661–670 of 1001 posts
impose universal health coverage & the jockeying will commence to see who is in charge of it. medical & diet fundamentalists will rejoice at the opportunity to seize control & force everyone to take certain drugs, eat or not eat certain foods or types of foods, exercise a particular way, surrender their organs at a particular age, or whatever else their hearts desire for everyone else. there have been so many rabbit…
impose universal health coverage & the jockeying will commence to see who is in charge of it. medical & diet fundamentalists will rejoice at the opportunity to seize control & force everyone to take certain drugs, eat or not eat certain foods or types of foods, exercise a particular way, surrender their organs at a particular age, or whatever else their hearts desire for everyone else. there have been so many rabbit…
Because none of the things you said have ANYTHING to do with "universal healthcare" and everything to do with "bad actors worming their way into positions of authority to enrich themselves". Surly you can't believe that "let every induvial person figure it out themselves in an unbalanced capitalist system" is a better answer, right? This isn't just about "if too many people are in the system then MY healthcare quality goes down", right?
It has to be one of the most bureaucratic and paperwork overloaded systems of all time. It's hard to imagine somebody who've had an actual health crisis would think otherwise, unless they can afford people who can shield them from the BS.
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One way to begin is look for studies on wait times or procedures of a given type per capita.
Those studies have all, to my knowledge of them, shown no system mode that is better or worse than any other. The USA for many categories of care has often in those studies had worse wait times compared to nations with fully nationalized healthcare. Heck when I went to college in Ohio's capital, the recommendation on how to get psychiatry or therapy as a new patient was to call the suicide helpline and claim that you…
The US maintains the highest hardware capacity of the three nations with roughly 43 scanners per million people and performs around 245 to 290 scans per 1,000 residents per year. non-emergency wait times are 1 to 7 days. The UK has 10 scanners per million people and ~100 scans per 1,000 residents, using centralized triage to keep non-emergency wait times between 1 and 6 weeks for NHS targets. Canada does 160 scans per 1,000 residents and 14 to 15 scanners per million, with wait times of 5 to 9 weeks.
When you consider that the US population is not fully covered by insurance, the number of scans is even higher
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> The first issue with this is that the gap between the uninsured and insured is not necessarily due to the lack of insurance. It could be due to factors associated with not having insurance, like living on the streets, being schizophrenic, being poor, and so on. Made up perspective to justify his angle. Not having healthcare access for a lot of people is 100% a policy choice. Waved off here by a list that really say…
Would free healthcare reduce deaths in uranium miners that are smokers? Probably some, but would it bring that to the same levels as non-smoking, non miners? Unlikely so. Hence it would be silly to pretend all the cancer deaths are due to lack of health care.
The smoking uranium miner example has a surprisingly realistic story, comes from real data; the dangers of radon in the basement were deduced from comparing cancer rates in smoking uranium miners with high radon in their basements, then they removed what they thought was the smoking and uranium contribution, then fitted to the general population.
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There's a multitude of evidence that points to the success of the ACA from a cost perspective (among other things). Cost of healthcare for individuals is not a good metric to judge by. The ecosystem of hospitals, patients, doctors, insurers, health systems, and the federal government is complex and you're not going to get a clear picture of the overall impact of the ACA by looking as something as simple as cost savin…
If the ACA was so successful at reducing coats we wouldn't still be having discussions like this about the excessive costs of both care and insurance in the US. We will never know how costs would have changed if we didn't implement the ACA, and cost is not the only metric of success. But it clearly hasn't led us to a place where people feel okay with what the industry costs.
Also necessary to remember the ACA was only passed because of Democratic support in 2010. Republicans hacked away at the proposal before it became law, kneecapping any real institutional changes it had contained, and have effectively killed it since becoming the majority in the House and Senate in 2024. That bipartisan support piece is required in order for anything meaningful to happen.
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One of my favorite health care facts: there are more MRI machines in the state of Massachusetts than there are in the entire country of Canada.
I know that you tend to be balls deep in American Exceptionalism, but the truth is that reasonable countries with reasonable health care average 15-30 MRI machines per million inhabitants. America is a wild outlier, and unless you have data to back that those machines are put to good use, I'd trust the rest of the world who decided the sweet spot is 15-30 mer million, not 60.
The gap between Canada and the United States is immense. Canada could add quite a large number of machines and not come even within the line of sight of where the US is.
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No, this absolutely does not explain the US's wildly off-base per-capita expenditure because uninsured people still go in the denominator of the per-capita figure! I'm sure the per-insured-capita figure is worse but that's not what we are comparing! Americans are constantly trying to exclude uninsured people from their statistics (and, worse, from the care itself) but the comparable countries don't do this so it is u…
The fun part is when you break those numbers down between government and non-government expenditure. You’ll find that US governmental spending on health care per capita is higher than every other country’s entire (gov and non-gov) spending per capita. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/health-at-a-glance-2025...
Even if it's US Government only per capita with people the government insures, it makes sense it would be so high because only people on government insurance are the poor/disabled AND old. Two groups that have extremely high utilization.
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Truly. Aetna, United Healthcare, Anthem, etc are examples of industry that does not need to exist, and exist only to serve the status quo. Each of those are companies worth billions of dollars that could be instead used to lower the individual cost of providing health insurance. As you say, this would of course be unsavory in some respects as those companies employ a lot of people. It's not a very economically produc…
They do perform one useful service: forcing a hospital that tries to issue a $100,000 bill that should be $10,000 to reissue it, and not leave the patient saddled with a giant debt. (Medicaid & Medicare claims processors do the same thing. Medicaid claims processing is mostly handled by private, third-party insurers now, and seems to be able to do so more efficiently and cheaply than when it was being run directly by…
Medicare is much cheaper because they have fixed rates and hospitals know what to bill.