Bob and I are in Nottingham, visiting with our granddaughter Sarah and her partner. It has been delightful–but would be better if Bob didn’t have an increasingly awful cold and hacking cough. We’ll do a first-hand exploration of the British health-care system this morning; flying home with an untreated upper respiratory infection probably isn’t the best idea.
I’ll try to report more on Nottingham tomorrow, but blogging may be spotty until we get back to Indy on Thursday. Meanwhile, I urge you to click through and read this essay from David Frum. As most of you know, Frum was a speechwriter for George W. Bush; since his service in that administration, however, he has been making a lot of sense, with the result that he’s been labeled a RINO by the ideologically extreme members of the GOP.
Frum is a thoughtful and genuine conservative voice, and he deserves to be heard. Whether the movement is too far gone and too rigid to listen is an open question.
Good luck with the MD’s. I sure hope he can get some help before the flight. Be safe. Pat..
Good post. I’m open to Frum’s thoughts and believe his tone would benefit conservatives.
Buuuut his view – that the current health coverage law (“Obamacare”) is inviolate is flawed, because Obamacare is flawed. Yesterday it was reported that the cheapest family insurance plan under Obamacare will cost $20,000. That’s insane.
Health insurance should be provided to all citizens, and for those who cannot pay it should be free.
When I was a kid there was a guy in the neighborhood who put a giant air spoiler on a Chevy Vega. The problem with US healthcare is similar – Obamacare is an air spoiler mounted to a Vega, the Vega being the US healthcare system. Putting two bad things together doesn’t create anything workable.
Mr Frum: He forgot to mention foreign policy in his good-bye.
WHO reported the cheapest family insurance plan under Obamacare will cost $20,000? That statement defies all logic and common sense. The copied and pasted information below came from ObamaCare Facts.
We have the facts on ObamaCare Insurance Premiums. ObamaCare does not increase insurance premiums, in fact the law states that as of 2011 insurance companies are no longer be able to raise insurance premiums for the sake of profit (this is ObamaCare’s rate review provision). If they do raise premiums they will have to justify rate hikes of over 10% to the state they operate in and then disclose this information immediately on their website and healthcare.gov. If the State does not have an effective rate review program the Federal Government will step in.
ObamaCare Insurance Premium Rate Hikes
The most common letter we get at ObamaCare Facts is from Americans who are outraged that ObamaCare has raised their insurance premiums. The truth is ObamaCare isn’t to blame, in fact ObamaCare helps curb the increasing costs of premiums via the rate review provision, the 80/20 rule and other protections implemented in 2014.
ObamaCare regulates health insurance companies, not your health care. In other words Government offers protections, but is not in control of your health care… You are!
Some insurance companies are using the confusion over ObamaCare to raise premiums on unsuspecting Americans in order to capitalize before more protections are put in place, grand fathering people into more expensive plans. This is in response to protections going into effect in 2014 and the need to cover more high-risk Americans. If this has happened to you please tell us who your insurer is and give us some other background so we can continue to investigate who is behind this.
Note On Health Insurance Premiums: Your provider can “grandfather you in” by upping your premium now and keeping it that way once the insurance cap protections kick in in 2014. They can also grandfather you into plans that don’t provide coverage options that are required under the Affordable Care Act.
I suspect that there is a lot of scare”news” out there so that the chickens will run to Colonel Sanders. Like some of the stuff where it’s “too good to be true”, the $20,000 figure sounds “too bad to be true”. We are told that if we “privatize” medicine, things will be much better, but it seems to me that medicine is pretty much privatized, and doesn’t work according to the usual privatization rules.