This website has the least pleasant scrolling experience I've ever seen
It gets better after the first three paragraphs, they just decided to do something odd for the introduction.
It did get better for a moment, then it started moving sideways…
Ill in England? Your Location Can Determine If You Live or Die
31–40 of 96 posts
Re: Ill in England? Your Location Can Determine If You Live or Die
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Whether this is true in every country I don't know, but it's certainly not an inevitability. Australia has pretty terrible health care in many of its rural areas, and Australia's governments (both state/territory and federal) are clearly guilty of major policy failures in rural/remote healthcare provision. But even supposing they did a much better job, even supposing they did the best job humanly possible – you are…
For reference on just how much smaller England is—your example of Sydney to Ivanhoe would get you nearly all the way from North to South—it's about the distance from London to Aberdeen. And again, most of the metrics here (bed availability, for example) should not be geographically bound at all.
> And again, most of the metrics here (bed availability, for example) should not be geographically bound at all.
Is that true though? A less densely populated area would have a lower baseline number of hospital beds, which I'd expect would make it more sensitive to unexpected volatility in demand. Major hospitals often have empty wards which are kept available as contingencies for unexpected events such as terrorist attacks or natural disasters – I've seen one in person before, all these beds and medical equipment with the lights turned off gives me goosebumps for some reason – less major hospitals are less likely to have such facilities – but obviously they give hospital management greater leeway (at least in theory) to manage unexpected bursts in demand. And of course, less densely populated areas are likely to have fewer major hospitals and a greater number of minor ones. Similarly, larger hospitals have larger staffs, so greater likelihood they can ask extra staff to come in to meet unexpected demand bursts.
So, in the abstract, I would not be surprised if less densely populated areas of England had worse bed availability than more densely populated areas. And indeed, the least dense area of England, the South West, scored the worst in hospital bed availability in their analysis–as I would have expected.
I think that is a flaw in the methodology of this article, they display no evidence of having considered factors like that, or having attempted to control for them.
Re: Ill in England? Your Location Can Determine If You Live or Die
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Whether this is true in every country I don't know, but it's certainly not an inevitability. Australia has pretty terrible health care in many of its rural areas, and Australia's governments (both state/territory and federal) are clearly guilty of major policy failures in rural/remote healthcare provision. But even supposing they did a much better job, even supposing they did the best job humanly possible – you are…
For reference on just how much smaller England is—your example of Sydney to Ivanhoe would get you nearly all the way from North to South—it's about the distance from London to Aberdeen. And again, most of the metrics here (bed availability, for example) should not be geographically bound at all.
As the population goes up, the variability is likely to go down. Single people are less of a blip in the numbers.
This means you can run with fewer free beds than in a low population area.
For example, if you have 3.8 beds/1000 people, that's 4 beds in a town of 1000 people.
A single additional person is 25% of the beds in the small town. A car crash? You won't be able to fit them in.
In a city of 50,000 people, that's 190 beds, and random events fit in the slack much more easily.
Also, since the baseline is larger, it's easier to scale. The minimum addition in the small town is a whole bed, or a 25% increase in costs.
In the city, it's also 1 bed, but that's ~0.5%.
Re: Ill in England? Your Location Can Determine If You Live or Die
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Healthcare across the entire west is crumbling, and not through defunding. It's driven by demographic shifts that nobody has a real plan to fix.
Explain how Japan has the #2 best healthcare system in the world then. (It’s universal with 70% of costs paid by the government)
Strong planning and hard decisions. Japan over produces doctors. Japan forces a strict 30minute cap on doctor visits when billed by that insurance. Japan limits hospitals to be only owned by doctors, not corporations. Japan has no medical malpractice lawsuits. Japan makes everyone pay 30% of medical costs, UpTo a cap of about 1k dollars per month. There is no such thing as the "nice" health care insurance nearly every American programmer working at a FAANG gets. Japan makes seniors also pay a large deductable.
Japan put in place many strategic constraints on their system to achieve this result. Hard decisions most countries would revolt at, doctors unions would strict at, and westerns would call broken.
But at least the system does it's job and is not projected to collapse. You can win votes, or you can design a functional system. You cannot do both.
Re: Ill in England? Your Location Can Determine If You Live or Die
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Healthcare across the entire west is crumbling, and not through defunding. It's driven by demographic shifts that nobody has a real plan to fix.
Ultimately the only viable plan is going to be severe care rationing. In most developed countries we have an aging population with an increasing incidence of chronic diseases and a shortage of physicians. Regardless of whether payments come from governments, employers, or individuals the reality is that we simply won't have the resources to care for everyone.
At least in the US they could stop restricting the number of residency slots.
Re: Ill in England? Your Location Can Determine If You Live or Die
#36Canada doesnt have these kinds of issues with its universal healthcare. We have pioneered new processes to reduce the burden to our medical system [1]. [1] https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/cj-jp/ad-am/bk-di.html
"We improved our support metrics by simply killing our customers, thus reducing call volume."
Re: Ill in England? Your Location Can Determine If You Live or Die
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ultimately the only viable plan is going to be severe care rationing. In most developed countries we have an aging population with an increasing incidence of chronic diseases and a shortage of physicians. Regardless of whether payments come from governments, employers, or individuals the reality is that we simply won't have the resources to care for everyone.
At least in the US they could stop restricting the number of residency slots.
This
Re: Ill in England? Your Location Can Determine If You Live or Die
#38>We have to invest more in identifying and tackling disease earlier if we want to “stop the hospitals from falling over and the GPs from being overwhelmed,” he said. Demographics and shrinking labor forces alone will bring the system to its knees regardless of money. It's absolutely baffling in the face of this trend that preventative, systemic policies are practically never discussed and everything centers around in…
If we invested more money I think the problem would get fixed. You need to be smart but you don't need to be a genius for most specialties. Some of those people that flood into big tech could instead go into becoming a doctor if the money and working conditions were there.
Re: Ill in England? Your Location Can Determine If You Live or Die
#39Nearly every country is now suffering from the age demographic bomb where senior retirees are starting to outnumber working adults. https://www.epbmacroresearch.com/blog/the-global-demographic... This has major implications for many social safety net programs and entitlements ie there aren’t enough working adults paying into the system, which is also exacerbated by recent anti immigration movements which was a major…
(I'm only pointing this out) There's also the issue where people believe that everyone, regardless of age, should be treated to the maximum level possible (or what they can afford in the case of the US). If you publicity suggested that someone who is 99 years old and in poor health shouldn't receive some treatment that costs a massive amount of money/resources you would be looked at in disgust. No politican would eve…
Yep. It's political suicide to bring up fairly obvious age/prognosis limits, but ultimately we all die of something.
Assuming most disease based hospital stays (heart attacks strokes, cancers) are biased towards older folk it makes sense that resources to younger folk be prioritised.
It makes -sense-, but asking a decent human to turf an "old person" out of bed because a "young person" has arrived (with a survivable, but urgent condition) is tough.
In war triage is a thing. Save the ones who can be saved, more-or-less ignore the ones you can't. We cannot, and should not, expect civilian medical staff to triage ambulances, A&E, ward beds. But health services are being drowned in the meantime.
Re: Ill in England? Your Location Can Determine If You Live or Die
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ultimately the only viable plan is going to be severe care rationing. In most developed countries we have an aging population with an increasing incidence of chronic diseases and a shortage of physicians. Regardless of whether payments come from governments, employers, or individuals the reality is that we simply won't have the resources to care for everyone.
At least in the US they could stop restricting the number of residency slots.
The number of residency slots isn't restricted. The problem is that almost all residency program funding comes from Medicare and hasn't increased much for many years.