Senate healthcare will pass in House

[MikeWaters]

Originally Posted by Cali Coug

In other words, it ISN'T taking over health care, you just think eventually it will lead to something that will.

Carry on then.

when the govt. requires that you buy health insurance, or be fined or go to jail or whatever, that is a fundamental sea-change, and is a huge step towards govt. takeover.

Are we in a system where every hospital and every provider is a federal employee? Not yet.

[Archaea]

Originally Posted by Cali Coug

According to this study, about 19% of bankruptcies are caused by health care debt. That is hardly rare.

http://www.hschange.com/CONTENT/1017/

So an Obama friendly organization, probably an Obama front, comes out with a study supporting change by claiming 17 percent of bankruptcies are health care related. Color me disbelieving.

I'll canvass the bk lawyers because I simply don't believe it. OTOH, I don't know what the People's Republic of California does.

[Cali Coug]

Originally Posted by Archaea

So an Obama friendly organization, probably an Obama front, comes out with a study supporting change by claiming 17 percent of bankruptcies are health care related. Color me disbelieving.

I'll canvass the bk lawyers because I simply don't believe it. OTOH, I don't know what the People's Republic of California does.

No. This was the lowest number I saw (this study was written critiquing a Harvard study that said it was 54% of all bankruptcies).

[Archaea]

Originally Posted by Cali Coug

No. This was the lowest number I saw (this study was written critiquing a Harvard study that said it was 54% of all bankruptcies).

I simply don't believe it and when I query bankruptcy attorneys they disbelieve those numbers as well.

Here is my big disappointment with liberally minded individuals who feel compelled to deliver free health care.

The debate is dishonest.

Nobody will state, we don't know what the problem is and how many persons it affects. It has become polarized and thereby distorted.

First, the debate centers on health care and who should pay for it.

It does not focus upon health.

So in order to garner support for federally funded health care, people manufacture numbers to show why it should be supported and why it is universally needed.

And then those persons reading the same phony studies, engage in groupthink and become frustrated with individuals who reject the, "everybody knows and feels," arguments. Mob mentality at its best.


I know many, many people and read local bar studies on bankruptcies in Nevada. Here in the Nevada, the significant factors in bankruptcy are an absolutely failed economy, people having purchased homes beyond their current needs in light of changed economics, and job loss or significant income reduction. Are there any bankruptcies related to health care costs? Possibly, but if you know how to negotiate the health care field, there should be next to none.

Your debate focuses upon services which government can promise individuals in order to win votes. It's as base as that.

When you actually in engage in a discussion regarding health, let me know. That discussion might be more interesting.

[Archaea]

But here's a point about health affecting bankrupticies

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/...nkruptcy/4683/

According to Zhu, having a serious medical condition makes you 50% more likely to file for bankruptcy, but not because of medical bills; medical bills are only a very small percentage of the overall debt of bankrupts, and are not significantly correlated with higher credit card debt, which one would expect if people were keeping down their medical bills by charging them to Visa. Presumably it's the income effect of disability or caretaking responsibilities.

And this paper rejects the flawed analysis of the papers you wish to rely upon to pursue a flawed public policy on health care insurance costs.

The paper seems to have covered most of the ways I initially suspected it had gone wrong; for example, I thought they might have missed people who had had an adverse income event like being forced into a lower-paying job, but length of job tenure was actually higher for bankrupts. I still have the lingering suspicion that it overstates its case, but it seems pretty robust--unlike the more widely quoted Warren study, which had to use a tenuous definition of causation to make its sensational claim that 50% of bankruptcies were due to a medical event--which turned into the even more sensational claim that 50% of bankruptcies were due to high medical bills in the hands of innumerate activists and journalists.

[Archaea]

It appears from reading your "studies" that they are nothing more than flawed position papers designed to advance a certain economic and political agenda without actually examination of the "causes" of bankruptcies.

A more careful reading of the factors seems to indicate "overconsumption" which diluted savings necessary to overcome an adverse event.

Ill health may contribute due to lost income, and not the actual cost of the medical bills.

Way to go, Lefties, spin it wrong so we never get it Right.

[Archaea]

The Harvard Study published in 2005 relied upon filers in 2001 in California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Texas. Are the reasons for bankruptcy in 2010 the same as they were almost a decade ago?

I'm not certain how valid that is, or how representative that is. I question the the controls employed in that study, as I have read parts of the break-down I find this study of questionable worth.

Why don't we have a study of all fifty states for the past ten years?

[Archaea]

Cali's simplistic approach to bankruptcy also ignores how difficult it is to attribute causation to it.

See, e.g., http://www.justice.gov/ust/eo/public...epnumbers.html

[Archaea]

It is ridiculous to read how one misguided, limited, study now becomes the ultimate in popular consciousness on the cause of consumer bankruptcies.

http://www.tfgi.com/201003/the-top-f...or-bankruptcy/

We public are morons in how we assimilate data and "science".

[Archaea]

and then there is this study, which is more comprehensive but still inherently flawed.

http://pnhp.org/new_bankruptcy_study...uptcy-2009.pdf

If you know about bankruptcy, and I do a small bit, anybody affiliated with it can see why the study is flawed.

This is priceless. Redefine to augment the definition.

We altered the 2001 criteria to
include debtors who had been forced to quit work due to
illness or injury.

But the figure is also misquoted:

Illness or medical bills contributed to 62.1% of all bankruptcies
in 2007

So the fifty percent figure is illness, or the health of an individual, which may be the major cause, not medical bills. Ah, that's the rub.

If we focus upon HEALTH and not Medical Bills, maybe we'll stumble upon a solution, eh?

The US health care financing system is broken, and not
only for the poor and uninsured. Middle-class families frequently collapse under the strain of a health care system that
treats physical wounds, but often inflicts fiscal ones.
\

So there's no political agenda, no none at all.