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Who needs national health care?

Goodpasture

Well-known member
Not us....

KANSAS CITY, Missouri (AP) -- A man threw his seriously ill wife four stories to her death because he could no longer afford to pay for her medical care, prosecutors said in charging him with second-degree murder.

According to court documents filed Wednesday in Jackson County Circuit Court, Stanley Reimer walked his wife to the balcony of their apartment and kissed her before throwing her over.

The body of Criste Reimer, 47, was found Tuesday night outside the apartment building, near the upscale Country Club Plaza shopping district.

Stanley Reimer, 51, was charged Wednesday. He remained jailed on $250,000 bond and was scheduled to be arraigned Thursday.

In the probable cause statement filed with the charges, police said Reimer was desperate because he could not pay the bills for his wife's treatment for neurological problems and uterine cancer.
 

Steve

Well-known member
what about the other side where they have national health care...Britain and the person dies waiting for basic treatment..

My MIL waited seven years for a bypass operation....we finally brought her over here and paid for it.....

she died waiting for chemo for colon cancer....

so beware of what you ask for...

as for you reasoning...
The documents listed her assets at approximately $6,700, with monthly income of $725 from oil royalties and Supplemental Security Income.

Medicaid is a jointly funded, Federal-State health insurance program for low-income and needy people. It covers children, the aged, blind, and/or disabled and other people who are eligible to receive federally assisted income maintenance payments.

Thirty-two states and the District of Columbia provide Medicaid eligibility to people eligible for Supplemental Security Income (SSI ) benefits. In these States, the SSI application is also the Medicaid application. Medicaid eligibility starts the same months as SSI eligibility.

MISSOURI is one of those 32 states....
 

Cal

Well-known member
August 17, 2007
Understanding the Limits of Health Insurance
By Steven M. Warshawsky

A tragic case of murder is being exploited by the media as propaganda pushing national medical insurance schemes. The ghoulish socialism-by-bathos strategy rests on the implicit unrealistic notion that we somehow can provide the best of everything for everyone.


An Associated Press story yesterday told a heart-wrenching tale of a "desperate" husband driven to murder his ailing wife "because he could not afford to pay for her medical care." The man's wife was 47 years old and suffering from uterine cancer and neurological problems. She weighed 75 pounds and was partially blind. According to the story, her husband kissed her goodbye, and then threw her off the balcony of their apartment building, to her death.


Significantly, the story does not condemn the man for his inhuman behavior. It does not question whether less-expensive alternatives were available for the wife's medical care (e.g., hospice care). Instead, the entire thrust of the story is that a lack of health insurance was the true culprit in this terrible situation. As the story noted, the wife "had no health insurance to pay for medical bills that ranged from $700 to $800 per week." According to the story, she only had $725 in monthly income (from oil royalties and social security disability), $6,700 in personal assets, and a parcel of property worth $20,000, which the husband planned to sell. Using the figures in the story as a guide, these assets could have paid for approximately one more year of the wife's medical care. So it is not at all clear that the husband's -- and the AP's -- explanation for why he murdered her makes sense. Of course, murder is such an extreme act that something more surely was going on here, probably inside the husband's deranged brain.


Nevertheless, it is obvious that this story reflects a larger agenda. The AP is using a human tragedy -- the wife's murder -- to argue, however subtly, in favor of a national health care system. I have no doubt that this story will find its way into the speeches of those advocating "universal" or "single payer" health insurance. After all, if such a system were in place, they will claim, this terrible tragedy would not have occurred. Right? Honestly, we can never know.


What we do know, however, is that "health insurance" is no panacea for high health care costs. At the end of the day (or fiscal year), someone has to pay for the medical care rendered to the insured and uninsured alike. If the wife in the AP story had health insurance, presumably her premiums and co-pays would have been less than the actual cost of her medical care (the $700 to $800 per week mentioned in the story). This is the only way her personal financial situation could have been improved by having had health insurance, as the AP suggests.

Yet the actual cost of providing medical care does not go down, as if by magic, just because someone has insurance. Advanced critical care or end-of-life care is extremely costly to provide. High-technology machinery, sophisticated pharmaceuticals, and well-trained doctors and nurses do not come cheap. So if the husband and wife in the AP story could not afford to pay for this type of care themselves (and it appears they could not), either they must go without it and/or find alternatives to it -- or someone else has to pay. This is true even if the wife had "health insurance."


Indeed, health insurance fundamentally is designed to shift the cost of providing health care from those who need it but can't afford it, to those who don't need it but can afford it. When people complain about a lack of national health insurance, in other words, what they really are saying is that someone else should be required to pay the cost of their medical care. Not only is this a radically irresponsible and immoral position in itself; but also, as a practical matter, few people, even in a society as rich as ours, have sufficient personal resources to pay out-of-pocket for the very best health care our medical industry has to offer in all contingencies. (Just as very few people can afford the nicest homes or fanciest cars or toniest prep schools.) So trying to shift the cost to other people through a scheme of national health insurance, ultimately, can't work. Whether individually or as a nation, we cannot consume more health care than we can afford.


So what about the ailing woman in the story? Unfortunately, sickness and dying are an inevitable part of the human condition. Even the most expensive medical care only postpones the arrival of the grim reaper. Nevertheless, as our society has become richer and more knowledgeable about combating the various illnesses that afflict us, the quality and quantity of health care available to the rich, the middle class, and the poor alike has improved immensely. We owe these advances, more than anything else, to the (mostly) free market system that survives in this country.


We need to keep moving along this path of improvement for all. National health insurance, i.e., socialized medicine, will derail this great train of progress, by eliminating incentives, stifling competition, elevating bureaucrats over doctors and patients, and imposing an ethic of shared mediocrity across the national landscape. All of us, but most especially people like the woman in the AP story, will be the worse off for it.


Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/08/understanding_the_limits_of_he.html at August 17, 2007 - 02:46:01 PM EDT
 

Cal

Well-known member
We already have socialized medicine in this country, how's that working out?

http://www.kotaradio.com/NEWS/story.asp?id=4555

Dorgan calls Indian health services scandalous
8/17/2007 7

CROW AGENCY, Mont. (AP) - Senator Byron Dorgan says Indian
health services in the U.S. are scandalous. He says care is often
denied, unless life or limb is threatened.
The North Dakota Democrat chairs the Senate Indian Affairs
Committee, which held a hearing yesterday on Montana's Crow Indian
Reservation.
Witnesses testified of cancer victims who could not get a
diagnosis until it was too late for treatment; yearlong waits for
surgeries; and trauma victims turned away from tribal clinics not
equipped to handle their problems.
The committee also heard from officials of the Indian Health
Service. They said they make funding go as far as they can -- but
the budget regularly runs out halfway through the year. Pete Conway
is Billings area director of the Indian Health Service. He says
members of some tribes in the Dakotas get only 40 percent of the
health care funding they need.



(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
 

Texan

Well-known member
Typical of a freakin' liberal. Some murdering bastard kills his wife and who do we blame? Certainly not the murdering bastard. Nope, that wouldn't be right. Let's blame it on our 'failure' to adopt socialistic plans such as hitlerycare. :???:
 

Steve

Well-known member
Typical of a freakin' liberal. Some murdering bastard kills his wife and who do we blame? Certainly not the murdering bastard.

Seems as the husband had health care,..then quit his job....so they could get medicaid....

Either way...as the facts come out they don't support the original argument for state ran health care...
 

mrj

Well-known member
Very possibly the Veterans Admin. health care is another example.

IF what the media says about the poor quality of it is true.

Proably more likely is that they are doing is the same as is being done with this story.

IMO, it would be best to place veterans and injured soldiers into whichever health system can best treat their problems in or nearest to the place they or their family chooses them to recuperate, with government paying the real cost, not necessarily the facility enriching prices.

mrj
 

Steve

Well-known member
Very possibly the Veterans Admin. health care is another example.

I get great care at the VA hospital...

IF what the media says about the poor quality of it is true.

I see many of the articles and most of the time it is selective reporting....


Proably more likely is that they are doing is the same as is being done with this story.

IMO, it would be best to place veterans and injured soldiers into whichever health system can best treat their problems in or nearest to the place they or their family chooses them to recuperate, with government paying the real cost, not necessarily the facility enriching prices.

Vets can use many sources depending on thier status...Tricare..Tricare for life...CampVA..military hospitals,,,Vet Hospitals,.. and Medicare...to name a few options...

I can see my local doctor,.. the Va clinic...the CG MTF.. or the Va hospital...all are paid for though one of three sources...

I can get Prescriptions ...from all or though the mail..

and I often get calls to follow-up on how I am doing from the VA... and while I bother my case worker vary little, I have a Person with a name who I can call if any-thing gets screwed up...

In my opinion those whom complain the most about the VA have never used it...or are in-eligible for using it...
 

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