"Unaffordable Health Insurance " from Mark Dayton's Facebook post today

[dflprincess]

http://www.facebook.com/#!/notes/mark-dayton/unaffordable-health-insurance/304840054659

Unaffordable Health Insurance
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Today at 3:33pm
Today I held "Meet & Greets" in Red Wing, Zumbrota, and Kasson. There I heard more heartbreaking stories about people, who have "health insurance" but still can't afford health care. One woman told me about her 58 year-old husband, who had a heart attack two years ago. Now they cannot find any affordable health insurance, because of his "pre-existing condition." Another couple, who have health insurance coverage through the husband's Carpenters' Union, are facing a 39% increase in their premiums from just a year ago. Another man told about his teenage daughter, who may need an MRI that he can't afford because his deductible is too high.

I have heard far too many of these horror stories throughout our state. Health care is unavailable for people without health insurance; and it's unavailable, because it's unaffordable, for people with health insurance.

Meanwhile, United Health Care, the nation's largest health insurance company, recently reported a quarterly profit of over $1 Billion. That's over a billion dollars in profits from NOT paying for people's health care. By UHC's own report, for every dollar in health care premiums they collect, they pay only 82 cents for health care. The rest goes into administration and profits. By contrast, Medicare, which is far from perfect, pays 97 cents of every dollar for health care.

That's why I support getting the health insurance companies' profiteering out of our health care system -- and eliminating the drug companies' profiteering, too. As Governor, I PROMISE that will be one of my top priorities.

He also has this response in the thread:

I support National Single Payer, which, unfortunately, due to the powerful special interests in Washington, does not appear likely any time soon. As Governor, I will work with Sen. John Marty and other legislative leaders to make Minnesota the national leader in providing affordable health care, not unaffordable health insurance, for all our citizens.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. That's cool.

[pengillian101]

2. There ya go, then,

I have heard far too many of these horror stories throughout our state. Health care is unavailable for people without health insurance; and it's unavailable, because it's unaffordable, for people with health insurance.

[DisgustedInMN]

3. With all due respect...

.. to Mr Dayton, I met and spoke with John Marty and several other of the candidates at our SD 49 Caucus yesterday. Marty has been out front on this issue and has a good plan for a state wide Single Payer program already put together. I'm less than impressed that Dayton has decided to circumvent the DLF process of the caucuses. It was quite informative to be able to one on one with R T Rybak, Matt Entensa, and couple of the others. It will be interesting to see if waiting to "primary into" the race was a good idea or not.

On another front, Tarryl Clark is quite a spitfire and IMHO just about right to take out Crazy Lady Bachmann.

[dflprincess]

4. Marty has long been a leader on health care

and I plan to subcaucus for him at my SD convention. But, should we wind up with an endorsed candidate who isn't all that great, it doesn't hurt to keep up with what Dayton is saying about things. It could be he'd be preferable to the endorsed candidate.