21–30 of 96 posts
Which country has the best health care in Europe? And what makes it the best solution? I ask from the perspective of an American, with access to great health care but it’s expensive. If we were going to reinvent health care here, who should we copy?
Price counts though right? If you can't afford healthcare in the US then for you it's the worst system
I think it’s amazing that a solid system can be defunded like that until it just sorta crumbles under it’s own weight. There’s no immediate solution either. If you build more hospitals, you need more staff, if you need more staff, you need to make it more attractive, but even if you do you need several years before the first doctors/nurses from the wave with renewed interest in the position finishes university. And t…
"defunded"? Maybe if you're comparing post pandemic budgets to pandemic budgets, but spending is still way up compared to pre-pandemic levels.
Nearly 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…
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 even dare. Combine that with the selfish nature of most people (of course to be fair the instinctual desire to avoid death) and an aging population (as you mentioned) and it seems like a few generations are going to be weighed down to extended the lives of the least productive members of society.
Earlier 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.
In Britain, citizens have a hard time getting basic dental care that they can afford: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-13/uk-dentis... The demographic explanation simply does not hold water when routine healthcare is not available.
In the US dental is considered a seperate insurance for most. So there's a separation for whatever reason meaning using it to disprove the demographic theory for "regular" healthcare might be valid
Isn't this true just about everywhere? Someone who lives in a major urban area is going to have more prompt access to advanced emergency healthcare than someone who lives in a remote rural area, simply due to factors such as travel time, and the clinical need to physically concentrate specialist medical resources (specialist clinical teams need a certain minimum case volume to properly maintain their skills, and if y…
This addresses the title but not the content. The NHS is failing to meet its own goals in a pretty bad way, pretty much everywhere. Whether this is true in every country I don't know, but it's certainly not an inevitability. > The analysis assessed how quickly patients can access health care in each of England’s 533 constituencies — the British term for electoral districts — and found that nearly every single area is…
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 still going to get higher mortality and morbidity somewhere like Ivanhoe [0] – a town of less than 300 people, 800 km by road west of Sydney – than in the Sydney metro area. It is just the inevitable tyranny of distance. Far Western NSW simply doesn't have the necessary population to sustain the most advanced health care facilities (tertiary/quaternary), and the inescapable physical delays in getting to them (even using air evacuation) is going to cause deaths and clinically inferior outcomes.
Now of course, England is geographically a much smaller country than Australia – England has over twice Australia's population in less than 2% of the area. However, even in England, I would be surprised if the impact of geography on mortality and morbidity completely disappeared – inevitably, even if the NHS were the best health system humanly possible (and it obviously isn't), someone who lives in central London is going to have faster access to the most advanced healthcare than someone who lives in Penzance, [1] – and there are going to be times when that difference makes a real impact to mortality and morbidity.
>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…
The UK does have a sugar tax that was implemented 5 years ago that seems to have some good effects
https://www.wcrf.org/looking-back-at-5-years-of-the-uk-soft-...
The problem is any regulation is an opportunity for those who don't like the government to attack the other side.
It's England... bring out your dead. https://youtu.be/zEmfsmasjVA
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This addresses the title but not the content. The NHS is failing to meet its own goals in a pretty bad way, pretty much everywhere. Whether this is true in every country I don't know, but it's certainly not an inevitability. > The analysis assessed how quickly patients can access health care in each of England’s 533 constituencies — the British term for electoral districts — and found that nearly every single area is…
> 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…
And again, most of the metrics here (bed availability, for example) should not be geographically bound at all.
I think it’s amazing that a solid system can be defunded like that until it just sorta crumbles under it’s own weight. There’s no immediate solution either. If you build more hospitals, you need more staff, if you need more staff, you need to make it more attractive, but even if you do you need several years before the first doctors/nurses from the wave with renewed interest in the position finishes university. And t…
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.
(It’s universal with 70% of costs paid by the government)