"John T. Jarrett" wrote in message
...
Speaking of Socialism...one way to meet Edward's plan of providing
insurance to all Americans like Congressmen get without raising taxes
would be to socialize medicine.

'Course that would **** off the rich doctors...but since that group
falls in the rich group that pays CPAs to get them around new taxes
anyway, they would be such a minority.

$750 for an Ambulance ride. $1000-$5000 for EVERY visit to an ER...

Was it Norway or Sweden that did it right? Pretty sure it wasn't
Austria...


But doctors don't collect the fees from the ambulances company nor do they
get the exorbitant fees from the ER. Huge corporations like ARA/Spectrum
(or what ever they call themselves these days) often run ERs and simply pay
doctors, who are subcontracts, a fixed fee. This is the same giant that
feeds people at the Olympics, runs hospital and industrial food services,
provides linens and uniforms to hospitals and the hospitality industry, and
runs the medical operations in thousands of jails and prison under a
subsidiary called "Correctional Medical Systems.". They are literally the
Halliburton of their industry.

While physician salaries are handsome in comparison to the average worker,
earning from $116K for a GP to around $220K for an obgyn, they are highly
educated, work long hours, and work in a high-stress situation often caught
between patient's needs and insurance company demands.
http://www.memag.com/be_core/MVC?mag...usive+s urvey

I think that the high cost of healthcare is more rightly attributed to
insurance companies, corporate healthcare providers, and pharmaceutical
manufacturers. Let's not forget that piece of the puzzle is waste and
fraud. And speaking of fraud, Bill First (R) Tenn., Senate Majority
Leader's family business, HCA, perpetrated the largest medical billing fraud
in US history resulting in $1.7 BILLION in fines and penalties!!!!!
The Bad Doctor
Bill Frist’s long record of corporate vices
by Doug Ireland

While TV gushed last week over the Republicans’ new Senate majority leader,
Bill Frist, intervening in a traffic accident, portraying the former heart
surgeon as a "Good Samaritan," in truth the GOP has simply replaced a racist
with a corporate crook.

Frist was born rich, and got richer — thanks to massive criminal fraud by
the family business. The basis of the Frist family fortune is HCA Inc.
(Hospital Corporation of America), the largest for-profit hospital chain in
the country, which was founded by Frist’s father and brother. And, just as
Karl Rove was engineering the scuttling of Trent Lott and the elevation of
Frist, the Bush Justice Department suddenly ended a near-decadelong federal
investigation into how HCA for years had defrauded Medicaid, Medicare and
Tricare (the federal program that covers the military and their families),
giving the greedy health-care behemoth’s executives a sweetheart settlement
that kept them out of the can.

The government’s case was that HCA kept two sets of books and fraudulently
overbilled the government. The deal meant that HCA agreed to pay the
government $631 million for its lucrative scams — which, on top of previous
fines, brought the total government penalties against the health-care
conglomerate to a whopping $1.7 billion, the largest fraud settlement in
history, breaking the old record set by Drexel Burnham.

The deal also meant that HCA can continue to participate in Medicare. And,
as part of the Bushies’ deal shutting down what Deputy Assistant FBI
Director Thomas Kubic called "one of the FBI’s highest-priority white-collar
crime investigations," no criminal charges were brought against the top HCA
execs who presided over the illegal bilking of federal programs designed to
aid the poor — and that includes Senator Frist’s brother, Thomas, HCA’s
former CEO (and current director), who’s been described by Forbes magazine
as "one of the richest men in America," with a personal fortune estimated at
close to $2 billion.

What did HCA do? It inflated its expenses and billed the government for the
overrun; it billed the government for services ineligible for reimbursement
(like advertising and marketing costs). HCA violated both law and medical
ethics when, as Forbes put it, "the company increased Medicare billings by
exaggerating the seriousness of the illnesses they were treating. It also
granted doctors partnerships in company hospitals as a kickback for the
doctors’ referring patients to HCA. In addition, it gave doctors ‘loans’
that were never expected to be paid back, free rent, free office furniture —
and free drugs from hospital pharmacies."

This is the ethical climate that reigned in the Frist family’s money
machine. In an unguarded moment, Senator Frist told the Boston Globe that
conversations with his doctor father about the family calling were like
"benign versions of the Godfather and Michael Corleone." Apparently the
senator considers defrauding the government "benign." So too does the Bush
White House, which dictated the Justice Department deal with HCA that let
the crooks escape jail just as Frist was being anointed the Senate’s
majority leader. A pure coincidence in timing, of course.

The senator has always claimed no current connection to HCA because the $26
million he and his wife hold in the company’s stock is in a so-called "blind
trust." But it was the family’s dirty money that bought Frist a place in the
Senate. In 1994, Frist — who’d never bothered to vote before first running
for the Senate that year — spent some $3.4 million of his personal fortune
to buy the seat from Tennessee (HCA’s headquarters) that he now occupies.
Moreover, "In the Senate, Frist has used his influence to further HCA’s
cause by stopping a strong patients’ bill of rights, gridlocking a mandatory
Medicare prescription-drug benefit, and promoting caps on damages for
victims who sue negligent hospitals like HCA’s," points out Jamie Court,
executive director of the Santa Monica–based Foundation for Taxpayer and
Consumer Rights, who adds, "The Senate should not replace a racist with a
principal backer of one of the largest corporate swindles ever perpetrated
against the American public. If Frist was a patriot first, he would have
sold his HCA stock long ago."

But Frist’s pandering to the lobbyists of the voracious health-care industry
knows no bounds. "Frist isn’t the senator from Tennessee — he’s the senator
from the state of Health Care Industry Influence — he’s gotten more than $2
million from the health-care sector, giving him the dubious distinction of
raising more cash from health-care interests than 98 percent of his
colleagues," says Nick Nyhart, executive director of Public Campaign.

Consider the special servicing he gave to pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. In
another example of his "patriotism," Frist engineered the insertion into the
Homeland Security bill of a provision that would protect Eli Lilly from
lawsuits over Thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative used in its vaccines.
Thousands of lawsuits have been filed against Lilly by parents who believe
Thimerosal caused autism and other neurological maladies in their kids. The
Frist-authored rider shields Lilly by forcing those lawsuits into a special
"vaccine court," where they can be easily scuttled, potentially saving Lilly
hundreds of millions. The pharmaceutical industry was the largest single
contributor to the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee that
Frist chaired, ladling out some $4 million — and Lilly was the single
biggest contributor to the GOP from that industry, having given $1.6 million
in the last election cycle, 79 percent of it to Republicans.

The good Dr. Frist voted against patients’ rights to sue their HMOs for
failure to provide adequate treatment, and voted to give tax subsidies to
HMOs and insurance companies to offer prescription drugs to seniors, rather
than providing them through Medicare. Frist has, of course, personally raked
it in from the interested industries, gobbling up $123,750 in campaign cash
from the HMOs and $265,023 from the pharmaceutical industry. Frist also took
$130,204 from the food-processing industry — and then helped kill a bill
putting teeth into the USDA’s authority to crack down on processing plants
that violate federal standards for bacterial and viral infection of meat and
poultry.

There’s a lot more, like this — so much that it leads to an inescapable
conclusion: In the Senate, "Good Samaritan" Frist has almost daily violated
the injunction of the physicians’ Hippocratic oath: "First, do no harm."

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/03/08/news-ireland.php