An email from Nancy Gonsiorek, who ran unsuccessfully for a seat in District 3 on McHenry County Board in the GOP Primary Election, talks of how to fund Obamacare counseling being discontinued by the Family Health Partnership:
Subject: Board Rejects Health Care Grant
Dear County Board Members Barnes, Evertson, Heisler, Hammerand, Kohler, McClellan, Miller, Nowak, Schuster and Skala;
The Affordable Care Act is not a perfect law.
Nancy Gonsiorek
In fact, it is an incredibly convoluted and frustrating law.
Nevertheless it is the law, and millions of hard-working taxpayers have been able to obtain insurance because of it.
I don’t expect it to go away; therefore my hope is that, over time, the law will be easier to administer and an increase in the insured population will reduce the cost of health care for all.
It was with great disappointment that I read in today’s paper that you have chosen to decline $584,791 in federal health care funding.
Respectfully, what is wrong with bringing our tax dollars back to McHenry County?
We have many people in this county who are uninsured, many of whom may be working one or more part time jobs, such as yourselves.
The difference between you and those who enroll in insurance plans provided through the ACA, is that you have the opportunity to receive taxpayer-provided benefits for your part-time job as a public official.
Perhaps you are not aware that a majority of employers in McHenry County do not provide benefits for part-time work.
Perhaps you may not know that many elected officials are, in fact, unpaid?
Perhaps we can make a compromise on this situation, to meet “halfway.”
I understand that you may oppose a current law on principle.
Whether it is good policy to reject the funding provided to administer the law may be appropriate in your mind; however, I view this as the baby thrown out with the bathwater.
So, If you really want to make a point about government spending, here’s your chance!
You, the 10 county board members who oppose wasteful government spending, should take your collective $286,972.12 in government-provided salaries and benefits and make a charitable contribution to the Family Health Partnership Clinic in Crystal Lake, so they may continue to provide health care to the uninsured.
Next, vote to reduce the size of the County Board from 24 to 14 members – voila!
More savings for taxpayers – that $286,971.12 becomes an annual savings for our taxpayers.
The additional benefit would be that the County Board meetings may not take quite so long.
You know the old saying about providing solutions rather than complaining about problems.
I hope you will agree that I have provided you a solution to your problem of wasteful government spending.
Thank you for your consideration.
Nancy Gonsiorek asks: “Respectfully, what is wrong with bringing our tax dollars back to McHenry County?”
She asks this as a rhetorical question, but I think it deserves an answer.
It is wrong because it diverts tax dollars from their intended purpose.
We pay taxes to the county to pay the county’s bills, to the state to pay the state’s bills, and to the feds to pay the fed’s bills.
Tax shifting from one unit of government to another is financially inefficient and thus destroys more wealth than simply using it to pay the legitimate debts of the state.
“Respectfully, what is wrong with bringing our tax dollars back to McHenry County?”
is a fallacious premise.
There is nothing beneficial for McHenry County taxpayers about requiring additional subsidization of the government mandated purchase of finance contracts from for-profit companies which supply unenforceable ‘promises’ to pay unspecified reimbursement rate to shifting, vaguely identified third party providers for non-specific services in the future at undisclosed prices.
If a needy person needs a medical service (for instance a lung biopsy), many private citizens or churches would gladly pay the Medicare reimbursement rate (which is less than 2 months typical health ‘insurance’ premiums) to obtain that needed service.
Instead, individuals are precluded from obtaining healthcare by being forced by law to spend publicly conscripted funds on the finance contracts (aka ‘insurance’) and then having no money left to buy actual healthcare.
Please do not characterize this government takeover of medical provision as other than what it is.
$500,000 would go a long way in a pool for people in need to buy ‘cash’ healthcare.
Please do some research about the true situation before cheerleading a cause that benefits a narrow few at the top of a pyramid.
Since Obamacare was a Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, idea which Obama put forth for unity purposes ( a joke because the Republicans refuse to work with him) most conservatives have hated it.
I personally want universal healthcare because it would be most fair.
Medicare for all would still let insurance companies sell policies for what Medicare doesn’t cover.
I think Nancy has a great idea.
This money will go to other counties in Illinois if McHenry turns it down and leave the hospitals to see the uninsured in ER rooms where insured peoples’ premiums are raised to pay for the uninsured.
Why not make people responsible?
If they have a job they can give up cigarettes or movies or make some sacrifice to pay for their insurance and the poor need help so if you care about people especially children ( in a country where 43 million are in poverty although we are rich) you will use your religious ethics to support this.
Republicans have had many years to come up with a viable alternative to Obamacare if they don’t like it.
There is an old saying “put your money where your mouth is” so I agree the county officials should donate their salaries and benefits to this if they want to turn down the money.
Charitable people can help a few people with charity like Habitat for Humanity houses but it doesn’t cover everybody in need.
Help make Obama care aka Roomneycare better.
And like your party said after the Gore-Bush election ” Don’t be a sore loserman” get over it.
Obama won.
Live with iit.
There is a great alternative, it is cash (direct pay) healthcare.
The issue has been obfuscated by people unwilling to research actual reimbursement rates and practices which make it nearly impossible for clinicians to obtain reimbursements for services rendered.
“This money will go to other counties in Illinois if McHenry turns it down and leave the hospitals to see the uninsured in ER rooms where insured peoples’ premiums are raised to pay for the uninsured.”
This statement contains Two factually inaccurate premises.
Counties who participate willingly in wasteful profligate spending will accept such funding, but while we may suspect other counties in Illinois have this beggar-thy-neighbor attitude we cannot be sure of it until it actually happens.
The first one to stand up and say: “No More Of This In Illinois” may set a tone which other counties follow.
The canard about ER overuse causing raised premiums is simply inaccurate on many levels.
ER rack rates are meaningless, reimbursement rates are determined by a small govt.Medicare committee, and private insurance reimbursement rates mimic those of Medicare.
Premiums do not rise and fall on ER use (over- OR under-).
If anything, it is uninsured patients (which includes all private payers who are out-of-network or ‘refused’a particular service by their ‘insurer’ but decide they would like to live anyway) who are subsidizing insured patients.
You want to state an opinion that will sway policy, I beg you: FIRST please read up on DRGs, CPT coding, RVUs, Stark Law (squelching cost-saving competition by medical professionals), Certificates of Need (authorizing hospital monopolies and squelching competition), RAC Audits shutting down small physician practices, and Chuck Schumer- orchestrated special waivers for GBOs (group buying organizations) which have caused shortages in all supplies from IV saline to oncology meds.
CPT coding is a registered trademark of the American Medical Association.
http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/physician-resources/solutions-managing-your-practice/coding-billing-insurance/cpt.page‘
Doctors in a universal system would work for the government and not be small businessmen which puts capitalism and medicine at odds
Why don’t we pay for basic services for people who need it.
Sometimes people who are low income can receive care that middle class people will think twice about since they have to pay copays and deductibles which they might not have at the moment.
But if we gave basic insurance coverage to everyone determined on medical need and made people who could afford it get insurance coverage for cosmetic procedures, elective procedures not medically necessary at least we would be assured of having everyone get basic care.
Profit should be take out of basic healthcare.
Instead even Obamacare incentivizes pharmaceutical companies, doctors and hospitals to game the system.
Why not lobby for basic healthcare for all like all other industrialized countries have and then have insurance bought for other procedures.
As long as we don’t have this yet, I think it is fair for people who earn money and can afford it to pay for their premiums, copays and deductibles if they are more fortunate to have the means to do so.
Let’s face it people say they can’t afford insurance but they gamble, drink, eat in restaurants, go on vacations, buy boats. They are irresponsible and Obamacare is making people share responsibility.
I Vehemently disagree that obamacare accomplishes ‘making people share responsibility’ .
Rather, it strives to give the impression that is happening while forcing the serving of an even larger slice of the health dollar pie up to administration, rather than provision, of medical care.
Third party gatekeepers which separate buyer and seller keep personal responsibility out of the transaction.
Keeping prices hidden maintains the illusion that gatekeepers are necessary.
When you know how much service you could get for the reimbursement rates paid, you see how little value these third party payers contribute.
And that vaunted lifetime cap on spending simply means there is a cap on allowed services performed by in network providers which won’t be exceeded.
It isn’t hard to see how little value that brings when networks and allowed services are narrowly defined and constantly redefined by third party payers.
If you want or need some ‘off the menu’ service you are free to exceed that lifetime cap on your own dime.
Nancy, Nancy, Nancy… you know many here in Nunda appreciate your hard work but you lost.
You lost because you refused to take a side and played both sides – poorly.
Maybe if you would have LISTENED to what the voters wanted maybe you would be 11 days out from a general… but your not.
Many people want to shrink the size of the board.
Fine. But lets not stop there.
Lets shrink the size of the county administration by cutting the salaries of all department heads by 33.3 percent… repeating of course.
How much money could we save then?
What if we did an in depth analysis of supervisors inside the county administration and removed every “supervisor” with less then four reporting employees, how much would we save then?
Get back to us on this Nancy – we look forward to your report.
I think it is disgusting that the Mchenry County Board thought fit to deny funding for health care insurance assistance to a few hundred folks in McHenry County.
Obviously the health care insurance industry was not working in America.
Unless you consider it acceptable that 40 to 50 million people mostly lower income lower be skilled folks could not afford basic health care insurance.
There remains plenty of problems with government and the health insurance industry.
Duhh.
Most people in the upper 80 % have jobs with insurance.
Why?
Because they “work hard” ?
Sure they do, because they CAN work hard.
They were born with an upper 80% skill set. What business hires people from the bottom 20 % ?
None, that is one reason why we need government, not private charities.
Inter governmental transfer inefficiencies is not the root problem.
The problem is some people really do not care about all people.
Why does skala need insurance coverage?
He has his own business in Huntley.
I GUESS IT IS TAKE TAKE TAKE.
Ernie you assume so much and are misinformed.
I suppose you agree with Hillary too when she just stated “businesses do not create jobs”.
Because of Obamacare jobs are lost, hours reduced, health care reduced, and going on the exchanges has become a nightmare.
Like Reagan said, it’s a bad day when the government says “we’re here to help”.
Just look at the VA to see what we’re in for, and Ezekiel Emmanuel (architect of Obamacare) a few weeks ago, no on should live past 75.
Under obamacare health care will be severely limited as you approach your senior years according to my doctor!
Discontinuing public funding of public promotion for private, for-profit insurance businesses should not be mischaracterized as “denying funding for healthcare insurance assistance to…folks..”.
With the obamacare insurance exchange up and running for some time now, there are ample private resourceslike fellow clients, churches, and other social service agencies which can get a prospective purchaser to a computer and talk about insurance.
If the client doesn’t participate to some degree in learning how insurance works (what is provided, what is expected) then signing that client up will only be of benefit to those receiving the monthly premiums.
There is one private company aggressively pursing all the “dual eligibles” in the area.
They spend their own money with movie nights and manicure events and such, in order to pitch to prospective clients.
Who knows what other private money would be invested in pushing a very lucrative private industry until public money gets out of the way?
And there’s Karma again with his Socialist drivel.
Yea those people are just “more fortunate” aren’t they Karma?
They didn’t work themselves to a better life and the ability to afford, they lucked out, right?
We should this and we should that.
Another great spender of other people’s money.
Right Comrade? Geez!
The resolution has absolutely NOTHING to do with receiving health care – free or otherwise.
It has to do with the issue of smaller government.
Why do we need to hire more people to help people find a health insurance company or apply for Medicare?
The Grant received last year was to be a one time grant to help in the initial sign-ups for healthcare – but like all other expenditures of my tax dollars, once a budget line item gets approved, it takes a voter earthquake to remove it from future budgets!
One of the primary items on the GOP Party platform is smaller government.
If you support this absolute WASTE of my tax dollars, the McHenry County GOP Central Committee should disavow any support for you!!!
You should NOT have an (R) behind your name.
The new health director of the McHenry County Health Department knows how to ‘play’ the local media.
This ‘play’ is made a lot easier when one of the Editors of the main local rag is on the BOARD for Pioneer Center!!!
I suggest that if Nancy is serious about helping people she volunteer her time to help people find a health insurance company.
Our healthcare system was based on employer based healthcare starting in the 1940’s.
Now a lot of businesses, who want a better bottom line, are not giving employees health insurance.
If we had universal healthcare businesses would not have to deal with so many options.
Canada has higher incomes than the US so how can they have universal healthcare and afford it.
In our current system insurance company ceo’s make big profits. Obama has said that 90% of premiums must go for healthcare thereby cutting some of the money of these ceos, but to save real money we cannot have a for profit healthcare system.
Fox News had a show where they said the richest asset of the earth is oil, but that is not true.
Earth’s biggest asset is people and if people don’t have healthcare they can’t be productive citizens.
Obama took a republican plan which the Heritage Foundation came up with and we still see republicans crying like babies.
Maybe because a lot more people are poorer now because since Reagan we have outsourced jobs and deregulated companies where we give incentives for so called “American business who are really multinational corporations to go for the cheapest and not necessarily the best labor.
The Democrats want to give incentives to bring businesses back to America but Boehner blocked this.
Without these businesses paying into the tax breaks middle class citizens are forced to pay more for healthcare, taxes etc while they are growing poorer.
Make Obamacare better by having both sides speak up for universal healthcare.
Also in reply to con, McHenry County is a mostly Republican county so why are property taxes so high here and don’t blame teachers and schools because locally elected school boards gave those raises.
I find most republicans want their medicare, their social security, their good schools, their beliefs but everyone else should find their own way.
Poverty rates in McHenry County are over 7% and growing.
Most people who make good money in McHenry County are either business owners or people who work for government (which they hate but take pensions etc sometimes double or triple dipping like Prim wants to do).
Republicans are anti immigration but how many people ask those they hire to do work on their property if they are here legally.
How many businesses hire illegal aliens regardless of the law because they know they won’t be held accountable.
If Insurance companies kept healthcare at reasonable prices and if employers gave each employee healthcare (which the businesses get a tax break for) the old system would work, but businesses mostly are greedy and only see the bottom line.
People who rant about poor people on Medicaid or governors who turn down Obamacare for single poor adults don’t care about their constituents.
America has become a country of service jobs and corporate welfare.
That is why Walmart and McDonalds tell their people to apply for food stamps and Medicaid but I never hear them criticized only Obama because he took the first step to solve this problem.
Nancy,
Why do we need so much money to help someone navigate a poorly deployed website?
More importantly, why didn’t this man just use the telephone to sign up?
Ernie,
Help me understand how somebody can be born into a skill set.
I always thought that a skill set is developed through education and training, no?
If you think a foreign National’s program is anything other than a way to control you – then there is no hope in educating you otherwise.
The Heritage Foundation’s idea had nothing whatsoever to do with keeping the three broken health systems we have in the United States and layering a fourth on top.
Obamacare is an abomination made of the greed of a few and the ignorance of the administration. Obamacare doesn’t resemble anything like best practices world wide or even anything like well intentioned mistakes made by nations over fifty years ago.
Obamacare is all Obama’s lack of understanding of leadership and good government.
If government is to get involved in the largest economic sector of our society then there are excellent examples of how to do this in nations far more experienced in this type of control.
Taiwan was the latest to overhaul their health system and would have been a brilliant place to start learning how intelligent educated people would create a health system from scratch for the benefit of The People and business alike.
Instead we have a law which caters to the wealthy special interests with absolutely nothing written into the law to actually overhaul the fragmented and fractured health system we have in this nation.
Obama will rightly be vilified for generations for his clear bankruptcy of conscience and utterly corrupt approach to governance.
If the ideas of the Heritage Foundation are desired then implement those ideas as stated.
The rightful place of government is, among many things, to be a counterweight to corporate and special interests.
Obama has proven to be as bought off as any modern president while willingly sharing his total lack of understanding as it pertains to the proper role of any government and certainly the proper role of the government of the United States of America.
Local government governing properly for their citizens is an excellent place to begin taking back The People’s rightful place as the sole and only arbiter of The People’s money.
Those little green men you always talk about are controlling you Cindy.
I have never ever once mentioned any little green men.
Is your psych person treating you for that projection problem?
I understand that the funding was to promote the ACA, with the goal to connect those folks whom remain without health insurance to insurance companies.
It is exactly the same concept as marketing an idea or product.
If the idea or product is discouraged you sell less.
If promoted you sell more.
Who are these particular folks?..
Probably at the bottom unfortunately with well below average skills.
For the last 2+ years there has been a tremendous effort to discourage and defund the ACA, with predictions of horrible results.
Its no wonder why some uninsured people, at the bottom, are confused and remain uninsured.
Private companies are indeed competing to get people to enroll with their insurance so they make more profit.
Great.
Yet, here we are, millions signed, millions more to go.
Progress, but far from completed.
Some people may think it is waste of tax payer money.
I think it is a waste to not to support our own people.
It’s an externality just like good roads, infrastructure, education, military, health care system.
It is easy and feels-good to advocate for spending unlimited amounts of money on unsupervised ‘agencies’ for vaguely described social wellbeing.
It is lazy and destructive to attack those who would question the efficacy of those agencies and the programs receiving public funding.
It is difficult to examine results of such programs and point out when they are not working (on a value-for-cost basis) or they are destructive (serving up advantages to a few competitors who may be more in favor with the current regime than others, or destroying the independent medical provision system in favor of serving up practical monopolies to a few insurers and a couple of hospital groups which in turn gives doctors little choice but to become service employees).
Supporting our own people comes in many forms.
I do not believe that agitating to get other people’s tax money to pass through government hands into programs which are not compelled to operate within standards of efficiency or objectivity is supportive of our people.
If the truth be told, little if any of the current debacle has to do with healthcare in the U.S.
It has more to do with tort law, and the trial lawyers that take advantage of it.
If you want to really reduce healthcare costs, the formula is simple: cap the maximum lawsuit amount at 50 to 100 thousand dollars, per patient, per incident.
Watch the costs, and subsequent prices drop, because doctors will no longer have to struggle to insure themselves.
Want to reduce healthcare costs EVEN MORE?
Another simple formula: require a social security number to treat a patient.
No SSN?
No problem!
Provide your billing information, and secure a deposit.
If the bill is not paid per the terms and conditions, put one of those trial lawyers back to work collecting the money owed!
And (in Nancy’s words)……. “voila!”
Greg,
People are indeed born with God given talent.
Some have great talent, some have meager talent,some have practically none.
Whatever the level these talents require education and training to come to fruition and life success. You may have never met a mentally disabled person, or even below average, but I have.
I have also met people with exceptional God given talent and are true leaders.
We who are lucky enough to have born talent and also to further develop their given talent with education and training are the most successful.
What about the others?
Forget they exist ?
Ok Ernie, try this on for size.
A 54 year old, hardworking McHenryite, who earns $46 K a year has to take Obama’s say garbage Bronze plan at $453 a month, 60% is paid after the $5 K deduct.
Then you got a drug using, fat alcoholic, who’s never held a full time job earning $15 K, just above Medicaid, pays exactly $1 per month for the same deal.
Real fair, no? Or should we just refer to your manifesto, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” Marx
Excellent question.
It sucks, that we need to decide to help the bottom 5% or the next 20%. The low payed hard worker should not be responsible for the fat alcoholic.
The next 75% are in a better position.
1) I am glad I am not the fat drug using alcoholic, that is a bad life, likely to be a short one. We should figure out how to eliminate this desease. Hmmm health care R&D ?
2) The 54 yr old making 46k$ has two bad choices of zero health insurance, or the crap bronze level… Who provides health insurance ? Private insurance.
The government covers the indigent alcoholics and private insurance covers the rest. This is not a venn diagram. Its an externality.
I agree with you.
That hard working fellow should either get a better job to make more money, or if such a better job is not available at his skill level, then You should pay more taxes to cover his insurance so his wife and kids have a better healthy future.
Or kill, is ignore the alcoholic so he and all others like him die and we can use the ‘extra’ money to help out the low payed hard worker.. Tough choices.
Not the society I want.
I hope we all can agree that human compassion is felt by all sorts of humans without regard to politics.
A discussion of whether to allocate scant public resources ( tax dollars) to any given project should not be distracted by which side is the bigger sociopath.
I believe a common tactic employed in controlling large prisoner populations is to channel release of aggression toward fellow prisoners ( rival gangs) as a distraction of focus from specific details of any issue at hand.
The issue at hand, in my opinion,is whether the specific target population of McHenry County has already been apprised of Obamacare, whether the noncompliant percentage of that population simply refuses to purchase this product, and whether more cost effective means to compel this noncompliant population should prevail over taxpayer funded programs.
Tort reform.
My suggestion for tort reform is to legislate that legal professional malpractice rules mirror medical professional malpractice rules.
Any non-economic damages (mental anguish, lost income, loss of consortium) allowed in medmal judgements should be allowed in legal mal judgements.
The first step toward equitable treatment under the law for all citizens is to eliminate special waivers and favors for privileged insiders.
If docs are subject to unlimited damage awards then so too should be attorneys.
Next, just as the government declared that doctors’ prices were too high, and took over the price-fixing for fees on every medical service( see Medicare reimbursement rates), the government should now take on the project of standardizing and socializing the legal profession.
Legal fees should be affordable for all citizens.
Unlike medical treatment, access to legal representation is mentioned in the Constitution.
Why then are attorneys given special dispensation from malpractice liability and allowed to charge unlimited hourly rates?
The effect of sky high legal fees, and the burgeoning of complicated legalities which require ordinary citizens to hire attorneys, is an even worse drag on the economy than medical prices ( prices that doctors actually receive, that is).
Small business competition is practically impossible as so much of the cost of any new business is legal compliance.
Where is the government on this issue?
Aren’t American citizens entitled to legal care as a human right?