Chubby Nickel Audio Vlog

There is no “death panel,”  “illegal immigrant coverage” or “total government control” in the bill. While if it had these in the bill, it would be something every American should be against. I was going to do a satire piece to show how ridiculous some people are when arguing the bill, but I think I will refrain from most sarcasm and humor in order to just explain the basics of the bill.

The so called “death panel” is nothing more than people trained to explain end of life care to people so that they know what their options are. Say for instance you are 80 years old and have terminal cancer that will kill you in about 2 months. These people may explain that if you go for treatment you will likely only get a few weeks more life but that each day of the end of your life will be spent being sick with little energy and throwing up often. They will also explain that there is a tiny chance that you may get cured from the treatment. They will also explain that without treatment you will feel much healthier for the first month. Informing people of their choices is in no way telling the people that they should die. Knowing your options and the consequences of those options is more about giving you choices rather than taking them away. This is of course an extreme example. Most of the time, the trained people will just be informing people of their options and will not be as death oriented.

No illegal immigrants will be covered under the health care bill, there is an entire section devoted to preventing illegal immigrants from receiving health insurance. However, without a drastic change in the system, no one can prevent any one from receiving emergency medical treatment. This had been put in to protect people from being left to die in the hospital waiting room. So even without the health care bill, illegal immigrants can receive emergency medical treatment because hospitals are forced to not discriminate.  I will rant later about the misuse of the term “health care” when people are referring to either health insurance or medical care.

The government will never be able to tell you which doctor you can or can’t see as your private practitioner. Nothing in the bill says anything about some group of people gaining the power to refuse certain treatments to people that need that treatment. This is something that has been blown way out of proportion. The bill covers watching and collecting data about treatments to remove the ones that are less effective. So if you are taking a pill that is doing nothing for you while there is a pill that is helping people with the same condition as you, the government will eventually weed out the pill that is less effective for the pill that is more effective. However if the pill you are taking is helping you, then you get to keep taking that pill.

Now onto my rant about the misuse of the term “health care.” People from countries with socialized medicine do come to the U.S. and other countries for heath care. Now be careful about what I am saying about this. They are not going to the U.S. for our medical insurance, they are coming to the U.S. for our medical treatments. Two things that are very different but still fall under the term “health care.” So when the argument is about health insurance and some one says that countries like Canada send people to the U.S. for health care, understand that they are two different things. The problem with the U.S. health care system is not the treatment, it’s the insurance. Every one agrees that medical treatments in the U.S. are very good, but the discussion is about the cost of treatment and the cost of insurance.

Example of a flawed system: I have had to get a new job about every year, each new company waits for 60 days of the date of hire to start their insurance coverage. Even if I get a new job instantly after losing one, the time between coverage is too long to be considered continuous coverage. So every new job I have to wait eleven months until I can use the service I am paying for. Sure if I found some new medical problem it would be covered, but all my pre-existing conditions are not covered for eleven months. So after six years of paying for health insurance I got to use the service about 8 months. It is unlawful for a service provider to take payment from a customer and then not provide the service, and this is exactly what insurance companies do.

So yeah, we need health care reform in the U.S. and we need it soon.

Health Care Bill