Fuck I want "socialized medicine" and I want it now!

The BBQ Pit
161

Allow me to address buttonjockey308 issues one at a time:
*

  1. The trial lawyers make too much money from the medical/hospital system because the legal system allows it.*

The trial lawyers make money from the Insurance Companies who use the excuse of high malpractice claims to raise rates through the roof. Reform in this area is desperately needed. The only ones that don’t want it are the trial lawyers and I think that special interest group can be knocked down if people actually know what they are voting for when these issues come on the ballot. Not ***OMG they can run my child down like a dog in the street and never be punished ***ads they put out now to discourage reform.

2. The insurance companies make too much money from the insured and from the kickbacks they get from the doctors to be ‘in plan’. Nor will they get to choose how and where you get care, which will cost them money.

What kickbacks are you referring to? I don’t know of any plan that requires Doctors to pay to be in them. Networks beg to get doctors aboard with the low fee schedule they offer. No one is going to pay for that privilege.
*
3. The hospitals won’t be able to charge $6.00 for an aspirin with their bottom up pricing structure.*

Although the hospitals CHARGE $6.00 for an aspirin, it doesn’t mean they are getting $6.00 for an aspirin. Hospitals are contracted with insurance companies to accept a particular fee schedule. A self pay patient may get a bill for this amount in an attempt to supplement the cost of care to the indigent but hospitals are well aware how unlikely they are to get half of their bill paid from someone with no insurance, let alone all. Hospitals aren’t big business money makers.

4. The doctors won’t be able to keep their insanely huge houses, expensive cars and fat bank accounts or get freebies in excess from the drug companies.

Freebies from drug companies have long been limited and are seriously scrutinized. I am unaware if you actually know a physician personally in this healthcare environment but due to managed care, the primary care physician that makes over $150,000 per year is rare indeed. People with Jobs as Physicians / Doctors Salary | PayScale.

*5. The drugcos won’t be able to rake in the millions upon millions of dollars they have been because bulk purchases demand deep discounts. *

The drug companies make little money on generic products which will likely be the only drugs paid for. What will suffer is R & D with no money or incentive to create new drugs for the profits they can make until the patent expires and generics become available.

6. The feds won’t be able to nitpick/monitor and restrict the development of new and different and (imagine this) effective treatments because the drugcos will be losing too much cash.

There will not be any any longer because there will be no incentive to create them.

The point is that providers aren’t likely to suffer anymore than they already have under managed care and Medicare caps. Many hospitals are already near bankruptcy and having no indigent people soaking up resources is bound to help. Insurance companies will suffer and so will trial lawyers but I have confidence that the majority of citizens will make this happen in the coming years regardless of the special interest groups.

162

Experience in Canada shows that it may not be as bad as you fear. Of course, there will be cases of people with the sniffles clogging up the E.R., but then what needs to be put in place is a public education program, penalties for abusers, and innovative programs like BC Nurseline, which

“provides 24-hour, confidential health information and advice. Specially trained nurses answer questions about health topics and procedures, identify symptoms, and help you decide when to see a health professional. Information and referrals are also provided to other services.”

This has saved the provincial medical system TONS of money, and has prevented many, many unnecessary ER visits.

163

It’s simple. Deal with them in order (either order).

Why is it that:

  1. UHC
  2. Tort reform
  3. PROFIT!!!

is so much more objectionable than

  1. Tort Reform
  2. UHC
  3. PROFIT!!!
164

Just to add a few numbers to this:

In Canada in about 1999, if you were *uninsured and you needed non-urgent medical care if you went to an ER you would be charged $268 for the consult.

By way of comparison, if you went to see a Family Doctor at a walk in clinic you would be charged $18.

I assume the cost difference is simlar in the US because the factors affecting the cost difference are the same - overhead, staff, etc.

*Like a visitor to the country.

165

Not sure if this clears anything up, but a page ago NinjaChick complained that her student visa didn’t afford her healthcare in the UK.

I’m not sure if that was the case when you were over here or a misunderstanding, but my girlfriend is a full-time student but an American citizen and doesn’t earn any money over here. She is entitled to exactly the same treatment that I am on the NHS (well, almost, I’m glad she’s entitled to some girly things that I don’t have to/get to have done).

166

First off, here’s a nifty graphic that shows how how much is spent per capita for health care vs life expectancy in a whole bunch of countries. As you can see, we’re spending WAY more than everybody else, but it doesn’t seem to be correlating to longer life here. Something seems to be amiss.

The CDC says that we’re now sitting at 29th for infant mortality–we were 12th in 1960, and a more recent report estimates we might actually be more like 34th. Something seems to be amiss–we’re spending all this money, how come we can’t keep babies alive?

The National Coalition on Health Care says we spent 2.3 trillion dollars last year on health care–that’s a whole fuckpot o’money for sure, about $7600 for every person, and 16% of our GDP.

Current estimates place the amount of unnecessary overhead we pay to insurance companies at 31%–this is money we wouldn’t have to spend if we went single payer. If I didn’t drop any zeroes, this is something like 713 billion dollars PER YEAR we could save by booting the insurance companies out of the business–hey, didn’t we just okay about 700 billion to BAIL OUT some insurance companies? Whoa, trippy. Anyway, to make that a little more real, taking out the 31% from the per capita number lets us reduce that $7600 by $2356 = $5244 per year per person. What was that again about not being able to afford health care? Bollocks, I say.

Health should not be a for-profit business. The health of a nation’s wage earners is just another form of infrastructure, no different from roads or airports or national defense. There are huge advantages to the single payer system, one not inconsiderable one being the bargaining power that single entity has in negotiating drug and equipment prices from vendors. I don’t have any good numbers on that, but I find it interesting that Canadian online pharmacies are a booming business here in the US where we can buy drugs more cheaply than at the local WalMart, even with shipping costs factored in. This is due to Canada presenting a unified buying presence to the pharmaceutical companies.

Insurance companies who have a financial stake in denying care should not be the final arbiters of treatment plans–this should be between doctor and patient with general guidelines to standardize care across the system.

We need single payer, and we need it now. Our system in irretrievably broken.

167

Thanks for the interesting graphics/stats. And thanks also for using the proper term - “Single payer system”

The term “socialized medicine” is simply a scary bogey-man term that is used to frighten people who are also frightened of the word “socialist”.

168

It should be for-profit for doctors and nurses.

169

I know this thread probably doesn’t need another anecdote but here I go.

My youngest brother was born 6 weeks early. I’m not entirely sure what happened but I think he got caught up in the umbilical cord which caused deformities to his left foot and hand. His left foot was swollen from his ankle, it was about 2-3 times the size of a normal foot and the swelling didn’t go down. Two fingers on his left hand were mangled beyond the first knuckle. Apart from that he was a normal healthy baby.

He was scheduled to go to Great Ormond Street children’s hospital in London. It’s the leading children’s hospital in the country, and have a consultation with a highly respected surgeon. His first bout of surgery was aimed at reducing the swelling of his foot and tidying up his fingers a little (they were a bit of a mess). It was reasonably successful at both. He still couldn’t wear a normal shoe but he stopped hiding his fingers from people.

He returned 6 months later for a second bout which reduced the swelling further and he did a fantastic job on his fingers. Now he can fit in to normal shoes and his fingers don’t really stand out at all. They are cut off just above the first knuckle and don’t have fingernails but apart from that they’re fine. He’s not bullied in school, thankfully, which was a fear of mine. His foot has some pretty bad scaring just above the ankle but I think he’s grown to like it, heh. Lucky git.

He went back 6 months later for another check up with the same surgeon. My brother was told what more could be done and they both decided not to continue with surgery. I don’t think he’s been back since.

Everything was free, from birth to final consultation.
The special shoes he needed up until his second surgery were free.
We don’t live near London, our train/tube tickets were reimbursed by the hospital each time (I went with my mother each time).

I know it’s not really free because we pay for it in our taxes but if we had to pay a lump sum we would have struggled to afford the initial consultation. I dread to think how much the whole treatment, which was basically cosmetic - not for health reasons, would have cost. We certainly wouldn’t have been able to afford it.

The NHS is there if we need it. If we get ill; we don’t need to stress about the cost, we only need to worry about getting better. If we think we might be ill then we can schedule to see our GP, usually the same day if you book it early, instead of sitting it out and hoping it’s nothing serious. It’s a massive weight off your mind.

I don’t think the NHS is wonderful. It certainly has it’s problems and I think we’ve probably been lucky so far. We’ve used it about a dozen times without a problem (6 births, 1 miscarriage, 2 broken bones, several lesser incidents). I don’t want to imagine the alternative. Woe betide anyone that tried to take it from us! Shakes fist.

170

Because we try to save babies that a lot of other countries don’t, and some of them don’t even count those babies as infant mortalities depending upon how long after they were born they actually died.

There are many tricks in the numbers, but that’s one of them. In the US, a 22 week fetus that lives in incubator for four hours is an ‘infant mortality’. In some other places, they don’t try to save that one and they call it a miscarriage.

171

Cite?

172

I really hope people will take the time to read this link. I think it’s pretty valuable information. Some highlights:

173

I wasn’t there on a regular student visa. It was a “blue card”, a six-month visa for American student who either had just graduated or otherwise left full-time study in the US. (Apparently, as the end of this year, the British government has discontinued the program.)

I wasn’t complaining. My only point in bringing it up was that, in the UK, pretty much everyone who earns any sort of paycheck puts a bit in towards NHS. Someone way up-thread said something about it being a mooch off the top 5% income bracket, or something to that effect, and I was just trying to point out that it’s simply not true. If I go back to the UK on a work permit, earn minimum wage, and never even think about seeing a doctor, I’d still be required to pay into it.

174

Yes. And you can thank trial lawyers who love to sue doctors for running up the cost of malpractice insurance, which of course gets passed on to the patients. That’s a big chunk of the cost right there.

175

That is not a well supported belief:

176

Whereas I share your sentiment here, I have to disagree with the wording–I agree that doctors and nurses should be well paid commensurate with their skills and experience but health care itself should not be a for profit enterprise. Take the Boy Scouts–a non-profit organization to be sure, but its executives are quite highly paid. Or my credit union–they pay their employees well, but any profit they make must be plowed back into the business and health care should be the same way. Take away the profit motive and you take away the incentive to cut corners, to compromise care, to deny care outright, to bill creatively–in short, you get rid of all the things that make insurance companies so very, very sucky.

I’m afraid I’m going to have to call for a cite as well. For one thing, I highly doubt that countries like the UK, Canada, Germany, France, Australia, New Zealand, etc. are fudging their numbers so wildly yet stealthily that the World Health Organization can’t figure it out. I also find it much easier to believe that with fifty MILLION Americans completely without access to routine health care, and millions more with “junk insurance” health care it’s much more reasonable to assume that improper/nonexistent prenatal care along with equally nonexistent well-baby care and regular checkups are infinitely more likely to result in a larger percentage of babies not making it to their first birthday. Even if we have a massively higher rate of premature births, I submit that inadequate prenatal monitoring, less than optimal health in pregnant women and lack of access to genetic screening and amniocentesis brought on by lack of adequate access to health care would more than explain the discrepancy.

Health care in this country is a classic example of “penny wise, pound foolish.”

177

Histrionics don’t help your cause.

Histrionics don’t help your cause.

Yay. We agree on these established facts. Can we drop this whole point now?

I wonder if other countries’ insurance companies are as hip-deep in the junk mortgage crisis as ours are.

And there will be plenty of people under UHC who will die waiting in line. All you’ve demonstrated is that there are flaws in the system. Baby - bathwater.

Well, $3500 would probably do me quite nicely for a year. Sorry it didn’t meet your requirements.

…including UHC.

No. We’ve talked about your histrionics. Desist immediately. Note how I’m only being snarky with you, but that I’m discussing issues quite politely with everybody else? Why do you think that is?

The fact is that I hate that your husband is doing poorly. My mother died a couple of years ago from complications from diabetes. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. I regret that you can’t seem to restrain your anger and sarcastic hysteria to actually try to convince someone who’s still on the fence about the issue.

178

Thank you for the information. I’ll read it and consider.

179

This assertion doesn’t seem to jibe with the facts.

180

I was being a bit hyperbolic purposefully. Hell, there are people who are well insured NOW that die waiting in line for tests/treatment.