Late returning to this thread, but I just noticed an interview quote in the article I linked. I wish we could all think of when debating healthcare (underlined emphasis mine).
[QUOTE=Dr. Otis Brawley]
You’re a stickler for acting on the basis of scientific evidence. Where does that come from?
I grew up in the inner city of Detroit with people who were not formally educated but who were wise. My father was also very inquisitive. I was influenced heavily by this and by the Jesuits in my high school, who taught me about the scientific process. They taught me there are three things: things that are known, things that are not known, and things that are believed. Very frequently doctors think of things they believe as things that are known. When you talk about cancer screening, many doctors of my generation and older never took a course that covered screening and don’t understand the basic principles.
[/QUOTE]
Of course the real world rarely has super-drugs that you have to milk from mutant spiders under the light of a full moon. Usually the prices are in a reasonable range. Well, reasonable for America. The rest of the world pays a lot less for treatments than we do.
If he has a gripe about my determination, I’ll hear it. But it’s absolutely obvious that the terms of the bet were laid out clearly. I conceded the actual point being made was valid. But it’s equally clear the specific terms I laid out were not met.
Yes. Then you’re right. And at some point we’ll reach a price point when it’s not ok. The question I was responding to in the original thread sought to trap me by asking, yes or no only, if it was ok to let them die.
Do I take it by your repetition of this that you disagree?
Its always possible to take the question to absurdity, where reason’s sidewalk ends. Do you want to take the chance of a child becoming terribly ill and/or contributing to a public health hazard if her parents cannot afford proper vaccinations? If it costs $1.50?
Let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.
Of course I have a bar where we have to worry about the capacity for treatment to others. I suspect that bar is a lot lower for you than for me.
If you’re too poor to afford food we give you food stamps. I have no problem with our culture giving medical care to someone who is too poor to afford healthcare.
To reiterate, the rationing you mention happens now. It’s just a guy who makes more money the less care he gives out is the one that makes the decision.
How that actually appears in the system is longer wait times, not denial of treatment. If there isn’t enough money, more clinics aren’t opened, more doctors aren’t hired, and more MRI machines aren’t bought, but people aren’t told that they can’t have treatment because there isn’t any money for it - they’re told that it’s going to be a six month wait before they get that knee replacement. I’m not going to say that life-threatening surgeries and treatments are always done in a timely fashion, but there is certainly triage going on to establish who gets what resources and when. Someone about to die from blocked arteries gets their open-heart surgery; someone who has some heart problems that need clearing up but isn’t about to die from them gets bumped until next week.
The more I hear about the US American healthcare system, the more surprised I am that anyone ever gets any treatments paid for, when your whole system is dedicated to making money for insurance companies and denying payment to patients. As far as I can tell, the endgame for American medical insurance companies is to take as much money as possible from everyone and never, ever pay any of it out.
As an aside I’ve experienced some excellent instantaneous, excellent, free, excellent, repeated, excellent NHS service recently. Instantaneous. Repeatedly.
Don’t worry. A few more years of GOP economics and we won’t be a wealthy version of anything anymore.
The “acne medication” bit was because this was an example that was all over the news a couple years back. Anyone who is even faintly informed on the topic is familiar with the fact that someone, somewhere, was denied coverage for needed medical treatment because of failure to disclose previous treatment for acne.
It’s hard for me to believe that someone would make the point you made due to legitimate ignorance. It requires ignorance of something so well-publicized that it strikes me more as a zealous commitment to ignoring reality.
[QUOTE=miss elizabeth]
eta: I see he posted while I was typing, and was open minded and intelligent as I thought he would be.
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He maintains that he “won his wager”, which is only tenable if you steadfastly ignore the spirit of the discussion at hand. I don’t see why anyone would consider this admirable.
Given the unique characteristics of the market for pharmaceuticals, that’s inevitable. If we had a single-payer health system with the ability to negotiate price over an entire national population, like say France, our prices on drugs would drop some, France’s (and Canada and the UK and Germany and so on) prices would go up a lot, and conceivably there would actually be a legitimate problem with there being no financial incentive to bear the huge financial risk of drug discovery.
To be fair, you apparently proposed the bet because you were skeptical that coverage for treatment of an aliment as grievous as a heart attack would be denied because of something as trivial as forgetting to mention having taken acne medication. No, you didn’t use the term “as grievous as” in the actual bet, but you didn’t use the term “coverage” in your original draft either and were perfectly willing to change the letter of the bet to match its spirit in that case. We can only speculate whether or not you would have proposed the same sort of bet if Euphonious Polemic had remembered that it was treatment for breast cancer and not a heart attack, but surely you can see why people have a gripe with your determination.
There are cases of partial denial of treatment, but in Spain I know of one: google “aitana tapones” to get a ton of hits about her (all in Spanish). This one is very complete.
It’s a girl who was born with a congenital cardiopathy (along the lines of “missing several important veins between her heart and lungs”); she’s had several operations (most under the Spanish UHC system and therefore with no direct cost to the family), but the “big fix” ones can only be done at Boston’s Children’s Hospital: she needs three of them, for a total cost thereabouts of half a million dollars (the values I get are in euros, of course, and anyway they’re estimates, but that’s what the back-conversion comes to). The family has a campaign asking people to send bottle caps (sending them via Spain and Portugal’s biggest courier is free) which they sell to a recicling company, and this money goes toward the operations. So far she’s undergone the first operation and they have money for the second one.
Last time I looked into this, it’s only true of surgeries too. The average wait times throughout the US and UK (last time I checked, several years ago) were almost equal for emergency room treatment (222 minutes in the US, 4 hours in the UK).
(or option 3 on the Mac. £)