Why don't republicans speak out about big insurance company Death Pannels?

What is a “death pannel” when it is at home?

Money…

They are trying to conceal the fact the US health care system just don’t work?

@DarkScribe I have no idea what a death panel is but I’m guessing from the tags it is the part your health insurance company that works out way not to pay for your health care thus condeming you to death.

Death panel sounds like a knee-jerk conservative-coined term (like who could be in favor of a death tax, or be the opposite of pro-life?).

Realistically speaking, the only absolute guarantee you have in life is that one day, you will die. There is nothing you can do to alter the eventuality of that outcome. It will happen at some point.

Oh wait… I googled the term, and it came up with Sarah Palin’s name attached to it…

It just all seems like Orwellian doublespeak to me.

I just want to be on the death panel for Paris Hilton.

I read a great argument about the health insurance situation you guys are going through. The article’s point was that health “insurance” cannot exist as car insurance or fire insurance does – you are guaranteed to get sick sometime in your life, unlike your car being broken into or your house catching on fire. The only possible way health insurance companies can make money is to take in more money than they give out, which means either having the world’s most efficient health system or they have to deny tons of claims to cover both the claims they approve and their salaries. Guess which one you guys are participating in!

It would be indeed very great to take this “death panel” talk and turn it around and show that these death panels already exist, they’re your insurance companies who decide whether you deserve to have your treatment covered by them or if you are sentenced to a life of debt. But by using the words they would continue the propagation of the original sentiments regarding “killing off old people”, so the government has chosen to rebuke it by posting videos on their website… not the best strategy but very little chance to backfire.

Great article about this in Salon

Death panel.

Because most republicans are a bunch of reptiles.

All: I think the reason they don’t talk about it is that it does not suit the conservative ta;lk show shills to beat their breasts about it and the people that swallow that claptrap whole can’t be bothered to do their own thinking or research.

@AstroChuck I think in this context this might be a better link for @DarkScribe:

@DarkScribe Here you go.

“Yesterday President Obama dismissed the notion—spread by Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and most of mainstream talk radio that health reform would set up “death panels”.

He is NOT in favor of death. And he pointed out that anyone who reads the bill knows there is nothing even remotely resembling a death panel in it.

And yet it turns out that death panels DO exist in this country. By one count, they condemn about 20,000 people to death each year in America. I know, it sounds outrageous, but a woman named Jackie called my show to admit she was ON one of them, up until last March:

“I worked for an insurance company as a customer service rep.”

She says she was one of the people whose job it was to say “no” to sick people desperately trying to get health insurance:

“I cannot tell you how many times as a frontline person I had to tell people ‘Sorry, pre-existing condition.’”

She was also the person who had to tell patients who DID have insurance, and who’d already racked up a huge bill…

”‘Sorry, not covered by your policy.’ Personally, I had high blood pressure throughout my entire time working there.”

I certainly hope that was covered. So what does Jackie think about the protests?

“You know I think the protesters don’t really have a clue. They, from what I have seen, are throwing tomatoes at the wrong person.”

Ironic, isn’t it, that so many talk show hosts would go to the trouble of making up stories about government death panels—when the real ones are right under their noses.”

@Dynamic
nicely clearified, wish I could lurve you 10 times,
(i mean GIVE you ten lurve ;).

A few years ago I didn’t have insurance. I had to go to a free clinic and that took about a month to be seen. (I’m not telling what it was)

So the doctor made a diagnosis and treated it. But she said that she wouldn’t put what it really was in my chart out of fears that if I ever did get insurance I would be denied for a pre-existing condition.

We have problems.

I haven’t been paying much attention to the news but the first i heard of it was yesterday on Glenn Becks tv show isn’t he a republican…?

@Judi – thanks for this question, I LOVE the perspective, didn’t really think about that particular type of hypocrisy. I was thinking more about the hypocrisy of them trying to kill reform designed to cover 50 million more people than are currently covered, because maybe someday, someone would be denied coverage. But yes, that’s an additional angel when you think about it, the executive panels within EXISTING insurance companies which convene to decide whether to deny someone coverage for something life threatening. You’re so right, let’s keep the ACTUAL death panels to avoid the risks of imaginary ones.

What really pisses me off though is that Democrats backed off on this one, this was the kind of shrill, ignorant, completely unhinged Republican tactic which if Dems had stood their ground and gotten the facts out there, it would have shown a lot of people that reform opponents are only interested in the status quo, nothing else. By turning tail and running it makes it look to the uninformed like the Rethuglicans had a valid point.

@jaketheripper;
some republicans have distorted a provision to assist people (if they want it) in discussing what they want in an advance directive with some sort of death panel to decide who lives or dies. Actually it helps YOU decide in advance if you want to be kept alive by artificial means if you are unable to speak for yourself.

Republicans are the party of big business. Medical insurance is definitely big business, so no Republican will say anything bad about insurance. In addition, all of our elected law makers in all parties are covered by a government health insurance program so they don’t understand what all the fuss is about unless they make an effort. The Democrats are the party of big government, so they tend to make the effort to see what people need.

I am very aware that “death panels” already exist. A friend had to sue her insurance company because she needed a bone marrow transplant to cure her lymphoma and the company refused to pay, saying it was an experimental procedure.

My neighbor’s son needed growth hormone injections or else he would end up being an adult who is only 40 inches tall. The insurance company refused to pay because no one is using the bovine growth hormone gathered at slaughter houses any longer. Now it is created in the laboratory and so the company claimed it was, you guessed it, an experimental procedure.

My son needed long-term residential treatment in a psychiatric facility. Payment was refused because we “hadn’t made sufficient use of community resources.” It turns out this meant he had never been arrested.

In all three cases, the company did end up paying but it took lawyers to do it. Why does a sick person have to sue to get coverage? Because insurance companies make more money if their customers die.

With insurance companies it isn’t necessarily a panel. It starts with one person, sometimes a doctor or a nurse, sometimes not. Often if a patient needs an expensive procedure or referral to a specialist, an insurance company has to authorize it. In the past, and maybe still, that person’s job evaluation and income are tied to how much money they saved the company.

If that patient wants to appeal, they cannot go to an independent court or mediator by the terms of the insuranc agreement, they have to go before a panel set up and paid for by the insurance industry. The majority of the time the panel affirms the company’s decision. It may be for reasons like the treatment is only effective in less than half the population or that the patient shouldn’t get a referral to a specialist for diagnosis because he doesn’t fit the profile of someone with the suspected condition. They may deem a procedure “experimental” for years after it has been proven effective.

Even though @Judi ‘s term death panel may be dismissed as dramatic, that is what they essentially are. But it goes beyond that. People die every year because of refusal or delay of treatment. Many more people who don’t die end up in bankruptcy trying to pay for care on their own after the insurance companies refuse to pay or drop their coverage. They might also find themselves with a liwer quality of life if for instance a man in his 50’s had knee surgery 15 years ago and is refused another one because it was a pre-existing condition so he loses his mobility. Or that a person on antidepressants is not eligible for counseling because she has hit her psychiatric payment cap, even though counseling is reducing her need for drugs.

@galileogirl – I assume you know this, but “death panel” is not @Judi‘s term, it’s @SarahPalin,‘s her divisive rhetoric was affirmed by Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann and a few other House Republicans (one southern Congresswoman actually hurled the accusation on the House floor), and the right wing noise machine ran with it until the largely uninformed and easily scared electorate began to set up protests against the so called Obamacare death panels which would force euthanasia on our elderly and disabled. @Judi was simply making a point about the hypocrisy of decrying a hypothetical death panel which has no basis in reality, when right now in the system we’re currently using, the very system that would be reformed, we essentially have actual death panels occurring on a daily basis, yet you don’t see the same people decrying THESE “death panels”.

Thanks Dale :-)

I was referring to her use in her question and @DarkScribe‘s follow up question

@galileogirl – kind of what I thought, just wanted to make sure you “got” that she was using the enemy’s term against them.

So given that healthcare resources are limited, whether provided by government or private company, surely it would be better that the people who are deciding what to spend the money on are answerable to the voter and not the share holder.

#1 “Death panel” is a scare tactic term used by the likes of Sarah Palin to vilify the Obama health care plan. She, and others like her, would never use the term in relation to the current health care issues.

#2 Health care is big business at this point. Republicans are pro big business and get money from the health care companies from the exorbitant profits they get from stealing from us without providing the promised coverage. Why would they piss off some of their main financial backers? They wouldn’t, which is why they won’t speak out about the current health care problem a being the fault of the insurance companies.

I watched John Q today. I think that’s the best representation of the problems we’re having in this country that I’ve seen in a while, though highly dramatized.

@avvooooooo In this case I am inclined to believe it more about political tactics than any kind of conservatism or campaign funding. What we have seen over the past 8 months is a crazy obstructionism by the GOP even in cases where it is against their own best interest.

The idea of end-of-life planning, patient requested DNR orders in medical records, and living wills have been a non-political issue. My HMO encourages members to have the paperwork on file and kept current, As for the health reform legislation goes, it is hard to come up with a negative.

1. You’ll lose your personal Dr-who are you kidding, the kindly Dr, Marcus Welby is dead and now the insurance company sends you a list of Drs, pick one.

2. The big bad govt will screw everything up-Federal and state govt already provide more coverage than any insurance company and all Republican Congressmen happily participate in a Federal plan.

3. Competition will keep costs low, trust the corporations-YEAH, RIGHT! Remember the past year? It will take another generation before you can pull that one again.

4. We can’t afford it-Cut anything you want just as long as it doesn’t affect me. Healthcare costs affect everyone.

They think the only way to win in 2012 is to make the next 3 years as chaotic and tumultuous as possible so that is what sticks in the voters’ minds, If during that time a Democratic choice isn’t successful they have the system in place to blow it out of proportion.

Sarah Palin and the Death Panels. New band. Sound pretty awful, though. I think they call it fib rap. Or something.

The truth is that those people crashing the health care town hall meetings are actually homeless people they paid to go and shout out the politicians. I actually saw them recruiting downtown, earlier this week. I also heard them talking about passing out the guns if health insurance reform is passed. They have already infiltrated homeland security, and are going to attempt a coup if this thing works. They are building concentration camps in the backcountry in Montana. Giant underground prisons in Alaska, too. They need the slave labor to get the oil past all those reindeer, I think. They figure that if most Americans are slaves, they won’t have to provide anyone with health care. Drive ‘em until they drop. There’s plenty more.

You know what what would help this mess, if the unbelievably overpriced medical equipment, medicine (yes I have heard about what it costs and am prepared to argue on another thread) and the like were more realistically dealt.

@Bri_L if the unbelievably overpriced medical equipment, medicine…and the like were more realistically dealt.

Yes. I have always been offended by the disparity in cost between a wheelchair and a racing bike. Many similar components yet the wheel chair costs up to a thousand dollars more for a simpler less difficult to make device. Three days ago I needed to purchase a laser type infrared thermometer such as used in ERs and Airports. The medical/surgical supply houses started at $900.00, the identical (same brand & model) device from a scientific instrument supply company was $299.00. When purchased for use in a medical clinic it costs much more than if purchased for laboratory work.

@DarkScribe – When purchased for use in a medical clinic it costs much more than if purchased for laboratory work. (I copied your technique. I find it helpfull). T

That is part of the chain. Everypart of the system charges like that. They charge that because they can/have to. the clinic pays that because they can/have to.

Because the health insurance companies offer huge kickbacks bribes campaign contributions to powerful Republicans, which they stand to lose under Obama’s plan.