by John O'Keefe-Odom
AgXphoto.info
Commentary
It's medical payment reform. It's not health insurance reform, health care reform or any kind of health anything reform drummed up as a catchy name by any business or political group. It's medical payment reform.
No one pays for health, beyond grocery bills and the costs of operating bathrooms and kitchen appliances. We pay for medicine. That is what medical payment insurance is for.
We pay for professionals to help us because we don't understand how our own body can heal itself. We can't always set those conditions by ourselves. There are times when we need help. That help comes in the form of advice, orders, guidance, procedures and objects directed at two main goals: the control of bodily destruction and the relief of pain.
That help lets our bodies heal themselves. The help that does that is medicine.
Health is about jogging and flossing. Our health insurance doesn't pay for jogging shoes, gym fees, or anything that actually sustains a state of positive health. That's not its main function.
Our medical payment insurance, which is what it actually is, covers the payments we need to make in order to receive medicine to control bodily destruction and alleviate pain.
With destruction and pain stopped, hopefully our bodies will grow and heal into a strong state of well being.
No one needs a form of insurance to cover the fees over at "Intro to Pilates", so let's stop kidding ourselves by calling it health-anything.
We have medical payments to make, and some insurance to help us along the way as someone else profits. That would be medical payment insurance. Our recent changes in federal laws have changed how those moneys will be collected, kept and distributed.
With all the political blabbering that's been thrown around over these important laws over the payment of money in exchange for pain relief and destruction control within our own bodies, it's time we started asking some questions that will lead us to some concrete answers that don't expose us to manipulation from businesses and political groups.
Below are some of the assertions I'd like to make, some of the questions that I'd like to ask, and what and why I'd like to see them answered.
1. Avoid Penalizing Doctors, Nurses and Technicians for These Payment Changes.
These people who are going to do the work of actually trying to help us heal ourselves probably don't deserve to be slapped with another huge bill. As it is, we've already charged them astronomical amounts of money so that they can have the privilege of being the person who will see us when we are at our worst.
In exchange for this investment, the truth is, we provided them little or no help when they were going through their hardest years of investment. It's clear: they've already paid and will continue to pay, enough of a high price for being our healers.
The doctors pay out about the cost of a house per year of education. They're going to need about five of those to get started, and the same house to live in that the rest of us need.
The nurses aren't much better off. They may need to make less of an up-front payment to get started, but they're on a different payment plan. They have to pay as they go, to sustain their education and training. Since everything gets more expensive as time goes on, this means that they, too, end up paying enormous fees just to keep working.
It's a wonder the lot doesn't sue us all for these payment schemes.
The technicians? Probably the most necessary jobs of the medical care industry, the technicians are probably routinely ignored and dismissed even though they have to keep the whole thing rolling.
None of these people need to pay more of anything as a result of medical payment reform.
There are some things we can do about it, which could include:
Substantive Educational Debt Relief. Every one of these people bought into a system that was based heavily on laissez-faire capitalism. It doesn't take a genius to see that medical payment insurance companies will push off profit losses onto everyone else in the chain. Since we have not made adequate provisions for trapping those medical insurance payment companies into accepting the burden of responsibility, we should see to it that they cannot effectively profit from billing the people who will help us in our times of need. One of the ways we can end-around this problem is by making a relieving effort to accept the financial burdens those doctors, nurses and technicians assumed when they went to school.
Realistic Tax Offsets and Credits. Namely, to the doctors, nurses and technicians to, again, end-around these lawyerly financial ploys that will be used to trick us into billing the medical professionals so that medical payment insurance companies can profit and can continue to increase their profits at everyone else's expense.
Encourage Pro-Bono and Volunteer Support. As in, stop billing doctors, nurses and technicians for providing help to people who cannot pay to receive help. When these people move to help us, as volunteers, they lose. There's some kind of loss of payment or income or progress of some sort that doesn't get accounted for. Each day of this that goes by will still be a day when medical payment insurance companies will attempt to seize and exploit this absence of liabilities they must assume.
2. Understand What Medical Care Is.
If there's one thing we've learned, it's that no one has managed to get on TV and tell us anything substantive about the actual procedures for providing common forms of medical care. We have no idea, collectively, what medical care really is. What does it take to really support and carry out some procedures over time?
Like procedures to counter:
heart attacks
cancers
strokes
AIDS
motor vehicle related traumas
What about basic injuries and ailments, like:
broken arm
broken leg
lacerations requiring stitches
sick babies with nondescript flu-like symptoms?
Truth is, we haven't heard anything substantive about how those treatments go, what kind of support do they need, what that support costs over time. What kind of tests will these people order, and typically how much do those cost and why?
Can we not get a realistic estimate for a hypothetical case based on realistic experience?
We have had more than enough sick and hurt people in our society for someone to finally tell us, what does all this really cost? Not the cheapest, not the most expensive, but a real, practical estimate realistically presented over time: what does that cost?
3. Identify and Ignore Obvious Manipulations
From "death panels" to "this won't change your health care", we've seen our political and business leaders make some of the most dumbfounding and unrealistic statements as part of selling their points of view to us. How gullible would we have to be in order to swallow any of these arguments?
It's important for us to identify and ignore some of the obvious manipulating tactics at hand:
Two Half-Truths and a Horror. A straw man syllogism or something like it: we see a pattern of speakers telling us two extremely limited truths and then following those with some horrific statement. Then, we're invited to agree with their opinion to deny this horror.
Parroted Talking Points. Six people in the same day using the same phrase to sell us a bill of goods we don't understand. Have decided on our own to believe in their point, or are they drilling us into accepting what they say?
Persuasive Phrasing. The speakers are setting the terms of the arguments, and making themselves the sole definer of the words involved. Health-anything is just one example.
Is it global warming or climate change? And, which persuader was speaking when those terms were used? What were they trying to persuade us into believing by picking those words?
Is it health care or medical treatment?
Identity Denial. Every lawyer's favorite trick, it's plagued us since before Plato's Republic, this path involves denying that something matches a description. Plato went on and on about what's a table, and the Bush administration tried to sell us on the idea that Prisoners of War were actually Detainees.
Once an identity or basis for an argument is denied, then the terms can be redefined by the next speaker as they wish. Identity denial often lays the groundwork for persuasive phrasing. We're sick of this, and it's not been fooling anybody for a while.
Invitational Clothing. Some of our nation's most important speakers are making wardrobe decisions that are one step short of a clown costume. Ask yourself: does this person look like their held office? Our news readers and commentators aren't doing much better.
These speakers are deliberately wearing or modifying their clothing to encourage us to identify with them and make the jump to agreeing with what they have to say, whether we understand it or not.
Excessive Color Saturation in Theatrical Staging. Our TV programs have fallen victim to the circus-style color schemes and corporate logo text placements. They come in a few main varieties:
i. Saturated simple shapes
ii. Complex designs with saturated colors, usually alternating warm and cold colors
iii. Excessive logo backdrops: lately, we've moved from repetitive logos to discretely placed logos.
iv. Catch phrase placards on podiums
None of these presentation aspects will control bodily destruction, relieve pain, or build sound laws.
4. Identify and Understand Our Current State of Medical Need
Anyone who's ever looked at Department of Labor figures knows that it's next to impossible to determine how many people are unemployed in any given area. Why? They parse the figures down so far that any and only positive arguments could be made based on them. We have a similar problem with facts about medical care in our communities.
How many people are in need of medical care right now, of what kind, and how much will that cost? What, exactly, are they going to have to buy?
The old, the indigent, the insured, and the emergency victims: what's a community really going to need to provide?
That is, what are people going to have to pay to care for themselves? Really.
Just as we've seen people sold on credit and financing when what they needed was savings and sound spending, so also we don't see the public being told directly what an individual will pay to stay alive during those times he really needs standard, quality, help.
We have yet to have anyone lay out for us just what these bills really are. Who pays what, for what, when, how does that cost increase over time, and so on.
All of this talk about medical care, and no one's told us about the actual medical care and its cost.
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