Not that it solves the problems raised by the OP. My country (France) has socialized healthcare for everyone (and covering almost everything to some extent) and there’s still a problem with doctors who are in the pocket of this or that lab or drug company getting kickbacks for prescribing this or that pill ; or prescribing unnecessary shit.
I’d like to know this too. Or at least how many Americans attempt to take advantage of Canadian health care for cheap medication.
Yes, that’s routine. The average Canadian heads to the U.S. for health care once every 800 years.
Medical tourismfor Americans is a growing industry. Americans often travel to Mexico for dental work, because the costs are so much lower. India is a growing a market for Americans to travel for serious operations like heart bypass and transplants.
I can’t find numbers for Americans heading to Canada for treatment, but when they do, they pay the full cost of treatment (unlike Canadians, who have this cost covered by their provincial medical services insurance plan) However, the costs are estimated to be Half of what they would pay in the US.
Of course, many Americans do take advantage of cheaper prescription drugs in Canada, even though it is technically illegal for them to do so. From this article, it looks like around One million Americans a year buy prescription drugs online from Canada
Somehow I am having trouble with the concept of someone not being able to afford medical care in the US being able to afford to travel to Canada for treatment.
The American system is great, if you can make sure you always have a job that provides insurance!
What? First, coverage and rules differ by province, so it’s a mistake to generalize at all. Second, you’re wrong. Alberta certainly allows anyone to forfeit provincial insurance in favour of the private insurer of choice. No one is stopping me from insuring myself through Blue Cross or what have you, in theory or otherwise.
I seriously doubt almost everything in this sentence. I agree that most Canadians live within a few hours’ drive of American hospitals. I doubt many go to the US to seek care (some might, when the situation calls for it, but not most), but that pales in comparison to my doubt that it happens ‘routinely’.
That is a small case. In most cases, it’s a simple economic decision. If I can shave $10,000 off of a medical bill, then that more than outweighs the price of a plane ticket and hotel. Non-coverage of orthodontic work for the kids? Pile in the plane everyone, time for a vacation!
Just because it doesn’t immediately throw me into bankruptcy doesn’t mean it’s ok for me to be price-gouged.
But most people that can afford medical tourism are going to say, wait, instead of saving $10k in Canada, I can save $50k in India! Kids, we’re going to see the elephants!
So a profit incentive contributes to a driving up of costs. Would it to be fair to say a country like the US, with an obesity rate over 30%, which is twice that of Canada’s and 3x higher than the rate in Holland & France, plays a much larger role than ‘greedy doctors who have investments in medical labs’? Let’s say for argument’s sake that you buy into the bullshit claim that says fat people are just as healthy as those with a normal BMI. Wouldn’t the American assault victim rate of 1.20%, more than 60% higher than Canada’s .75% rate, lead to higher medical care costs? The US has at least 11 million illegal immigrants, who as a rule work off the books and don’t have employer provided health benefits. That’s a huge drain on a system when compared to Canada’s 78,000 undocumented immigrants.
While the market’s good at maximizing profits, that doesn’t necessarily mean the government is more efficient or less expensive. Medicare alone pisses away $60 billion a year…$400 for every person who filed their taxes this Monday. Two layers of federal and state bureaucracies, staffed by an army of AFGE & CSEA members, won’t likely to be all too concerned about outlays, claims and the like. But you too are half right: It’s either nationalize the whole damn industry, ala Taiwan; force everyone into the market like the Swiss, or get government out of the health care business as much as possible.
What’s the free market solution for obesity again? I think I saw advertising regulations, tariffs on unhealthy products and education programs recommended on the mises site…
That said, it doesn’t pan out for infant mortality rates, if my reasoning is correct. Roughly 34% of US women are obese, compared to roughly 24% of UK women. According to this study, obese women are roughly 34% more likely to give birth to a dead child. If we take the UK levels as baseline, then we should expect the increase accountable to obesity to be roughly 34% of the additional that are obese 10%, but I forgot how to work out percentage increases so I pegged that as a 4% higher rate, when we actually see something like 77% higher rates.
Shall we address the numbers? Roughly 15k Americans murdered each year, 30k dying in automobile accidents, 45k dying due to lack of health insurance, 600k from heart disease.
Canada pays $3500 dollars less per capita on healthcare and is 10 places higher in infant mortality and 26 places higher in terms of life expectancy.
Which would be resolved by decriminalising their presence in the country.
Edit:
Here are the admin fees for Social Security. Compare to the admin fees for a charity.
I would argue that the basic problems of for-profit medical care are social rather than financial.
I will the next time someone gets rushed to the hospital in an ambulance for LASIK surgery.
If your retina is detaching, though, you don’t shop around. If you are having a heart attack, you don’t shop around. That where the money is. I’m fine with a private market for totally elective surgery.
I’m fine with evidence-based medicine, which is a good solution to the problem in the OP. But the free market does not address this, and any individual person is not going to know if his or her doctor is over-specifying a given test. I don’t know if insurance companies monitor this, I’d hope so, but the government sure could. We’ve actually got claims rejected when our center mislabeled them and violated insurance company policy - which is fine with me, since our center fixed the problem when it was called to their attention.
Not to get in the way of the debate about for-profit medical care, but here’s some context to the linked news story for anyone interested.
Current federal law permits physicians (such as urologists) to send their biopsies to an in-house pathology lab that’s part of the urology practice. Urologists have found this to provide a nice added chunk of revenue, which comes at the expense of private pathology labs (like the one I work for). In recent years, prostate and bladder biopsies (along with other tests urologists order) have been increasingly diverted to these urologist-owned labs.
The study cited in the linked article was funded in part by the College of American Pathologists, which is an organization that acts in the interests of pathologists. The study found that urologists are submitting their prostate biopsy tissue in lots of individual containers which can be billed for separately; this is of dubious value from a diagnostic standpoint but it makes the urology practice extra money. The urologists are firing back, claiming that they need all these extra separately marked bottles to “map” the prostate cancer, or that “tissue tangles together” if they submit more than one biopsy in the same bottle.
As a pathologist, the former claim strikes me as very dubious; the latter claim is bunk.
Personally, I think Congress should close loopholes like this one which allow urologists to self-refer biopsies, from a cost-saving standpoint. Of course, if they do this it’ll mean some more dough for Jackmannii since urologists will have to send out biopsies to private labs like mine again. Win-win. 
Arguments including the urologists’ perspective can be found here.
Only if we can send them all to live in your state. Suddenly making 11 million minimum wage earners able to easily and legally access social services tends to drive an economy into the ground. See “California”.
While I’m here, what would really help to drive down medical costs would be to stop requiring the whole to pay for the expensive decisions of the individuals. Anyone who is a smoker under a certain age (whenever it was that it became obvious that smoking will kill you in an expensive way) has to pay extra for a side policy for smoking related illnesses. People who want to have children pay extra for a side policy. Anyone who reproduces knowing they have a genetic disease buys a side policy for each child they have. Etc. Just as plastic surgery is handled, any time individuals choose to do something that is going to cost serious money for medical expenses, they have to get a side policy for it. More personal responsibility and less “let the insurance companies/government/whoever pay for it”.
Says the woman getting government aid.
Nope. And no matter how much you want to change facts just because you don’t agree with my viewpoints, repeating it won’t make it so either. Sorry.
I don’t have a problem with such a concept, but it’d contravene Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which the US is a signatory.
I do think that if such a concept were applied, families having more than two children ought to be penalised just as much.
The condition with the highest cost to healthcare is almost certainly obesity. I think the solution is to fine the contributors to obesity. Corporations that advertise and trade in food that contribute obesity ought to pay more towards the treatment of the associated problems.
No, no, no, the line is “I paid into it, so I deserve it!”
You’re missing all your cues nowadays.
Fee-for-service works great when you’re talking about purely elective procedures that don’t affect a person’s ability to function or, y’know, live. Botox for wrinkles? Pony up the dough, honey. LASIK because you don’t want to wear glasses and you hate contacts? Cash on the barrelhead, sir; we take Visa, Mastercard, and American Express.
It doesn’t work all that well when you’re talking about care that is either mandatory (e.g., vaccinations for kids to be able to enter school) or where not doing it will impair function or possibly cause loss of life. I don’t have the $400 that a set of vaccinations costs, even though I know about it well in advance. The pure capitalist will argue that I have sufficient notice that I should be able to save up to pay for them, but let’s crunch some numbers. If I save $20 a month toward the cost of the shots, which is a nice, comfortable amount, it’ll take me 20 months before I have the $400. This also assumes that the cost doesn’t increase, or that I don’t need that $20 a month for something else. So that’s why I have health insurance. I pay $200 a month so they’ll not only pay for the shots, but they’ll also manage the other risks, like the unpredictable possibility of medical problems that may cripple or kill me.
No, not really. The State of California is actually considering implementing RomneyCare, with the governor and state health and human services secretary actively advocating for it. Do you have a cite that your assertion is correct, or are you just pulling numbers out of your ass?
We have that. It’s called “smokers are charged more for insurance”. It’s also called “incentives to quit smoking”, like cheaper premiums on insurance, no-cost smoking cessation help, and being able to keep a job or to find one.
We also have that. It’s called “higher premiums for families.” Sometimes, that can double or triple an employee’s monthly premiums. In fact, my own family has gone without health insurance because I couldn’t afford to cover the three of us.
Are you for real, or are you just trolling?
What wouldn’t you need a “side policy” for? Or are you just trolling again?
Ya know, you might be a useful idiot, if only you were useful.
It is not a “line”. Social Security is not “government aid”.
I’m not sure what your quote has to do with what I said, especially since you seem to think it somehow proves that the state hasn’t gotten into financial trouble largely because the government expects those with money to support those who are here illegally, or who cannot be bothered to support themselves. Your cite shows they haven’t learned from that and are considering making even more of those who still have some money to pay in even more. As for numbers out of my ass, I have no idea what you are talking about, unless it’s that 11 million? That is a quote from a post by JohnBckWLD. I personally have no idea how many illegals there are here.
You want to provide a cite that all smokers are charged more for insurance? My husband has smoked for decades and in the 20 years I’ve been married to him, he has never paid more for coverage. Just as the people in his office who have four kids don’t pay any more than those with two. Unless things have radically changed in the group insurance industry since I left in 2007, providing lower premiums for non-smokers is rare.
Higher premiums for those who already have children, and as I said above, generally no more (or not significantly more) for many children than for a few. That is all based on how many people the policy needs to cover - the costs to take care of a pregnancy, birth the child and any issues arising from child birth are not part of that. They are just lumped into the coverage of any female of child bearing age, because the assumption is that any such female will start having kids as soon as she gets coverage (no I don’t have a cite for that, it is just what was said during my 25 years in insurance).
You seriously think that it is trolling to expect people to pay the freight for those who are selfish enough to roll the genetic dice and hope that their child won’t get whatever expensive health problem they have? Shit, it’s bad enough for the child itself, but then these folks turn around and look to others to pay for that bad genetic roll.
Just because I don’t think that children are the be all and end all of existence doesn’t mean that I am trolling. And if you could think without all those baby booties in your way, you would realize that a basic policy would cover all things that are not brought about by choice. You know, like how plastic surgery is covered under almost all policies if it is the result of an injury or accident, but not if it is being done because the person doesn’t like their nose or whatever? How most (all?) insurance that covers Lapbands only do so if you are X overweight and regular weight loss has already been attempted? A basic policy would cover accidents (not covered by other coverage), illnesses, essentially any breakdown of the human body that come about thru the course of living life, but nothing that comes about because someone chose to do drugs, smoke, create life, race cars or anything else that folks choose to do that tend to end up costing an insurance company a bunch of money.
At least I’m not creating a significant ongoing expense (children) that I cannot afford. Really, if you cannot save $400 in five years (time from when baby is born until it enters school) what are you doing with a child? That’s less than $7 a month. You shouldn’t be having children unless you can afford to save for their college, never mind school vaccinations.
I fail to see how you can consider me an idiot for expecting that others should show some amount of personal responsibility. I still haven’t figured out how we ended up with the idea that people should not be held responsible for the decision to reproduce without having the money to pay for it as long as there are other around who can be forced to cover the costs. Neither do I understand how anyone can look at what is happening here and not see the devastating results of those policies.