So the healthcare system - as described here - is largely benefiting the living members of the dying by helping them cope and transition into death.
That is what I took away from this article.
This is how you healthcare: American Death in London
71–80 of 127 posts
Re: This is how you healthcare: American Death in London
#72The author's father, Bill, around age 76, never paid taxes while living for decades in the UK, but was still treated, and died there. The author assumes he wouldn't have had care in the U.S. That's wrong. Even though he never held a recognized job (and probably was a tax cheat), as a senior citizen he would probably receive Medicare and as a poor person he would also potentially be supported by Medicaid for any short…
I think the author's point was that his father wouldn't have bothered to fill out the paperwork required by Medicare so the fact that the NHS is automatic allowed his father to have coverage.
"his father wouldn't have bothered to fill out the paperwork required by Medicare"
Having gone thru something kind of similar yet different with my own older relatives, the hospital has a blindingly obvious financial motivation to "help" elderly / senile patients with the paperwork, and therefore there are people on staff walking the halls doing precisely that. Seen it with my own eyes, this is not theoretical. As long as the dollars you can haul in from properly filled out medicare forms exceed the cost of hiring a ombudsman or coordinator or advocate or whatever the job title was...
Re: This is how you healthcare: American Death in London
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
The system does bankrupt people, but it doesn't refuse to treat people. That is why people go bankrupt - the hospital has to treat everyone, then hands them an immense bill.
Actually, it does refuse to treat people quite regularly. Aside from emergency department, health care providers are generally free to refuse care for patients they believe cannot pay except in the case of a life-threatening emergency. What this means is that in the USA it's common for people to have to allow earlier-stage, less expensive to treat problems develop into serious problems before finally going into the E…
>>Actually, it does refuse to treat people quite regularly. Aside from emergency department, health care providers are generally free to refuse care for patients they believe cannot pay except in the case of a life-threatening emergency.
This isn't actually accurate at all. Hospitals with emergency departments must stabilize patients in an emergency. Thats it. The emergency room has no responsibility to treat the underlying cause. It isn't a loophole that people take advantage of because you still don't get treatment. I suppose you could show up to multiple emergency rooms and hope one treats you but that isn't something you do if you are chronically hurt.
People who can't afford to get treatment or aren't on medicaid or charity care don't get treated period. You can test this by just comparing the emergency room rates in Massachusetts before and after coverage expansion. More people went to the emergency room once they had coverage than previously.
Re: This is how you healthcare: American Death in London
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking as someone who's had multiple relatives die at the hands of NHS rationing, I completely disagree. In a system where you can't sue your healthcare provider for egregious malpractice because they're a governmental body and are thus subject to the same citizen-sues-state rules as law enforcement or any other public service, I fear for the quality of our healthcare.
Can you explain this please, as I'm pretty sure you can totally sue the NHS if you want to.
Sure
In one instance in the 1970s I had a great uncle who came into a local clinic complaining about crushing chest-pain, and was told to come back the following day because the attending physician was out for the day. He died on the street of a heart attack while walking home. Why he wasn't immediately rushed to a hospital is beyond me.
More recently, my grandmother, who died in 2004, was wait listed for over a year to get medical imaging and biopsy performed on what she (correctly) assumed was a tumor on her neck. By the time the scan was performed it was determined that she had metastasized lymphoma and the tumor was plainly visible to anyone who could fog a mirror. She died in hospice within a couple of months of being diagnosed.
So what are we to sue for there? Clearly both instances of complete and utter NHS incompetence (and sadly, complacency on the part of my UK relatives) but it's incompetence by omission and rationing, not a doctor embedding a scalpel into someone's tibia.
Had either of my relatives lived in the US, they would have had a much better fighting chance at living than they did at the hands of the NHS.
Re: This is how you healthcare: American Death in London
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why does it seem like a step in the right direction, specifically?
One reason is that it represents the first acknowledgement that health care is something that every man, woman and child should have. That's not to say there aren't horrible things about Obamacare (i.e. terrible business model) but yes, it's a start.
Everyone requires food, clothing and shelter, and yet we use other mechanisms to insure that our citizens don't go hungry. While not necessary for survival, education is guaranteed by the states, and we use a different model for its delivery.
Neither of those is to say that necessarily Obamacare is the wrong solution but its certainly not the only path.
Re: This is how you healthcare: American Death in London
#76All this noise about the problems of the American "system", ignores the fact that America doesn't have a health-care system yet. If the problem in the United States is high-cost, the solution is tort-reform, so that GPs can comfortably practice general medicine and afford their insurance premiums again.
Unless a central "system" is going to indemnify GPs, there won't be a flood of them entering the pool, since their rates will be fixed by central rate tables (maybe, if they are lucky, adjusted for regional cost-of-living) even if only indirectly by maximum benefits needed to maintain minimal legal coverage levels; if they are to remain privately run and thus administratively independent.
Re: This is how you healthcare: American Death in London
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking as someone who's had multiple relatives die at the hands of NHS rationing, I completely disagree. In a system where you can't sue your healthcare provider for egregious malpractice because they're a governmental body and are thus subject to the same citizen-sues-state rules as law enforcement or any other public service, I fear for the quality of our healthcare.
> In a system where you can't sue your healthcare provider for egregious malpractice because they're a governmental body and are thus subject to the same citizen-sues-state rules as law enforcement or any other public service, I fear for the quality of our healthcare. That's nonsense, hospitals and NHS Trusts are routinely sued for malpractice, along with the doctors involved. There's nothing special about any part o…
Sorry if my comment doesn't please the autistic bias of HN community and greater internet justice. See my response to your sibling comment below.
Re: This is how you healthcare: American Death in London
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why does it seem like a step in the right direction, specifically?
One reason is that it represents the first acknowledgement that health care is something that every man, woman and child should have. That's not to say there aren't horrible things about Obamacare (i.e. terrible business model) but yes, it's a start.
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Re: This is how you healthcare: American Death in London
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
One reason is that it represents the first acknowledgement that health care is something that every man, woman and child should have. That's not to say there aren't horrible things about Obamacare (i.e. terrible business model) but yes, it's a start.
Everyone requires food, clothing and shelter, and yet we use other mechanisms to insure that our citizens don't go hungry. While not necessary for survival, education is guaranteed by the states, and we use a different model for its delivery. Neither of those is to say that necessarily Obamacare is the wrong solution but its certainly not the only path.
6.7 million households went hungry in 2012. How are those "other mechanisms" working out? Source: http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/us_hunger_facts.ht...
Re: This is how you healthcare: American Death in London
#80I was in America, in LA, a few years back (I'm British), when the whole Obamacare thing was being debated everywhere. The one thing I noticed, and it was a rule that didn't have a single exception, was that everyone I talked to could give at least one example of a time when either they or somebody they personally knew had been faced with a ruinous bill for healthcare. People who'd been bankrupted, people who'd fled t…
I tried then, and I've tried in the years since, but I simply cannot understand where they're coming from. How anyone can support a healthcare system in this day & age that can, and does, bankrupt or refuse to treat people.. I just can't understand it. I find it curious and odd that you can't understand another philosophy on the role of government and the individual.
This is not about the role of government and the individual. This is about healthcare, something fundamental that every human being needs. For which it cannot be predicted when one needs it, and where need can vary greatly through (in by far most cases) no fault of people themselves (an unpredictable unelastic good).
Such matters - often literally of life and death - are not something that ever could be trumped by philosophies about 'roles'.
Yes the market works well in most other spheres, yes economic freedoms are important, but no, economic freedoms (or justice) do not trump human life and death, where avoidable (in a civilized society). Economic freedom is just one of the many things people need for happyness. Health and healthcare are another, that is at least as important. And thus the value of economic freedom needs to be balanced out against healthcare.
The government just is the mediator. Taxing one sphere of life (economic activity) to ensure justice and security in another that fares better if guided by other principles than profit extracted from individual patients.
(individual GPs do profit in the UK system. They, for example, get a bonus if they can make a patient stop smoking, etc. ...speaking of preventative healthcare. They just have less incentive to exploit individual patients (by having them come back later with lung cancer for example) and then charge them to their limit)