A Complete Waste of Space

Banner makes 1.5% profit. Period. Talk about small margins. Most hospitals make those kinds of percentages.

ruggbutt wrote:Banner makes 1.5% profit. Period. Talk about small margins. Most hospitals make those kinds of percentages.

I call bullshit.
Got links?

Don't need links. Got it straight from the lead Materials coordinator.

Barfly wrote:No one goes without health care here... you don't need insurance as it is. It's just that the government wants the control and the money.

who the hell do you think pays for all that care given away for 'free'?

ruggbutt wrote:Don't need links. Got it straight from the lead Materials coordinator.

sit down and take a deep breath, Ruggie, but I don't doubt you for a minute. Most hospitals run at a really low profit margin. The same cannot be said for pharmaceutacal firms(around 20%, after R and D budget) or insurance companies(20% plus).

callmeslick wrote:

Barfly wrote:No one goes without health care here... you don't need insurance as it is. It's just that the government wants the control and the money.

who the hell do you think pays for all that care given away for 'free'?

I never said anything about free.

callmeslick wrote:

ruggbutt wrote:Don't need links. Got it straight from the lead Materials coordinator.

sit down and take a deep breath, Ruggie, but I don't doubt you for a minute. Most hospitals run at a really low profit margin. The same cannot be said for pharmaceutacal firms(around 20%, after R and D budget) or insurance companies(20% plus).

Not real certain about the terms you chose to use, Slick. They appear confusing, to anyone. I see "profit" and "R and D"....and the number 20% thrown around casually. I sure would like to see that 20% plus on the Insurance Company side. Not saying or trying to imply that I know anything about Insurance, though a did hold a license in property casualty insurance here in Texas for a few years. What I paid out to the insureds? Was materials, labor plus 10% overhead and 10% profit, which went to the "contractors". Granted, the "health insurance" is a dab different. I have strongly held the opinion for the last six years that health insurance companies along with the hospitals should investigate all the "medical supply" middle man companies who are
well known to mark up "common" medical supplies several hundred percent.

To put it simply, no where in Obamacare or any "care" are the the costs associated with "health care" controlled
by legislation, federal or state, that I am aware of? Obamacare neglected, on purpose, identifying and legislating this problem. Why? Because your bastards are just as corrupt as our bastards.

You really want to do something about "affordable" health care....? It ain't difficult. Control profits across the health care industry providers. All of them. Allow only one middle man "medical supply" company to be involved. Limit everyones profit to 10% Overhead and 10% profit. Pharmaceutacal firms, the same plus 10 years to recover documented R and D costs. There you have it.

By the way...you also seemed to insinuate that taxpayers end up paying for health care anyway. That is inaccurate. More to the point, for your info...Tax payers who pay for their own health care insurance, pay higher premiums for that insurance, because everybody knows? Their medical bills are deliberately inflated to pay for the indigent/poor folks. That is a fact.

Pud, I didn't just make up the numbers. I used to work for a very large pharm corporation(now GlaxoSmithKline) and the target for the pharma side of the business was 20%, after taking a huge cut of revenue to plow back into R and D. As for the insurance companies, I deal with them now pretty regularly, as they are the primary payers to the Lab businesses, so those numbers aren't random either.


Barfly, you stated that, right now in the US, no one can be denied healthcare. You are correct, but what happens is that A LOT of people without insurance receive healthcare that gets rolled into the premiums from the insurers, and the cost structures of the hospitals(Doctors can and do deny service within their private practices). Thus, you and I pay for the uninsured, and we do so with built-in markups along the way. Frankly, single-payer systems are so much more efficient, the average US citizen is batshit crazy not to support cradle-to-grave Medicare, with supplemental insurance for those who wish to pay for it.

callmeslick wrote: Most hospitals run at a really low profit margin. The same cannot be said for pharmaceutacal firms(around 20%, after R and D budget) or insurance companies(20% plus).

The latter two are much higher than 20%. I'll talk to my buddy again and ask him what those margins are.

callmeslick wrote:Pud, I didn't just make up the numbers. I used to work for a very large pharm corporation(now GlaxoSmithKline) and the target for the pharma side of the business was 20%, after taking a huge cut of revenue to plow back into R and D. As for the insurance companies, I deal with them now pretty regularly, as they are the primary payers to the Lab businesses, so those numbers aren't random either.


Barfly, you stated that, right now in the US, no one can be denied healthcare. You are correct, but what happens is that A LOT of people without insurance receive healthcare that gets rolled into the premiums from the insurers, and the cost structures of the hospitals(Doctors can and do deny service within their private practices). Thus, you and I pay for the uninsured, and we do so with built-in markups along the way. Frankly, single-payer systems are so much more efficient, the average US citizen is batshit crazy not to support cradle-to-grave Medicare, with supplemental insurance for those who wish to pay for it.

It's batshit-crazy to assume that any single-payer system in the world is as good as what we have right now, despite our problems. It baffles how anyone believes they make a case that countries like Canada, Sweden, Bulgaria, Cuba have better health care systems than we do - without ANY supporting evidence. Just point to happy, government-informed foreign citizens that are told they are getting something for free, and it's a better arrangement than a free market system. Go take a visit to Cuba, and tell us how a dirt-poor country, that produces nothing, with an extraordinary unemployment rate, has anything but a tiny amount of modern health care for the few privledged, while the rest go with nothing but home remedies.

G.