I’m trying this (Resistbot) today, and will let you know if there’s any difference in the responses I receive from my senators.
I’ve emailed, called, and filled out online petitions and form letters. I always receive an email back from Senator Brown (OH-D) addressing my concerns when I email or call. Senator Portman (OH-R) sent one email informing me that he’s listening but will do what he thinks is best (re:NEA funding) and I’ve been added to his emailed newsletter list.
Congresswoman Kaptur always sends me letters back after I email or call.
I don’t think I’ve gotten any response from online petitions, but I don’t expect a personal response to them.
1 Like
Every time I’ve gone to the trouble of contacting my Congressman or Senators about an issue, I always get a (probably canned) response and specifically mentioning the issue I contacted them about. So I figure, if they go to the trouble of doing that, I know that they’re paying at least some attention. But if you haven’t received any sort of feedback, it would lead me to question this method and the weight that they give it.
I’ve called plenty of times and never gotten a response. (I never expected anyone to call me back to acknowledge my call.) With the faxes, I’m not indicating that I’d like them to contact me. I’m saying, “This is important to me. Please do such-and-such. Thank you.” I’m sure the aides add it to the pile or make a mark on a list somewhere.
3 Likes
Sure, but you spend the majority of your time in Japan, yeah and presumable what happens in Japan has much more of a direct effect on your health care situation. I mean, is your health insurance situation really going to be influence by what the republicans do and by what they aren’t telling their constituents? Will you be one of the 20 million Americans who may lose their coverage if they pass what they’ve proposed thus far (ie what’s in the house bill)? Which of course we don’t know if that will be in the final bill, because they are pretty much doing all this behind closed doors, which is a problem. This isn’t a bill related to national security or some such, it’s a health care bill that they GOP campaigned on wanting to fix - they clearly had no real plan to do so, which shows and it probably part of the reason they are doing much of the work behind closed doors. I mean, come on, they have no plan here and that’s what they don’t want us to know:
After years of them complaining about obamacare, I don’t see how they can’t have come up with a viable alternative given that they voted like 50 times to repeal the damn thing. If they want to do something about rising premiums and high deductibles, fantastic! I’d love to see those shrink. But they’re not serious about this. They just want to gut the whole thing and not replace it with anything in the mean time. They don’t seem to care if people lose their life savings or house for daring to get anything more than a cold.
There are genuine concerns from people who will be directly impacted by what we know so far (again, house bill - which is all we have to go on at this point). I don’t think that the senate working behind closed doors to ram this through before the 4th is the kind of transparency we need on a bill of this importance. It just makes it seem like they don’t actually care about helping people, but about grandstanding and giving tax cuts to the people who aren’t struggling.
12 Likes
For the record, I will be greatly impacted (hopefully only financially) by the new health care bill, yet I fully support your right to be flippant.
2 Likes
My father put it this way in an email: “maybe the cancer will kill me before trumpcare since obammacare couldnt manage that much”. He’s retired, on a fixed income and somehow his healthcare costs went up with obamacare. He really despises Trump (and has since the 80s, its not him hopping on the bandwagon now that its cool to hate on Trump). Though he expects a visit from the reaper any day now, he still manages humorous cynicism.
Guess it runs in the family.
2 Likes
I’m deeply sorry about your dad. As my dad did die of cancer (and my aunt and step dad and grandmother), I know it sucks and it’s hurts. I have nothing but empathy for you on that. I also get the gallows humor, as this is how my family grieves, too.
I do think that Obamacare wasn’t the right fix and could do with help/major overhauls. People shouldn’t ever take financial hits because they are sick. Obamacare was a generally private industry fix to a public health problem. It did give people who didn’t have insurance insurance. But nothing the GOP has thrown at the problem has been serious fixes to the problem of runaway costs. This country throws away more money on health care than the rest of the free world and has much worse outcomes too. The political class (democrats and republicans both) need to get serious about this, but they won’t because too many of them lack imagination and the ability to empathize with the rest of us and they get good coverage by being elected officials.
Do I have all the answers? No. But does ignoring constituents and pretending like the private sector can fix everything do any good. I’m fairly confident that’s a no.
11 Likes
[quote=“Mindysan33, post:27, topic:102941”]
I do think that Obamacare wasn’t the right fix and could do with help/major overhauls.[/quote]
I think the Americans face major challenges to getting a decent universal health-care system on multiple fronts:
- The majority of people do get fairly decent health insurance through their work-place, which decreases the urgency of providing a universal health care system to the voters and thus to the government.
- The US has a long cultural tradition of assuming you are rewarded for hard work. The plus side: you develop a culture which makes Americans work hard and eventually makes them, hands down, the wealthiest people on the planet. The negative: being poor is “your own fault”. The incentive to make certain poor people are taken care of is culturally rather weak.
- Americans expectations from their health-care system are already too high. Universal health-care is not a magic bullet. It’s a series of trade-offs. An American earning $60K, covered by workplace insurance should be prepared to get less health-care for the same dollars, because they’ll be paying for the health-care of people earning $30K.
It’s easy to blame the government, but the reality is that I don’t think a strong majority of Americans are ready to trade their current, fairly decent, health-care for longer wait-lines, “death panels” (aka denial of access to expensive medicines), etc. for the privilege of having a moral health-care system. Which means that the Americans are condemned to a hodge-podge system like ACA for the forseeable future.
(I think Canadians were accidentally fortunate enough to switch to such a system before the advent of widespread health-care insurance.)
Also, oddly enough, the ratio of health-related bankruptcies are about the same on both sides of the US/Canada border despite medical care not being a cost in Canada (The Atlantic). I was stunned by this, but it appears the biggest contributor to medical bankruptcies is loss of income. It does make some of sense. If you’re middle-class, you probably have both work-place related health insurance and some form of disability, etc. If you’re already poor, in the US you get hit with health costs AND loss of income. In Canada you only get hit by loss of income, but that’s still enough to bankrupt you.
While I’m rambling, I’ll say the biggest benefit of our Canadian system is simply lack of worry. I’ve never been terrified about losing health coverage. It’s just one factor that isn’t there. Because it’s not measurable, I think mental security (or what I call the sleep-at-night factor) is undervalued.
That doesn’t mean it’s free. I pay for it in terms of trade-offs. But it is valuable.
4 Likes
Premiums and deductibles have ballooned in the past decade, which began well before the ACA and has (according to the CBO, at least) has slowed, but not stopped. I’ve seen this happen with my own insurance. It also covers shit. Like we pay out of pocket for all sorts of stuff that should be covered. I can imagine that people who have less resources than my family does just puts off going to the doctor or dentist because of that. I in fact KNOW people who regularly do this, despite the risks to their overall health, because they can’t afford to do it. These are people with jobs and some sort of coverage. [quote=“tlwest, post:28, topic:102941”]
covered by workplace insurance should be prepared to get less health-care for the same dollars
[/quote]
I fully reject this, because a person who makes this much money doesn’t deserve to die because they are somehow lesser than. The entire point of insurance is to spread the risk and deciding that someone who makes $60,000 is worth less than someone who makes double that is nothing more than class warfare bullshit we should all reject. [quote=“tlwest, post:28, topic:102941”]
It’s easy to blame the government,
[/quote]
They deserve some of the blame, especially for refusing to fully regulate insurance companies in a way that makes sense. [quote=“tlwest, post:28, topic:102941”]
“death panels”
[/quote]
These already happen. They just happen through a private corporation rather than through the government. At least in the case of a government, we elect the people making the rules. We have much less say in who works at Aetna or whatever. [quote=“tlwest, post:28, topic:102941”]
the ratio of health-related bankruptcies are about the same on both sides of the US/Canada border despite medical care not being a cost in Canada
[/quote]
I didn’t know this, so thanks for the link.
You’re losing $$$ because you’re out sick, is your point? Hm. I’ll have to roll that around in my head a bit, I think. It’s an interesting point, because it’s the same result at the end of the day, right?
That would be nice here, too. Stress over whether or not you’re going to be able to pay for your medical care only compounds people’s health issues, yeah?
10 Likes
The so-called “death panels” don’t even work this way and their decisions aren’t legally binding.
4 Likes
I would take a panel any day over an overworked bureaucrat at a for-profit health insurer deciding whether to cover my particular treatment, incentivized to meet a quota of coverage rejections. At least a “death panel” has a 1-in-x chance of containing a person with either common sense or empathy.
6 Likes
There is no “right to be flippant.”
People have the right to have their own opinions, and others have the ability to embrace or scorn them for them.
There is no valor in false quarrels, or in being a perpetual contrarian.
3 Likes
I’ve never not gotten a full voicemail.
The Atlantic article you link to is based on a study by the Fraser Institute, a far-right “think tank” that doesn’t differ much from US Republicans in their values. Furthermore, the article links to this one:
http://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2009/07/highly-questionable-medical-bankruptcy-figures-from-fraser-institute.html
that shows how the Fraser Institute cherry-picked their data. For most years, the US bankruptcy rate is substantially higher.
I’m not sure what you mean. Yes, there are approved medicines and treatments that the system pays for, but these are based on effectiveness, not on profitability. And no one is denied the right to purchase any additional treatment they want.
And death panels in that sense simply don’t exist. No government body is looking at individual cases to determine their worthiness. They just look at treatments to decide which ones have proven results.
12 Likes
my that sure is one obfuscating opinion piece.
go look more at the canadian study it cites. the study specifically looks at the rate of bankruptcy for people ages 55 and up. you cannot compare that to the us overall. lower down in the report you will find the estimated overall rate of 13%. in the us that overall rate by even the most right wing conservative studies is pegged at 18%-25%. that’s significantly more. [ edit: that 13% might be wrong. i think the actual whole population rate isn’t even listed. ]
you also took this away from the piece:
but what the report actually means by “income loss” is simply a decrease in income – largely because as people get closer to retirement in this modern era they have a harder time finding jobs that pay what they used to.
take this quote from a who report instead:
A number of studies in the United States have addressed the problem of medical debt. Health care costs pose a significant problem in the United States, and a 2007 survey found that 70 million Americans owe medical debt or experience difficulty in paying for treatment.
Another found that 62.1% of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical; 92% of these medical debtors had medical debts over $5000, or 10% of pretax family income while others had lost significant income due to illness or mortgaged a home to pay medical bills – and that between 2001 and 2007, the share of bankruptcies attributable to medical problems rose by 49.6%.
While these findings have not gone undisputed, it seems safe to say that illness and medical bills meaningfully contribute to US bankruptcies.
Traditionally, rates of medical bankruptcy have been considerably higher in the United States than in those countries with bankruptcy laws less favorable to debtors and more comprehensive social safety nets, for example Canada and Europe. One commentator even notes that “The main difference between these European countries and the United States is the absence of healthcare costs as a significant cause of financial difficulty”.
the point is that medically related bankruptcies don’t vanish in countries with socialized health care. but the us rates are a kettle of fish beyond any other.
moreover, zero bankruptcy shouldn’t be the goal. people need bankruptcy whenever there is debt and credit. the goal should be that people aren’t dying or in pain from easily preventable medical causes. something that the us system – and its private healthcare system – is absolutely terrible at.
health care “choice” is no choice at all when you can’t afford to even see the doctor.
12 Likes
Well, this is from earlier this year, but I couldn’t help but think of it:
I’ve said this before, but I think an effective abstinence-based approach to sex education may actually be an image of Ted Cruz describing the nether regions. Or it may be the cure for priapism.
6 Likes
And how is that working out for you on health care and lots of other issues? You may elect them, but they don’t seem to want to work for you. I have an American nephew with MS. His meds cost $70K per year (thanks for nothing big pharma) and I’m very worried that he’s going to die as a result of politicians on both sides of the aisle not giving a shit about the average citizen.
2 Likes
While Trumpcare is probably the best name to fight against it, I hope that if it passes, we can pivot and call it “Republicare”. We need to tar all who helped pass it with the blame.
4 Likes
What’s happening now in Medicare is a movement toward reimbursing hospitals and doctors for “quality outcomes” which purport to incentivize better care and quicker recovery.
But the government spells “quality” with the letters c, o, s, and t. They explicitly reward the provision of care for those elective surgeries which generate the lowest amount of total Medicare spend, with no allowance for the patient’s condition going in.
So the best way for a surgeon or hospital to get rewarded for “quality outcomes” under this plan is to adjust your patient intake with a bias toward fewer complicating conditions - an 84 year old patient with a cardiac condition and rheumatoid arthritis is much likelier to need more Medicare spend for a hip replacement than a healthy 70 year old.
And the result will be that doctors and hospitals increasingly will decide to treat that 84 year old with painkillers and physical therapy and maybe a wheelchair, instead of a new hip. This isn’t a death panel, but it is definitely a quality of life panel.
Now, if we as a society can’t afford to do hip replacements for everyone who can benefit from them, I am fine with making that decision. But let’s make it openly and publicly please, rather than bullshitting everyone by pretending it’s about “quality”.
This is what we have lots more of to look forward to under “Medicare for all”.
2 Likes
I used it to send faxes to the Senators from my state. But they solid “Christian Americans!!!” so I know it was a waste of effort. Still I’ll do what I can to support those fighting in other states.
