myiW Current Conditions and Forecasts Community Forums Buy and Sell Services
 
Hi guest · myAccount · Log in
 SearchSearch   ProfileProfile   Log in to check your private messagesLog in to check your private messages   RegisterRegister 
Pipe dream? Obamacare
Goto page Previous  1, 2, 3 ... 163, 164, 165 ... 199, 200, 201  Next
 
Post new topic   Reply to topic    iWindsurf Community Forum Index -> Politics, Off-Topic, Opinions
View previous topic :: View next topic  
Author Message
techno900



Joined: 28 Mar 2001
Posts: 4161

PostPosted: Thu Jan 16, 2014 3:02 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

There is a shortage of nurses, doctors and hospital CEO's, even with good pay. Well, maybe the pay really isn't all that great?

Nursing specialties run the gamut, it's not one size fits all. Just like Doctors, there are the Docs in a box and brain surgeons. Pay disparity is huge and that is based on what they can do and where they can get hired.

Yes, some get big bucks, but if a nurse is pulling in 200K because she/he works overtime, then the hospital could do a lot better if there were more highly qualified specialty nurses available to fill the holes and minimize overtime. So were does the problem lie? Why aren't there more folks working to get a nursing degree?

The real question, will the ACA make any of this better? Will more people want to go into the medical and nursing fields with the ACA? We will see.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17742
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Sun Jan 19, 2014 4:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Interesting perspective:

Quote:
Society as a whole benefits from cancer survival
By Bob Tufts, guest commentary © 2014 Bay Area News group
POSTED: 01/17/2014 04:00:00 PM PST

A cancer-free future is getting closer every day. Medical innovation has more than doubled the number of cancer survivors since 1990 from 6 million to 13 million. New cancer treatments have given 50 million years of additional life to patients diagnosed with the disease.

The value of those additional years is about $5 trillion. And the cost? Less than 1 percent of what America spends on health care each year.

Yet a group of oncologists is attacking these innovations as too expensive, even "unjustly" priced.

The recipients of those 50 million years of life may beg to differ. I should know -- I'm one of them.

Innovative cancer therapies have delivered value that far exceeds their price tags and stand out as among the most effective weapons in the battle against cancer.

An article written earlier this year for the influential medical journal Blood claimed that prices for cancer drugs are lower in other countries -- and that people elsewhere even get them for free.

It stands to reason, then, that if the United States adopted the foreign model of delivering health care -- with government calling all the shots -- all Americans would have improved access to these cancer drugs and thus live longer lives.

The reality abroad is far different. In most developed countries, patients have to cover up to 20 percent of their health care costs. For new medicines -- like the cancer drugs that have kept me alive -- the share for which patients are responsible is even greater.

More importantly, these countries delay access to new medicines -- or even deny it outright. Government officials often decide that high prices for innovative new medicines are "unjust" -- so nobody gets them.

Americans, by contrast, have access to new cancer therapies up to three years sooner than patients abroad. It's no coincidence that death rates from all cancers are declining 30 percent faster in the United States than in Europe and elsewhere.

Consider chronic myelogenous leukemia. The survival rate for this form of blood cancer in America has doubled since 2001. The death rate has been cut in half.

In Britain, by contrast, CML death and survival rates have not budged. The difference? Targeted therapies like Gleevec have been made immediately available in America to more patients. Americans had access to Gleevec by 2001. Britons couldn't get it until 2003 -- and even then, only a limited group of patients could do so.

In fact, if I were a Briton, I probably would not be alive today. The country's National Health Service did not approve use of the cancer drug I'm on until three years after my diagnosis.

Saying "no" to drugs with "unjust" prices may have saved our health care system a few billion dollars over the past decade. But such savings would have come at the expense of millions of people with HIV/AIDS, rare childhood diseases and cancer, who otherwise would have died.

The American health care system certainly can stand to improve the ability of patients to access high-priced drugs. But the solution to that problem is not to forego them entirely.

Instead insurers must recognize the value that innovative drugs deliver for patients and the economy -- and cover their cost fully. The cutting-edge therapies of today save money in the long run by keeping people out of the hospital and by preventing diseases from developing into acute health emergencies.

Further, federal regulators at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration must speed up the review process for new medicines. Once a new cancer drug is known to work in specific patients, it should hit the market. Patients shouldn't have to wait years to access drugs that could save their lives.

By focusing narrowly on the price of innovative cancer therapies, dissenting oncologists end up championing regulations that reduce the pace of medical progress and drive up the cost of the last-generation drugs that remain.
Such rules grant government officials the power to determine the price of a human life -- en route to deciding who lives and who dies. That doesn't seem very "just." Or very smart.

Bob Tufts is an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at New York University and a former major-league pitcher for the Giants and the Kansas City Royals.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
isobars



Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935

PostPosted: Sun Jan 19, 2014 5:58 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

A White House spokesman boasted this week that the ACA has resulted in 6.1 million newly insured citizens. The actual figure is 386,000; the other 5,714,000 were simply buying (mostly subsidized) Ocare policies to replace their old insurance. A 1,480% lie.

I could cite the details and sources by rewinding my DVR, but I'm not going to bother because the left doesn't care.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
keycocker



Joined: 10 Jul 2005
Posts: 3598

PostPosted: Sun Jan 19, 2014 8:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Iso big problem is that posters here, left ,right, or no politics do care.
They doubt his facts and when he showed sources, the sources disagreed with him or were offensive extremists.

It annoyed him to be caught faking facts so he had to pretend to block out their responses and act as if he was doing all the talking.
Most folks don't bother to read his conversations with himself as a result.

He does have an ongoing comedy act in which he responds to a post calling the person a liar. In the same posts he obviously lies about his ability to read the guys post.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
pueno



Joined: 03 Mar 2007
Posts: 2807

PostPosted: Sun Jan 19, 2014 8:36 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

keycocker wrote:
Iso big problem is that posters here, left ,right, or no politics do care.
They doubt his facts and when he showed sources, the sources disagreed with him or were offensive extremists.

It annoyed him to be caught faking facts so he had to pretend to block out their responses and act as if he was doing all the talking.
Most folks don't bother to read his conversations with himself as a result.

He does have an ongoing comedy act in which he responds to a post calling the person a liar. In the same posts he obviously lies about his ability to read the guys post.

Mikey's a clown. Enjoy the show, enjoy the laugh.
.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
mrgybe



Joined: 01 Jul 2008
Posts: 5180

PostPosted: Mon Feb 10, 2014 4:53 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

From today's WSJ:

"In regulations outlining the Affordable Care Act, the Treasury Department said employers with between 50 and 99 full-time workers won't have to comply with the law's requirement to provide insurance or pay a fee until 2016. Companies with 100 workers or more could avoid penalties in 2015 if they showed they were offering coverage to at least 70% of their full-time workers, the Treasury said.

The move is a new, significant revision of the law after a series of delays and a troubled rollout. Originally, employers with the equivalent of 50 full-time workers or more had to offer coverage or pay a penalty starting at $2,000 per worker beginning in 2014.
"

What an utter fiasco.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
boggsman1



Joined: 24 Jun 2002
Posts: 9118
Location: at a computer

PostPosted: Mon Feb 10, 2014 5:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

How many people are we talking about here?
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
isobars



Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935

PostPosted: Mon Feb 10, 2014 5:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I predict that the ACA as defined by Obama's pen, if ever documented, will soon exceed the size and complexity of our federal income tax code.

And the website will never work well.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
nw30



Joined: 21 Dec 2008
Posts: 6485
Location: The eye of the universe, Cen. Cal. coast

PostPosted: Mon Feb 10, 2014 9:02 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yea well in the meantime, it's getting so bad that they have to dip into the CYA pool again and throw another hail Mary.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
White House delays health insurance mandate for medium-sized employers until 2016

By Juliet Eilperin and Amy Goldstein, Updated: Monday, February 10

For the second time in a year, the Obama administration is giving certain employers extra time before they must offer health insurance to almost all their full-time workers.

Under new rules announced Monday by Treasury Department officials, employers with 50 to 99 workers will be given until 2016 — two years longer than originally envisioned under the Affordable Care Act — before they risk a federal penalty for not complying.

Companies with 100 workers or more are getting a different kind of one-year grace period. Instead of being required in 2015 to offer coverage to 95 percent of full-time workers, these bigger employers can avoid a fine by offering insurance to 70 percent of them next year.

How the administration would define employer requirements has been one of the biggest remaining questions about the way the 2010 health-care law will work in practice — and has sparked considerable lobbying. By providing the dual phase-ins for employers of different sizes, administration officials have sought to lighten the burden on the small share of affected employers that have not offered insurance in the past.

As word of the delays spread Monday, many across the ideological spectrum viewed them as an effort by the White House to defuse another health-care controversy before the fall midterm elections. The new postponements won over part, but not all, of the business community. And they caught consumer advocates, usually reliable White House allies, by surprise, particularly because administration officials had already announced in July that the employer requirements would be postponed from this year until 2015.

Congressional Republicans seized on the announcement as the latest justification for scrapping the health-care law. In particular, they renewed their opposition to the law’s requirement that most Americans have insurance, saying it is unfair to delay rules for businesses and not for individuals.

“If unilateral delays were an Olympic sport, the White House would sweep the gold, silver, and bronze,” House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) said in a statement. “The White House is in full panic mode, and rather than putting politics ahead of the public, it is time for fairness for all.”

Originally, the employer mandate — which affects companies employing 72 percent of all Americans — was to have gone into effect Jan. 1, at the same time the law began requiring most Americans to have health insurance.

A senior administration official, who briefed reporters on the proposal on the condition of anonymity shortly before the rule became public, said the Treasury Department decided to allow medium-size businesses more latitude because they “need a little more time to adjust to providing coverage.”

The law says that anyone who works 30 hours or more is a full-time employee, and it compels many employers to offer affordable insurance to those workers and their dependents. It defines affordable as premiums of no more than 9.5 percent of an employee’s income, and employers must pay for the equivalent of 60 percent of the actuarial value of a worker’s coverage. Businesses that fail to do so will eventually face a fine of up to $2,000 for each employee not offered coverage, though workers are not required to sign up for the benefits.

Under the health-care law, small employers — those with fewer than 50 workers — do not have to offer insurance. Instead, they will be allowed to buy health plans through new marketplaces created under the law. Because of hardware and software problems, the federal small-business marketplace, which was supposed to open in October, will not become available until the fall.

But until now, the government had not spelled out important details. Nor had it defined exactly what insurance benefits must be covered by employer-sponsored health plans.

Administration officials said Monday that they will issue a separate set of rules in coming weeks that will cover related questions about how employers must report their workers’ insurance status to the government.

Trade associations — which represent many of the U.S. businesses affected by the new requirements — had a mixed reaction to the rule.

The National Restaurant Association, whose nearly 500,000 members were concerned because many industry employees work odd schedules and do not receive benefits, lauded the phase-in. “It’s welcome news, as is anything that helps employers figure this out and gives them time to comply,” said the group’s director of labor and workforce policy, Michelle Neblett, who noted that many members do not yet have systems in place to keep track of worker hours.

But Joe Trauger, the National Association of Manufacturers’ vice president of human resources policy, said businesses will still face massive new compliance costs under the law. “What they’ve released is doing what they can to make some things that are not great policy more livable,” Trauger said. “But at the end of the day, it’s not great policy.”

Ron Pollack, executive director of the consumer lobby Families USA and an ally of the administration, said he was “very surprised” by the new postponements. He contended that, because most large employers already offer insurance, the law’s requirements are not that burdensome. But Pollack added that for workers at large companies that do not provide coverage, “it’s very unfortunate . . . that they don’t have a guarantee it will be extended to them for quite some time.”

Senior administration officials said the latest postponement will have little real-world impact, because the vast majority of employers have fewer than 50 workers.

But employees of bigger companies represent a much larger fraction of the U.S. workforce, with more than seven in 10 at companies and other organizations that employ 100 or more people.

The extra time before certain employers must offer insurance is among a variety of specifics that Treasury Department officials spelled out for the first time in the final rule they issued late Monday afternoon. Each addressed an issue that, while narrow, had become controversial among certain constituencies.

For instance, the rule pleased fire companies, which had feared that the government might have required them to offer insurance to volunteer firefighters and other first responders. The rule also said that educators who have summers off are nonetheless to be treated as full-time workers entitled to be offered coverage. Adjunct faculty members will be counted as working 2.25 hours for ever hour in the classroom. And the rule said that seasonal workers — such as farm workers or extra department-store hires around Christmastime — are considered full time only if they work for at least half the year.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/white-house-delays-health-insurance-mandate-for-medium-sized-employers-until-2016/2014/02/10/ade6b344-9279-11e3-84e1-27626c5ef5fb_story.html
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
J64TWB



Joined: 24 Dec 2013
Posts: 1685

PostPosted: Mon Feb 10, 2014 11:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Really your not happy? Isn't less more? Don't understand.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
Display posts from previous:   
Post new topic   Reply to topic    iWindsurf Community Forum Index -> Politics, Off-Topic, Opinions All times are GMT - 5 Hours
Goto page Previous  1, 2, 3 ... 163, 164, 165 ... 199, 200, 201  Next
Page 164 of 201

 
Jump to:  
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
You cannot attach files in this forum
You cannot download files in this forum

myiW | Weather | Community | Membership | Support | Log in
like us on facebook
© Copyright 1999-2007 WeatherFlow, Inc Contact Us Ad Marketplace

Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group