriminated against or received poor treatment.

Most people who have Medicare right now are satisfied with it, but I bolded the important statement. Medicare does not pay as much as private insurance! At present, there are quite a few people who have private insurance, and the additional cost not paid by Medicare is passed on to them through higher prices.

We are talking about making it supposedly cheaper for people to take this government option. We are talking about huge numbers of people having that same payment schedule as Medicare. That's a lot more cost to be passed on! What do you expect to happen when the insurance companies can no longer handle the higher costs? There are two options open to doctors at that point: either stop seeing government insured patients, or decrease the quality of the care given. Now I don't know which will happen, but when someone is faced with a pay cut, they typically don't just shrug their shoulders and accept it! Something will have to give.

About the cost of health insurance under the government option: As I understand it the government will charge less than most private insurance plans because they won't be in it for the profit. Therefore the private insurers will have to compete with government rates and so will have to lower their costs if they're going to get customers.

A couple of things here: first of all, exactly what is wrong with profit? I'm sure you profit, or you wouldn't go to work. I know the only reason I work at a job is to make income - profit! Do you only charge your employer enough to cover your cost of showing up at work? If so, you are a very unique individual.

The problem with insurance companies is not that they make a profit; it is that they have created a situation where their profit is guaranteed by their actions over the last few decades. They have a monopoly not on insurance, but on health care, and have set up a situation where their profit is not made by supplying a desired product, but by supplying a product made necessary by their own actions.

Now as to government not making a profit, of course they won't. They never do! They can't! In order to make a profit in a free market economy, one must be adaptable to the needs of the customers and able to trim wasteful expenditures. These are the two things the government is known for not doing!

Just because someone does not make a profit, it does not mean they will necessarily be the cheapest either. How much money is wasted in government keeping up with and filling out paperwork that is absolutely worthless? How is it profitable to spend $100 to make sure you don't lose $10? That waste has been the underlying problem with every governmental program since the American Revolution.

All the waste that government inherently creates is far in excess of the profit made by the typical insurance company. That's why government doesn't run businesses. They can't afford to in a free market economy. Government provides services that are paid for by everyone for the benefit of everyone, that cannot be provided by private enterprise. They provided a post office for mail delivery when no company could afford to cover the entire nation with household delivery. They provide roads; no company could purchase the vast amount of land needed to build our present transportation infrastructure. They provide military protection, obviously out of the reach of industry. And they do these things very well, although at an increased cost. In competition with free enterprise, however, please name one, just one program that has ever succeeded in making a product or offering a service cheaper and of higher quality than private business.

Some people will do that with health insurance. They'll take out the minimum and just go to the emergency room when they're sick or have an accident and get treated and not pay, as many people do now. The trouble with that is the rest of us have to pay more to make up for the free loaders.

So what exactly will have changed? The very same things that make health care unaffordable today will still exist. How will we be better off? The only difference will be that insurance companies now know we have to buy their product by law. Who benefits from this? The people who have lost their ability to decide for themselves how they will provide for their health care? Or the insurance companies that they have to go to for that health care?

TheRedneck