If the current administration truly wanted to lower the cost of healthcare, they WILL need to address TORT Reforms as well.

First day of law school... What is a Tort? Do ya'll actually know what Tort reform is? I hear alot of people saying that, but I'm not sure they know what it means. Be careful of what you ask for. You may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

There is already a cap on med-mal claims of $500,000.00 (at least in Louisiana. We went thru Tort reform in 1996 under then Govenor, Mike Foster). Also, med-mal cases are some of the most difficult lawsuits to prosecute. You have to go before a medical review panel so they can tell you whether you can bring your lawsuit against a doctor/hospital. That is pretty rigid, IMO.

This just in.... I just got my "group" healthcare rates for my family thru BCBS...$793.00 per month! Up 9.5% from last year. It was to increase by 12.5%, but the insurance company was "generous" enough to give our company a discount. :rolleyes:

I don't know what the solution is, but something must be done about the cost of healthcare.

In keeping, my corporate went up by 10%.

V & I pay $760 per month, off the top or the bottom, for Major Medical
Blue Cross Blue Shield of NC...it has a deductible of $5,000 per "incident"
and a lifetime ceiling of $2Mil. Obviously, I don't go near a Doc or a hospital,
with the sniffles, bug bites, aches & pains, the flu, and on and on, and on...

We we first copped it, after shopping hard back in early '02, it was ~$250/month.

I'm not gonna miss lunch because of the monthly fee, but that $9Gs+ per year,
for basically calamity insurance coverage, (with pages and pages of exclusions and
less than full coverage, minus the deductible(s)) currently, is a bite in the butt for
us retired bums.

I don't know the "answer", or really any semi-answers after reading/watching the
HC arm wrestle in the media, for the past couple of weeks.

It is an expensive, lobbyist driven fookin nightmare, however.

Is this group or an individual plan?

Your state may have a cap, California has a cap, but not every state has a cap. Pennsylvania does not have a cap and they basically drove out all the OB-GYN doctors out of the state...

Unfortunately, depending on the specialty, there is a lot of defensive medicine being practiced these days which also adds cost to healthcare. Better technology adds cost to healthcare (since this is a BMW board, I will make a BMW analogy)...look at the cost of buying a new BMW....Why is it more expensive?
More technology, more expensive to build because increase cost of building cars and material, etc.

The same thing is happening with healthcare all over the world. There is a lot of waste going on these days and I have never heard of any government program that has made anything more efficient. I agree something needs to be done...will more regulations save more money?

No matter what, everyone will need to get used a coordinated care model...that will be the solution to help cut healthcare cost down. If you don't understand that...just Google it...;)

Olbermann understands, but he's just a big hypocrite. Dissent was fine pre-January.
Hypocrisy Flashback: ?It Is Political Dissent That Created This Country and Sustained It and Improved It.? | NewsBusters.org

Group.

So, if you are comparing the cost of healthcare to buying a new BMW, healthcare is not only a privilege, but a luxury.