Azelma wrote:
Please provide specific citations in the article where it shows clearly that they are promoting Insurance companies and absolving them of all blame in our broken healthcare system.
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Recchi’s bill and six others examined line by line for this article offer a closeup window into what happens when powerless buyers — whether they are people like Recchi or big health-insurance companies — meet sellers in what is the ultimate seller’s market.
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The health care industry seems to have the will and the means to keep it that way. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the pharmaceutical and health-care-product industries, combined with organizations representing doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, health services and HMOs, have spent $5.36 billion since 1998 on lobbying in Washington.
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The other $2 trillion will be paid mostly by private health-insurance companies and individuals who have no insurance or who will pay some portion of the bills covered by their insurance. This is what’s increasingly burdening businesses that pay for their employees’ health insurance and forcing individuals to pay so much in out-of-pocket expenses.
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Stamford Hospital’s chargemaster assigns prices to everything, including Janice S.’s blood tests. It would seem to be an important document. However, I quickly found that although every hospital has a chargemaster, officials treat it as if it were an eccentric uncle living in the attic. Whenever I asked, they deflected all conversation away from it. They even argued that it is irrelevant.
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As we examine other bills, we’ll see that like Medicare patients, the large portion of hospital patients who have private health insurance also get discounts off the listed chargemaster figures, assuming the hospital and insurance company have negotiated to include the hospital in the insurer’s network of providers that its customers can use. The insurance discounts are not nearly as steep as the Medicare markdowns, which means that even the discounted insurance-company rates fuel profits at these officially nonprofit hospitals.
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Also on the bill were items that neither Medicare nor any insurance company would pay anything at all for: basic instruments and bandages and even the tubing for an IV setup.
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Steve H. was about to run up against a seemingly irrelevant footnote in millions of Americans’ insurance policies: the limit, sometimes annual or sometimes over a lifetime, on what the insurer has to pay out for a patient’s claims. Under Obamacare, those limits will not be allowed in most health-insurance policies after 2013.
I could go on like this but the point is made.
Every time the insurance companies are mentioned, it is in a favorable context. The reason the article associates them with Medicare and foreign systems that are known to work is because it wants to project that same positive aura on them.
The article also excludes insurance industries from lists of bad guys where they would normally belong, and argues that Obamacare (which reined in their worst abuses, including the limit clause, which was never about anything but denying care, and has no place in Medicare or other Western state healthcare systems, is bad).
The article didn't "try" to "ask a question". The article, like absolutely everything else in TIME, is blatant propaganda and you should feel bad for allowing yourself to be manipulated by it so easily.
Further proof the article is propaganda. It pulls the whole "death panel" routine and tries to demonize the innocuous. CHARGEMASTERS OMG. Spends three pages talking about them. The chargemaster says what procedures cost at any given hospital. Well if there wasn't a chargemaster, then how would the cost be defined? Durp. Every firm in every industry has someone responsible for setting prices. Demonizing the innocuous and trying to make nothing itself look suspicious is characteristic of all propaganda. The article adopts the same style as Tea Party talk about "death panels" because its true loyalty is the same.
Jubbergun wrote:
Even the "not for profit" medical facilities were "gouging" on their mark-up for good and services. "Profit" isn't the problem.
We know for a fact this is untrue.
State-care systems, in which profit is not as strong a driving force as it is within the American system, do not have these problems. "Non-profit" is merely a tax designation and does not accurately characterize the forces operating in our system, by design.
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I don't think you read it...if you had read it, you would see that the article speaks very highly of Medicare. It praises the accountability that medicare encourages by making sure hospitals can only charge what things actually cost. It points out how much cheaper healthcare is in other countries.....countries with public health options, how does that make them insurance propaganda writers? Wouldn't insurance propaganda articles not want to evangelize government-sponsered healthcare systems?
The goal of the article is to make insurance companies look indispensable and conceal the fact (as it has so brilliantly done so with you) that the insurance companies themselves are what separate our system from theirs. It does this by way of directly associating those insurance companies with the systems to which they are antithetical.
If it were not so, why would the article do that, when doing so is totally illogical and contrary-to-fact?
Why does it try to demonize "chargemasters" when doing so doesn't make sense either?
And you still haven't answered my question - again - why take this crap any more seriously than any other propaganda? Do we say that Pravda or Xinghua or any other propaganda rag is just "making an argument"? Or do we completely write it off because we know that truth is incidental?
