If Canadian waiting lists work like Spanish ones, they involve triage.
Dad’s cancer was OPERATENOW, so he got surgery within a week of it being detected, all three times. He polevaulted over the waiting list.
Gramps’ are “cancerous polyps again…,” he gets them burned off routinely (every three months).
My aunt’s current one was a mid-of-the-way, she was scheduled for surgery one month after the cancer was detected, based on the type of cancer it was.
Hah, the same thing happened to me! The difference was that I’m in Canada and this happened in the early evening, so instead of going to the ER I looked up evening clinics on the internet, and hit the nearest one.
Total wait time was about 2 hours, but that’s because clinics take their patients on a “first come first served” basis and I arrived well after the start of the clinic. The standard practice is to start queuing for a clinic about a half hour before it opens, so you get in first. It reduces the wait time from 2 hours to 30-60 minutes. The only paperwork was showing my provincial health card to the nurse doing the check-in desk.
I wasn’t being sarcastic - so are there buy-a-kid-a-pair-of-glasses funds? In England you had a health visitor come to the school who checked us all for “warts, corns & blisters”, I guess even with free doctor visits some people don’t take their kids to the doc. A van would come around and check your hearing & sight.
Over here
I live in the UK, which has a National Health Service and private medicine (for those who wish to pay to be treated immediately for non-urgent conditions or to have cosmetic operations etc).
Over there
I bashed my toe on a trip to Vegas. :smack:
I wasn’t sure if it was broken and anyway it hurt, so I wanted medical treatment.
My first call was to my insurance company in England, who confirmed I had £500,000 ($1,000,000) worth of cover. They agreed to pay.
Once the money was in place, I got excellent service and had the problem cleared up.
N.B. Because I had the million dollars:
-I could have had a doctor visit my hotel
I asked the doctor what would have happened without insurance. He said I would have to go to the local free clinic and wait. He estimated there would be a 6-12 hour delay (because they were short-staffed). I would have to pay my own transport and cope with the pain until then.
Bloody hell, you’d have to be out working the streets to afford that then. You’d get around 70 months of fearless shagging in the West Indies for that (using the pill) - the health care here is limited of course, being a developing country but socialised non the less. I’m in Antigua but we’ve got a deal with Cuba and we have many wonderful Cuban doctors & nurses - wooooooo communist!
My husband is experiencing socialized medicine through the VA.
He has to wait months for an appointment. He had a bunch of MRIs done…by the time they were scheduled, finished and read, they were out of date. Oh, and they lost them too.
Many of his appointments have to be held over in Tampa. If he can’t get a shuttle to get him there by the time of his appointment, he has to drive himself.
He’s frequently on the phone with the VA for hours at a time, either on hold or being transferred from department to department because the person has no clue how to help him.
Conversely, I was diagnosed with breast cancer on May 6, 2008, had my surgeries six weeks later, and have just finished chemo and am about to start radiation. My husband has been trying to get his problem taken care of for two years.
I had some hospital bills, the highest was $460. I gladly paid them. I recently got a bill from my chemo doctor for $25. I was about to pitch a fit until I started reading the items. My Neulasta shot (to keep my white blood cell count up) was $7300 for a 6mg shot. My private insurance through my employer (all hail Aetna) covered it.
I wrote that check for $25 with nary a peep.
I think if health insurance companies could compete for our business, like car insurance companies, the costs would go down dramatically.
As you’re in the U.S. and supposedly earning $500 an hour how would you know?
I actually live in a country where we have socialised medecine,if your problem is non urgent then yes you may well wait two weeks for an appointment,if your problem is more pressing then you wont.
An added advantage of living in the U.K. is that if I really wish to spend money and I can’t wait to have a splinter removed,or my blood pressure tested or anything else of a non urgent nature I can have it taken care of by our private medical system.
Its not either or here,its both.
The U.S. may have a very high standard of medical treatment technically but your system itself is not all that far removed from that of a third world country.
Are you ill but can’t afford to pay?
Bad luck sir,come back when you’ve got some money.
I think this is an important and often overlooked point.
As I look out the door of my office, I see approximately 50 people sitting in their cubicles busily working away at claims-related stuff. Fifty. Let’s say they make an average of 30,000/year. Indeed.com and Salary.com put the salary of medical AR clerks at about that. That doesn’t include benefits, but I’ll use that for my estimate. In some part of this building I can’t see, there is another room full of medical “coders”, people with the special training necessary to correctly generate medical bills that are acceptable to insurance companies. Let’s say we employ another 25 of them, at 30K each. So, that’s about $2.25 million we spend just to deal with the demands placed on us by insurance companies. It is fucking insane.
I’m not sure I’m completely behind the idea of a single payer system. But our current system is fucked.
I am sorry but do you think paperwork will stop if we get a national healthcare plan? Having worked with Medicare and Medicaid for years…there will be an increase in these positions or at the very least, no savings in that area.
I will say that a highly regarded spine surgeon in my building has patients from Canada and the UK flying in often for self pay surgeries. The explanation I was given is that herniated disks and spinal degeneration is not considered an emergency and to get these types of surgeries from specialists can take anywhere from a month to a year.
Seems to me that being willing to pay upwards of $40,000 for a self pay surgery not to mention putting your family up in a hotel for weeks means that socialized medicine does need a little work.
There is going to be a lot more to work out than people who are assuming that they’ll be handed a card and will get excellent care whenever they want. No system is perfect.
Quite a bit, actually. If the same happened to me, in Copenhagen, I could go to the ER where I would have to wait for 4 to 5 hours, seeing that my condition wasn’t lifethreatening. If I didn’t want that, I could call my family doctor in the morning, he probably could find me a time the same day. I could call an earspecialist too and all of it would be free.
The downside is that the Danish taxes are high.
Well, to be fair, it was $500 every five years, about $8.33 per month, which is low. However, a lump sum of $500 really hurts when you’re a student and trying to make ends meet!
I think the people whining about bills being so high because the insured are subsidizing the uninsured overlook the fact that those who self-pay don’t generate nearly the same tonnage of expensive dead trees; but they still pay for it.
Beyond that, Bayard has it right:
Per capita spending on health care in nations with socialized systems hovers around half of the United States’. The same level of care costs much more under your system.
I don’t feel terribly raw about being coerced into having affordable health care.\
Ftttt. My wife discovered a painful lump in her groin Saturday night. Had it diagnosed at a clinic Sunday morning, and saw her family doctor about it on Monday. We have emergency rooms up here, too.
Do you think it’s the spotty implementation of the system or the fact that it’s socialized at all?
I’m curious how UHC stacks up in countries with populations as large or larger than ours.
We don’t have insurance right now (and haven’t for months), due to a mix-up at my husband’s company. And they can’t just start insurance right away, even though they screwed it up. We have to wait for his employment start-date to roll around again (November, thank goodness) before we’ll be covered again.
I would love UHC, because I realize that if something were to happen to one of us today, we’d go from well-off middle class to dirt poor, practically overnight. When my mom was in her car accident several years ago, the bill was something like $100,000. Since my mom was a teacher, she had insurance, but if she hadn’t, my parents would’ve been completely wiped out.
I gave birth in March. Blood pressure went from normal to high on my due date, on the Thursday before Easter. I was asked to come in twice over the Easter weekend for monitoring and blood tests, then was admitted on Monday morning (a public holiday) for induction. The drugs finally took effect on Tuesday morning and a midwife was stationed with me in the private birthing suite for the entire duration of my labour. An anaesthesiologist administered two epidurals (the first failed). When my daughter was born at 10pm, there were three midwives, my obgyn and a paediatrician in the room. My daughter spent about six hours in the NICU and the paediatrician checked on her several times over the following days. I was allowed to stay in hospital until the Saturday after the birth in the single room where I had her, with the private bathroom and double bed. The bill? $19AU (about $13US). That was for iron tablets, pills for my blood pressure and some paracetamol. If I hadn’t needed to take medications home with me, it wouldn’t have cost me a cent.
Government healthcare isn’t self pay. It is lots of crossing Ts and dotting Is. But, yes, self pay certainly saves trees.
More people will need to be hired on the government level to process all these claims but of course, it won’t add up to nearly what the head honchos of the big insurance companies pull in. Coding will still have to be done, submission of paperwork will still have to be done, authorization and approval of procedures etc.
It won’t be…here’s a magic card…go forth and get anything you want anytime.
Oh, and I forgot the managers – another five or so people probably in the 90K range, and the five or six programmers and assorted IT folks at 60-70K each who do nothing but deal with billing interfaces and claims programming. So, we’re up to about $3 million a year worth of grabbing our ankles for the insurance companies.
According to payscale.com, the median salary for an RN with 10 years experience is 58K. Let’s say 60K to make the math easier. So, for that 3 million we spend dealing with our complex, inefficient system, we could hire 50 highly-experienced RNs. Fucking brilliant.
(Yeah, I know, you wouldn’t recover all that money if we had a single payer; my numbers are WAGs, blah blah blah. Our system still stinks.)
Ok, so you went to an emergency room for a false alarm and got hit with a big bill. You would prefer that your big bill be socialized.
It may sound good, but keep in mind that there are a lot of people out there who regularly go to emergency rooms for trivial things. Under socialized medicine, you may end up paying for a lot of Qtips over the course of your lifetime.
What the fuck is going on here? Why is it that conservative poster’s every experience with “Socialised medicine” is an unmitigated horror while every liberal posters experience is an unqualified success? Someone here is bullshitting.
Here are the relevant facts as I see them (from CIA World Fact Book & Wikipedia):
Average life expectancy in U.S.A. = 78.06 years
Average life expectancy in U.K. = 78.70 years
Average life expectancy in Canada = 80.34 years
Average life expectancy in France = 80.59 years
Average life expectancy in Spain = 79.78 years
Infant mortality rate in U.S.A. = 6.3 deaths per 100,000 live births.
Infant mortality rate in U.K. = 4.8 deaths per 100,000 live births.
Infant mortality rate in Canada = 4.8 deaths per 100,000 live births.
Infant mortality rate in France = 4.2 deaths per 100,000 live births.
Infant mortality rate in Spain. = 4.2 deaths per 100,000 live births.
Percentage of Americans who are clinically obese = 31%
Percentage of Britons who are clinically obese = 23%
Percentage of Canadians who are clinically obese = 14%
Percentage of French people who are clinically obese = 9%
Percentage of Spaniards who are clinically obese = 13%
To conservative opponents of socialised medicine I ask this very simple question:
**You assert, categorically, that the establishment of a “socialised” health care scheme will result in: [ul]
[li] Longer waiting times.[/li][li] An empowered, gargantuan bureaucracy.[/li][li] Less efficient service for the majority of consumers.[/li][li] A newfound reticence on the part of many to take full responsibility for their own health.[/ul][/li]
How, then, do you account for the fact that citizens of Great Britain, Canada, France, and Spain, all of whom toil under the yoke of “socialism”, enjoy a longer life expectancy than you? How do you account for the fact that their infant mortality rate is superior to yours? And why is it that, if the American system so effectively promotes personal responsibility for one’s own wellbeing, so many American’s are suffering from a serious medical condition that is (a few rare exceptions aside) entirely self-induced?**
People in countries with “socialised” medicine are healthier, live longer, and bury less dead babies than people in America. We must be doing something right.
I think UHC opponents ought to account for the above disparities between America and the aforementioned “socialist” nations before grandly proclaiming what a failure UHC will be.