President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

We're sixty, make just enough money to get thoroughly fucked, and both have pre-existing conditions. If we were on Medicare we'd be lucky to pay $11k a year.

I pray the damn thing craters. My wife's stress level is out the roof over possible changes to our medical insurance. She needs two total knee replacements.

I hope McConnell is posturing, but I saw Trump get elected. I trust nothing coming out of Washington any more.

 

Oh, how cute: They're like fingers, only smaller!

 

It's a pile of dogshit that everybody has a reason to hate. Obviously how to pay for healthcare is the million-dollar question, but I think the following items would have bipartisan support:

- If a drug has been approved in Canada, Switzerland, etc., it should get reciprocity in the U.S. instead of having to go through FDA review. A strict list of approved countries would ensure quality control.
- Reduce the term of pharmaceutical patents to encourage the development of cheaper generics.
- Move to expand the number of OTC medicines. Requiring a prescription for a drug increases the time and cost of treatment while also bringing insurance companies and the accompanying bureaucracy into the picture. I especially like the idea of OTC birth control - it makes contraception more widely available at a lower price while solving the problem of people complaining about their tax dollars going to sluts and whores.
- Let as many foreign doctors in as possible and give their medical degrees reciprocity if they are from certain countries. The shortage of practitioners drives up costs and reduces availability of care.
- Preempt certificate of need laws. Many states effectively prevent new hospitals and clinics from opening by placing the burden on them to show that a new facility is "necessary," and existing hospitals get to lobby state regulators to deny the permit. It's blatantly anti-competitive, and it hits especially hard in preventing specialty clinics from opening.

 

This plan ignores several very basic problems. First and foremost, it does nothing to attempt to drive down the high cost of medical care. I personally don't like the idea of health care for profit, but if we are going to have it there needs to be a way to allow market forces into the discussion. People go to the doctor, get a referral out for a procedure, and have no idea what it is going to cost. If they ask, in most cases, no one really has an answer. It all depends on your insurance. You can't comparison shop, and that sets aside the fact that if you have to go to the ER you want the closest one to you, not the cheapest.

There is nothing in the bill that attempts to encourage preventative medicine and wellness. A lot of expensive results can be avoided by making sure that people get and take their damn medicine and do their exercises. Yeah, yeah, personal responsibility and all that... well, I've worked primary care medicine under an old school doctor. If you were on continuing medications, say for high blood pressure or diabetes, you needed to be seen every six months. Once that six month prescription ran out, when you called for a refill, you'd get one month and the nurse would tell you to get in for an office visit. If you didn't come in, the next refill would be for ten days... which you would have to make a full co-pay to get. That usually got people off their asses and back to the office. Being seen allowed getting routine blood work and blood pressure checks, checking their weight, making sure that their Rx dosage was right, that nothing had changed. Some basic monitoring goes a long way toward catching problems before they get out of hand.

I think that there also needs to be a hard look at malpractice law. I have no problem with an incompetent doctor getting sued for doing or not doing something that damages a patient. The problem is the number of procedures that are done simply to cover the doctor's ass against a possible lawsuit years down the road when the diagnosis is pretty straightforward. Doctors live in fear of making a misdiagnosis and then having a lawyer ask them "Well, then Doctor, why didn't you have X procedure done? Obviously your diagnosis was wrong, and having a CT done to be certain would have made certain would have protected your patient." That's true, and if there is doubt and a gray area, sure, do it... but often the problem is pretty straightforward. This leads to unnecessary care and expense.

As Trump found out, healthcare is hard, but letting those who stand to profit from the bill write the bill is madness.

 

Thanks for your service, now we are going to deport you.

The Pentagon promised citizenship to immigrants who served. Now it might help deport them.

 

This isn't the usual Trump/Russia article. There are a number of interesting details in here that I had not heard elsewhere. Well worth a read.

Why Is Donald Trump Enabling Russian Espionage in America?

 

This tweet is horrific.

The idea that she would use "impacted" is disturbing. Who's writing these for her, @outofplace?

 

Where's his other hand?

 

YF is probably holding it.

 

Those *are* small fingers.

 

I think they are actually big palms which make the fingers look small.

 

Short-fingered vulgarian indeed.