271–280 of 537 posts
The first Fortune 500 company to give it's employees free travel to Mexico, Canada, or Cuba for affordable care will cause quite a few waves.
Or a smart country could open up "embassy clinics" throughout America, offering affordable healthcare and taking the profits back home.
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Well, they also get harrassed and get their credit destroyed. Hardly “effectively” socialized.
A foreigner comes in and racks up bills for $300k. His travel insurance pays only $50k. He leaves... and guess who pays the rest? Or a homeless person gets rolled in - they give no shit if you trash their credit rating. Honestly... I live in US, if I get hit with anything similar... I'll just pack up and go back to Europe.
The book The Healing of America by T.R. Reid, 2010 was a phenomenal look at this subject and the conclusion was this: we are the only developed nation whose government allows for-profit health insurance companies to exist with ZERO regulation to cap healthcare prices. Because of this, we spend 20% of every dollar on "administrative" costs compared to 3%-7% in the European and Asian countries. The goal for American he…
I read that book too, and agree it's phenomenal. It's not just about capping insurance profits. The countries doing the best also have price controls on the healthcare providers. Doctors make a lot less money. On the other hand they generally don't have to pay for medical school. France, Germany, and Japan all have similar systems, according to the book. They have private nonprofit insurance, some kind of mandate to…
Any sort of change towards this in the United States (and I agree, it's a good one) will be spun as losing jobs and crushing the economy, which is a very hard argument to defeat.
Where does the money go? Aside from the waste and fraud, two places. First, we pay for convenience. We want to see a doctor now . We want immediate access to all the best equipment, and specialists, and drugs, and we don't want to wait around or travel far. And we increasingly want it for every citizen. Second, over treatment of the dying - no subject is more uncomfortable. When asked what the biggest problem Kaiser…
I don't get fast - seeing a doctor immediately isn't easy, and I still have to wait in the reception. If I need immediate care, it's either $900 for ER, or a few hours wait... basically the same as UK NHS expectation. I don't get cheap - the premiums aren't cheap, and it's company sponsored. I can't say that it's much better care - they're only there for the damn ZocDoc review of a bedside manner.
I mean... I had a tapeworm scare and my doctor was literally reading medical encyclopedia in front of me.
I think it would be worthwhile to discuss more than just per capita cost. The way that these costs are distributed is important and, I believe, problematic. The problem here is not just that per capita cost is high, it’s that for reasons that are partly structural, and partly demographic, healthy young payers with lower incomes can be burdened with the full, un-subsidised, costs of insurance, while others consume ser…
I'm confused, do you have low income and a fairly large amount of assets? I can see this if you retired early or something, and in this case the comparison with your income really isn't particularly interesting.
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I'm Canadian and as far as I know you don't have a private option in most provinces. The only option is to travel to the United States and pay for it yourself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Canada#Restricti...
This is correct. Canada's single payer system means doctors can't work in both the public and private systems. They have to choose one over the other. There has been plenty of efforts put into allowing private clinics outside of the public system, but they have all been shutdown.
On the other hand, one thing that is usually ignored about Canadian healthcare when it's discussed in US, is the fact that it's run by provinces. Feds are involved, and most federal money that goes to healthcare comes with strings attached wrt how the resulting healthcare system should look; but ultimately the decision of how (and whether) to run healthcare is down to provinces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_Health_Act#History:_Fed...
Furthermore, that system didn't come up all at once - a single province tried it first, and it had proven popular enough that other provinces gradually adopted it. Once it was sufficiently widespread, the federal government stepped in.
Given that federalism in US is more developed than in Canada, I don't understand why this isn't the approach advocated by most adherents here. If Saskatchewan could organize healthcare all by itself back in the day, surely so can California, New York etc.
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> We want to see a doctor now. We want immediate access to all the best equipment, and specialists, and drugs, and we don't want to wait around or travel far. And we increasingly want it for every citizen. Australians can get these at a fraction of US prices though
Can they? Mr Meschemberg’s cancer is HER 2-positive (HER 2 is a protein found on the surface of some cancer cells). HER 2-positive cancer cells tend to be far more aggressive, as they divide and grow faster than normal. “That makes [my cancer] a bit different,” he said. “There are drugs that are available to help but they’re not on the PBS.” https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/mee...
But thing is - not all medications are covered at the same level under American private insurances as well.
It's worth noting that the U.S. market does pay for the lion's share of patented drugs, effectively funding a significant portion of R&D that benefits the whole world years later when generics come into market (at least for those drugs which are not costly to manufacture, which happen to be the majority). I'm not saying this model is right. I'm just saying that doing away with it will have fundamental consequences to…
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What’s with the ‘out-of-network’ thing that gets pulled out regularly? Is healthcare really that much more expensive to an insurer if it’s done at one site or another? Sure, they’d prefer it was done in-house so that the ticket can be clipped multiple times, but it’s clearly just made up numbers that are produced currently.
It's not that it's more expensive at one place or another for the most part. When you go in-network you are seeing providers that your insurance has a contract with. This contract includes agreed amounts for procedures. Providers will often grossly overbill (mostly because it's easier to let the billing backend resolve these limits than bill accurately in the first place) and your insurance will respond with the amou…
It's worth noting that the U.S. market does pay for the lion's share of patented drugs, effectively funding a significant portion of R&D that benefits the whole world years later when generics come into market (at least for those drugs which are not costly to manufacture, which happen to be the majority). I'm not saying this model is right. I'm just saying that doing away with it will have fundamental consequences to…