Health Insurance Mandate

[Polk]

The Bill is 1200 pages long. Have you read it?


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"1200 pages".

Did I stutter?

My point was the bill isn't 1200 pages long.

 

[NO!bama08]

Listen up people. Obama does not give a crap about providing health care to the un-insured. If liberals wanted to get un-insured covered it would have been done during the Clinton or Bush administrations. The percentage is the same today as it was then. It's not going to change no matter what they do. Obama only wants to CONTROL healthcare. It's a power-grab, pure and simple. Conservatives are standing tall against it, independants are joining them. The 85% of us who have good healthcare don't want to see it screwed up just for this socialist experiment.

 

[Cecilie1200]

I just ran across something interesting that I hadn't previously thought of. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) is a practicing physician specializing in family medicine, obstetrics and the treatment of allergies. He has personally delivered more than 4,000 babies and is a two-time cancer survivor. He is one of only two physicians in the U.S. Senate. Here's what he said:

“If you take neo-natal mortality outside of Medicaid, we rank No. 1 or No. 2. What percentage of babies born in this country are born under Medicaid? It’s getting close to 50%. Now look at neo-natal mortality rates and Medicaid. That’s a government-run program, and neo-natal mortality rates are very high. So if you look at the private sector, we have excellent results.”

It's an interesting point for those who want to talk about the infant mortality rate as a reason to scrap private insurance for government healthcare.

He also has some things to say on the point I usually argue infant mortality rates on: the fact that other countries cook the books by not counting all live births.

Japan is ranked first in the world according to the 2004 WHO data, the last year the complete international data were available. Yet babies born alive in Japan who do not survive for at least 24 hours are simply not counted, severely skewing the statistics. Babies must be at least 30 centimeters in length -- that’s 12 inches long -- to be counted as a live birth in Switzerland, which further skews the numbers.

“If a baby is born in the peri-natal period [post-20th week of gestation] and it dies, other countries don’t count it,” Coburn said. “Some countries if they don’t make it through a 24-hour period, they’re not counted. And if you look at the rest of single-payer nations, if they’re born under 30 weeks they don’t count them. We routinely save babies born under 30 weeks. We save babies at 23 weeks now.”

In Canada, if a baby weighs less than 500 grams when it’s born -- that’s about 1.1 pounds -- and the baby doesn’t survive, it doesn’t count. The Canadian government calls these babies “unsalvageable.”