Hey, Stringbean was a potential threat to adaher’s ‘wrongest poster ever’ title. The man had to do something to tell the competition, “Back off. You’re mere amateurs at this.”
Because the 75% or so of Americans who like their health insurance won’t want to be put on the same plan. Learn from Switzerland, a multi-payer system that is similar to ACA, and recently rejected single payer by referendum. And it wasn’t close.
What disturbs me most is that Carson obviously hasn’t got any idea what things cost, which really is a concern.
$2000 a year, with 1/3 marked for insurance premiums? Dude, my part of insurance is $110/month at work. That’s over *half *the $2k per year, before any medication is prescribed, treatment received, or deductibles needing to be met.
Ditto, and more props to Wesley. I would have made those arguments, but I was busy yelling, “Are you fucking kidding me? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? HOW DUMB CAN CARSON BE?” and waving my hands and generally acting like a lunatic.
A high percentage of Americans also believe a woman who gave birth a while back was a virgin at the time and her offspring was god, that doesn’t make them right.
“I don’t wanna!” is the plea of a spoiled, ignorant child. Americans have been sold a stack of lies about their health “system” (it’s the best! No, it’s not) and that of other countries. They are working with incomplete and misleading information.
I’m not convinced by polls saying Americans are crying “I don’t wanna!” I’m interested in facts, not opinions. Other countries do it better, for less money, with better results. Therefore, their systems are better than ours. Therefore, ours sucks and maintaining it is cruel and wasteful.
Most UHC systems are not single payer, but multi-payer, and no multi-payer UHC system has ever gone single payer. Actually, once a UHC system is in place, it’s basic nature never changes, because “I don’t wanna!” is a universal human reaction to the risk of change when they have something to lose. It’s why Britain is wedded to the NHS and Germany wedded to their Bismarckian system and Switzerland wedded to its ACA-like system.
We now have a UHC system, or what passes for it in a free country: everyone who wants health insurance can now get it, and it can’t abandon them when they get sick.
No, that’s a universal health insurance system. Not universal health care.
Then few countries have UHC. Germany and Switzerland sure don’t. Neither does France, because some sectors of society are exempt from the government system(because they wanted to keep what they had).
Those sectors are still getting healthcare, and able to join the general system any time they choose to do so. And the coverage provided by the insurance I had in Switzerland makes every policy I had in the US look like used toilet paper.
Spain went from multipayer to (almost) single pay by a double process of extending coverage to groups which previously didn’t have it and of private Mutuas voting to join into Seguridad Social; nowadays it’s multipayer only inasmuch as the big bag of money gets divided into smaller bags and handed down to the regional governments, but the National Police are almost the only group that still sticks to having their own Mutua… until they get sick, when suddenly they discover that the benefits from Social Security are actually better 
(that Mutua is very much on its way out as a general healthcare system, becoming a professional-health-only system like every other Mutua). Oh, and the doctors those cops go to? The same ones everybody else does.
Bullshit.
I personally know people who want health insurance who simply can not afford the premium on even the most basic policy available them. No, “everyone who wants health insurance can now get it” is a lie.
And the hell they can’t be abandoned - insurance companies still do whatever they can to deny a claim. There are still problems with in and out of network providers, so you can slammed by unexpected bills because, while your hospital, surgeon, the nurses, etc. were all in network maybe the anesthesiologist for your surgery wasn’t, so now you’re on the hook for thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. That’s a shit system.
Our system is NOT universal health care because it doesn’t cover everyone. There are tens of millions who are uncovered, still. There are still more with inadequate coverage due to either finances or ignorance.
That’s completely wrong. Some sectors are exempt from the main government system because they already had a government-run system. But the whole thing is largely a public insurance scheme that is much closer to Medicare than anything else in the US.
Switzerland only spends 7-8% of gdp on health care, the US spends 18%. If the US were only spending 8% of gdp on health care then we wouldn’t be having this debate here either. If our system were that cheap then people could buy rock solid plans with indemnity coverage, low deductibles and no surprise bills for affordable prices. As it stands now, with the aca, people are stuck paying several hundred a month for high deductible plans that will weasel out of paying the bills when you get sick.
Our system is broken on a fundamental level. It is overpriced and immoral, and with each year that passes more and more people will call for reform.
If anything, proponents of the system should push for reforms now because all that will happen is I’m the future people will push for even more radical reforms. The urge for a working system will not go away.
Australia moved away from a multi payer non uhc system in favor of a single payer system in the 70s and 80s.
I wonder how much of the reduced healthcare costs of the countries with universal healthcare are because the citizens live healthier lifestyles? I’ve been to Switzerland and, for the post part, everyone looks pretty fit. Other European countries seem similar. I would not be surprised if their lifestyle consisted of more regular exercise and a healthier diet that lead to lower healthcare costs. That is, their lower costs may be due to a healthier population overall not incurring healthcare expenses rather than efficiencies in UHC versus private insurance.
I’m not sure that UHC in the US would reduce costs as much. I still support UHC in the US because our current system is a mess and too many people fall through the cracks, but I don’t know if we’d see similar savings as other countries.
I chuckle at these proposals for vouchers. Vouchers would only work for healthy people who don’t have trouble getting insurance anyway. A voucher won’t help the unemployed 50-year-old diabetic with cancer because no insurance company would agree to cover them and even if they did, the premiums would be astronomically expensive.
In multi-payer, money that would be wasted treating the sick and reducing human suffering, is better disbursed as sweet-sweet profit and CEO salaries.
Not a substantial amount. The UK now has a comparable obesity rate to ours, yet still has far better health outcomes with far lower costs.
I’ve done the math in previous threads and shown that the US spends more per capita on health care administration than the UK spends (both public and private) on healthcare in total.
That good?
Well, for one, thinness is a class issue in the US. In the US, wealthier people are more likely to exercise, to have comprehensive health insurance, and to be thinner. (Poorly-controlled health problems can make someone gain weight. Asthmatic can’t afford the expensive preventative inhaler, but goes to the ER monthly for an attack. Gets steroids. BAM! Weight gain. Person with back problem can’t afford PT on his catastrophic insurance plan. Just “rests”, maybe takes meds, maybe smokes weed or drinks. Weight gain.)
Wealthier people have the insurance that allows them to obtain care before problems become major. If a doctor catches someone who’s put on 20# because of general diet backsliding, then the doc can get them to make changes and lose weight; possibly averting diabetes. Even if a doc sees a diabetic, that doc can work with the diabetic to get them to lose weight, have labs taken and work on anything needed (including by taking medication); that doc then reduces the long-term risks of cardiovascular disease and so on. Money saved, but money has to be paid up-front.
All this takes good insurance coverage. Not catch-as-catch can, not “catastrophic only”. Good coverage with evidence-based standards and guidelines.
“Americans are fat” certainly should not be a consideration when adopting a rational health care policy.
I agree that’s the case in the US. Cheap food and a leisure lifestyle means that people need to go out of their way to be healthy.
In other countries, it seems their normal lifestyle promotes greater health. Even if they are overweight, they are living a more healthy lifestyle. They seem to walk a lot more than people in the US. Walking alone provides huge health benefits regardless of weigh loss. They’re not doing it at the health club. They’re not as car-centric as the US so they’re walking around more to go to the store, to work, etc. It’s just a normal part of their life to be active.
And their diet seems to be focused more on real food rather than fast food, frozen food, soda, and other junk calories. So even when they are overweight, the calories they eat seem more nutritious than typical food in the US.
So that’s why I say that even if the US had UHC, it’s not going to cause a lifestyle change of more walking and eating healthier.
One thing that might be comparable is the costs of Medicare with other countries for that same age group. Since Medicare is the closest thing to UHC we have, how does the cost of it compare to other countries for their over-65 patients?
Medicare doesn’t cover everything (or even a great deal), so even that’s not really comparable. That’s what all those Medicare gap-filler and Part D plans are for.
Yeah, but then it only cost one chicken to see the doctor.
It’s not that the citizens live a healthier lifestyle. It’s that at the very onset of illness they get care, instead of putting it off due to lack of the ability to pay the copay, until it’s now going to take much longer and many more resources to cure. Or worse still with no coverage the patient doesn’t enter the system until they need extremely expensive care for now a catastrophic condition.