81–90 of 127 posts
- I'm really sorry to hear about the author's father's passing. - While it's heart-warming, it is unrealistic to think that a public program can spend infinite amounts of money on citizens who a) have paid "little or no" taxes and b) "throat cancer suffers who quit smoking four years afterwards". The math just doesn't add up. - The fact that the US has a pseudo market-based healthcare system is what allows drug / dev…
- I'm really sorry to hear about the author's father's passing. - While it's heart-warming, it is unrealistic to think that a public program can spend infinite amounts of money on citizens who a) have paid "little or no" taxes and b) "throat cancer suffers who quit smoking four years afterwards". The math just doesn't add up. - The fact that the US has a pseudo market-based healthcare system is what allows drug / dev…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with the TANSTAAFL argument in this case is that the NHS is far cheaper than the American alternative. It is also far superior at providing preventative care than the American alternative.
Indeed. The US private sector and the US federal government EACH spend more per capita on health care than the UK does. And yet we rank behind the UK on virtually every health statistic that they bother to track. In 1993 Republicans did an interesting analysis. They found that Clinton's health care plan would work, and would be popular. If it passed, they believed that Republicans would be losing national elections f…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having lived in the uk for the first 27 years of my life, and then in California for the past 10, I have only one word to describe the way American healthcare feels to me: barbaric. Long live the NHS, and yay for Obamacare - it seems like a step in the right direction at least.
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.
When my wife gave birth in Europe the 11 hour procedure, which apart from the traditional medical stuff, included massage and acupunture for relaxation, involved a handful of nurses, 3 midwives, 2 doctors, an anesthesiologist etc. After the birth our little family stayed in the 300 square foot private room at the hospital for two days. We never saw any papers except the booklets the hospital gave us about having an i…
It was not free. You didn't pay for it. There's a difference.
Our European income taxes are not higher than NYC's combined taxes, though, and European healthcare is vastly cheaper than American healthcare.
When my wife gave birth in Europe the 11 hour procedure, which apart from the traditional medical stuff, included massage and acupunture for relaxation, involved a handful of nurses, 3 midwives, 2 doctors, an anesthesiologist etc. After the birth our little family stayed in the 300 square foot private room at the hospital for two days. We never saw any papers except the booklets the hospital gave us about having an i…
This is an indictment of the U.S. legal system, not the U.S. healthcare system.
- I'm really sorry to hear about the author's father's passing. - While it's heart-warming, it is unrealistic to think that a public program can spend infinite amounts of money on citizens who a) have paid "little or no" taxes and b) "throat cancer suffers who quit smoking four years afterwards". The math just doesn't add up. - The fact that the US has a pseudo market-based healthcare system is what allows drug / dev…
How can it be unrealistic? Every other modern industrialized nation does it.
- The other modernized nations you speak of are all running deficits, with the exception of small countries with tremendous natural resource wealth (e.g. Scandinavia) and Germany (which has a tremendous manufacturing sector that I don't fully understand.) That said, the US also is running huge deficits, but a lot of that is due to a ridiculously disproportionate military budget.
- Again, the profitability that comes to drug and device companies from the US market largely subsidizes the cost of these goods in other countries. Cut off the profitability in the US, and the costs for drugs and devices go up in every other market.
I would love to see a way for the US to be able to provide full healthcare coverage to all its citizens, but as someone with a graduate degree in healthcare economics who has studied the problem in depth, I just don't see it.
That said, we shouldn't be turning away the uninsured that need basic healthcare. We have to figure out a way to provide that coverage in a more efficient way than the ER.
I 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…
Having lived in the uk for the first 27 years of my life, and then in California for the past 10, I have only one word to describe the way American healthcare feels to me: barbaric. Long live the NHS, and yay for Obamacare - it seems like a step in the right direction at least.
- I'm really sorry to hear about the author's father's passing. - While it's heart-warming, it is unrealistic to think that a public program can spend infinite amounts of money on citizens who a) have paid "little or no" taxes and b) "throat cancer suffers who quit smoking four years afterwards". The math just doesn't add up. - The fact that the US has a pseudo market-based healthcare system is what allows drug / dev…
Anyone who is a throat cancer sufferer who has only recently quit smoking has paid quite a bit of tax, at least in the UK.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was not free. You didn't pay for it. There's a difference.
Sure we paid. Little by little, over our taxes. Our European income taxes are not higher than NYC's combined taxes, though, and European healthcare is vastly cheaper than American healthcare.