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I had a health crisis in France

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Re: I had a health crisis in France

#131

Post by alkonaut »

vacri wrote: post #76
clouddrover wrote: post #8

The US spends more per capita on health care than other OECD countries, even ones with universal public health care: http://kff.org/health-costs/issue-brief/snapshots-health-car... And yet the US has lower life expectancy than those countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...

The fundamental problem to solve, though, is getting money back out of medicine. American doctors get paid ridiculous amounts more than doctors in other developed nations. If you want affordable medicine, then medical salaries are going to have to take a hit, so you can afford more staff overall. An example of how much money is in the system: I was talking to a nurse in the US whose adult son had a series of mental i…

US doctors are paid more because they take risks (they have expensive education, handle expensive treatments etc)

If an MD cost zero to get, doctors would still be paid well, but not crazy well.

Re: I had a health crisis in France

#132

Post by maelito »

raphaelj wrote: post #6

> My individual burden, however, is far more reasonable than > an American might assume. I pay an annual income tax of > about 23%. How comes this number is that low? Tax revenue in France account for about 48% of the country's GDP[1]. I'm living in Belgium, and my payroll tax is already higher than these 23%. -- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_reven...

"annual income tax", which is "impôt sur le revenu" in french, is irrelevant here, it doesn't fund the social security system.

Re: I had a health crisis in France

#133

Post by wnkrshm »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #112

I think I (living in the UK, currently an EU country) understand the mentality behind the US healthcare system(s). I think it's along the lines of "Why should I pay for someone else's healthcare?". I've heard similar arguments from British people (I'm rather more socialist in my outlook than average, for a UK resident, I fear) and I don't really have an answer to that. Why indeed? I'm probably conditioned to answer t…

I think it's interesting to ask why people separate themselves from other people, I.e. people who are sick and possibly dieing, who need help.

Something I read on hn a while ago involved trying to place others who have had bad things happen to them in mental categories apart from oneself, to not have to deal with the possibility of bad things happening to yourself without any reason. E.g. a traffic accident, cancer etc.

With traffic accidents, is very instructive to see that people will reflexively think that the persons involved did something wrong, this removes the need to accept that life isn't safe and that our behavior often has little influence at all on wether bad things happen to us. I think it's the same with healthcare. The defense mechanism is: they got sick so they must have lived unhealthily - granted, there are a lot of things your behavior can influence: cardiopulmonary disease, some forms of cancer but not all of the tragedies of health that can befall you are in any way under ones control. By sticking together we can shoulder the burden of the few that didn't have any blame on their fate.

Re: I had a health crisis in France

#134

Post by alkonaut »

kweinber wrote: post #117
alkonaut wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Healthcare alone is just one piece of the puzzle. Having a french style healthcare system without corresponding safety nets in other areas to fight poverty/addiction/inequality etc would be better than the status quo, but not very effective.

Important to note that the opioid addiction epidemic is actually exacerbated by flaws in the US healthcare system, so adoption of standards from France or elsewhere could help with that too.

Not to mention how many people need addiction treatment and/or psychiatric care who are instead incarcerated.

Re: I had a health crisis in France

#135

Post by jdietrich »

brianwawok wrote: post #89
Retric wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US has 75% higher infant mortality than France which has a real impact on life expectancy.

Look at infant mortality for college educated people in the two countries. Much more interesting. The US has massive population segments on drugs and other segments here illegal that dont get medical care. Generally if you are well off, the US is a fine place to be. If you are addicted or poor, it's not so great.

The drug problem is intimately related to the healthcare problem. America's private system is absolutely lousy at preventative medicine and public health.

In most of Europe, it's easy to get into rehab even if you're destitute. We have drug workers out on the streets providing advice, clean needles and referrals to other healthcare services. Homeless addicts still have access to exactly the same services as anyone else. The death toll from addiction falls remarkably quickly if there's a concerted effort to abate it.

We also avoided the opiate epidemic that is currently blighting the US - pill mills simply don't exist when there's no profit motive to dole out opiates like tic-tacs.

Setting aside the obvious humanitarian issues, failing to address the healthcare needs of the very poorest is costing the American taxpayer dearly. The economic benefits of preventative medicine and social care were described better than I could in Gladwell's essay "Million Dollar Murray".

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/02/13/million-dollar-...

Re: I had a health crisis in France

#136

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

markharris99 wrote: post #51
madaxe_again wrote: post #23

I was hospitalised in France last year - and coming from the UK, which has a social healthcare system too, I was likewise blown away by the quality of care. I was staying in a remote house, miles from the nearest village, an hour from the nearest hospital. After about four days of continuous vomiting in 40 degree heat I caved and called a doctor, in the hope of getting a prescription for antiemetics over the phone. I…

> I had a similar experience earlier this year in the U.K., and the contrast was significant - in the U.K. one feels like an irritation and an inconvenience. "Bloody hell, what's a patient doing here? This is a hospital!". I'm 50. I remember what London was like way before Labour first got into power. Lets look at today. Immigration is way out of control. London has probably 10 million people? It's busting at the sea…

>> Like the Democrats in the US, they wanted immigrants from all over to change the political landscape and keep them in power. Regardless of native population.

You're being downvoted to unreadability anyway, but I feel I should clarify this just for the sake of people who are unaware of it: immigrants to the UK don't get a vote in parliamentary elections and therefore Blair's Labour could bring in the entire population of Asia, he still wouldn't have got a single vote out of them.

And he couldn't have just given them all British citizenship either: in general one needs to have residence before being elligible for citizenship.

Residency is obtained automatically after five years of living in the UK (if you can prove it anyway). Parliamentary elections happen every four years. We now have a Tory government, the second after ten ish years of Labour. Clearly, if Blair had a cunning plan it wasn't cunning enough.

And even if the numbers don't move you, think of it this way: if immigrants had any say in the governing of the UK, the country would not have just jumped off a cliff with a weight tied around its neck (a.k.a. Brexit).

Re: I had a health crisis in France

#137

Post by [deleted] »

ekianjo wrote: post #31
antirez wrote: post #21

This is normal on all western Europe states. However France has very high standards in general about health care and is regarded as one of the best systems. I think it's time for US citizens to accept that most of Europe has better life expectancy, lower infant mortality than US, and to be ill is not a financial tragedy. Moreover the treatment that a low-income and high-income citizen receives is very similar, so the…

> Europe has better life expectancy, Diet has a lot more to to about that than medical care.

[deleted]

Re: I had a health crisis in France

#138

Post by phd514 »

Retric wrote: post #75
ekianjo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Europe has better life expectancy, Diet has a lot more to to about that than medical care.

US has 75% higher infant mortality than France which has a real impact on life expectancy.

The US healthcare system has lots of problems, but the quality of its infant care isn't really one of them. Infant mortality rates are calculated very differently in different countries which accounts for much of the US's "poor" rating. The biggest factor is that the US considers all births, regardless of how premature they are, towards its mortality rate and is aggressive in its treatment of pre-term births. Many other countries don't count early births or babies born with weights below a certain threshold towards their infant mortality rate.

Re: I had a health crisis in France

#139

Post by ElKrist »

cm2187 wrote: post #28

The French health system has its own problems. There is little evaluation of physicians so picking a hospital is very much a lottery, unless you know insiders who will tell you where to go and not to go. The system runs a massive financial deficit. It is run in an administrative way which creates odds behaviors. For instance department allowances based on % of occupation of hospital beds, which lead them to keep peop…

> The system runs a massive financial deficit.

French person here. Although the deficit of the healthcare system is often pointed at by the media, it is far from "massive". From [1] translated in English:

"This budget is in deficit, (...) but this deficit is far less than the budget of the State. In 2011, the deficit of the Social Security represented 2,66% of its total budget (11,7 / 440,8 billions €) compared to 45% for the State budget (92 / 200 billions €)."

I'm not saying that it's OK to have a deficit because the State deficit is bigger. But we should keep orders of magnitude in mind (the French budget would be in super-duper-massive deficit then?). Plus, as you can also see in [1], the deficit is shrinking since 2010 and getting close to zero.

Yes, there are some optimizations possible in the French Social Security. I can't find the source anymore but the cost of running the public Social Security is lower, in percentage, than French private healthcares (if my memory is right its 8% vs 25% of the total budget of each organization) It is not hard to imagine that economies of scale play a major impact for this.

[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_de_la_S%C3%A9curit%C3%A...

Re: I had a health crisis in France

#140

Post by fiatjaf »

"I pay an annual income tax of about 23%."

So you don't pay any kind of VAT?

That also wouldn't mean anything, if the State is not taxing you so much, but it still has money to finance these things, it is obviously because it is taxing other people a lot more and using the money to treat your health.

I would not find it very good to have my needs fulfilled with stolen money, as you seems to be finding.

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