Didn’t Michael Moore do exactly this in part of Sicko - talk with people in UK and France about their system, how much they have to pay for a stay in hospital and acting confused at their weird looks (because the reaction of a normal European, who doesn’t read SDMB or other sources about Healthcare in the US and the debate, can’t comprehend the notion that an ordinary person wouldn’t be insured and have to pay thousands of dollars. 10 Euros a day for a hospital is what people in Germany have as copay fee, and that’s only after the last reform.
As for CNN or Fox to reach the idiots rooted in ideology - since when have the mouthpieces for conservatives/ neo liberals been interested in facts, what the people say, or balanced reporting?
The power of it would lie in people talking to people, without political filters or other media filters. Just “Hey, may I ask what you were doing at the hospital today and how did it go?”
Of course, FOX would accuse whoever did this of faking it and/or applying selective editing. “They only show you the one guy who pays 10 bucks for his hospital bed, not the THOUSANDS OF MILLIONS who pay TRIPLE DIGITS for a tube of aspirin while not enjoying our FREEDOM FROM GOVERNMENT”.
Or something like that. It’s wonderful, the kind of reporting you can do when you’re not bound by ethics 101.
I’m Starving Artist, being the open minded person that he is, will thoroughly evaluate this evidence and will reconsider the wisdom of his strong opposition to UHC. You’ll see!
It’s not a stretch to say that the application process for SSDI is extremely difficult to navigate. I work in a closely related field, and I look at SSDI applications and decisions all day, and it’s not unusual for the process to take as much as a year, including appeals. Keep in mind that most disability claims aren’t as cut-and-dried as “I’m a quadriplegic” or “my hands were cut off in a cement mixer”. Usually they’re more arcane considerations like “my back hurts and I can only sit upright for three hours at a time”. Obviously, the potential for abuse of the system in such cases is pretty significant, hence the long wait times. If your hands are cut off, your application will usually be accepted and processed real fast; after all, it’s pretty tough to fake an amputation.
What is a stretch is drawing a parallel between SSDI and healthcare. SSDI is, generally, a permanent entitlement (although things get switched around a bit once you reach retirement age). It makes perfect sense that it would take a long-ass time to determine whether or not a person is entitled to a lifetime of disability benefits. We’re talking about amounts in the millions here, in many cases.
As such, it makes perfect sense for SSDI claims to be litigated. It does not make any sense at all for a health insurance claim to be litigated in most cases, since we’re talking about amounts in the thousands. Larger claims can be and are litigated all the time.
There seems to be some confusion over what I mean when I talk about wait times. Your cite talks about wait times of days for a doctor’s appointment, and another poster a couple of weeks ago seemed to think the issue was wait times in emergency rooms. When I talk about wait times, I’m talking about the amount of time required for a person to begin treatment once their condition is diagnosed, or wait times to have diagnostic procedures performed once a physician decides they are in order. It has been my understanding, based on things I’ve read here and elsewhere, that in Canada and the U.K., both can take anywhere from a couple of months to a year or more. These are also the types of wait times where I’m concerned that more people will end up dying each year than the amount of people who die now due to having no health care.
I am saying that each province is in charge of its own health system, so you cannot make a blanket statement based on one province. Yes, I am saying that every province is not “plagued” by wait times. My family and colleagues and aquaintences have not had any problems with waiting for any procedures. Some do, I’m sure, but the problem has been relieved in recent years.
Please note that there are wait times in the United States for various procedures as well, even if you have insurance, and if you don’t have insurance, the wait time for some procedures will be infinite.
Provinces track wait times for various procedures, and every one of them is actively working on reducing wait times.
see here for details of wait times across the provinces Note that Health Canada has a 10 Year Plan outlines strategic investments directed toward reducing waiting times for access to care. Note that we acknowledge that a problem exists and are taking steps to correct it. What plan exists in the United states for improving access to care and better health for all its citizens?
And Starving? Relying on a dimly remembered, unsearchable anecdote is not really very convincing. Better to look at, maybe, ACTUAL STATISTICS on wait times in Canada before making a pronouncement, OK?
For the record, I recall it being said exactly once before and my response was pretty much the same as it was here.
As usual, people would be well advised to ignore anything Guinastasia says as it’s almost invariably wrong.
My purpose in posting it – at least in this instance – is to illustrate why I have objections to UHC and not necessarily to persuade people to my point of view.
Son-of-a-Bitch! I just received the medical coverage rates at my place of employment for 2010. A 29% cost increase, 29 fucking %! This is for a single person, from $386 per month to $499, and this year’s $386 was a 23% increase from 2008. It is beyond imagination medical insurance going up 52% in only two years. I am screwed, my employer can not afford this and I am already paying out of pocket $50.00 per month in addition to zero raises for the past four years because of out of control health care costs.
So you’re going to cling to a dimly remembered anecdote, one that flys in the face of many, many posters telling you that the facts on the ground do not support this anecdote, and in the face of ACTUAL statistics compiled by the various provinces, all of whom are working hard to reduce wait times for various procedures.
Have you ever heard of changing your mind based on the evidence?
Allow me to correct your typing here; you seem to have accidentally included quite a few extraneous letters. Properly written, it’s:
“As usual, people would be well advised to ignore anything [del]Guinastas[/del]i[del]a[/del] say[del]s[/del] as it’s almost invariably wrong. :D” – Starving Artist
I don’t have time for much of this today, but the poster referred to is not the only reason for my objections to UHC. His experience though does speak to and confirm other things I’ve read about the Canadian system, such as wait times so ridiculously wrong that the Canadian Supreme Court countermanded Canadian law (yeah, yeah, in a province – as though the same conditions didn’t exist elsewhere else) to allow private care; the comments of Dr. Doig; etc. The statistics and comments by people here cannot, IMO, be relied upon because they are: a) a small sample of the Canadian population; b) strongly biased toward a government health care system in the first place; c) utterly ignoring of the negative aspects of the Canadian system that I have brought up and posted cites for; d) I’ve seen enough of how our own government operates to have absolutely no confidence in it to run anything as massive and complex and important as UHC well.
And now I’m out for the day.
Not that I have any problem at all with your posting this (which I haven’t :)), but I will point out that despite the many occasions when I’ve seen other posters do this with nary a word from the mods, on the one occasion when I did do the same, it was deemed that I was altering quotes (depite the fact that jokingly altering the quote is the intent in the first place) and I got reprimanded for it. Here’s hoping the same won’t occur with you.
(Plus you left out an “I” either just before or just after “[del]Guinastasia[/del]”.)
P.S. - I don’t recall the forum in which I made the alteration or the mod that warned me for it, so it should not be assumed that it was one of the Pit moderators who did so as it may or may not have been one of them.
I’ll add that those statistics aren’t that hard to find. Here, for example, is a link to median wait times in the province of British Columbia (as you recall, we must consider the provinces separately, since they provide the insurance plans and the care). While it shows median wait times, most of them don’t seem to be unreasonably long. Certainly, there is no nine-month heart surgery wait–it looks like it was about 3.6 weeks last spring.
Ah, you say, but what if care is urgent? No heart surgery patient can wait 3.6 weeks if care is needed now. True enough. So you’ll be interested in this BC Ministry of Health Services reassurance to its plan members:
Emphasis in the original.
Not sure why I keep posting supportable facts to this thread, but perhaps I’m fighting some lurker’s ignorance somewhere.
I lol’d !!! Icerigger: I’m paying $367 per month premium on a policy to cover myself and one child. Our yearly deductible is $5,000; so my out-of-pocket monthly expense is $783 ($367 + $416) … I suppose that’s what I get for starting a business and trying to grow the economy.
In the same spirit of generosity, I sincerely hope that nobody finds out it was you who sold the brown acid at Woodstock. I’d hate for that to get out…
Here are search results showing 17 posts in which you spell the word form with “bureau*” (thank you, Jelsoft, for putting a wildcard feature in your search function). Closer inspection will show that the correct spelling is from your use of the quote function in a significant fraction of those posts. And several others follow instances of your having been called on the incorrect spelling.
Here are search results showing 28 instances of you using “beauro*”. And they’re all yours.
Looks like back in 2004/2005, the words didn’t give you any trouble at all. Then 2007 came around and you started to lose your grip on them, with a few saving throws in 2008. I’d say you ought to go pick up some ginkgo biloba, before the death panels say you can’t have any.
No, I think if you ask enough Canadians, they’ll tell you about the horror stories and the negative aspects. Granny had to wait weeks for a hip replacement, Little Johnny had to wait six hours in the ER for an x-ray, Mrs. Smith cannot find another GP after hers retired. These things happen, and we cannot deny that they do. What we can do is to bring them out in the open and work to improve them; rather than hide problems behind corporate policies designed to provide shareholders with a good ROI. I think it is similarly telling that many of the Canadians posting here and in other threads allow how our system can be improved. I’m sure we differ in the details of how to improve the systems, perhaps strongly, but we live in a free country; we’re allowed to.
So maybe it’s not perfect, but it has its advantages: we’re not tied into jobs because that’s where we might get health insurance that (a) can be denied based on pre-existing conditions; (b) can have claims denied for any or no reason at all; and (c) carries with it a rack of deductibles and co-pays and premium payments (Icerigger, is that new premium really approximately $6000 per year?). If we’re biased towards a UHC, it’s because having experienced one, we’ve never gone without because we’ve lost a job. Nor have we been afraid to change jobs because the next job’s plan might not cover us, or be inferior to the plan we have now, or might not even exist. Obviously, we’ve never had to mortgage the house or sell our car to pay for care. It’s a good feeling.
