Will it be the death of WLS?
on 8/20/09 8:35 am
Since the plan has not been finalized, it's hard to say.
Britain and Canada have NHS, and WLS is covered there. I had insurance, but was not covered here, yet people on medicaid ARE covered.
I hope that the new plan, whatever it is, includes coverage for WLS and other preventive procedures.
I have been reading H.R. 3200. It's VERY long, so I haven't gotten far, but here are 3 things I've noticed, that could have a bearing on what you asked:
1) SEC 124 Process for Adoption of Recommendations; Adoption of Benefit Standards
(b) Adoption of Standards (1) Initial Standards--Not later than 18 months after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary shall, through the rulemaking process consistent with subsection (a), adopt an initial set of benefit standards.
It is very upsetting to me that we are being asked to put into law a bill such as this, that will change health care, for good or ill, for all Americans, without the benefit standards being decided upon beforehand.
2) SEC 206 Other Functions
(b) Coordination of Risk Pooling--The Commissioner shall establish a mechanism whereby there is an adjustment made of the premium amounts payable among Qualified Health Benefit Plan offering entities offering Exchange-participating health benefits plans of premiums collected for such plans that takes into account (in a manner specified by the Commissioner) the differences in the risk characteristics of individuals and employers enrolled under the different Exchange-participating health benefit plans...
What I put in italics concerns me most. ObamaCare is being touted as "free," but it will not be free. Trust me. We who are obese (or have any "risk characteristics" to be determined in the future, by the Commissioner) will pay higher premiums.
3) SEC 1173 Administrative Transactions (2) Goals for Financial & Administrative Transactions Standards shall be: (D) enable real-time (or near real-time) determination of an individual's financial responsibility at point of service...whether individual is eligible for a specific service with a specific physician at a specific facility...
We will be told what procedure we can have, when we can have it, and which doctor and facility we can use.
I do not see how anyone, Republican or Democrat, can support this. You can read this bill (all 1,000+ pages of it) at the Library of Congress web site, and I wish everyone would.
Blessings,
Mary
ObesityHelp Support Group Leader and Support Group Coach
on 8/21/09 12:43 pm
I worked for a medical practice management company, and they made the decision to lump the doctors in with the non clinical workers. The next year we could barely afford our insurance (docs have an extremely high rate of insurance usage and the amount of use goes into figure the next years rates).
The pulled the non-clinical workers out the following year. I always thought that was ironic, being a physician is a "risk characteristic".
What concerns me about the "Obama care" term is that Obama is not writing this bill-congress, who WE elected is writing the bill and will ratify the bill. Making it sound like it's one person is just building a language of fear and distrust at a time when we all need to work together.
ObesityHelp Support Group Leader and Support Group Coach
ObesityHelp Support Group Leader and Support Group Coach
ObesityHelp Support Group Leader and Support Group Coach
on 8/22/09 1:13 am
Mary, we are just going to have to agree to disagree on this one.
This "hasty change" has been under discussion for 20 years that I can remember. Choosing (and by this in mean the press, not you) to ignore it until recently doesn't mean the work that went into it never happened, it just meant that you might not have known about it. Every time it comes up, the opposition squashes it with fear mongering, and the people that suffer are the people who cannot get medical care.
If we are not going to provide decent medical care to our citizens, who will? What I find particularly offensive in this whole debate is that I get regular e-mails (not from you) from people who want to deny healthcare to American citizens, yet ask for donations to their missionary efforts abroad. From my cynic's point of view, photos of starving kids raise more money than a poor person dying of a treatable disease.
Move beyond the fear and work together mean just that-nothing more, and it's a testament to the paranoia being raised that most people are more concerned about changing "our way of life" than they are about people dying for lack of care.
There are many problems with a national system of health care (Canada, Great Britain). It is not something (in my opinion, and that of many others) that we want or need. All of these social programs will bankrupt our country, in a time when the economy is in desperate straits. Trust me, someone will have to pay for national health care, and, for one, I'm really tired of my husband working half the year just to pay for the taxes taken out of his paycheck now.
Taxes will go up, and I'm not sure how much more we, who are in the middle, can bear.
There is more to this than "changing our way of life." Actually, maybe that's the best phrase to use. How will our way of life change? We'll pay more taxes, we'll have less of a say in our health care decisions, and we'll be stuck with a program that will probably help illegal aliens more than the older citizens. After all, why would the government care about old people, when they don't care about the unborn baby.
We are messed up, and we need to wake up! I agree that we need to focus our missionary efforts at home, as well as abroad, and it would all be taken care of if people followed the biblical principle of tithing. If that happened, there would be more than enough to take care of the needs of people. That's how God, according to His Word, meant it to be. The fact that I am against becoming a socialist country, with national health care (and other indicators) does not make me any less compassionate, as a believer. To ask me to stand by and allow our members of Congress to not vote the will of their constituents and blindly sign off on a bill that is way too general, allowing for interpretive license after the fact, is unconscionable.
Blessings & Good Health,
Mary
ObesityHelp Support Group Leader and Support Group Coach
