Apparently waiting 6 months for a doctor’s appointment gives you a lot of free time to lecture others on health coverage.
<slaps thigh> Your witty bon mots and hilarious hyperbole never ceases to be a great source of amusement to all and sundry sir!
eta: You’re probably right though, since he clearly says in the OP that he’s been living in the United States for the past 4 years. I guess he does not have your doctor.
What god-forsaken cave in the middle of Nunavut would I have to live in to have a 6 month wait on a doctor’s appointment?
That’s insanity on the level of saying that there all US insurance companies have secret ninja assassination squads that they use to kill off unprofitable clients.
Those are the goals set by your government.
Just wait for the punchline The Lurker Above! This Mcgiver guy is freakin’ hilarious!
From your own citefrom the other thread the government benchmark for hip replacements was 26 weeks and none of the hospitals met that goal. 6 months waiting in pain for what amounts to a common operation in the US. Same thing for knee replacements. None of the hospitals met that pathetic benchmark.
And therein lies the single greatest weakness of the Canadian Health Care system - long wait times for elective surgery. Guilty as charged.
For that, Canada is further burdened by a system that:
- Costs about 66% of the US system per capita
- Covers everyone
- Allows patients and doctors to be hassle free from dealing with insurance companies who fight to reimburse you every dollar owed
- Has lower infant mortality
- Has longer life spans
- Doesn’t do your dishes
I’ll trade paperwork/insurance hassles for pain any day. Been there, appreciate that. I was happy for the opportunity to choose between treatments and the ability to add my own money to the mix in the form of co-pays.
As for infant mortality rates that is a function of premature births in the US which is a combination of old people breeding, crack heads, and the American tradition of eating ourselves stupid.
We already cover everybody in the US for catastrophic care. If you need it to survive you get it. We also cover the vast majority of Americans through insurance of one kind or another. The gap is something that we’re trying to fix without throwing the baby out with the bath water. In this respect everybody is united that something needs to be done.
I want my insurance company to make a profit on me. It means I’m healthy.
None of us are healthy, death is imminent. Just takes a bit longer for some.
Because, as you have made abundantly clear, YOUR experience with healthcare is clearly what everyone in the US experiences. It is all about what YOU get. YOU are happy with what YOU receive, therefore, all is right with the world. We get that.
The fact that there are plenty of people in the US who do not even have the option of getting a hip replacement AT ALL let alone waiting for one… this does not matter, because they are NOT YOU.
Even if the overheas is 25% and could be cut to 5% it would do little to reduce healthcare-related bankrupcies. Owing 400k rahter than 500k is not going to be that important.
If that were true then politicians wouldn’t be hiding in the tall grass right now. The current health care bill(s) are dead in the water and it isn’t because of the letter I wrote to my representatives.
The fact that I’ve repeatedly stated we should work to close the gap is lost on you.
The way I see it, the current health care bill(s) are dead not because they are bad, which they are. Like I said in the OP, it has failed because of a culture of lies, deceit, and obfuscation that permeates the health care debate.
Why I laugh so hard at your comments about wait time is not because they’re so silly, which they are. It’s because right now there is a politician in Canada making the EXACT opposite argument. He is literally saying, “I would gladly wait 26 weeks for a hip replacement if it meant I didn’t have to die at the hands of an insurance company.” And he would wave a study that shows all the deaths in the US because of privatized health care.
And he’s just as wrong as you are. The hyperbole he’s pushing is meant to further his agenda, and sadly his followers gladly gulp down the cool-aid, just as you have, just as I did.
I’m pulling all of these myths out into the light so that at some point in the future we (both the US and Canada) can have an actually debate about health care.
You keep trotting out these meaningless statistics about wait care in Canada, but that isn’t even the real issue. Any more than insurance company profits. Our wait time issue is well known and being addressed. Within a few years they will be cut in half at the vary least. Yes, they will still be there, because our health care will always cost less than yours.
The real problem with health care in Canada is that we are expressly forbidden from buying private health care in the Canada Health Act. And when ever that issue gets brought up, some moron pulls out stats about “American style health care” that scars the bajeezas out of his electorate, preventing reasonable discussion.
So when you mention wait times I literally laugh out loud because I know it’s something you didn’t come up with. You are trotting out ideas someone fed to you a long time ago.
While I appreciate the effort, part 13 should be titled ‘addressing myths about humanity. You give us facts and we change our beliefs accordingly’.
For the most part we believe what we want to believe. If you say health care is a mess and tell a liberal he’ll say we need more government and more regulation. A conservative will say we need less government and less regulation. Both can dig up enough facts to back up their arguments.
So it seems the world is a buffet now, with contradictory facts that can be cherry picked to justify a pre-existing worldview (liberals point to the lower administration of medicare, conservatives point to the lower costs of competitive industries like Lasix).
Despite health care being a mess, part of the problem isn’t the profits, it is the survival of industries dependent on high spending. Pharma doesn’t just want to make profits, they want to survive and maintain market share. Same with private insurance. You survive by selling the most expensive plans you can and eliminating competition. Both have done well with health reform in doing that.
A public option was supposed to cut health costs by $100-200 billion over a decade. Why? Because it would be run more cheaply than private insurance, forcing private insurers to improve efficiency or lose market share. They didn’t like it, so it was scrapped. No public option.
There are efforts to reimport drugs from Canada. That was blocked too. Why? Because it would save money and force domestic pharma outlets to lower prices to stay competitive (if the price discrepancy between Canada & the US becomes too great, people start importing from Canada. So domestic Pharma is forced to lower costs).
It is the opposite of the general race to the bottom of capitalism. Usually in capitalism you go all over the world to find the lowest labor and environmental standards. However what was being attempted with reimportation was going over the world and finding the countries with the best and strongest public negotiation tactics, and importing them. Rather than racing to the bottom with labor and the environment, people wanted to race to the bottom with corporations and import products from countries with the strongest public regulations of private corporations.
Naturally it was blocked (racing to the bottom with labor and the environment is ok, but racing to the bottom with corporate hegemony and regulation was blocked). And some people get upset when you say the US is a plutocracy.
Part of me seriously wonders if going overseas for major medical care will become illegal within the next decade. Doing that has the same effect, it forces domestic providers to provide higher quality and lower cost care to survive. Who wants to pay $150,000 for open heart surgery if you can get a western trained doctor in India to do it for $25,000.
Anyway, my point is it isn’t profit per se that is the problem. It is the fact that we have huge private companies that do not want to lose market share. And anything that would rein in the cost of health care is going to cost them market share.
If we could flip a switch and eliminate the waste, overuse, corruption, etc in US health care and drop it from 16% of GDP down to 11% of GDP, that means that hospitals, pharma and private insurance would lose hundreds of billions of dollars.
In medicare sometimes the cost is double for various geographic regions despite health outcomes being the same. One part of the US spends 15k per person on medicare, another spends 7.5k. But both have the same outcomes even when you control for other factors (health, demographics, etc).
According to Peter Orszag, about 1/3 of the health spending in the US ($800 billion) does nothing to improve health, and may actually make health worse by putting people at higher risk of complications, infections, mistakes, etc.
But if you eliminate that $800 billion you eliminate $800 billion in revenue for hospitals, health workers, pharma, private insurance, etc. So they will lobby to block improvements.
Pharma makes $250 billion in revenue a year. If you make our health care world class in efficiency, that may drop to $150 billion. Their profits would be lower, but beyond that their industry would shrink. They would lay people off, have less for advertising, have less political clout. They aren’t going to do that.
My impression is the problem isn’t profits, it is the fact that the incentives are for the most expensive care possible. And since private insurance can just deny care to the truly expensive (via rescission and blocking people with pre-existing conditions) the cycle goes on.
There is a ***huge ***difference between ‘waiting for a doctor’s appointment’ and ‘scheduling an elective surgery’.
You knew that, didn’t you? Your post 26 shows you did. But knowing the difference didn’t keep you from casting that base canard.
This is the real importance of the UHC debate. But making disingenuous statements that pander to fears is more the style of objectors.
I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of days, and the conclusion I’ve come to is that the health insurance industry isn’t to blame at all. They are behaving exactly the way an insurance company should behave. Just like auto insurance, they are going to charge more for high risk clients, and they are going to drop clients that failed to disclose relevant information.
If you have a history for crashes while intoxicated, your premiums are going to go up until the insurance company balances the level of risk they are undertaking. And if you fail to tell them about previous DUIs, then get in another accident while drunk, they aren’t going to cover you, despite how many years of premiums you paid. And they aren’t going to cover you AFTER you’ve had an accident, why would they?
It sounds like we’re blaming the hammer for the holes in the wall. The hammer is working exactly as it should be, it just so happens that it’s the wrong tool for the job.
There is no regulation that can alter make the health insurance industry act the way we want, because in the end we DON’T want insurance.
Think about what has been proposed: we want to force them to take high risk clients without due compensation (high premiums), we want them to take clients with current problems (like taking an auto policy after an accident), and prevent them from dropping clients (paying for clients that lied).
If we end up agreeing that we need fixed, low cost premiums; that everyone has to buy coverage; that high risk clients can’t be dropped; that there can’t be excessive profit; you’ve simply created a very complicated and expensive version of UHC.
I know a couple people who went to Mexico for weight reduction surgery. They are quite pleased with the results. Our medical costs are outrageous. I know people who go to Windsor, Canada for lasix for their eyes. They have been ahead of our doctors for over a decade.
Are you sure Canada is that cheap? This post says that
Half of 31% is a hell of a lot more than 1%
One other thought: a significant portion of one person’s bureaucracy is another person’s elimination of fraud, waste, and abuse… a common theme from both sides of the aisle when looking for new cash to spend.
I just realized this: shouldn’t it really be “Dispelling US Health Care Myths: Part 3: Profit!”