The Red Brick Times

Dear Health Insurance Industry,

Please be advised that The Red Brick Times may be willing to officially support abandoning any and all health care reform. Your talking points, no matter how ridiculous, could be repeated here ad nauseum. All that is required is a tiny piece of what these guys get.

Much like your pocketbook the possibilities are endless. Cash only please, plain brown wrapper, etc.

Yours Truly,
tRBT Editorial Staff
Posted 5:04 AM by whatley (2) comments

       Comments:

Like everyone else, I'm totally in favor of up-heaving the entire compost heap of rotting regulations and actuary-driven quarterly profits as long as I don't have to be discomfited or have to pay more or have to wait in line at the doctor's office.

Battle lines may be forming.

The business side is rich, powerful, lobbyist-heavy, loud, stentorian and rapacious. The lines of snuffling, aching, whining miserable wretches huddled in plastic seats under fluorescent glare at midnight being herded by vacant-eyed sleep-deprived would-be servants of health care are powerless to resist the administrative dehumanization visited upon each of them.

It feels like the underpinnings of the French Revolution here, with a trickle of benefit leaking past the vault doors, just enough to keep the downtrodden hopeful for the medical lottery to spin their way.

Struggle to get the "right" language on the claim form so your particular travail is "covered".

Pick the right times to visit, the right place to go so the "out of pocket" is minimized.

Choose the correct cheap and maybe ineffectual drug to match the "formulary" written in sanskrit and legal precedent.

Put the ball down and see if it comes up red or black when the wheel stops spinning. Let them eat the caked residue scraped from the inside of the oven chimneys once the fires are out and all the wheat grains have been gleaned from the barren fields in mid-winter.

I have seen those I presumed to be intelligent posting pictures of a grinning, buffoonish George W. waving gaily at the camera with the caption: "Miss me yet?" Not on your best day, bucko. The battle is not yet begun.

# posted by  Andy : October 03, 2009 8:26 AM
 
At least one voice in the medical community is ready to call Congress to task.

From 9/22/2009 NPR interview by Linda Wertheimer with Denis Cortese, Pres./CEO Mayo Clinic:

[excerpt]
WERTHEIMER: Dr. Cortese, as you look at the various plans for revamping health care systems that the Congress is struggling with, I understand that one of your concerns was having some sort of public option.

Dr. CORTESE: Well, we are not fighting the issue so much from the insurance side. We just think everybody should have insurance. When people start talking about the public plan, it wasn't clear what kind of public plan we were talking about. And if a public plan looks like Medicare, I think the country would go broke almost overnight because Medicare is already proposed to go broke by 2015 to 2017.

If what they meant by a government-run public plan was the federal employees' health benefit plan - well, that one's quite good. That is one that could be used to insure people. So we want people to be focused and end up with our citizens insured and that we're starting to pay for value in the near term.
[/excerpt]

Full interview transcript

# posted by  jeichenlaub : October 03, 2009 10:40 AM
 
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