The End of Universal Health Care for Children

[Guest]

Universal Health Care for Children in Hawaii will no longer be available after Nov. 1st. However, HMSA will step up until the end of the year to honor those that are on it currently.

*edit* Title to reflect thread
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My Blog

[DrJ]

Gov. Linda Lingle's administration cited budget shortfalls and other available health care options for eliminating funding for the program. A state official said families were dropping private coverage so their children would be eligible for the subsidized plan.

"People who were already able to afford health care began to stop paying for it so they could get it for free," said Dr. Kenny Fink, the administrator for Med-QUEST at the Department of Human Services. "I don't believe that was the intent of the program."


This is what happens when you give people something for free. THose who don't need it try to take advantage of it....

[Guest]

If people cared as much about their children's nutrition and fitness as they did their dogs, we wouldn't need FREE meds.

People feed their kids sh1t and don't make them work and get fit, but they worry about their dog's food and fitness as if they are the last of a breed.

How many times have you seen people feed their kids ice cream and pan cakes with syrup?

You wouldn't feed your dogs that crap.

Hey baby you just lay there and play that nintendo, I'll mow da grass, do you wanna nuda manapua?

Have you ever wondered why it is cheaper to get a doctor to see your dog than it is to see you or your kid?

Largely it is because Vets deal in cash on the barrel head. Doctors have to deal with 3rd party payment. Insurance, medicare, medicaid, etc.

If we took charge of our own health, by eating right and working out, and if doctors only accepted cash,. They would be hustling for our business with low prices and high service.

[bodysurf]

granted ..a healthy diet and exercise are great...but those that are in the lowest income brackets are exactly the ones that can't afford to eat well..what can you eat for $1 a meal?..that's why you end up eating plenty SPAM li' dat...
and kinda hard to prevent many childhood illnesses through diet and execise themselves...prevention is definitely worth a pound of cure...the keikis are just gonna end up in the ER with something
worse..

[HiloHaole]

Arrest the parents for boozing away the money for food for the children and getting tattoes instead of buying food for the children and, and, and ....

[Guest]

bodysurf, Seeing as how pork is free and beans and cornbread are dirt cheap. And growing vegetables is very cheap I don't see the problem. Well I guess if you take out intelligence and diligence from the equation. There are 24 hours in every day to do nothing but be industrious, but I suspect it is hard to squeeze in thrift and industry in to ones schedule when there is Maury, Oprah, Jerry Springer to watch. That is another reason to not have gamble and lotto. It seems that the same people that don't understand mathematical odds also don't understand that for the price of a kids meal at McDonalds you can feed a family of four a nutritious meal.
I was in a remote village in the Amazon, I noticed the Indians that lived in and around the village were impoverished , dirty and malnourished. The indigenous peoples living just a mile from the village were happy, healthy and very industrious. They were down right muscular and beamed with health.

Some people show a boundless amount of craft and industry when they need another chunk of ice.

[loffelkopffl]

leave it to lingle and her cohorts to eliminate this important program, making sure our kids have health insurance should be a top priority, but in the typical right wing conservative response, she decides $50000.00 a month is just too much for her budget, maybe with that huge savings she'll be able to travel to more states to campaign for her alaska soulmate, lol

[Rob Tucker]

It is indeed a shame that the first thing to get tossed overboard are education and children's health. Is it true that the legislature voted themselves a 35% pay increase at the same time? If so that is disgusting.

esnap seems to miss the reality of health issues. It is not McDonald's based and the answer doesn't lie in the Amazon. It is modern medicine in todays work and the fact that we are all frail humans. The McDonald's argument sounds like the plastic bag ban argument.....

[Guest]

Sorry Rob, I just don't think it is my or the "collectives" responsibility to pay for free medical care, free food, free clothing, free housing or free education for that matter. There are Utopian gardens of Eden like North Korea and Cuba where the state enforces the "From those according to their ability, to those according to their needs" but those Marxist ideals are antithetical to the human spirit and cause misery universally and absolutely.
When a government starts down the path of confiscating your corn and redistributing it, they will also have to set up gulags and a secret police to squash dissent.
Medical care is way over priced because most of it is paid for with a 3rd party payer system. (Private insurance, Medicaid, Medicare, etc) If you could go to the grocery store and get any and every thing you wanted and just charge it to a 3rd party, your shopping and eating habits would change.
If there was no private or public health insurance, doctors would become very competitive. Basic medical care would be affordable. When it comes to radical or major trauma there is almost no limit to how much money can be thrown at a condition. Hospitals, Medical device companies and drug companies make fortunes from this. I have no problem if you have worked hard, saved and sacrificed to gain wealth and you want to pay for a quadruple bypass for your 85-year-old grandmother. I just think that is like putting a brand new engine and transmission in a 1974 pinto. Trading money for things is a system where people get exactly what they disserve.

Money is not just a measure of how hard or how much you work, but also how smart you work and how much you are willing to sacrifice by doing without and saving.

In the world there are always going to be slackers, I just don’t see where giving them anything free is going to make less of them.

Maybe there should be a special premium that socialist could pay so that all there socialist friends could have all the socialist benefits. Then these socialists could take their socialist children to the socialist clinic. Oh wait a tick, there already is a system like that, it goes under different names, Kaiser Permanente, Blue Cross, blue shield are a two.

In the U.K. where they have socialized medicine:
“The National Health Service, Britain’s government-run health care system, finds itself so unresponsive that it doesn’t trust itself to provide care for its employees. Instead, they paid private physiotherapists to treat its staff rather than wait for NHS providers to become available”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopi...ately.html

But I agree about the shame of politicians giving themselves pay increases. That should be subjected to a popular vote.

[Rob Tucker]

So children are slackers?

I understand where you are coming from from a conservative point of view. I don't think that children should be the first to be shorted in tough times. I think they should be the last. I don't think of this as conservative or liberal. The word humane comes to mind.

Once upon a time the values of our society could be summed up as Women and Children First. The natural alternative to that is Every Man for Himself.

Which of those phrases best illustrate your values?

Just asking for the sake of discussion as Hawaii leadership seems to prefer the latter.