Magiver, please post proof that Canadians must wait Years for basic care, or admit that this statement of yours was hyperbole at best, and misinformed at worst. You are only posting opinions based on ??
Yes, waiting lists for procedures are not ideal. It would be great if everyone could be seen by the best specialist right away, like you are. Sadly, this is not possible; this is not the case for everyone in your country.
The choice seems to be: A situation where everyone is seen, prioritized by medical need, or a situation where those with financial backing are seen quickly, and others may not be seen at all, unless they are about to die and go to the emerg. ward.
You’re just happy because you’re in the first group. It’s a third world solution.
I did post an example. Not only did I post an example but the rebuttal clearly showed a goal of 26 weeks for just the procedures (which were not met in many instances). That is not acceptable in the United States. I’m glad Canadians have the option of traveling to the US for timely medical care and you’re more than welcome. However, if we go to a national system that option goes away.
You also worked very hard to shift the debate from a topic you were losing towards something else you’re about to lose. You managed to wave your arms and yell fire to make sure everyone reading forgot about what we were talking about.
Wait times are currently the single biggest problem with Canadian health care. But do you why you were able to find those cites? It is because it is the single biggest problem with our health care. We have commissions studying it, experts evaluating it, politicians drafting bills to improve it. We can do all that because we aren’t concerned with 50million people being uninsured, we managed to get all 34million in one shot. We don’t have multiple overlapping government programs. We don’t have special interests buying off elected officials. And we don’t have a massive bloated private health care industry setting the agenda.
It is not hard to find faults and failures with the Canadian system, in fact, we have it very clearly and openly documented, and will very politely tell you everything that is wrong with it. But pointing to the house across the street and yelling “smoke” does not change the fact that your house is on fire.
You posted a single example of someone whose initial consult with a doctor revealed that she was having difficulty hiking and cross country skiing. And her treatment was not as timely as she would have liked.
Bitching about wait times is a national pasttime for Canadians, and there is a lot of attention given to it by the media. Individual cases like hers, where a person bitches to the press about a wait time can be a valuable wake-up call to get additional resources put into certain medical areas.
You say that a wait in this case would not be acceptable in the United States. Would you be surprised to hear that there are cases in the United States where a person with the identical prognosis would not be seen at all?
I didn’t work hard at all. I pointed out that the Canadian system has major flaws and there is no reason to ignore the lessons learned.
I hope you fix it. We don’t have health rationing issues in the United States. Whether someone has insurance does not mean they will not get the care needed. The 37 million person gap is a financial issue which can be resolved without destroying a system that is more functional for the remaining 280 million people.
I’m not the one that started this thread-lecture from Canada. It’s like listening to someone from East Germany espousing the cost benefits of a Trabant.
So what’s the wait list like for someone without insurance who needs hip surgery because they can no longer hike or cross country ski? It’s not rationed or anything, right?
The person with a cancer diagnosis and no insurance gets the exact same level of care as someone with insurance, right? Do you think I might be able to locate an anecdote or two that disproves this?
I have a cousin who had cancer with no insurance. No delays in treatment although the paperwork was fun.
We have the medical infrastructure to work with. The gap in insurance is a function of connecting people to policies so more people actually pay into the system. that’s the issue at hand. That is what needs to be fixed.
It has major flaws but is far and away better and cheaper than ours in every way except wait times. Don’t you find it strange that you’ll claim to be willing to learn lessons from Canada’s (slight) failures and are at the same time unwilling to learn from its (considerable) success? It suggests that you are unwilling to modify your opinions, no matter what the facts are.
It does not work for the remaining 280 million people. It is the reason for the majority of American bankruptcies and costs us nearly twice as much for terrible results. Are you okay paying for an BMW and getting a beater VW Bug with a surfboard rack on top? Never mind that Canada has a very nice Corolla.
It’s more you’re an engineer on the Titanic smiling broadly about how shiny and wonderful the brand-new engine is as the compartment fills with water.
Actually, I had intended to use the Titanic as an example of trying to fix a mammoth problem while it’s sinking instead of regulating ship standards. Governments are better at regulating than they are at actually building stuff.
Well, shit. If you have an anecdote I guess the discussion is over.
I know a woman who’s six-foot-two, I guess that means that women are in general slightly taller than me. Honestly, do you not understand that anecdotes aren’t data?
No, we have prices increasing faster than inflation, bankruptcies, people putting off care because they can’t afford it, and people who think they are covered well but are not.
Also, we are way sicker as a culture and pay almost twice as much for the privilege.
On the one hand, you can come up with a case of someone in Canada who had to wait to get surgery for a condition that was not life threatening. I have no doubt that this happened. It is not a normal case, but it can happen, and in this case, was so unusual that it made the press. It was a worst case scenario.
On the other hand, you come up with an anecdote of a single person who was able to get good cancer care in the US despite having no insurance. Good for him - I have no doubt that this can happen. Do you think that this might have been a best case scenario?
Can you see that this does not prove your case though? Do you think your anecdote about your cousin proves that people with a cancer diagnosis and no insurance will generally get the exact same level of care as someone with insurance?
Oh, in that case I suppose you support the Senate bill? The only thing created in it is the exchange and it will only allow private insurers to connect to clients.
One thing that bears repeating:
If you want removal of pre-existing conditions you need to have a mandate. If you want a mandate you need to have a subsidies. What exactly are you against in the Senate bill?
If only it would stay $90 billion/year. As you note, Medicare alone is (was, the $440 billion/year figure is a couple of years old) $440 billion/year. When it was conceived, nobody would have dreamed or dared to propose something that cost $440 billion/year. It was sold as a $3 billion/year program, with estimates of about $12 billion/year by 1990. The actual 1990 figure was $107 billion.
Now take that $90 billion a year and apply the same curve over the same amount of time and there’s simply not enough money to pay for it. If the government is so good at controlling costs, why haven’t they done so with Medicare? Why should we believe that UHC will miraculously be spared from the same inefficient spending that government estimates missed by nearly an order of magnitude over barely 2 decades for Medicare?
Our government is bloated and inefficient, what works in other countries may not ever work here simply because of the bureaucracy involved.
I can see the bureaucracy becoming so tangled that the canned response would be, “Take 2 aspirins and re-apply”. On the surface, it would look fine. People would be getting “healthcare”. Mission accomplished.
Our postal service ran an estimated $7 billion deficit last year. Inefficient? Topheavy due to retirement/benefits for federal employees? The employees in UHC would be eligible for at least similar benefits as postal employees, plus all the other federal employees needed to run such a huge bureaucracy. If our government can’t even break even delivering mail, how can we expect them to be able to pull a rabbit out of a hat with UHC?
For the record, I think UHC is a great idea, I just have zero faith in our government to be able to pull it off at $90 billion/year. I think this has a lot of people spooked, “Government” and “Efficient” are not two terms many people think of together. This, coupled with the fact that President Obama made such an aggressive statement about getting it passed so quickly without first detailing to the average American what all was entailed, made a lot of people very wary about the whole deal. The vibe was, “We know what’s best, don’t argue with us, it’ll all be great, trust us, we’re from the government”.
I don’t know a single person who would be against the concept of being able to walk into the doctor’s office anytime and getting treated without having to pay a bill, that part is accepted. It’s just that the bill will have to be paid, and there will be no going back once it’s signed into law. It’ll be virtually impossible to get away from if passed, so we are placing blind trust in our government to do something that they’ve demonstrated they are not really very good at doing. You can cut defense budgets, you can table highway bills, but can you imagine if somebody proposed a cut in UHC spending? Wonder how the $3 billion/year Medicare program got to $440 billion/year? It’s not because we have 146 time more people than in 1966.
Can government do it better than the insurance companies? I see a lot of railing against the insurance companies and their profits. No argument from me there. My only question is, will the inefficiency of layers of government bureaucracy be worse than or equal to the insurance profits? Insurance companies deny you coverage, but will a panel of bureaucrats on a budget make the best call? Will coverage be effectively denied just the same? And I’m not talking about “death panels”, I mean the same review procedure that BC uses. You say that time is the only factor limited by budget constraints, less money = more time. I wish I could be so optimistic about our government even getting it this close to right.
You do know that Medicare costing more than projections made in the 60s is a good thing, right? Life expectancy in was over five years higher in 1990.
Medicare is more efficient than private insurance. It costs a lot because it helps people at the end of life when people are most likely to need medical care.
Medicare is more efficient than private insurance.
Just because you can imagine something that sounds like the ravings of a crazy person doesn’t mean it will come true.
Look down. See that flat typewriter looking thing? Follow the cord. You see the box it’s plugged into? That’s why the USPS is running at a loss. People don’t mail stuff as much as they used to. Also, Medicare is more efficient than private insurance.
He couldn’t sell it until the details were hammered out. If he sold the public option hard he’d be in a pickle now, wouldn’t he?
It’s because we have more people, we live longer and we have treatments that can extend life that we didn’t have in 1966. Also Medicare is more efficient than private insurance.
Medicare is more efficient than private insurance.
You know that right now your insurance is handled by a panel of bureaucrats who make more money if they don’t pay for your treatment, right?
Why on earth would you think that coverage would be denied just the same?
As I posted in the “death panel” thread:
Which scenario seems more likely:
A committee of doctors from the government and doctors from a medical association decides together to screw over a patient in order to save money for the government. This decision becomes public, unless all the doctors on the committee conspire to keep it out of the public domain illegally. Plus, this public decision to deny care must apply to EVERYONE EQUALLY, including those same doctors’ families and the politician’s families.
A single claims adjustor with no medical training from a private company denies care or cancels the policy of a single patient in order to increase his bonus. Nobody finds out about this because the company is private.
