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Getbig Main Boards => Gossip & Opinions => Topic started by: RagingBull on February 26, 2010, 05:58:24 AM
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socialized medicine: where the government owns the hospitals and clinics, where the doctors and nurses are government employees.
The VA (Veterans Administration) is socialized medicine. Medicare is not.
Medicare is a single payer system, where the government "owns" the insurance company.
I believe the UK is socialized medicine, where doctors are government employees. Canada is a single payer system.
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socialized medicine: where the government owns the hospitals and clinics, where the doctors and nurses are government employees.
The VA (Veterans Administration) is socialized medicine. Medicare is not.
Medicare is a single payer system, where the government "owns" the insurance company.
I believe the UK is socialized medicine, where doctors are government employees. Canada is a single payer system.
Ever go to the VA...it's not terrific care...that's what you get with socialized medicine.
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Ever go to the VA...it's not terrific care...that's what you get with socialized medicine.
You're behind the times.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2005/0501.longman.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/21/AR2005082101073.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/12/08/eveningnews/main2243606.shtml
however, that's beside the point, as no one is arguing for socialized medicine for all in the US. Single payer, on the other hand, would be the best solution to our current mess.
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am i...i guess you failed to read about the multiple people who used the VA for health care coming down with blood born diseases because of improper sterilization practices..perhaps you can come with me next time me and my old man visit the VA...i don't take the word of cbs news
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am i...i guess you failed to read about the multiple people who used the VA for health care coming down with blood born diseases because of improper sterilization practices.
when you make such claims on the internet, you really need to provide a link. I find this
http://injury-law.freeadvice.com/defective_products/va-biopsy-device.htm
however, I also find this
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/oct/14/local/me-cedars-sinai14
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/CancerPreventionAndTreatment/doctors-shocked-radiation-exposure/story?id=8818377
Mistakes are made in all professions. Fortunately we still have the ability to sue hospitals and doctors for malpractice.
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I wonder who paid for the production of that "Ronald Reagan speaks out against socialised medicine" record...?
I doubt it could be the very same insurance companies who profit from the deplorable inequities of the American healthcare system... could it?
No, surely not. Corporate propaganda is not the kind of thing a great statesman and intellectual like Ronald Reagan would be involved with... he's wasn't some kind of corporate shill, some kind of B-movie actor sell-out turned corporate mouthpiece.
Was he...?
The Luke
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I wonder who paid for the production of that "Ronald Reagan speaks out against socialised medicine" record...?
I doubt it could be the very same insurance companies who profit from the deplorable inequities of the American healthcare system... could it?
No, surely not. Corporate propaganda is not the kind of thing a great statesman and intellectual like Ronald Reagan would be involved with... he's wasn't some kind of corporate shill, some kind of B-movie actor sell-out turned corporate mouthpiece.
Was he...?
The Luke
Well, as SAG Pres., he did name names at HUAC hearings. That's not so good in my books. Probably rates pretty highly in Coach's, tho.
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Well, as SAG Pres., he did name names at HUAC hearings. That's not so good in my books. Probably rates pretty highly in Coach's, tho.
Those the McCarthy kangaroo courts... with "Have you no decency, sir" Senator Joe McCarthy searching for socialists/communists and his flaming queen sidekick Roy Cohen (who died of Aids in the '80s) ferreting out those sneaky closeted homosexuals (takes one to know one) on behalf of that most heterosexual of men, J Edgar Hoover...?
That debacle...?
The Luke
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and his flaming queen sidekick Roy Cohen (who died of Aids in the '80s) ferreting out those sneaky closeted homosexuals (takes one to know one) on behalf of that most heterosexual of men, J Edgar Hoover...?
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You're behind the times.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2005/0501.longman.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/21/AR2005082101073.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/12/08/eveningnews/main2243606.shtml
however, that's beside the point, as no one is arguing for socialized medicine for all in the US. Single payer, on the other hand, would be the best solution to our current mess. Canada is a single payer system.
Since you like to cut and paste: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,539943,00.html
Canadian Health Officials: Our Universal Health Care Is 'Sick,' Private Insurance Should Be Welcomed
Monday, August 17, 2009
PrintShareThis
Dr. Anne Doig, the incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association, said her country’s health care system is “sick” and “imploding,” the Canadian Press reported.
“We know there must be change,” Doig said in a recent interview. “We’re all running flat out, we’re all just trying to stay ahead of the immediate day-to-day demands.”
Canada’s universal health care system is not giving patients optimal care, Doig added. When her colleagues from across the country gather at the CMA conference in Saskatoon Sunday, they will discuss changes that need to be made, she said.
“We all agree the system is imploding, we all agree that things are more precarious than perhaps Canadians realize,” she said.
Current president of the CMA, Dr. Robert Ouellet, will make a presentation at the conference about his findings when he toured Europe in January, and met with health groups in several countries.
Ouellet has said that “competition should be welcomed, not feared,” meaning private health insurance should have a role in the public health system.
Doig said she isn’t sure what kind of changes will be proposed when the conference wraps up, but she does know that changes have to come – and fast. She said she understands that universal health care, while good in some ways, has not always been helpful for sick people or their families.
"(Canadians) have to understand that the system that we have right now — if it keeps on going without change — is not sustainable," Doig said.
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Reagan always was a douche.
Yes, it is true that the US has the 37th best health care system in the world, according to data from the World Health Organization (WHO). Fortunately for the ego of the United States, the WHO stopped doing the ranking in 2000 due to the difficulty of compiling the data.
The top ten are France, Italy, San Marino, Andorra, Malta, SIngapore, Spain, Oman, Austria, and Japan.
11-20 are Norway, Portugal, Monaco, Greece, Iceland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Ireland, and Switzerland.
21-30 are Belgium, Columbia, Sweden, Cyprus, Germany, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Israel, Morocco, and Canada.
31-40 are Finland, Australia, Chile, Denmark, Dominica, Costa Rica, United States of America, Slovenia, Cuba and Brunei.
41-50 are New Zealand, Bahrain, Croatia, Qatar, Kuwait, Barbados, Thailand, Czech Repubic, Malaysia, and Poland
Although our health care system is the ranked behind nearly every other industrialized country, the US can proudly boast that we pay more, a LOT more, than anyone else for our care. Not only does the United States spend more than $1 trillion more per year than anyone else on the planet, we also pay more, a lot more, per capita for our health care.
The World Health Organization says, “The U. S. health system spends a higher portion of its gross domestic product than any other country but ranks 37 out of 191 countries according to its performance.” This puts to rest the tired notion that the American “free market” pushes for the most efficient and least expensive system. In fact, we are the least efficient healthcare in the industrialized world.
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when you make such claims on the internet, you really need to provide a link. I find this
http://injury-law.freeadvice.com/defective_products/va-biopsy-device.htm
however, I also find this
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/oct/14/local/me-cedars-sinai14
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/CancerPreventionAndTreatment/doctors-shocked-radiation-exposure/story?id=8818377
Mistakes are made in all professions. Fortunately we still have the ability to sue hospitals and doctors for malpractice.
how's this?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/23/AR2009082302175.html
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Reagan always was a douche.
QFT.
Isn't the number of people without health insurance around 15% (40 some-odd million) of the US population? That's a huge, huge number of people without access to adequate medical care.
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Yeah I mean Gordon Brown is a douche too but at least in Britain we all have access to thousands of pounds of healthcare whenever we need it, and some poor single mother from some shitty area doesn't have to worry that her kids won't get treatment cos she earns almost nothing, or that she will be financially crippled of they do. Broad analogy haha but you get what I mean.
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when you make such claims on the internet, you really need to provide a link. I find this
http://injury-law.freeadvice.com/defective_products/va-biopsy-device.htm
however, I also find this
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/oct/14/local/me-cedars-sinai14
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/CancerPreventionAndTreatment/doctors-shocked-radiation-exposure/story?id=8818377
Mistakes are made in all professions. Fortunately we still have the ability to sue hospitals and doctors for malpractice.
and this....
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/04/AR2007030401394.html
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QFT.
Isn't the number of people without health insurance around 15% (40 some-odd million) of the US population? That's a huge, huge number of people without access to adequate medical care.
you can have health care without health insurance.
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you can have health care without health insurance.
Interesting. I don't know a great deal about the US system of health care ( other than media bs ), but why purchase health care insurance if it isn't required in order to receive health care? I'm pretty sure people who can't afford insurance could no more be able to afford to pay outright for medical services.
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Reagan always was a douche.
Yes, it is true that the US has the 37th best health care system in the world, according to data from the World Health Organization (WHO). Fortunately for the ego of the United States, the WHO stopped doing the ranking in 2000 due to the difficulty of compiling the data.
The top ten are France, Italy, , SIngapore, Spain, Oman, Austria, and Japan.
11-20 are Norway, Portugal, Monaco, Greece, Iceland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Ireland, and Switzerland.
21-30 are Belgium, , Sweden, Cyprus, Germany, Israel, Morocco, and Canada.
31-40 are Finland, Australia, Chile, Denmark,, United States of America, Slovenia, Cuba and Brunei.
41-50 are New Zealand, Bahrain, Croatia, Qatar, Kuwait, Barbados, Thailand, Czech Repubic, Malaysia, and Poland
Although our health care system is the ranked behind nearly every other industrialized country, the US can proudly boast that we pay more, a LOT more, than anyone else for our care. Not only does the United States spend more than $1 trillion more per year than anyone else on the planet, we also pay more, a lot more, per capita for our health care.
The World Health Organization says, “The U. S. health system spends a higher portion of its gross domestic product than any other country but ranks 37 out of 191 countries according to its performance.” This puts to rest the tired notion that the American “free market” pushes for the most efficient and least expensive system. In fact, we are the least efficient healthcare in the industrialized world.
Anybody want to get appendicitis here.....San Marino, Andorra, Malta. Or how about get in a car crash here Columbia, Dominica, Costa Rica, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates.....gimme a friggen break. That WHO study is now and always has been bullshit. If medicine in SA was so great they wouldn't be coming here.
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Anybody want to get appendicitis here.....San Marino, Andorra, Malta. Or how about get in a car crash here Columbia, Dominica, Costa Rica, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates.....gimme a friggen break. That WHO study is now and always has been bullshit. If medicine in SA was so great they wouldn't be coming here.
Dude, travel a little.
All three of those countries have top notch health services.... and Malta, Andorra and San Marino are all in Europe, not South America.
I've been to Malta (lots of antediluvian archaeological sites to see), every second street corner has a cosmetic dentist offering cutting edge technology; ozone sterilization; laser whitening; veneers and 3D x-ray topography custom milled porcelain caps at a fraction of the cost you'd pay in America (or elsewhere in Europe). The entire island (and Comino) is populated with retired British ex-pats... and if a country full of retired old people has decided on universal healthcare, maybe there's something to it.
The Maltese government rightly uses it's bulk-buying single payer status to batter down prices on prescription drugs, so forgive me and my "socialist" predilections if the thought of Big Pharma earning only honest profits DOESN'T cause a single solitary tear to roll down my cheek.
In fact, so many retirees have been enticed to move to Malta, that Malta now has the highest per capita income in the entire EU. How many wealthy retirees has America LOST due to it's poor healthcare system...?
I think the problem here isn't one of facts and misconceptions, as many presume... it's that people such as yourself have been propagandised to within an inch of your sanity and you don't even realise it.
The Luke
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if the us system sucks...then why do you have arab sheiks flying to the mayo clinic for medical treatment...stop the bs with the socialized medicine crap...
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All I can say about you liberals is WOW, you guys seriously need help!
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if the us system sucks...then why do you have arab sheiks flying to the mayo clinic for medical treatment...stop the bs with the socialized medicine crap...
you really think that pointing out the type of care a billionaire can get supports your cause regarding the masses? we have the best that money can buy. but if you have no money, you have limited access. the goal is to get the most care to the most people who need it, not just the few who can afford it.
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All I can say about you liberals is WOW, you guys seriously need help!
you could use some empathy. "There but for the grace of God go I."
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You're behind the times.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2005/0501.longman.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/21/AR2005082101073.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/12/08/eveningnews/main2243606.shtml
however, that's beside the point, as no one is arguing for socialized medicine for all in the US. Single payer, on the other hand, would be the best solution to our current mess.
A single payer system run by the government.. Great,,,, because they run ALL other programs top notch... No Thank you. I'll keep my insurance I buy out of my pocket...
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All I can say about you liberals is WOW, you guys seriously need help!
Coming from the guy who voted for CLINTON 2x.......
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anyone who opposes single payer healthcare for america is either
A)misinformed about the effectiveness of other countries single payer healthcare
b)misinformed about the effectiveness of our current system
c)misinformed about how our countries healthcare system would be set-up and funded if we shifted to single payer..
b)healthcare industry lobby or shareholder
the current system we have in place is horribly wasteful, we spend more per person here than alot of countries do that give their citizens totally free healthcare for everything from surgery, check ups, medications. we could increase coverage, improve covergae, and reduce costs simultaneously if the health insurance lobby would be obliviated.
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anyone who opposes single payer healthcare for america is either
A)misinformed about the effectiveness of other countries single payer healthcare
b)misinformed about the effectiveness of our current system
c)misinformed about how our countries healthcare system would be set-up and funded if we shifted to single payer..
b)healthcare industry lobby or shareholder
Head of nail, meet hammer. Quoted for truth!
The Luke
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I love our healthcare system here in Quebec.
Of course every one bitch about it because a lot of pussies goes to the hospital when they have a cold but hey... it's free.
with better organisation it could be a lot better.
out biggest problem here is with the old people, they hospitalize them put afterward they don't know where to put them so they take a lot of room in the hospital until they are switch to CHSLD or other institution that will take care of them
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Coming from the guy who voted for CLINTON 2x.......
Don't lie lib. I voted for him in his first term and regretted it (within 6 months) as I started to learn a little more then it because clear that your party wasn't that far from communism.
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A single payer system run by the government.. Great,,,, because they run ALL other programs top notch... No Thank you. I'll keep my insurance I buy out of my pocket...
yes, they do run medicare rather well, using up only a few percentage for administration cost, compared to up to 30% for for profit insurance companies
why is medicare ok for seniors, but not for everyone else?
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anyone who opposes single payer healthcare for america is either
A)misinformed about the effectiveness of other countries single payer healthcare
b)misinformed about the effectiveness of our current system
c)misinformed about how our countries healthcare system would be set-up and funded if we shifted to single payer..
b)healthcare industry lobby or shareholder
the current system we have in place is horribly wasteful, we spend more per person here than alot of countries do that give their citizens totally free healthcare for everything from surgery, check ups, medications. we could increase coverage, improve covergae, and reduce costs simultaneously if the health insurance lobby would be obliviated.
This is coming from a 20 year old who has no job and depends on others for survival. You truly have no clue much like JTsunami who thought it was Bush's fault that we have property taxes ::)
Read this, I have hundreds more where this came from...........
Socialized medicine has meant rationed care and lack of innovation. Small wonder Canadians are looking to the market.
Mountain-bike enthusiast Suzanne Aucoin had to fight more than her Stage IV colon cancer. Her doctor suggested Erbitux—a proven cancer drug that targets cancer cells exclusively, unlike conventional chemotherapies that more crudely kill all fast-growing cells in the body—and Aucoin went to a clinic to begin treatment. But if Erbitux offered hope, Aucoin’s insurance didn’t: she received one inscrutable form letter after another, rejecting her claim for reimbursement. Yet another example of the callous hand of managed care, depriving someone of needed medical help, right? Guess again. Erbitux is standard treatment, covered by insurance companies—in the United States. Aucoin lives in Ontario, Canada.
When Aucoin appealed to an official ombudsman, the Ontario government claimed that her treatment was unproven and that she had gone to an unaccredited clinic. But the FDA in the U.S. had approved Erbitux, and her clinic was a cancer center affiliated with a prominent Catholic hospital in Buffalo. This January, the ombudsman ruled in Aucoin’s favor, awarding her the cost of treatment. She represents a dramatic new trend in Canadian health-care advocacy: finding the treatment you need in another country, and then fighting Canadian bureaucrats (and often suing) to get them to pick up the tab.
But if Canadians are looking to the United States for the care they need, Americans, ironically, are increasingly looking north for a viable health-care model. There’s no question that American health care, a mixture of private insurance and public programs, is a mess. Over the last five years, health-insurance premiums have more than doubled, leaving firms like General Motors on the brink of bankruptcy. Expensive health care has also hit workers in the pocketbook: it’s one of the reasons that median family income fell between 2000 and 2005 (despite a rise in overall labor costs). Health spending has surged past 16 percent of GDP. The number of uninsured Americans has risen, and even the insured seem dissatisfied. So it’s not surprising that some Americans think that solving the nation’s health-care woes may require adopting a Canadian-style single-payer system, in which the government finances and provides the care. Canadians, the seductive single-payer tune goes, not only spend less on health care; their health outcomes are better, too—life expectancy is longer, infant mortality lower.
Thus, Paul Krugman in the New York Times: “Does this mean that the American way is wrong, and that we should switch to a Canadian-style single-payer system? Well, yes.” Politicians like Hillary Clinton are on board; Michael Moore’s new documentary Sicko celebrates the virtues of Canada’s socialized health care; the National Coalition on Health Care, which includes big businesses like AT&T, recently endorsed a scheme to centralize major health decisions to a government committee; and big unions are questioning the tenets of employer-sponsored health insurance. Some are tempted. Not me.
I was once a believer in socialized medicine. I don’t want to overstate my case: growing up in Canada, I didn’t spend much time contemplating the nuances of health economics. I wanted to get into medical school—my mind brimmed with statistics on MCAT scores and admissions rates, not health spending. But as a Canadian, I had soaked up three things from my environment: a love of ice hockey; an ability to convert Celsius into Fahrenheit in my head; and the belief that government-run health care was truly compassionate. What I knew about American health care was unappealing: high expenses and lots of uninsured people. When HillaryCare shook Washington, I remember thinking that the Clintonistas were right.
My health-care prejudices crumbled not in the classroom but on the way to one. On a subzero Winnipeg morning in 1997, I cut across the hospital emergency room to shave a few minutes off my frigid commute. Swinging open the door, I stepped into a nightmare: the ER overflowed with elderly people on stretchers, waiting for admission. Some, it turned out, had waited five days. The air stank with sweat and urine. Right then, I began to reconsider everything that I thought I knew about Canadian health care. I soon discovered that the problems went well beyond overcrowded ERs. Patients had to wait for practically any diagnostic test or procedure, such as the man with persistent pain from a hernia operation whom we referred to a pain clinic—with a three-year wait list; or the woman needing a sleep study to diagnose what seemed like sleep apnea, who faced a two-year delay; or the woman with breast cancer who needed to wait four months for radiation therapy, when the standard of care was four weeks.
I decided to write about what I saw. By day, I attended classes and visited patients; at night, I worked on a book. Unfortunately, statistics on Canadian health care’s weaknesses were hard to come by, and even finding people willing to criticize the system was difficult, such was the emotional support that it then enjoyed. One family friend, diagnosed with cancer, was told to wait for potentially lifesaving chemotherapy. I called to see if I could write about his plight. Worried about repercussions, he asked me to change his name. A bit later, he asked if I could change his sex in the story, and maybe his town. Finally, he asked if I could change the illness, too.
My book’s thesis was simple: to contain rising costs, government-run health-care systems invariably restrict the health-care supply. Thus, at a time when Canada’s population was aging and needed more care, not less, cost-crunching bureaucrats had reduced the size of medical school classes, shuttered hospitals, and capped physician fees, resulting in hundreds of thousands of patients waiting for needed treatment—patients who suffered and, in some cases, died from the delays. The only solution, I concluded, was to move away from government command-and-control structures and toward a more market-oriented system. To capture Canadian health care’s growing crisis, I called my book Code Blue, the term used when a patient’s heart stops and hospital staff must leap into action to save him. Though I had a hard time finding a Canadian publisher, the book eventually came out in 1999 from a small imprint; it struck a nerve, going through five printings.
Nor were the problems I identified unique to Canada—they characterized all government-run health-care systems. Consider the recent British controversy over a cancer patient who tried to get an appointment with a specialist, only to have it canceled—48 times. More than 1 million Britons must wait for some type of care, with 200,000 in line for longer than six months. A while back, I toured a public hospital in Washington, D.C., with Tim Evans, a senior fellow at the Centre for the New Europe. The hospital was dark and dingy, but Evans observed that it was cleaner than anything in his native England. In France, the supply of doctors is so limited that during an August 2003 heat wave—when many doctors were on vacation and hospitals were stretched beyond capacity—15,000 elderly citizens died. Across Europe, state-of-the-art drugs aren’t available. And so on.
But single-payer systems—confronting dirty hospitals, long waiting lists, and substandard treatment—are starting to crack. Today my book wouldn’t seem so provocative to Canadians, whose views on public health care are much less rosy than they were even a few years ago. Canadian newspapers are now filled with stories of people frustrated by long delays for care:
vow broken on cancer wait times: most hospitals across canada fail to meet ottawa’s four-week guideline for radiation
patients wait as p.e.t. scans used in animal experiments
back patients waiting years for treatment: study
the doctor is . . . out
As if a taboo had lifted, government statistics on the health-care system’s problems are suddenly available. In fact, government researchers have provided the best data on the doctor shortage, noting, for example, that more than 1.5 million Ontarians (or 12 percent of that province’s population) can’t find family physicians. Health officials in one Nova Scotia community actually resorted to a lottery to determine who’d get a doctor’s appointment.
Dr. Jacques Chaoulli is at the center of this changing health-care scene. Standing at about five and a half feet and soft-spoken, he doesn’t seem imposing. But this accidental revolutionary has turned Canadian health care on its head. In the 1990s, recognizing the growing crisis of socialized care, Chaoulli organized a private Quebec practice—patients called him, he made house calls, and then he directly billed his patients. The local health board cried foul and began fining him. The legal status of private practice in Canada remained murky, but billing patients, rather than the government, was certainly illegal, and so was private insurance.
Chaoulli gave up his private practice but not the fight for private medicine. Trying to draw attention to Canada’s need for an alternative to government care, he began a hunger strike but quit after a month, famished but not famous. He wrote a couple of books on the topic, which sold dismally. He then came up with the idea of challenging the government in court. Because the lawyers whom he consulted dismissed the idea, he decided to make the legal case himself and enrolled in law school. He flunked out after a term. Undeterred, he found a sponsor for his legal fight (his father-in-law, who lives in Japan) and a patient to represent. Chaoulli went to court and lost. He appealed and lost again. He appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. And there—amazingly—he won.
Chaoulli was representing George Zeliotis, an elderly Montrealer forced to wait almost a year for a hip replacement. Zeliotis was in agony and taking high doses of opiates. Chaoulli maintained that the patient should have the right to pay for private health insurance and get treatment sooner. He based his argument on the Canadian equivalent of the Bill of Rights, as well as on the equivalent Quebec charter. The court hedged on the national question, but a majority agreed that Quebec’s charter did implicitly recognize such a right.
It’s hard to overstate the shock of the ruling. It caught the government completely off guard—officials had considered Chaoulli’s case so weak that they hadn’t bothered to prepare briefing notes for the prime minister in the event of his victory. The ruling wasn’t just shocking, moreover; it was potentially monumental, opening the way to more private medicine in Quebec. Though the prohibition against private insurance holds in the rest of the country for now, at least two people outside Quebec, armed with Chaoulli’s case as precedent, are taking their demand for private insurance to court.
Rick Baker helps people, and sometimes even saves lives. He describes a man who had a seizure and received a diagnosis of epilepsy. Dissatisfied with the opinion—he had no family history of epilepsy, but he did have constant headaches and nausea, which aren’t usually seen in the disorder—the man requested an MRI. The government told him that the wait would be four and a half months. So he went to Baker, who arranged to have the MRI done within 24 hours—and who, after the test discovered a brain tumor, arranged surgery within a few weeks.
Baker isn’t a neurosurgeon or even a doctor. He’s a medical broker, one member of a private sector that is rushing in to address the inadequacies of Canada’s government care. Canadians pay him to set up surgical procedures, diagnostic tests, and specialist consultations, privately and quickly. “I don’t have a medical background. I just have some common sense,” he explains. “I don’t need to be a doctor for what I do. I’m just expediting care.”
He tells me stories of other people whom his British Columbia–based company, Timely Medical Alternatives, has helped—people like the elderly woman who needed vascular surgery for a major artery in her abdomen and was promised prompt care by one of the most senior bureaucrats in the government, who never called back. “Her doctor told her she’s going to die,” Baker remembers. So Timely got her surgery in a couple of days, in Washington State. Then there was the eight-year-old badly in need of a procedure to help correct her deafness. After watching her surgery get bumped three times, her parents called Timely. She’s now back at school, her hearing partly restored. “The father said, ‘Mr. Baker, my wife and I are in agreement that your star shines the brightest in our heaven,’ ” Baker recalls. “I told that story to a government official. He shrugged. He couldn’t fucking care less.”
Not everyone has kind words for Baker. A woman from a union-sponsored health coalition, writing in a local paper, denounced him for “profiting from people’s misery.” When I bring up the comment, he snaps: “I’m profiting from relieving misery.” Some of the services that Baker brokers almost certainly contravene Canadian law, but governments are loath to stop him. “What I am doing could be construed as civil disobedience,” he says. “There comes a time when people need to lead the government.”
Baker isn’t alone: other private-sector health options are blossoming across Canada, and the government is increasingly turning a blind eye to them, too, despite their often uncertain legal status. Private clinics are opening at a rate of about one a week. Companies like MedCan now offer “corporate medicals” that include an array of diagnostic tests and a referral to Johns Hopkins, if necessary. Insurance firms sell critical-illness insurance, giving policyholders a lump-sum payment in the event of a major diagnosis; since such policyholders could, in theory, spend the money on anything they wanted, medical or not, the system doesn’t count as health insurance and is therefore legal. Testifying to the changing nature of Canadian health care, Baker observes that securing prompt care used to mean a trip south. These days, he says, he’s able to get 80 percent of his clients care in Canada, via the private sector.
Another sign of transformation: Canadian doctors, long silent on the health-care system’s problems, are starting to speak up. Last August, they voted Brian Day president of their national association. A former socialist who counts Fidel Castro as a personal acquaintance, Day has nevertheless become perhaps the most vocal critic of Canadian public health care, having opened his own private surgery center as a remedy for long waiting lists and then challenged the government to shut him down. “This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week,” he fumed to the New York Times, “and in which humans can wait two to three years.”
And now even Canadian governments are looking to the private sector to shrink the waiting lists. Day’s clinic, for instance, handles workers’-compensation cases for employees of both public and private corporations. In British Columbia, private clinics perform roughly 80 percent of government-funded diagnostic testing. In Ontario, where fealty to socialized medicine has always been strong, the government recently hired a private firm to staff a rural hospital’s emergency room.
This privatizing trend is reaching Europe, too. Britain’s government-run health care dates back to the 1940s. Yet the Labour Party—which originally created the National Health Service and used to bristle at the suggestion of private medicine, dismissing it as “Americanization”—now openly favors privatization. Sir William Wells, a senior British health official, recently said: “The big trouble with a state monopoly is that it builds in massive inefficiencies and inward-looking culture.” Last year, the private sector provided about 5 percent of Britain’s nonemergency procedures; Labour aims to triple that percentage by 2008. The Labour government also works to voucherize certain surgeries, offering patients a choice of four providers, at least one private. And in a recent move, the government will contract out some primary care services, perhaps to American firms such as UnitedHealth Group and Kaiser Permanente.
Sweden’s government, after the completion of the latest round of privatizations, will be contracting out some 80 percent of Stockholm’s primary care and 40 percent of its total health services, including one of the city’s largest hospitals. Since the fall of Communism, Slovakia has looked to liberalize its state-run system, introducing co-payments and privatizations. And modest market reforms have begun in Germany: increasing co-pays, enhancing insurance competition, and turning state enterprises over to the private sector (within a decade, only a minority of German hospitals will remain under state control). It’s important to note that change in these countries is slow and gradual—market reforms remain controversial. But if the United States was once the exception for viewing a vibrant private sector in health care as essential, it is so no longer.
Yet even as Stockholm and Saskatoon are percolating with the ideas of Adam Smith, a growing number of prominent Americans are arguing that socialized health care still provides better results for less money. “Americans tend to believe that we have the best health care system in the world,” writes Krugman in the New York Times. “But it isn’t true. We spend far more per person on health care . . . yet rank near the bottom among industrial countries in indicators from life expectancy to infant mortality.”
One often hears variations on Krugman’s argument—that America lags behind other countries in crude health outcomes. But such outcomes reflect a mosaic of factors, such as diet, lifestyle, drug use, and cultural values. It pains me as a doctor to say this, but health care is just one factor in health. Americans live 75.3 years on average, fewer than Canadians (77.3) or the French (76.6) or the citizens of any Western European nation save Portugal. Health care influences life expectancy, of course. But a life can end because of a murder, a fall, or a car accident. Such factors aren’t academic—homicide rates in the United States are much higher than in other countries (eight times higher than in France, for instance). In The Business of Health, Robert Ohsfeldt and John Schneider factor out intentional and unintentional injuries from life-expectancy statistics and find that Americans who don’t die in car crashes or homicides outlive people in any other Western country.
And if we measure a health-care system by how well it serves its sick citizens, American medicine excels. Five-year cancer survival rates bear this out. For leukemia, the American survival rate is almost 50 percent; the European rate is just 35 percent. Esophageal carcinoma: 12 percent in the United States, 6 percent in Europe. The survival rate for prostate cancer is 81.2 percent here, yet 61.7 percent in France and down to 44.3 percent in England—a striking variation.
Like many critics of American health care, though, Krugman argues that the costs are just too high: “In 2002 . . . the United States spent $5,267 on health care for each man, woman, and child.” Health-care spending in Canada and Britain, he notes, is a small fraction of that. Again, the picture isn’t quite as clear as he suggests; because the U.S. is so much wealthier than other countries, it isn’t unreasonable for it to spend more on health care. Take America’s high spending on research and development. M. D. Anderson in Texas, a prominent cancer center, spends more on research than Canada does.
That said, American health care is expensive. And Americans aren’t always getting a good deal. In the coming years, with health expenses spiraling up, it will be easy for some—like the zealous legislators in California—to give in to the temptation of socialized medicine. In Washington, there are plenty of old pieces of legislation that like-minded politicians could take off the shelf, dust off, and promote: expanding Medicare to Americans 55 and older, say, or covering all children in Medicaid.
But such initiatives would push the United States further down the path to a government-run system and make things much, much worse. True, government bureaucrats would be able to cut costs—but only by shrinking access to health care, as in Canada, and engendering a Canadian-style nightmare of overflowing emergency rooms and yearlong waits for treatment. America is right to seek a model for delivering good health care at good prices, but we should be looking not to Canada, but close to home—in the other four-fifths or so of our economy. From telecommunications to retail, deregulation and market competition have driven prices down and quality and productivity up. Health care is long overdue for the same prescription.
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The average wait time for a Canadian awaiting surgery or other medical treatment is now 18.3 weeks, a new high, according to a report released Monday.
That's an increase of 97 per cent over 14 years, the report says.
"Canadians wait longer than Americans, Germans, and Swedes for cardiac care, although not as long as New Zealanders or the British," it reads. "Economists attempting to quantify the cost of this waiting time have estimated it to amount to $1,100 to $5,600 annually per patient."
The report, the 17th annual edition of Waiting Your Turn: Hospital Waiting Lists in Canada, is published by the Fraser Institute, an independent Canadian research organization.
"Despite government promises and the billions of dollars funnelled into the Canadian health-care system, the average patient waited more than 18 weeks in 2007 between seeing their family doctor and receiving the surgery or treatment they required," said Nadeem Esmail, director of Health System Performance Studies at the Fraser Institute and co-author of the report, in a release.
The total median waiting time for patients between referral from a general practitioner and treatment, averaged across all 12 specialties and 10 provinces surveyed, increased to 18.3 weeks from 17.8 weeks in 2006, according to the report.
"The small increase in waiting time between 2006 and 2007 is primarily the result of an increase in the first wait – the wait between visiting a general practitioner and attending a consultation with a specialist," the report says.
The report also found that total wait times increased in six provinces: Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador. British Columbia, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island lowered their wait times.
Waiting times best in Ontario
Ontario recorded the shortest wait time overall (the wait between visiting a general practitioner and receiving treatment) at 15.0 weeks, followed by British Columbia (19.0 weeks) and Quebec (19.4 weeks). Saskatchewan (27.2 weeks), New Brunswick (25.2 weeks) and Nova Scotia (24.8 weeks) recorded the longest waits in Canada.
Despite have one of the shorter waits among the provinces, Quebec's 19.4-week wait shows that despite more money directed at fixing the problem, there hasn't been any improvement, Tasha Kheiriddin, the Quebec director of the Fraser Institute, told CBC News Monday.
She says Quebec has invested millions of dollars over the past few years in efforts to reduce wait times, but that inefficiencies in the public system are proving to be obstacles.
"What this tells us is spending more money in the system does not decrease wait times. In fact it's the opposite result, so we have to look at other solutions," she said.
Across Canada, the wait time between referral by a GP and consultation with a specialist rose to 9.2 weeks from the 8.8 weeks recorded in 2006. The shortest waits for specialist consultations were in Ontario (7.6 weeks), Manitoba (8.2 weeks) and British Columbia (8.8 weeks).
The longest waits for consultation with a specialist were recorded in New Brunswick (14.7 weeks), Newfoundland and Labrador (13.5 weeks) and Prince Edward Island (12.7 weeks).
The wait time between a specialist consultation and treatment – the second stage of waiting – increased to 9.1 weeks from 9.0 weeks in 2006. The shortest specialist-to-treatment waits were found in Ontario (7.3 weeks), Alberta (8.9 weeks) and Quebec (9.4 weeks), while the longest waits were in Saskatchewan (16.5 weeks), Nova Scotia (13.6 weeks) and Manitoba (12.0 weeks).
The shortest total waits (between referral by a general practitioner and treatment) occurred in medical oncology (4.2 weeks), radiation oncology (5.7 weeks) and elective cardiovascular surgery (8.4 weeks).
Patients endured the longest waits between a GP referral and orthopedic surgery (38.1 weeks), plastic surgery (34.8 weeks) and neurosurgery (27.2 weeks).
Nova Scotia best for CT scans
Patients also experienced significant waiting times for various diagnostic tests across Canada, such as computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and ultrasound scans.
The median wait for a CT scan across Canada was 4.8 weeks. British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia had the shortest waits for CT scans (4.0 weeks), with Manitoba experiencing the highest wait (8.0 weeks).
The median wait for an MRI across Canada was 10.1 weeks. Patients in Ontario experienced the shortest wait for an MRI (7.8 weeks), while Newfoundland and Labrador residents waited the longest (20.0 weeks).
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The health care bill that's trying to be passed into law is nothing but a lot of pork with very slim pickings. Too many people have put their own back room deals into it and quite frankly, you simply can't trust the government to run the health care system.
Just say no.
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Coach is to politics as Jenny McCarthy is to medicine.
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socialized medicine: where the government owns the hospitals and clinics, where the doctors and nurses are government employees.
The VA (Veterans Administration) is socialized medicine. Medicare is not.
Medicare is a single payer system, where the government "owns" the insurance company.
I believe the UK is socialized medicine, where doctors are government employees. Canada is a single payer system.
Medicare is a form of Socialized Medicine. If the government "Owns it", and has the right to deny payment, or make payment, its Socialized Medicine!!!
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PL&index=40
"He can't say anthing now, he's dead"
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Coach is to politics as Jenny McCarthy is to medicine.
That's one hell of a response to what I just posted. Thanks.
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The health care bill that's trying to be passed into law is nothing but a lot of pork with very slim pickings. Too many people have put their own back room deals into it and quite frankly, you simply can't trust the government to run the health care system.
Just say no.
QFT
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if your not a vet who is currently using the va for healthcare
and is in favor of socialized heathcare
you have no clue to which your speaking.
specially tbombz. your still an idiot who ought to keep his mouth shut.
idiot fucking felon. the va beats nothing if it don't kill you first.
oh and the wait upto 6 weeks ive experienced to see my primary care
well you will just love obama care.
fogarty your clueless as well. you obviously know nothing about medicare
let alone the va just spouting the usual idiot liberal bullshit
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It's easy for people like Coach who make a good living to hate on socialized medicine.
Other aren't so lucky (or are lazy pieces of shit), and they simply don't have the money
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there is really only one argument against single payer universal healthcare in the united states. that argument is that
"the federal government was not given the power by the constitution to create such a system, the government's role is limited to only those things outlined in the u.s. constitution and the government does not have the legal right to create any kind of healthcare system."
that argument actually holds ground.
but nobody opposed to universal single payer healthcare says anything about it. they argue with false information, and bad logic.
if the above argument was laid out, most people would say
"hm. that is kinda true. but i think the founding fathers intended the government to do everything necessary for the people that the people could not do individually for themselves. so its okay for us to pool resources and allow every citizen to get coverage they otherwise couldnt afford."
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there is really only one argument against single payer universal healthcare in the united states. that argument is that
"the federal government was not given the power by the constitution to create such a system, the government's role is limited to only those things outlined in the u.s. constitution and the government does not have the legal right to create any kind of healthcare system."
that argument actually holds ground.
but nobody opposed to universal single payer healthcare says anything about it. they argue with false information, and bad logic.
if the above argument was laid out, most people would say
"hm. that is kinda true. but i think the founding fathers intended the government to do everything necessary for the people that the people could not do individually for themselves. so its okay for us to pool resources and allow every citizen to get coverage they otherwise couldnt afford."
You didn't read any of those two articles I posted did you? I have ALOT more if you'd like. Do you think these are isolated cases?
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yes, they do run medicare rather well, using up only a few percentage for administration cost, compared to up to 30% for for profit insurance companies
why is medicare ok for seniors, but not for everyone else?
Medicare is damn near bankrupt, what the hell are you talking about Tim? Same with Social Security.
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I know one simple thing Obama could do that would end this whole debacle:
Simply remove the "over 65" requirement from Medicare.
Problem solved.
Medicare is no longer bankrupt (50 million poor, but young and healthy, uninsured people sign up) and everyone is happy. Weiner seems to be the only person arguing this, and yet it remains the simplest, cleanest and most effective solution.
The Luke
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It's easy for people like Coach who make a good living to hate on socialized medicine.
Other aren't so lucky (or are lazy pieces of shit), and they simply don't have the money
BINGO!
Stavios, I started with NOTHING, I did not come from a wealthy family, I didn't take any bank loans, no help from friends or family and didn't even dream of using the government for help. I make a good living (like thousands in this country) because I worked my ass off for it. Yes, most able bodied people who use the government for support are LAZY!
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I know one simple thing Obama could do that would end this whole debacle:
Simply remove the "over 65" requirement from Medicare.
Problem solved.
Medicare is no longer bankrupt (50 million poor, but young and healthy, uninsured people sign up) and everyone is happy. Weiner seems to be the only person arguing this, and yet it remains the simplest, cleanest and most effective solution.
The Luke
How about step down!
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Who's this Ronald Regan that everyone keeps talking about?
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BINGO!
Stavios, I started with NOTHING, I did not come from a wealthy family, I didn't take any bank loans, no help from friends or family and didn't even dream of using the government for help. I make a good living (like thousands in this country) because I worked my ass off for it. Yes, most able bodied people who use the government for support are LAZY!
Yeah but you are a good business man !
For example, when I will finish school I will be paid about 25$ an hour and after I finish university I can go to about 36$ an hour max.
it's OK money here in Quebec, but I will be far from rich.
It would piss me off to pay 10 or 20k ( just trowing numbers out) if I get sick. Of course I will have insurance but if I think about some of my friends who have their own little compagny and who don't have insurance, it sucks.
but YES, a lot of people are lazy pieces of shit that should stop whining and go to work
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Yeah but you are a good business man !
For example, when I will finish school I will be paid about 25$ an hour and after I finish university I can go to about 36$ an hour max.
it's OK money here in Quebec, but I will be far from rich.
It would piss me off to pay 10 or 20k ( just trowing numbers out) if I get sick. Of course I will have insurance but if I think about some of my friends who have their own little compagny and who don't have insurance, it sucks.
but YES, a lot of people are lazy pieces of shit that should stop whining and go to work
Actually I'm better at training than I am at business. I made A LOT of mistakes and still do. I don't have a big business but this summer we plan on opening our gym, I will take no equity from my house and again no loans from family, friends or otherwise. We have saved enough to use our own money (which is probably a stupid idea since in business the object is to use OTHER peoples money but at least I will own it out right). My thing is I refuse to work for someone, they would fire me because I hate taking orders. But in business I set GOALS and do what ever I can to reach them.....my family depends on it plus I set myself a certain standard of living that forces me to keep pushing, I thrive on that and love what I do!
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you are a hard working man Joe, I respect you for that 8)
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Ever go to the VA...it's not terrific care...that's what you get with socialized medicine.
usmc friend back from the dessert had appendix surgery same day as mine,,, he went to va, i went to community hosp,
(be it i'm friends with both the board chairman and the biggest $ giver, both happend to show up and talk to the dr that performed the surgery but still)
we both had the cut, not laparoscopy,
he got a 6-8 inch frankenstein scar, which he still owns.
i had a half inch line and without applying any "scar" creams or stuff of the likes to make it go away, it can barely be seen to where i can't find it anymore
just a story for what it's worth.
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Joe/JME,
Just a quick question, as I would appreciate the insight into your point of view:
What would you do if (not wishing you ill) you, or one of your kids, were to suffer a catastrophic illness: heart attack, cancer, liver or kidney failure... and you ended up being one of those unfortunate 15-17% of INSURED Americans who are simply denied coverage in such a catastrophic instance?
I know you'd like to think you could fix such a situation on you own, (an admirable if somewhat misguided macho notion) but do you really feel you and your family should go bankrupt; lose your house; end up homeless... if say, you had a car accident and the insurace company decided simply not to pay and lumber you with a couple of million dollars worth of medical bills...?
Seriously, do you consider corporate profiteering more important than your self and your family?
Serious question.
The Luke
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Jesus hates socialized medicine...he believes that it takes manna from the rightfully ordained elites to care for the lepers in the street.
Jesus hates lepers...
he also hates fags...so you fags just deal with it! >:(
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Who's this Ronald Regan that everyone keeps talking about?
One of the dead Presidents :-X
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Jesus hates socialized medicine...he believes that it takes manna from the rightfully ordained elites to care for the lepers in the street.
Jesus hates lepers...
he also hates fags...so you fags just deal with it! >:(
Jesus called, and he said, STFU!
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BINGO!
Stavios, I started with NOTHING, I did not come from a wealthy family, I didn't take any bank loans, no help from friends or family and didn't even dream of using the government for help. I make a good living (like thousands in this country) because I worked my ass off for it. Yes, most able bodied people who use the government for support are LAZY!
Yeah, but what about people who can't get health insurance due to pre-existing conditions? That has nothing to do with being lazy.
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there's risk involved in trying to achieve whatever your dreams are.
one of those risks is your health and it's associated costs.
how the hell anyone expects the usa to remain a free country
when so many refuse to accept any risk when things get tough.
going broke, bankrupt etc is part of the risks. it's the terms you
must accept to live and persue your dreams in this country.
otherwise take your dumb fucking wetback asses back to where ya came from
and enjoy your socialized healthcare.
btw for those that don't know, the va is not free if you make over 985 a month.
after then you are charged co pays and then more based on your income.
not too many freeloaders in the va unlike the rest of our healthcare system.
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but what about people who can't get health insurance due to pre-existing conditions? That has nothing to do with being lazy.
see my post above. there are risks in life and no one has the
right to expect or demand an insurance company to write bad policies that
will only loose money. obama seems to think so but he wants to socialize
the entire country and everything in it and can't create a single worthwhile job
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heres the reason why we should be legally required to have AT LEAST full government coverage for all medical costs for those who either cant get coverage ( pre existing conditions) or cant afford coverage.....
the government does not have the right to tell a business that they MUST accept customers with health problems who want to buy health insurance... in essence, that would be the government forcing a business to make a bad deal.. that is unconstitutonal, you cannot force someone to lose money.. thats theft at gunpoint.... so the Obama proposal that would block health insurance companies from denying coverage to those with pre existing conditions is inapplicable as it stands in opposition to the basic principles of the constitution.
because of the fact that the gov. can not force companies to accept people with pre existing conditions, the government is required to make sure that the people with pre existing treatments right to LIFE is not impeached upon by sudden preventable illness....
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US blows, thank goodness I live in the UK, in this argument anyway.
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government is required to make sure that the people with pre existing treatments right to LIFE is not impeached upon by sudden preventable illness.
and they do. it's called the emergency room or free clinic. there are also
advocates for anything but the common cold that will help
defray or cover costs.
your still a dumb fucking felon
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reagan is dead
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and they do. it's called the emergency room or free clinic. there are also
advocates for anything but the common cold that will help
defray or cover costs.
your still a dumb fucking felon
It's "you're".
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at my age you don't give a crap if it's your a dumbass
or you're a dumbass.
why?
because you are indeed a dumbass for pointing this out either way
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If you're going to call people stupid on the internet it's best not to write like you're stupid.
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Joe/JME,
Just a quick question, as I would appreciate the insight into your point of view:
What would you do if (not wishing you ill) you, or one of your kids, were to suffer a catastrophic illness: heart attack, cancer, liver or kidney failure... and you ended up being one of those unfortunate 15-17% of INSURED Americans who are simply denied coverage in such a catastrophic instance?
I know you'd like to think you could fix such a situation on you own, (an admirable if somewhat misguided macho notion) but do you really feel you and your family should go bankrupt; lose your house; end up homeless... if say, you had a car accident and the insurace company decided simply not to pay and lumber you with a couple of million dollars worth of medical bills...?
Seriously, do you consider corporate profiteering more important than your self and your family?
Serious question.
The Luke
I'm going to have assume without looking at any stats that the out of those 15-17% were turned downed for other reasons besides just for the sake of being turned down for no reason. I know our health care systems has to be revamped in some ways, what system this big doesn't?
Now getting back to the question, I'd rather be in debt for the rest of my life knowing they got the best possible care the medical community can provide than to lose my wife or son as opposed to being denied lets say certain medications because the government does not see fit to pay for it because that particular medication is too expensive. Or lets someone in my family or I does get cancer and it's caught in the early stages but we can't get another appointment for another 3 or 6 months and by then it might be too late, what happens then?
I am all for keeping the health care private and having doctors doing for their patients what they feel necessary to treat patients not what the government whats them to do. My first wifes father died in a VA hospital from diabetes, later after he passed she did some investigating and found that the VA was negligent but by then it was too late, he lost both legs and half an arm from amputation. Why? well one of the reasons was it took them forever to get an appointment and again....like my scenario above, it was too late.
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and they do. it's called the emergency room or free clinic. there are also
advocates for anything but the common cold that will help
defray or cover costs.
your still a dumb fucking felon
so you oppose universal healthcare but your ok with free clinics? you realise they are basically the same thing.
i brought it up to point out the legal principle that would require the gov to provide healthcare
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and they do. it's called the emergency room or free clinic. there are also
advocates for anything but the common cold that will help defray or cover costs.
if you believe that because of the ER no one goes without health care in this country (which is not true, but anyway...) then the argument becomes is this the most economical way to provide health care. your insurance premiums are higher because of the uninsured going to the ER.
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Tim, if hospitals are in the US are refusing health care it's nothing short of illegal. Not saying it doesn't happen but if caught it's serious trouble.
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Tim, if hospitals are in the US are refusing health care it's nothing short of illegal. Not saying it doesn't happen but if caught it's serious trouble.
Dude,
Aside from the fact that you never answered my original question, (instead quoting a list of pseudo-capitalist delusions and justifying your reasoning with blatant falsehoods) but now you are making an argument that is so totally out of touch it's frightening.
Haven't you seen that video footage of hospital staff dumping badly injured homeless alzheimer patients outside homeless shelters dressed only in hospital gowns... in the snow... in the middle of the night?
Let's introduce a few facts here... MOST bankruptcies in the US are caused by medical bills; and MOST of those going bankrupt due to medical bills HAVE health insurance.
So having morons like Joe here spout off with such certainty with only propaganda screamed by Rush Limbaugh on behalf of theiving insurance companies for reference... is a bit rich.
Facts are facts... there is at least a 15% denial rate by US health insurers in cases of catastrophic health problems (the only situation people buy insurance for)... and that denial is simply a random denial hoping the patient dies before recouping the money owed.
So, apart from billionaires and politicians (and those on Medicare), NO ONE paying private health insurance is fully covered.
So Joe, you only have 85% coverage... like eveyone else who is so scared of fair and equitable "socialised" healthcare. Think about that.
The Luke
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so you oppose universal healthcare but your ok with free clinics? you realise they are basically the same thing.
i brought it up to point out the legal principle that would require the gov to provide healthcare
free clinics are generally not under fed gov control. more likely state or local gov
or more than likely tied to a charity. the va has no free clinics.
if your income is over 985 a month you begin to pay after that.
there are very very few free clinics regardless and no free dental
not even va.
if you believe that because of the ER no one goes without health care in this country (which is not true, but anyway...) then the argument becomes is this the most economical way to provide health care. your insurance premiums are higher because of the uninsured going to the ER.
your assuming alot. with or without the er people are not going without health care. the 30 million
fucking wetbacks in this country are proof enough. look in an er lately. there's a big problem
with premiums. if not 30 million there's no denying this country is full of wetbacks.
I don't have an answer for that but giving them insurance? out of the question.
the er in most cases would be better than the va on their best day and both herd
you like cattle. many many people go to the er everyday and their insurance pays part
and they pay part. you never hear about those figures. only the number of wetback soon
to be democrat voters.
know any good deals on ammunition anyone? (http://www.freejunknstuff.com/laf.gif)
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Jesus called, and he said, STFU!
Jesus doesn't like when people put words in his mouth! >:(
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You're behind the times.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2005/0501.longman.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/21/AR2005082101073.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/12/08/eveningnews/main2243606.shtml
however, that's beside the point, as no one is arguing for socialized medicine for all in the US. Single payer, on the other hand, would be the best solution to our current mess.
What current mess? That 13% of the population is black and they are responsible for 50% of the welfare claims? That this same group largely doesn't take care of its health and so America's health care system is considered to be so bad as a result. In reality, it is probably the best system in the world - for people who buy insurance anyway.
It reminds me of Canadians who say Americans commit so much gun crime...yeah..."Americans". ::)
Tim, do you live in Los Angeles yet you remain liberal and unable to connect the racial dots?
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yes, they do run medicare rather well, using up only a few percentage for administration cost, compared to up to 30% for for profit insurance companies
why is medicare ok for seniors, but not for everyone else?
Yeah, because it's not like those profits are the driving force behind research and development for new drugs and medical technology or anything. ::) They just exist magically somehow!
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Yeah, because it's not like those profits are the driving force behind research and development for new drugs and medical technology or anything. ::) They just exist magically somehow!
MattC, you think healthcare insurance companies pay for medical research and drug development...?
WTF? Are you high?
The Luke
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will universal healthcare work? yes.
does our current system work? no.
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will universal healthcare work? yes.
does our current system work? no.
Succinct, quality post.
You're making some very good points in this thread tbombz. Why aren't you propagandised and deluded like yor fellow Americans?
The Luke
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Dude,
Aside from the fact that you never answered my original question, (instead quoting a list of pseudo-capitalist delusions and justifying your reasoning with blatant falsehoods) but now you are making an argument that is so totally out of touch it's frightening.
Haven't you seen that video footage of hospital staff dumping badly injured homeless alzheimer patients outside homeless shelters dressed only in hospital gowns... in the snow... in the middle of the night?
Let's introduce a few facts here... MOST bankruptcies in the US are caused by medical bills; and MOST of those going bankrupt due to medical bills HAVE health insurance.
So having morons like Joe here spout off with such certainty with only propaganda screamed by Rush Limbaugh on behalf of theiving insurance companies for reference... is a bit rich.
Facts are facts... there is at least a 15% denial rate by US health insurers in cases of catastrophic health problems (the only situation people buy insurance for)... and that denial is simply a random denial hoping the patient dies before recouping the money owed.
So, apart from billionaires and politicians (and those on Medicare), NO ONE paying private health insurance is fully covered.
So Joe, you only have 85% coverage... like eveyone else who is so scared of fair and equitable "socialised" healthcare. Think about that.
The Luke
I thought I did answer your question. But you need to understand one thing...nothing is "free". I'm willing to pay for quality health care, you take away a doctors right to make a living based on capitolism you're going to find more and more doctors looking for another line of work, less high school and college students will not be choosing to become doctors and the list goes waaay beyond just what you described. Look at the quality of health care at lets say the VA hospitals here in the US or even europe or canada compared to here. Are you willing to give up quality? I'm not.
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Succinct, quality post.
You're making some very good points in this thread tbombz. Why aren't you propagandised and deluded like yor fellow Americans?
The Luke
Because he's a kid who doesn't have to support himself to understand what is really going on. I can understand where you're coming from because you have grown up to what you think is best. I have not nor do I want to.
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. Look at the quality of health care at lets say the VA hospitals here in the US or even europe or canada compared to here. Are you willing to give up quality? I'm not.
Have you ever been in Europe ,Coach ?
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take away a doctors right to make a living based on capitolism you're going to find more and more doctors looking for another line of work, less high school and college students will not be choosing to become doctors and the list goes waaay beyond just what you described. Look at the quality of health care at lets say the VA hospitals here in the US or even europe or canada compared to here. Are you willing to give up quality? I'm not.
there is no evidence for any of this. Doctors are making decent salaries in Europe and Canada.
We have a sever shortage of nurses in this country, but that has nothing to do with socialized medicine.
In this country, no one is trying to nationalize hospitals or force doctors to become government employees. However, many doctors in this country do choose to work for the VA or for county run health centers, thereby being government employees. My ex (the one who I put through his residency, then dumped me on my ass, but I'm not bitter *) chooses to work for the county of Los Angeles. He makes six figures by August, only has to work 40 hours a week, has his malpractice insurance paid for by the county, and receives all the benefits of a full time employee, including medical, dental, sick leave, vacation pay, and 403b. Doctors in private practice don't get any of those things.
* (in fact, we're best friends, and talk many times a day)
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I honestly fear that with the US govt's track history it is more likely to resemble the VA system than anything in europe, canada, etc... and having had quite a bit of experience with the VA...NO THANKS !
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I honestly fear that with the US govt's track history it is more likely to resemble the VA system than anything in europe, canada, etc... and having had quite a bit of experience with the VA...NO THANKS !
We're not asking for a system like the VA, socialized medicine where the government owns the hospitals, and doctors are government employees. We're asking for a public option, where the government takes the role of an insurance company. This could be simply an expansion of Medicare. Medicare is a single payer system for people over 65. If having such an option is not acceptable for you, why is it good enough for your parents or grandparents?
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Tim, do you live in Los Angeles yet you remain liberal and unable to connect the racial dots?
I've answered this before. I do live in Los Angeles. And I flatly reject your racist view of the world.
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if the us system sucks...then why do you have arab sheiks flying to the mayo clinic for medical treatment...stop the bs with the socialized medicine crap...
You aren't educated are you...the US medical system is good to MILLIONAIRES
you fucking moron..why do you say shit like that. Dude have you heard from some of the REPUBLICANS on this board and some of their insurance nightmares..
that is an idiotic statement...stupid ass
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You aren't educated are you...the US medical system is good to MILLIONAIRES
you fucking moron..why do you say shit like that. Dude have you heard from some of the REPUBLICANS on this board and some of their insurance nightmares..
that is an idiotic statement...stupid ass
big_malboski slapping the shit out of random retards for sport. 8)
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We're not asking for a system like the VA, socialized medicine where the government owns the hospitals, and doctors are government employees. We're asking for a public option, where the government takes the role of an insurance company. This could be simply an expansion of Medicare. Medicare is a single payer system for people over 65. If having such an option is not acceptable for you, why is it good enough for your parents or grandparents?
But I am thinking down the road. If the govt is allowed to "compete" with insurance companies, they will run under the premise that they don't have to make a profit, so they will be at a huge advantage over the private companies.....who will one by one go under and thus eventurally leaving us with only the govt run option. I think we would see what private companies offer greatly diminish in an attempt to just stay afloat. And medicare is not good enough for my parents. It needs to be improved.
I would much prefer to just see stronger regulation on the current insurance companies, ie: no prexisting conditions, etc...., a cap on malpractice suits which drive up doctors insurance which in turn drives up what we are charged and reign in hospitals where waste is rampant in regards to paying CEO's, and other higher up managerial types, too much. Those are just off the top of my head, but I think there are far better ways to improve our current system.
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anyone who opposes single payer healthcare for america is either
A)misinformed about the effectiveness of other countries single payer healthcare
b)misinformed about the effectiveness of our current system
c)misinformed about how our countries healthcare system would be set-up and funded if we shifted to single payer..
b)healthcare industry lobby or shareholder
the current system we have in place is horribly wasteful, we spend more per person here than alot of countries do that give their citizens totally free healthcare for everything from surgery, check ups, medications. we could increase coverage, improve covergae, and reduce costs simultaneously if the health insurance lobby would be obliviated.
BOOM BITCHES
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Yeah, because it's not like those profits are the driving force behind research and development for new drugs and medical technology or anything.
No, the profits the insurance companies make are not going into R&D. Insurance companies are administrators. They take money from many people in the form of insurance premiums, put them into a big pool, then pay the medical costs of the few who get sick. Anything left over they get to keep. They try to maximize this amount by doing their best to deny or delay the claims of those who have catastrophic illnesses such as cancer or organ failure. The problem is that's the main reason you pay for medical insurance, to receive care for the catastrophic illnesses.
Whether the profits the pharmaceutical companies make are justified or not is a separate issue than the one at hand.
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many doctors in this country do choose to work for the VA or for county run health centers
that's more misguided liberal bullshit. the va is hurting big time for doctors. reason being they pay for
shit and those that are willing to work at the clinic where my primary care is, they don't want
them to work in their own practice and the va. the va docs don't have nurses to do their paper work
they do it all. nurses actually sorta kinda do nursing.
my daughter is a nurse at the dayton hospital. i see doctors and get testing done there.
be kinda hard to throw bullshit liberal spewage my way and expect to get away from it.
oh btw, why is your great redeemer doesn't have the balls to quit smoking.
but claims to be 95% cured. damn that 5%. oh this is the guy that has the cure
for our perceived health care problems. and jobs.
right
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I would much prefer to just see stronger regulation on the current insurance companies, ie: no prexisting conditions, etc....,
yes, I would too. but the problem is that individuals would not have incentive to pay for insurance until the catastrophic illness occurs. Insurance only works with large pools of healthy people subsidizing those who get sick. so then you say have a mandate, that everyone must buy insurance. but how do you mandate that people buy a product from a private company? especially when you don't regulate the price. what do you do to people who cannot afford those prices? if the government subsidizes them, then you're subsidizing the profits of a private company. why should our tax dollars go to the shareholders of private companies? so we put the poor into a non-profit insurance company, otherwise known as a public option.
a cap on malpractice suits which drive up doctors insurance which in turn drives up what we are charged
malpractice insurance and claims are less than 2% of our medical costs. any caps might bring it down to 1% if we're lucky.
and reign in hospitals where waste is rampant in regards to paying CEO's, and other higher up managerial types, too much.
but but but that's anti-capitalistic
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Insurance companies are administrators. They take money from many people in the form of insurance premiums, put them into a big pool, then pay the medical costs of the few who get sick. Anything left over they get to keep. They try to maximize this amount by doing their best to deny or delay the claims of those who have catastrophic illnesses such as cancer or organ failure. The problem is that's the main reason you pay for medical insurance, to receive care for the catastrophic illnesses.
Whether the profits the pharmaceutical companies make are justified or not is a separate issue than the one at hand.
people pay them money first of all.
deny claims? yes you must duh or try. ever turned in car or homeowners claim
delay on purpose. prove that. you can't
everything you spew contains outright bogus information
any profits a company legally makes should never be questioned or sought out in order to punish.
and remember any legislation that comes out won't go into effect for years, will probally face legal
battles but will tax the fuck out of the coach.
got ammo
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yes, I would too. but the problem is that individuals would not have incentive to pay for insurance until the catastrophic illness occurs. Insurance only works with large pools of healthy people subsidizing those who get sick. so then you say have a mandate, that everyone must buy insurance. but how do you mandate that people buy a product from a private company? especially when you don't regulate the price. what do you do to people who cannot afford those prices? if the government subsidizes them, then you're subsidizing the profits of a private company. why should our tax dollars go to the shareholders of private companies? so we put the poor into a non-profit insurance company, otherwise known as a public option.
So how about just expanding medicare? I heard a brief disussion about that on the radio, but didn't catch enough specifics.
[/quote]
malpractice insurance and claims are less than 2% of our medical costs. any caps might bring it down to 1% if we're lucky.
[/quote]
Then why do states like WV have a hard time getting obgyn's for example? I've always heard it was because they couldnt' afford malpractice insurance.
[/quote]
but but but that's anti-capitalistic
[/quote]
I have no problem with it. Pure capitalism doesn't really exist in the US anyway, so I see no problem with it.
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Are you willing to give up quality? I'm not.
Willing to give up quality? 'Cause that's exactly what's happee in Europe... (sigh).
You have a 15% chance of having your entire net worth wiped out should you suffer catastrophic illness.
Roll a dice... if it comes up snake eye: you're one of those 50 million Americans (1 in 6) with no insurance... Roll that dice again... if it comes up snake eye this time you're one of the INSURED Americans (1 in 6) who will be denied coverage... bankruptcy and/or homelessness follow.
Sorry to offend dude, but you don't understand enough to have an opinion on this subject.
You don't keep a private fire brigade on retainer... should your house catch fire would you negotiate a "free-market solution" with whichever neighbor had the longest garden hose...? Or call the "socialised" local county fire department?
You don't have a private security force on retainer... if you were a victim of a crime, would you enlist a private investigator and negotiate a price in the open market with Blackwater mercenaries...? Or would you call the "socialised" local county police department?
Don't you support the (taxpayer-funded government-run socialised) troops?
Seriously...
-do you only drive on privately-owned toll roads?
-do you only walk on privately-owned tolled pavements?
-do you have your own well? Or do you use municpal water supplies?
-do you receive mail?
-do you run your own courts?
-do you run your own, non-socialised government?
-do you test your own food and water?
-do you refuse to vote in "socialised" elections?
Joe, you're already more of a "socialist" than you unerstand.
The only freedom you stand to lose under socialised medicine, is the freedom to be so gladly fleeced by corporate insurers in the hopes of being at their mercy should the worst happen.
The freedom to be more propagndised and brainwashed than a pro-Christmas turkey.
The freedom to be a fool.
The Luke
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Willing to give up quality? 'Cause that's exactly what's happee in Europe... (sigh).
You have a 15% chance of having your entire net worth wiped out should you suffer catastrophic illness.
Roll a dice... if it comes up snake eye: you're one of those 50 million Americans (1 in 6) with no insurance... Roll that dice again... if it comes up snake eye this time you're one of the INSURED Americans (1 in 6) who will be denied coverage... bankruptcy and/or homelessness follow.
Sorry to offend dude, but you don't understand enough to have an opinion on this subject.
You don't keep a private fire brigade on retainer... should your house catch fire would you negotiate a "free-market solution" with whichever neighbor had the longest garden hose...? Or call the "socialised" local county fire department?
You don't have a private security force on retainer... if you were a victim of a crime, would you enlist a private investigator and negotiate a price in the open market with Blackwater mercenaries...? Or would you call the "socialised" local county police department?
Don't you support the (taxpayer-funded government-run socialised) troops?
Seriously...
-do you only drive on privately-owned toll roads?
-do you only walk on privately-owned tolled pavements?
-do you have your own well? Or do you use municpal water supplies?
-do you receive mail?
-do you run your own courts?
-do you run your own, non-socialised government?
-do you test your own food and water?
-do you refuse to vote in "socialised" elections?
Joe, you're already more of a "socialist" than you unerstand.
The only freedom you stand to lose under socialised medicine, is the freedom to be so gladly fleeced by corporate insurers in the hopes of being at their mercy should the worst happen.
The freedom to be more propagndised and brainwashed than a pro-Christmas turkey.
The freedom to be a fool.
The Luke
Don't you live with mommy and daddy in Ireland ???
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yes, they do run medicare rather well, using up only a few percentage for administration cost, compared to up to 30% for for profit insurance companies
why is medicare ok for seniors, but not for everyone else?
Problem is, they want everyone to get on Medicaid which is not run very well, and most doctor's don't accept it. So, they will mandate doctor's to accept it and mandate the amount Doctors make. So, that will in turn make it into a socialized medicine.
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You aren't educated are you...the US medical system is good to MILLIONAIRES
you fucking moron..why do you say shit like that. Dude have you heard from some of the REPUBLICANS on this board and some of their insurance nightmares..
that is an idiotic statement...stupid ass
so you are saying the mayo clinic only treats millionaires? they treat no one other than people who can prove they are millionaires? how fucking stupid do you sound? you are also telling me that people who aren't millionaires suffer? you are kidding right? my parents weren't millionaires and we always had good healthcare..dental care,,,eyeglasses..etc..hey..i was even born in a hospital you fucking pinhead...who sounds like a stupid fuck now...
oh yes..that's right..only democrats..and poor people have insurance nightmares...laughable..
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Problem is, they want everyone to get on Medicaid which is not run very well, and most doctor's don't accept it. So, they will mandate doctor's to accept it and mandate the amount Doctors make. So, that will in turn make it into a socialized medicine.
Yep.
That's what's happened in the rest of the developed world.
It's not so bad... doctors drive Porsches instead of Lamborghinis; but they don't have to pay: student debt; malpractice insurance; etc etc
However, everyone is covered (less crime, less suffering, less stress), and when your ELECTIVE NON-SERIOUS surgery is bumped back two weeks so the hospital can do a transplant... at least you can console yourself that things could be worse: you could be an American happily paying a grand a month for coverage who just got denied surgery for his dodgey knee and can't change providers 'cos now you have pre-existing condition.
I'd rather pay thosand bucks a year in taxes.
Let the doctors drive Porsches, so the poor can sleep at night.
The Luke
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so you are saying the mayo clinic only treats millionaires? they treat no one other than people who can prove they are millionaires? how fucking stupid do you sound? you are also telling me that people who aren't millionaires suffer? you are kidding right? my parents weren't millionaires and we always had good healthcare..dental care,,,eyeglasses..etc..hey..i was even born in a hospital you fucking pinhead...who sounds like a stupid fuck now...
ah, you do.
US medical system great for 1) people who can afford their own care, and 2) people who have insurance who don't get denied coverage.
US medical system terrible for 1) people who don't have insurance, and 2) people who think they have insurance but who's insurance company denies them coverage on a technicality. as was pointed out, #1 is 1 in 6 Americans, and #2 is 1 in 6 Americans with a catastrophic illness who thought their insurance would cover it.
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Because he's a kid who doesn't have to support himself to understand what is really going on. I can understand where you're coming from because you have grown up to what you think is best. I have not nor do I want to.
coach your political idealogy reflects your need to feel superior to those who have little. :)
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coach your political idealogy reflects your need to feel superior to those who have little. :)
I find this to be a very common attitude unfortunately.
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Succinct, quality post.
You're making some very good points in this thread tbombz. Why aren't you propagandised and deluded like yor fellow Americans?
The Luke
why thank you, though dont throw all americans under the bridge..its only an isolated fragment of our population who make the rest of us look bad.
why am I able to think rationally about political issues? i guess because i love the truth more than i love my ego.
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because i love the truth more than i love my ego.
LMAO, if that was true you wouldn't be juicing for untruthful and temporary gains to satisfy your ego.
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LMAO, if that was true you wouldn't be juicing for untruthful and temporary gains to satisfy your ego.
hahahahaha yes, your so right. perfect argument. check, mate. ;D ::)
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hahahahaha yes, your so right. perfect argument. check, mate. ;D ::)
"you're"........and we're suppose to buy into your genius political and steroid advice?
haha ;D
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Lots of bashing here... very little cogent argument.
The Luke
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"you're"........and we're suppose to buy into your genius political and steroid advice?
haha ;D
your not supposed to buy into anything, your supposed to recognize accurate information and truth in logic...
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coach your political idealogy reflects your need to feel superior to those who have little. :)
Not true, when you get a job, take half your pay check, pay taxes, buy a home and have your taxes being raised for no reason....that'll be your wake up call.
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ah, you do.
US medical system great for 1) people who can afford their own care, and 2) people who have insurance who don't get denied coverage.
US medical system terrible for 1) people who don't have insurance, and 2) people who think they have insurance but who's insurance company denies them coverage on a technicality. as was pointed out, #1 is 1 in 6 Americans, and #2 is 1 in 6 Americans with a catastrophic illness who thought their insurance would cover it.
typical talking points..did you get this stuff from rachel maddow or keith olbermann...how many of these people that you say don't have insurance chose not to purchase insurance and use emergency rooms as their own private health insurance programs? for those that don't have health insurance because of affordability--pennsylvania has a chip program for children--and free clinics supported paid for by taxes...hospitals nowadays don't throw people out on the streets when emergency care is needed...
as for castastrophic illness.....--i'm sure it happens---it shouldn't...but the way you make it sound people are people turned down left and right and left to die...that's simply wrong. should a whole healtcare system be overhauled because some people have health insurance issues..that's crazy....and to say health care would be soundly run by a government that can barely run what it has now is pretty damn naive. just because someone disagrees with your viewpoint doesn't make someone sound stupid.
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typical talking points..did you get this stuff from rachel maddow or keith olbermann..
facts tend to have a liberal bias.
hospitals nowadays don't throw people out on the streets when emergency care is needed...
no, they just force you into bankruptcy later
should a whole healtcare system be overhauled because some people have health insurance issues..that's crazy....and to say health care would be soundly run by a government that can barely run what it has now is pretty damn naive.
no one is asking for socialized medicine. we're not even trying to get single payer, even though I think that is the best solution. The most basic reforms are being blocked by the insurance industry because it will cut into their profit margin.
just because someone disagrees with your viewpoint doesn't make someone sound stupid.
says the guy who keeps calling people stupid
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facts tend to have a liberal bias.
no, they just force you into bankruptcy later
no one is asking for socialized medicine. we're not even trying to get single payer, even though I think that is the best solution. The most basic reforms are being blocked by the insurance industry because it will cut into their profit margin.
says the guy who keeps calling people stupid
''facts'' tend to bent towards the individuals bias...
i'm not the one who started the name calling..that was big_mal who decided he couldn't come up with anything more intelligent to say than calling me stupid..you chimed in later.
again...what's the percent of the people forced into bankruptcy because they chose not to have insurance compared to those who honestly could not pay for it...
i'm in agreement..no one should be denied healthcare..but to change something that works fairly well right now because a certain group doesn't like it doesn't make sense...ok, also in agreement that insurance companies are blocking changes..but blame the politicians...democrats, republicans, conservatives and liberals alike for that--the insurance companies couldn't do it..if the lawmakers didn't allow it.
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''facts'' tend to bent towards the individuals bias...
I was quoting Steve Colbert
again...what's the percent of the people forced into bankruptcy because they chose not to have insurance compared to those who honestly could not pay for it...
if you are poor and have a catastrophic illness, you get Medicaid (which is different than Medicare) and usually don't get the cutting edge treatments. the hospitals know your situation and only do things that Meidcaid covers. the group that usually ends up in bankruptcy are those who have insurance, get the procedures, but have their coverage denied after the fact. see you are usually required to sign this document that says if your insurance doesn't pay, you agree to.
i'm in agreement..no one should be denied healthcare..but to change something that works fairly well right now because a certain group doesn't like it doesn't make sense...
but by all measures, our health care system doesn't work fairly well. we spend more per person than any other western country, yet are far from the top on many different measurements of quality.
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if you are poor and have a catastrophic illness, you get Medicaid (which is different than Medicare) and usually don't get the cutting edge treatments. the hospitals know your situation and only do things that Meidcaid covers. the group that usually ends up in bankruptcy are those who have insurance, get the procedures, but have their coverage denied after the fact. see you are usually required to sign this document that says if your insurance doesn't pay, you agree to.
but by all measures, our health care system doesn't work fairly well. we spend more per person than any other western country, yet are far from the top on many different measurements of quality.
oh..i don't watch him much...
well..i wish it could be solved...it's a huge problem--a problem created by shoddy government and corruption--it does need to be changed but i'd be hard pressed to agree we need to do it now...our economy is in shambles and we have other pressing issues.
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coach your political idealogy reflects your need to feel superior to those who have little. :)
Quite common among those who are 'self-made.' They've worked hard for their dough and refuse to share any of it. Hence the expression: 'no one steps harder on his fellow man than the self-made man.'
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Quite common among those who are 'self-made.' They've worked hard for their dough and refuse to share any of it. Hence the expression: 'no one steps harder on his fellow man than the self-made man.'
I'd be willing to bet I've shared more willfully that you have from it being stolen from you.
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You guys want a reason to socialize medicine ?? ever watch the movie John Q, with Denzel Washington ?!!? that's a pretty good reason, not to get denied by a greedy insurance company because your son needs a $140,000 surgery.. people keep thinking of it like social assistance or welfare, except they fail to realize that there's a pretty good chance in the course of one's natural life they're gonna need some kind of expensive procedure or emergency treatment. I would rather pay a few extra dollars in taxes and live carefree knowing my gov't will take care of me if I have to undergo a serious surgical procedure then save those few dollars and be completely screwed and shit out of luck if something does happen.
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You guys want a reason to socialize medicine ?? ever watch the movie John Q, with Denzel Washington ?!!? that's a pretty good reason, not to get denied by a greedy insurance company because your son needs a $140,000 surgery.. people keep thinking of it like social assistance or welfare, except they fail to realize that there's a pretty good chance in the course of one's natural life they're gonna need some kind of expensive procedure or emergency treatment. I would rather pay a few extra dollars in taxes and live carefree knowing my gov't will take care of me if I have to undergo a serious surgical procedure then save those few dollars and be completely screwed and shit out of luck if something does happen.
1. Hospitals cannot refuse treatment...it's illegal.
2. Whats to say if someone needed a transplant and has it, the government refused to authorize the rejection medication needed to keep this person alive because it's too expensive? If you want to go to the extream, there it is.
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Yep.
That's what's happened in the rest of the developed world.
It's not so bad... doctors drive Porsches instead of Lamborghinis; but they don't have to pay: student debt; malpractice insurance; etc etc
However, everyone is covered (less crime, less suffering, less stress), and when your ELECTIVE NON-SERIOUS surgery is bumped back two weeks so the hospital can do a transplant... at least you can console yourself that things could be worse: you could be an American happily paying a grand a month for coverage who just got denied surgery for his dodgey knee and can't change providers 'cos now you have pre-existing condition.
I'd rather pay thosand bucks a year in taxes.
Let the doctors drive Porsches, so the poor can sleep at night.
The Luke
I can see your point, but the biggest thing is the United States was built on Capitalist principles.. That is the reason so many people want to come here. I can't say it is right or wrong, but I would rather have Sky's the limit on how much I can make and be successful in life. I have health insurance I pay out of my pocket. I am relatively healthy, I carry catastrophic coverage with quarterly allowable visits and 100% cancer treatment if I need. I pay $157.00 a month. I would rather take that then have to worry about waiting in line as with what happens in Canada and other places. Just my take.. My needs are just that, mine.
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You guys want a reason to socialize medicine ?? ever watch the movie John Q, with Denzel Washington ?!!? that's a pretty good reason, not to get denied by a greedy insurance company because your son needs a $140,000 surgery.. people keep thinking of it like social assistance or welfare, except they fail to realize that there's a pretty good chance in the course of one's natural life they're gonna need some kind of expensive procedure or emergency treatment. I would rather pay a few extra dollars in taxes and live carefree knowing my gov't will take care of me if I have to undergo a serious surgical procedure then save those few dollars and be completely screwed and shit out of luck if something does happen.
hospitals and doctors don't allow people to die...
the govt pays a portion of anti-rejection meds fees...the person has to come up with the rest...
john q is one of the most far fetched movies--poor example---no insurance company could ever survive if they did that...
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Yep.
That's what's happened in the rest of the developed world.
It's not so bad... doctors drive Porsches instead of Lamborghinis; but they don't have to pay: student debt; malpractice insurance; etc etc
However, everyone is covered (less crime, less suffering, less stress), and when your ELECTIVE NON-SERIOUS surgery is bumped back two weeks so the hospital can do a transplant... at least you can console yourself that things could be worse: you could be an American happily paying a grand a month for coverage who just got denied surgery for his dodgey knee and can't change providers 'cos now you have pre-existing condition.
I'd rather pay thosand bucks a year in taxes.
Let the doctors drive Porsches, so the poor can sleep at night.
The Luke
Sorry dude, health care isn't a right and all doctors are not equal in skills even if it is the field. If you want health care pay for it, if not suffer. People all the time spend more on shit they don't need as opposed to taking care of themselves or their family.
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I'd be willing to bet I've shared more willfully that you have from it being stolen from you.
Sorry, Coach. Just making a point. I didn't mean for you to take it personally. :)
/willingly?
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Sorry dude, health care isn't a right and all doctors are not equal in skills even if it is the field. If you want health care pay for it, if not suffer. People all the time spend more on shit they don't need as opposed to taking care of themselves or their family.
most pre existing conditions have an exclusionary period attached to them..meaning if you have a dodgy knee you may not be able to get service on that knee for six months or a year...
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1. Hospitals cannot refuse treatment...it's illegal.
hospitals cannot refuse emergency treatment. they certainly don't have to do transplants if you cannot pay for it.
2. Whats to say if someone needed a transplant and has it, the government refused to authorize the rejection medication needed to keep this person alive because it's too expensive? If you want to go to the extream, there it is.
insurance companies are already doing that. why is that ok?
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well..i wish it could be solved...it's a huge problem--a problem created by shoddy government and corruption--it does need to be changed but i'd be hard pressed to agree we need to do it now...
you would agree we need to do it now if you or anyone you knew had to deal with the insurance industry because of a pre-existing condition or a catastrophic illness
our economy is in shambles and we have other pressing issues.
we spend so much on health care. any reform would save us billions and help the economy. fewer and fewer small businesses are offering company provided medical benefits to their employees. just think how much more competitive businesses could be if they didn't have that expense.
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This is the common trend in these threads...
All the frightened, misinformed right-wingers regurgitate the Pavlovian misconceptions hammered into them by right-wing radio hate speech (which is essentially mass distribution corporate propaganda).
But then someone (in this case Tim Fogarty) takes the time to patiently and dispassionately explain to those brainwashed by these corporate talking-points, what the real situation is.
Gradually, the fervent assertions and Rush-Limbaugh-arguments fizzle out, only to be replaced by self-conscious cop-outs. Just read some of these:
-"it does need to be changed but i'd be hard pressed to agree we need to do it now...our economy is in shambles and we have other pressing issues."
...straight from the desk of the Health Insurers Anti-Reform PR Commitee.
If you want health care pay for it, if not suffer. People all the time spend more on shit they don't need as opposed to taking care of themselves or their family.
...straight from the delusional racist rants of Rush Limbaugh.
hospitals and doctors don't allow people to die...
...just delusional. Then who does? Insurers who profit from such deaths? Forty five thousand Americans died last year because didn't have healthcare.
john q is one of the most far fetched movies--poor example---no insurance company could ever survive if they did that...
...actually that's exactly how health insurers survive and profit.
i'm in agreement..no one should be denied healthcare..but to change something that works fairly well right now because a certain group doesn't like it doesn't make sense...
...works fairly well for the fifty million Americans with no coverage? Or works fairly well for the one in six INSURED Americans who are denied catastrophic coverage? Medical bills are responsible for 78% of bankruptcies, and 66% of those bankrupted had FULL COVERAGE.
ok, also in agreement that insurance companies are blocking changes..but blame the politicians...democrats, republicans, conservatives and liberals alike for that--the insurance companies couldn't do it..if the lawmakers didn't allow it.
...in fact it is the propagandised public (like those arguing against reform in this thread) who allow this to happen.
This thread has only been running for a few pages and already those who were so fervently against reform are beginning to cave under the weight of reality... would any of them, I wonder, be willing to concede that if they only knew a little more about the facts they'd probably be pro-reform; pro-public option?
The Luke
PS- Tim, I salute you.
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But then someone (in this case Tim Fogarty) takes the time to patiently and dispassionately explain to those brainwashed by these corporate talking-points, what the real situation is.
all parrots and faggotryism
thanks bdb for your post. your insight is invaluable
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Dick Cheney, George W. Bush’s vice-president: “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.”
;D
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This is the common trend in these threads...
All the frightened, misinformed right-wingers regurgitate the Pavlovian misconceptions hammered into them by right-wing radio hate speech (which is essentially mass distribution corporate propaganda).
But then someone (in this case Tim Fogarty) takes the time to patiently and dispassionately explain to those brainwashed by these corporate talking-points, what the real situation is.
Gradually, the fervent assertions and Rush-Limbaugh-arguments fizzle out, only to be replaced by self-conscious cop-outs. Just read some of these:
PS- Tim, I salute you.
agreed. 100%
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This is the common trend in these threads...
All the frightened, misinformed right-wingers regurgitate the Pavlovian misconceptions hammered into them by right-wing radio hate speech (which is essentially mass distribution corporate propaganda).
But then someone (in this case Tim Fogarty) takes the time to patiently and dispassionately explain to those brainwashed by these corporate talking-points, what the real situation is.
Gradually, the fervent assertions and Rush-Limbaugh-arguments fizzle out, only to be replaced by self-conscious cop-outs. Just read some of these:
...straight from the desk of the Health Insurers Anti-Reform PR Commitee.
...straight from the delusional racist rants of Rush Limbaugh.
...just delusional. Then who does? Insurers who profit from such deaths? Forty five thousand Americans died last year because didn't have healthcare.
...actually that's exactly how health insurers survive and profit.
...works fairly well for the fifty million Americans with no coverage? Or works fairly well for the one in six INSURED Americans who are denied catastrophic coverage? Medical bills are responsible for 78% of bankruptcies, and 66% of those bankrupted had FULL COVERAGE.
...in fact it is the propagandised public (like those arguing against reform in this thread) who allow this to happen.
This thread has only been running for a few pages and already those who were so fervently against reform are beginning to cave under the weight of reality... would any of them, I wonder, be willing to concede that if they only knew a little more about the facts they'd probably be pro-reform; pro-public option?
The Luke
PS- Tim, I salute you.
talk about frightened and misinformed...the way you talk you'd think hospitals are a bunch of butcher shops unwilling and unable to take care of the nations sick...45k thousand died out of 300 million americans...how many were saved even though they didn't have insurance...post those numbers..btw..i voted for nader and never voted for a republican president--talk about being misinformed.
you are in the wrong country big guy if you think health insurers have no right to profit..that's big business...
50 million uninsured? where are those numbers from...obama claimed there were 42 million..how many of those are illegal aliens who don't deserve anything from the american government...how many are those who chose not to pay for insurance and lost by gambling on never being sick...you can sit there and claim this and that but you are not sounding any more informed that anyone else on here...50 million uninsured? where are your numbers from? 45k died at the hands of insurers? where did those numbers come from? did you post the numbers on how many uninsured people receive hospital care at the expense of local, and state and the federal government already? post those numbers...
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50 million uninsured? where are those numbers from...obama claimed there were 42 million..
Obama is quoting the last estimate... and the economy has had a little trouble since then.
An easier way to do this would be to tot up the number of INSURED, and subtract it from 302 million. I think you'll find that when you subtract those already insured by government programs (governement employees; soldiers and veterans; those utilising Medicare; state employees; prisoners etc) the actual number of uninsured who should have their own private coverage is closer to 1 in 4.
Here's an easier calculation:
Last year, US health insurers (collectively) posted $30 billion profit, that's a hundred dollars profit for every man woman and child in America; every minority; every illegal alien; every refugee... and that figure was quoted from an IRS report by Congressman Weiner on the foor of the Congress (and again in several media interviews).
So the average person who is AGAINST healthcare reform: a married conservative midde-class guy with two kids, (just generalising) is paying:
-$400 to healthcare insurers profits on behalf of himself and his family
-another $100 to healthcare profits on behalf of some uninsured person (who don't contribte to these profits)
-another $100 to healthcare profits on behalf of some pensioner using Medicare (who dont contribte to these profits)
...now not all of that (approx) $600 annually is payed via premiums, some of it is collected via taxes which the government then pays to the healthcare insurance industry as tax breaks and subsidies (corporate welfare).
But the really interesting part is what happens next.
Having paid out (approx) $600 directly towards the PROFITS of these inefficient, poorly-performing HMOs and insurers who provide NO SERVICE and operate with ten times the administration overhead of Medicare... our averaged anti-reform married conservative middle-class guy with two kids then digs deeper into his pocket and pays THE ACTUAL COST OF HIS FAMILY'S MEDICAL CARE and,... wait for it,... his contribution towards the care of those who receive goverment run insurance (Medicare, Medicaid, Tricare).
...and this ACTUAL COST OF HIS FAMILY'S MEDICAL CARE is grossly bloated too.
It includes doctor's overheads (half of which is malpractice insurance which goes back to the insurance companies again) and the overheads of the health insurers (which is outside of the profits contribution he already paid).
So, lets look at the average family premium of $6,328 for a family.
http://healthinsurance.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ&zTi=1&sdn=healthinsurance&cdn=health&tm=87&f=00&su=p736.8.336.ip_&tt=2&bt=0&bts=0&zu=http%3A//www.ahipresearch.org/pdfs/2009IndividualMarketSurveyFinalReport.pdf
Seems pretty reasonable when you consider the US spends $7,421 dollars per resident, annually on healthcare.
http://www.kaiseredu.org/topics_im.asp?imID=1&parentID=61&id=358
Except that MOST of that $7,421 per capita is collected via taxes and salary levies (approx $30k for our family)... of the $6,328 per family premium (some say this is now over $11k per family) at least $600 is pure profiteering by insurers; another $2,000 is insurers administration overhead of 30%; (which should be $200 like the 3% administration cost of Medicare).... and only the $3,500 remaining goes towards the cost of insuring that family.
So, very roughly, Americans are paying $7,421 per capita for healthcare.
But $100 per capita is insurers profits.
Another $450 per capita is insurers administration cost (guesstimating from the $2k cost to out hypothetical family of four, which should be $200).
So do Americans get $6,900 worth of healthcare once you remove the cost of profits (funding the parasitic rent-seeking classes); the cost of administration (running the unnecessary insurers); ; and the cost of corruption (funding the lobbying efforts made against the general public)...?
No, I dont think so.
The French pay roughly $3,000 dollars per capita for what is widely regarded as the very best healthcare system in the world. In 2001, when the US was in much better shape and BEFORE healthcare costs rose 250% for the average American, the WHO undertook the very biggest comparative national healthcare study... France was number one with a bullet, the US ranked 37th.
The French have the biggest "capitalist" healthcare system in Europe (the governmet run very few of their hospitals and most doctors are self-employed, with private healthcare competing for patients alongside state services and the taxpayer picking up the tab either way).
French patients have full choice of which doctor to see; patients generally only pay the initial consultation costs and are re-imbursed within the hour by swiping their medical card.
French patients pick their own surgeons and hospitals for procedures... and don't have to get approval from the government.
France has no bed shortage; and no waiting lists.
Please, guys, take the time to see what you could be gettig for half the price:
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/pvd/Primer.htm
Every coutry on Earth should be copying the French and the Scandinavians when it comes to healthcare... if you think otherwise, you probably dont know what you're talking about.
The Luke
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so what happens to Private Health?
socialising Health is incredibly doomed to deliver....
what do you think all those 100000s of wealthy medical professionals will say about this?
its an absolute disarster
Obama needs to get over his socialist ideals.....Martin Luther King didnt sign up for this legacy......
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Obama is quoting the last estimate... and the economy has had a little trouble since then.
An easier way to do this would be to tot up the number of INSURED, and subtract it from 302 million. I think you'll find that when you subtract those already insured by government programs (governement employees; soldiers and veterans; those utilising Medicare; state employees; prisoners etc) the actual number of uninsured who should have their own private coverage is closer to 1 in 4.
Here's an easier calculation:
Last year, US health insurers (collectively) posted $30 billion profit, that's a hundred dollars profit for every man woman and child in America; every minority; every illegal alien; every refugee... and that figure was quoted from an IRS report by Congressman Weiner on the foor of the Congress (and again in several media interviews).
So the average person who is AGAINST healthcare reform: a married conservative midde-class guy with two kids, (just generalising) is paying:
-$400 to healthcare insurers profits on behalf of himself and his family
-another $100 to healthcare profits on behalf of some uninsured person (who don't contribte to these profits)
-another $100 to healthcare profits on behalf of some pensioner using Medicare (who dont contribte to these profits)
...now not all of that (approx) $600 annually is payed via premiums, some of it is collected via taxes which the government then pays to the healthcare insurance industry as tax breaks and subsidies (corporate welfare).
But the really interesting part is what happens next.
Having paid out (approx) $600 directly towards the PROFITS of these inefficient, poorly-performing HMOs and insurers who provide NO SERVICE and operate with ten times the administration overhead of Medicare... our averaged anti-reform married conservative middle-class guy with two kids then digs deeper into his pocket and pays THE ACTUAL COST OF HIS FAMILY'S MEDICAL CARE and,... wait for it,... his contribution towards the care of those who receive goverment run insurance (Medicare, Medicaid, Tricare).
...and this ACTUAL COST OF HIS FAMILY'S MEDICAL CARE is grossly bloated too.
It includes doctor's overheads (half of which is malpractice insurance which goes back to the insurance companies again) and the overheads of the health insurers (which is outside of the profits contribution he already paid).
So, lets look at the average family premium of $6,328 for a family.
http://healthinsurance.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ&zTi=1&sdn=healthinsurance&cdn=health&tm=87&f=00&su=p736.8.336.ip_&tt=2&bt=0&bts=0&zu=http%3A//www.ahipresearch.org/pdfs/2009IndividualMarketSurveyFinalReport.pdf
Seems pretty reasonable when you consider the US spends $7,421 dollars per resident, annually on healthcare.
http://www.kaiseredu.org/topics_im.asp?imID=1&parentID=61&id=358
Except that MOST of that $7,421 per capita is collected via taxes and salary levies (approx $30k for our family)... of the $6,328 per family premium (some say this is now over $11k per family) at least $600 is pure profiteering by insurers; another $2,000 is insurers administration overhead of 30%; (which should be $200 like the 3% administration cost of Medicare).... and only the $3,500 remaining goes towards the cost of insuring that family.
So, very roughly, Americans are paying $7,421 per capita for healthcare.
But $100 per capita is insurers profits.
Another $450 per capita is insurers administration cost (guesstimating from the $2k cost to out hypothetical family of four, which should be $200).
So do Americans get $6,900 worth of healthcare once you remove the cost of profits (funding the parasitic rent-seeking classes); the cost of administration (running the unnecessary insurers); ; and the cost of corruption (funding the lobbying efforts made against the general public)...?
No, I dont think so.
The French pay roughly $3,000 dollars per capita for what is widely regarded as the very best healthcare system in the world. In 2001, when the US was in much better shape and BEFORE healthcare costs rose 250% for the average American, the WHO undertook the very biggest comparative national healthcare study... France was number one with a bullet, the US ranked 37th.
The French have the biggest "capitalist" healthcare system in Europe (the governmet run very few of their hospitals and most doctors are self-employed, with private healthcare competing for patients alongside state services and the taxpayer picking up the tab either way).
French patients have full choice of which doctor to see; patients generally only pay the initial consultation costs and are re-imbursed within the hour by swiping their medical card.
French patients pick their own surgeons and hospitals for procedures... and don't have to get approval from the government.
France has no bed shortage; and no waiting lists.
Please, guys, take the time to see what you could be gettig for half the price:
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/pvd/Primer.htm
Every coutry on Earth should be copying the French and the Scandinavians when it comes to healthcare... if you think otherwise, you probably dont know what you're talking about.
The Luke
Every coutry on Earth should be copying the French and the Scandinavians when it comes to healthcare... if you think otherwise, you probably dont know what you're talking
nice statement...you sound just like the elitist scumbag you purport to dislike. Yep..and everyone is running to france and finland for healthcare...what a douche.
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nice statement...you sound just like the elitist scumbag you purport to dislike. Yep..and everyone is running to france and finland for healthcare...what a douche.
...are poor uninsured people travelling to America for treatment?
No one is arguing that American healthcare isn't great for billionaires... it's just that poor and middle-class Americans are the ones defending this shit system on behalf of the bilionaire class. That's retarded.
For example, rockyfortune, assuming you have quality private insurance yourself, how would you cope if you were one of those poor bastards denied coverage under conditions of catastropic illness?
Don't dismiss it, it happens to 15 to 17% of INSURED people.
The Luke