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This is how you healthcare: American Death in London

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Re: This is how you healthcare: American Death in London

#111

Post by marknutter »

potatolicious wrote: post #109
marknutter wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well then what's wrong with people simply paying out of pocket for basic services? Insurance would be there to cover the truly catastrophic health issues, but otherwise we would all pay for the level of basic service (maintenance) we prefer to pay for.

We have this - this is what one normally finds in the form of health indemnity. They cover (up to some maximum) only emergency/catastrophic costs, and have no everyday coverage. They are extremely unpopular for many reasons, which center primarily around paying out of pocket for normal services: For the purposes of this argument I'm going to use "health plan" to refer to what most people call "insurance" - to avoid c…

I recently had my brakes repaired for around $300. $300 for maintenance on my own body seems pretty fair. And perhaps people shouldn't be visiting the doctor every time they get a sore throat.

Re: This is how you healthcare: American Death in London

#112

Post by JackFr »

NateDad wrote: post #79
JackFr wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Food insecurity is not the same thing as going hungry. Changing your food buying patterns, ie foregoing a purchase you might have otherwise made, to buy food is not pleasant, but it is not hunger.

Re: This is how you healthcare: American Death in London

#114

Post by tptacek »

potatolicious wrote: post #98
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I non-trolling Brit here. Single-payer seems from scan of Wikipedia to be "government pays the bills" - in other words an NHS like solution. Which seems to me a position the others in the thread are advocating (ie our current system is barbaric, bankrupts people we must fix it) So I am a little confused why your post seems to be defending itself from posts that as an outsider I would see as firmly in your camp?

Single-payer is a bit more nuanced than "government pays the bills". Single-payer means that health care institutions remain private , government does not run or employ any doctors directly, and everything works much like it does today, except pricing is unified and the government pays all bills. This is different from nationalized health care, especially on paper, where it can preserve market-style competitive press…

It's different from nationalized health care mostly on paper, because it gives the government monopsony power over the market. The single-payer administration can rule out treatments, mandate questionable treatments, and make for itself important value judgements about end-of-life routine care vs. mid-life cost of emergency care. We have hints of the problems that come from this now with things like the Medicare "doc fix".

Beyond all that, single-payer fixes prices for an industry that represents a huge chunk of the total economy.

No question at all that we badly need a new system of health insurance in the US (I'm hoping that Obamacare, carefully and aggressively executed, will be it), but single-payer health care is a radical change.

Re: This is how you healthcare: American Death in London

#115

Post by malandrew »

GiraffeNecktie wrote: post #47
danso wrote: post #8

Some excerpts: He was a charming, damaged, charismatic, fiercely intelligent, dissolute individual, who lived entirely on his own terms. As a professional gambler, it is unlikely he paid much if any tax in 37 years. He had no will, no funeral plan. He never did fill out the forms necessary to vote in the last election, or the one before that, as I discovered. He just hated forms. I could sympathise. Had he stayed in…

But the nice thing about a publicly financed health care system is that early interventions become much more likely when people aren't forced to make decisions like "Should I spend my paycheck getting this lump in my breast checked out or should I spend it on groceries for the family."

Exactly. My mom is dying from terminal breast cancer and she avoided going to the doctor for more than a year for chest pains because she had anxiety issues and was too worried about the financial aspects to confirm whether it was anxiety issues or something more serious. It had to turn from chest pains to shortness of breath before she finally set aside the cash to get it checked out. Turns out the breast cancer had metastasized and ended up in her lung, bones and liver by the time they diagnosed the cause. By that point the cancer in her lung was the size of an orange.

Re: This is how you healthcare: American Death in London

#116

Post by carbocation »

potatolicious wrote: post #40
carbocation wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Actually, it does refuse to treat people quite regularly. Let's not play with words like that. People in the US get treatment—you even say so later, despite your ominous lead sentence. They just get it later, via the ED, after prevention goes un-performed. That's abominable enough, and that's what we should talk about, not the (false) specter of non-treatment.

> "They just get it later, via the ED, after prevention goes un-performed. That's abominable enough, and that's what we should talk about" You two aren't disagreeing. You say we should talk about the epidemic of people unable to afford primary care, pushing treatment later and later, eventually into the ER where they may not even be able to be saved - and even if they do, suffer long-term health effects due to the de…

Yes, that's why my point was to ask that we refrain from falsely hyperbolic statements (people don't get treatment) so we can focus on the myriad true problems that most agree exist, some of which you pointed out.

Re: This is how you healthcare: American Death in London

#117

Post by ericclemmons »

malandrew wrote: post #115
GiraffeNecktie wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the nice thing about a publicly financed health care system is that early interventions become much more likely when people aren't forced to make decisions like "Should I spend my paycheck getting this lump in my breast checked out or should I spend it on groceries for the family."

Exactly. My mom is dying from terminal breast cancer and she avoided going to the doctor for more than a year for chest pains because she had anxiety issues and was too worried about the financial aspects to confirm whether it was anxiety issues or something more serious. It had to turn from chest pains to shortness of breath before she finally set aside the cash to get it checked out. Turns out the breast cancer had…

Similar case with my uncle and colon cancer. The anxiety of knowing made the situation worse.

For most of us, the money can be attained, as evident by the electronic devices littering our homes and offices.

Related, I've found that many young people don't want to know what their credit card or bank balance is, for fear of seeing how little money they have left (or saved).

Terrible way to live.

Re: This is how you healthcare: American Death in London

#118

Post by rmc »

redblacktree wrote: post #97
marknutter wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it's cheaper - the NHS is actively controlling prices. That of course means that doctors get paid less, patients wait longer for certain types of treatments or are denied other types outright, and people do are not granted unlimited resources to fight death at their end of life as they are in our system. You can't just say it's cheaper as a blanket endorsement without analyzing exactly why it's cheaper.

Is private insurance still available if I want more exotic options? Sounds like the best of both worlds to me.

Yep. You can go private if you want and if you have the money.

My father in law in the UK got a cataract done privately.

If you have the money, you can get what you want.

Re: This is how you healthcare: American Death in London

#119

Post by rmc »

marknutter wrote: post #91
ahi wrote: post #35

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.

Of course it's cheaper - the NHS is actively controlling prices. That of course means that doctors get paid less, patients wait longer for certain types of treatments or are denied other types outright, and people do are not granted unlimited resources to fight death at their end of life as they are in our system. You can't just say it's cheaper as a blanket endorsement without analyzing exactly why it's cheaper.

US patients are not granted unlimited resources to fight death. They are limited by how much money they have.

The UK also allows you go privately and pay yourself and choose your won doctor and hospital and treatment if you want and have the money.

Re: This is how you healthcare: American Death in London

#120

Post by rmc »

oneandoneis2 wrote: post #6

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…

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.

Give it 50 years and they'll never go back. The Tories in the UK were opposed to the NHS (AFAIK).

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