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India Wants to Give Half a Billion People Free Health Care

nytimes.com

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Re: India Wants to Give Half a Billion People Free Health Care

#51

Post by ucaetano »

sol_remmy wrote: post #30
ucaetano wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brazil's is also dual, everyone gets covered by the public system, but there are plenty of private systems. And Chile is always a special case, the combination of natural resources, small population and good public systems does wonder for the country. Despite the extreme differences, I tend to compare Chile to the Nordic countries more than with LatAm. Not sure if that's scalable to larger countries, which is always…

> And Chile is always a special case, the combination of natural resources, small population and good public systems does wonder for the country. Despite the extreme differences, I tend to compare Chile to the Nordic countries more than with LatAm. You are flat out wrong with this comparison. Chile has one of the lowest tax burdens in the world. It can be accurately compared to either Hong Kong or Singapore. Average…

> You are flat out wrong with this comparison.

Do you really think that I am comparing tax burdens?

Sorry, but you're flat wrong with your understanding of what I'm comparing, which I listed in case it wasn't obvious enough.

But apparently writing down what I was comparing wasn't obvious enough for you.

Re: India Wants to Give Half a Billion People Free Health Care

#52

Post by chimeracoder »

jasonlotito wrote: post #47
groby_b wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me translate that: "I sure have a lot of money". The point is having a doctor available for everybody , not just the people who can afford it. Yes, those of us who make more money pay more for it, in the form of taxes. Ultimately, you'll need to decide if you want to care only about your wellbeing, or about society's wellbeing.

> The point is having a doctor available for everybody Not necessarily in a timely manner, which is important for things like Autism (and because of the belief in the system, can actually harm the person). Even if you can afford it, you don't necessarily get to see a doctor, even with years long wait times. And even if you see a doctor, the actual service they provide might be worthless (e.g. suggesting you put your…

> Not necessarily in a timely manner, which is important for things like Autism (and because of the belief in the system, can actually harm the person).

On a related note, since you mention autism: for all the faults of the healthcare system in the US, it's far and away the best at treating chronic mental health conditions. For various reasons, most European countries have a pretty bad approach at providing access to mental health care. This isn't just for specific conditions, but for a wide range of the most common mental health ailments (depression, anxiety, ADHD, ASD, etc.)

Just getting diagnosed is incredibly difficult, but even for people who've been disagnosed, getting approved for treatment is such a long and painful process that many people give up[0]. I know people who have literally turned down jobs that would require them to live in Europe for extended periods of time because they couldn't afford (in the metaphorical sense, not financial) to go without treatment for months before getting approved.

Mental health care in the US has a lot of problems, and I hope we fix them, but there's no comparison if you're looking at other countries.

[0] Don't forget that many of these conditions also affect a person's ability to make it through the months-long process in the first place, so telling them "you'll have to jump through a series of hoops for a year before you can get treated" is basically equivalent to refusing to treat them.

Re: India Wants to Give Half a Billion People Free Health Care

#53

Post by alok-g »

empath75 wrote: post #44
tejaswiy wrote: post #33

The govt. of Andhra Pradesh (a state in India) has pioneered a state backed insurance program several years ago with reasonable success ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aarogyasri ). The problem however with these programs is that corruption within the healthcare industry is still endemic and doctors create fake diagnoses and perform unnecessary surgeries on patients to get their reimbursements from Aarogya-sri. If th…

> If this program is to be rolled out a national scale, the govt. needs to address the systematic corruption in the healthcare industry first. I think it depends on how much corruption is tolerable when trying to achieve such an important goal.

Corruption in India is high by default. Just like security often can't be an after-thought in software development, anything new in India should not leave anti-corruption measures as an after-thought.

Re: India Wants to Give Half a Billion People Free Health Care

#54

Post by dsfyu404ed »

sol_remmy wrote: post #30
ucaetano wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brazil's is also dual, everyone gets covered by the public system, but there are plenty of private systems. And Chile is always a special case, the combination of natural resources, small population and good public systems does wonder for the country. Despite the extreme differences, I tend to compare Chile to the Nordic countries more than with LatAm. Not sure if that's scalable to larger countries, which is always…

> And Chile is always a special case, the combination of natural resources, small population and good public systems does wonder for the country. Despite the extreme differences, I tend to compare Chile to the Nordic countries more than with LatAm. You are flat out wrong with this comparison. Chile has one of the lowest tax burdens in the world. It can be accurately compared to either Hong Kong or Singapore. Average…

It's not the taxes that makes everyone like the Scandinavian countries.

If Chile can have government programs with comparable return or results to the Scandinavian countries at a fraction of the cost then they're a hell of a lot more interesting from a policy perspectives.

Comparing governments based on taxes they levy is like comparing modes of transportation based on the amount of fuel they consume.

Re: India Wants to Give Half a Billion People Free Health Care

#55

Post by wavefunction »

IanDrake wrote: post #50
horsecaptin wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the current government conservative and pro-business? If the are the ones implementing free healthcare, then why should the leftist opposition want to remove it? I bet they'll try to undermine it at every stage well before they ever get power. That will make it easy to kill or fix it when they do get power back.

According to the article, there already is free healthcare provided by the government. The problem is that model, predictably, sucks. “Although government-run hospitals are theoretically free for everyone, the waits are long, quality is poor and corruption is endemic.” So the left doesn’t want private healthcare providers to show them up.

"The left" makes me curious who you're referring to.

Billing fraud is of course a problem with private health-care providers as well.

Re: India Wants to Give Half a Billion People Free Health Care

#56

Post by WoodenChair »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #54
sol_remmy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And Chile is always a special case, the combination of natural resources, small population and good public systems does wonder for the country. Despite the extreme differences, I tend to compare Chile to the Nordic countries more than with LatAm. You are flat out wrong with this comparison. Chile has one of the lowest tax burdens in the world. It can be accurately compared to either Hong Kong or Singapore. Average…

It's not the taxes that makes everyone like the Scandinavian countries. If Chile can have government programs with comparable return or results to the Scandinavian countries at a fraction of the cost then they're a hell of a lot more interesting from a policy perspectives. Comparing governments based on taxes they levy is like comparing modes of transportation based on the amount of fuel they consume.

> Comparing governments based on taxes they levy is like comparing modes of transportation based on the amount of fuel they consume.

I don't think this is a very good analogy. We compare modes of transportation based on the amount of fuel they consume all the time. Unless I'm missing your point? And not everyone likes the Scandinavian countries. They are blessed by very homogeneous populations, in a region unscathed by war the past 70 years, with abundant natural resources, and stable governments. I wouldn't exactly consider them a good model for the rest of the world and I'm not sure what there is to like about them beyond these natural advantages and the fact that most of their people are very nice... Lucky would be more like it.

For example, Norway, the richest per capita of them derives "Export revenues from oil and gas have risen to almost 50% of total exports and constitute more than 20% of the GDP."[0] not exactly something the rest of the world can model.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norway#Economy

Re: India Wants to Give Half a Billion People Free Health Care

#57

Post by rajathagasthya »

t1o5 wrote: post #26

To be read as - the elections are coming. Mr Modi is seeking a second term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_elections_in_India NYT article to be read in tandem with this one https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-budget/with-electio...

It's okay for Mr. Modi to take advantage of that in the elections if it benefits 500M people. That's what every politician does.

Re: India Wants to Give Half a Billion People Free Health Care

#58

Post by randcraw »

ethagknight wrote: post #7

>> The health care plan, part of the government’s 2018-19 budget presented on Thursday, would offer 100 million families up to 500,000 rupees, or about $7,860, of coverage each year. Thats roughly $800B dollars, or over 30% of India's GDP. What am I missing? Most people won't participate? EDIT: according to the article, the Finance Ministry has allocated $314 million (or 4 hundredths of a percent of the theoretical m…

500M people times $7860/yr is $3.93 trillion (the max possible coverage). But if only $314M is authorized, the average person will receive only 314M/500M, or about 63 cents.

Re: India Wants to Give Half a Billion People Free Health Care

#60

Post by chris_wot »

t1o5 wrote: post #26

To be read as - the elections are coming. Mr Modi is seeking a second term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_elections_in_India NYT article to be read in tandem with this one https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-budget/with-electio...

If Mr Modi has rolled out free health care to 500 million people, saving millions of lives, probably a good thing and I hope it wins him some votes!
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