81–90 of 189 posts
Biggest surprise for me was that the best aspect of the healthcare system has been Medicare. Consistently helpful and all the communications were clearly designed with seniors in mind.
Very other aspect is characterized by innatention of obvious corporate motivations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rural healthcare is being crippled in part due to state politicians posturing for political clout. Major reforms like medicare for all shouldn't be held back because they're not perfect, because otherwise we're going to continue having the same problems we've been having where compromised half-assed bills make the system overall worse.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t reform - I’m saying we should be careful about what that reform is, and what its goals are. I would generally suggest that CMMI and provider groups is/are more heavily involved than big city voters who know very little about a very, very complicated issue. Lastly, rural healthcare is in trouble because reimbursements are bad (especially Medicare reimbursements), FFS (fee-for-service) is a…
I don't dispute the rest of your arguments about healthcare, but you cannot fix education and/or brain drain without fixing state politics.
My boyfriend woke up one day to find out they couldn't pee. After a few ER visits and an MRI, they determined he had Stage 2 bladder cancer. However, because they had the audacity to seek immediate medical treatment for a life threatening health issue, they have now been saddled with thousands of dollars in medical debt. I had to personally dip into my earnings from my Big Tech internship to help pay some of it off.…
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Brilliant essay, with so many fantastic lines.
I am picking this one out because amongst the many perversions of 'the system' is that the crazy healthcare inefficiency is counted as a metric on GDP. Those thousands of wasted hours of wasted hospital activity, ultimately paid for by the tax payer, is counted as economic activity in the national economy.
What percentage of GDP is based on humans navigating broken systems in a 'pre-modern' way? Probably way too much
I'd be interested what one, single change might help. Something intangible like independently curated complete health record in some normative form on a smart card. Or, a legalism of a "first do no harm" nature which demands once a qualified professional determines you have cover and it's just an argument about who pays between competing covers, you get no-worse-off service choices immediately until they decide which…
What do you mean "return to an NHS model"? The US never had anything of the sort. To answer your question: Ban employers from paying for health insurance as a benefit. If individuals see directly how much it costs, that will put much more pressure on prices. And employees don't have to worry about losing their insurance if they lose their job. Some other gradual options: - end the AMA licensure monopoly, making docto…
I see how this would lower prices, but it's not clear how this would increase quality. Naively I would suspect it would, at least initially, lower average quality.
The biopsy was indeterminate, and instead of immediately sending it out for a second opinion or molecular testing they decided to wait until I could see my specialist before giving me the options. I immediately told them to go for the second opinion and to check about insurance approval for molecular testing.
They had no idea how to bill me for molecular testing because the pathologist for some reason never suggested it in their report (which I later learned from another peer specialist at another hospital that molecular testing would have been written on the report for insurance approval purposes).
My insurance adamantly insisted that it would be covered, and then turned around and told my hospital that I would have to pay nearly six thousand dollars out of pocket.
The second opinion took three weeks, which concurred with the original pathology report and finally put the magic words "recommend molecular testing" on paper which got insurance to approve it. But rather than push it through, my specialist decided to play phone tag with me for a couple more days to make sure I was okay with the fifty dollar copay.
This entire process, from start to finish, took six and a half weeks to learn that the biopsy sample was benign and nothing to worry about. Now imagine if this were a serious thing and that I needed to have surgery as soon as possible. A six and a half week feedback loop to begin scheduling surgery (every surgeon for this issue in my area was booked at least five weeks out) may as well be a death sentence.
I've come to the conclusion that in this country, even if you are extremely proactive and aggressive about advocating for your own health, it's still not enough. You have to supplement this with something proactive like a full body examination in a foreign country (i.e. Japan's Ningen Dock system), otherwise you risk dying from the apathy and bureaucracy of the American medical system.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Looks like they used both "he" and "they". My guess was that the boyfriend might use either set of pronouns.
he: boyfriend / they: s/o, partner, friend, hckrfriend ...
My boyfriend woke up one day to find out they couldn't pee. After a few ER visits and an MRI, they determined he had Stage 2 bladder cancer. However, because they had the audacity to seek immediate medical treatment for a life threatening health issue, they have now been saddled with thousands of dollars in medical debt. I had to personally dip into my earnings from my Big Tech internship to help pay some of it off.…
Why with single payer would there not still be instances of treatment being denied? >rather than deal with faceless automata at health insurance companies Would this not be replaced with faceless automata in government? Just look at how the VA is run and complains about it. Looking at that I have exactly zero confidence in the government being able to run things better than the shit show at the insurance companies. B…
Typically no - what treatment is used might be different, but that treatment is needed and will be supplied is not usually up for discussion.
> Would this not be replaced with faceless automata in government?
In 29 years living in a single-payer system I've never needed to do this. The government does not get involved in healthcare, they just fund it.