Questions about Insurance and Healthcare

Questions about Insurance and Healthcare

for Conservatives and Liberals

 

For Conservatives

• Are you prepared to see people denied healthcare if it means their not having serious illness treated or dying from preventable causes because they lack healthcare?

• If are so prepared:

• Would you also do away with or severely limit the benefits currently provided seniors by Medicare?

• Would you do away with or severely limited the benefits provided to the poor by Medicaid?`

• Do you make any distinction between the sick and the injured in the obligation of hospitals to treat? Would allow hospitals to deny emergency treatment to either or both?

• If the Affordable Care Act is repealed, to what point in American history would you set back the clock with regard insurance and healthcare? 

• Do you favor a purely market-driven (to the extent such is possible in the American economy) to the availability of insurance and the distribution of healthcare?

• Would you do anything at all to insure or provide healthcare for those with pre-existing conditions?

• Is there a limit in the numbers of persons or percentage of the population suffering death because of lack of healthcare you would find unacceptable?

• If you are not so prepared:

• What would you be willing to do to assure that persons with serious illnesses are treated and that persons whose deaths are preventable do not die?

• Assuming you would want churches and charitable organizations to enable uninsured persons either to obtain insurance or to receive healthcare, what, if anything, would you do about those for whom these organizations could not or would not provide?

• Would you leave in place Medicare? What changes do you think are necessary for it to continue to be viable?

• Would you leave in place Medicaid? What changes would in terms of contraction, expansion, modification to keep it viable?

• What, if anything would you do about those with pre-existing conditions?

• What, if any role, do you envision for the government?

• Do you think it would be more likely to come up with workable healthcare solutions by working with Conservative Group 1 above or Liberal Group 2 below?

For Liberals

• Are you prepared to spend an unlimited amount of money so that everyone with a serious illness and everyone with a preventable cause of death is treated?

• If you are so prepared:

• Would there be any role of the insurance industry?

• Do you favor a single payer system of providing healthcare?

• Even, if an unlimited amount of money were provided, would rationing of healthcare be necessary?

• How would you provide the money to insure and/or treat everyone? Increased deficits? Higher taxes for some? 

• What, anything would you do to restrain the cost of healthcare? Would hospitals be run by the government? Would doctors become employees of the government? Would the pharmaceutical companies be owned by the government?

• How do you see money being available for medical research that would lead to such things as innovation in treatment, development of new drugs, etc?

• Would parts of the federal budget have to be eliminated, cut, or restrained in order to have money to spend on healthcare? If so, what parts?

• When you say you are willing to spend an unlimited amount of money, do you mean an absolutely unlimited amount of money? Would there be any limits in terms of such things as percentage of the federal/state budgets or percentage of the GDP?

• If you are not so prepared:

• Would you cover with insurance or by some other means provide healthcare for all?

• Do you favor a single payer system or a system that uses some combination of government and private involvement?

• What limits would you impose on expenditures for healthcare?

• What changes, if any, would you make to Medicare and Medicaid?

• Do you think it would be more likely to come up with workable healthcare solutions by working with Liberal Group 1 above or Conservative Group 2 further above?