I quite like South Korea’s national health system. First, everyone (generally) who works is required to pay 4% of their salary to the NH scheme. Second, the employer is required to match that 4% contribution. Third, you get to choose your doctor and the doctor bills you for your portion of the payment, and then bills the NH corporation for theirs. It’s rather easy. I had a thread around 8 years ago about my hospital stay of almost a month. My share was quite low.
Yeah, this is why my last response to SA was a one liner. Anyone who can say with a straight face that the ACA meant specialists could no longer determine a patient’s course of treatment without abiding by the dictates of what insurance companies will allow is not worth the electrons. They are quite simply ideological to the point of insanity; able to blank out entire areas of knowledge lest it contradict their beliefs.
It’s utterly bizarre, because this is clearly someone who is capable of thinking. He just actively seems to choose not to.
May I ask a question?
Is your son entitled to use the NHS?
Does he, or one of his parents, pay into the system?
The NHS is not free, we pay for it.
Health tourism is a real problem.
There are rumblings about ID cards, payments up front, rationing.
The U.S. is not the only country wrestling with this.
Hey, at least he had a wisp of a response to my constant questions of conservatives wrt what they think of people in UHC countries who like their systems and can’t imagine why America doesn’t have it. No one else who believes that health care reform is evil seem to even want to touch it, especially here, where they can actually engage with people from those countries.
Are they really that afraid of being shown up by simple reality?
I’m in England. It’s horseshit.
Yes, there are individual cases where delays are excessive, but it’s still a helluva lot better than the US system for overall outcomes.
I was told this by my cardiologist (who, btw, was on the phone still arguing with my insurance company the day before my scheduled arteriogram). I had an appointment scheduled to see a hematologist a month later due to having developed anemia and mentioned this to my cardiologist. He told me the doctor I was seeing was a very good one and that I was fortunate indeed to be able to get in to see him after only a one month wait because so many specialists are quitting in the wake of the ACA that it’s getting harder and harder to get in to see the ones who are still in practice.
With regard to insurance before the ACA, you got the care you contracted for. If you paid for a plan that covered certain illnesses, medications or procedures, you got those illnesses, medications and procedures covered. Now it’s a crapshoot, with the doctors themselves unsure as to what treatments will be allowed and having to spend an inordinate amount of time arguing with insurance companies about whether the tests and procedures they think are necessary really are.
Of course there are individual cases where delays are excessive. Every case is individual, and I’m sure that had you been told you’ll have to wait eight months to get surgery for your cancer, or been told your treatment was denied because it was too expensive or actuarial tables show your predicted lifespan doesn’t justify it, you wouldn’t have thought the system was so great. Our own Maastricht once recounted how in the Netherlands a person in such circumstances is given palliative treatment in the form of pain meds and essentially told to go off and have a nice death.
As in the case of communism, where leftist thought held that a crappy, substandard lifestyle for all was preferable to a good lifestyle for most because ‘fairness’ ( :rolleyes: ), the idea now is that substandard health care for all is ‘better’ than excellent care for most because fairness. In my opinion more people will suffer and die under the substandard system of care than will under the more free market approach, but typically those who support the substandard system don’t care. As long as we have a system where those who have the means aren’t getting care denied to the small percentage who don’t, it’s all golden to the left no matter how crappy it is in reality.
As someone who’s lived with and benefited from single-payer health care his whole life, when I read the kind of ignorant bullshit that you post all I can do is shake my head. You haven’t a single solitary clue what you’re talking about. Period.
Doctors – and potential medical students – have been dissuaded from medical practice for years because of the costs and onerous bureaucracy of dealing with insurance companies. What they’re telling you here is nothing new, and under the ACA, health care policies are still underwritten by insurers just like they always were. This whole God-forsaken mess is unique to US health care and always has been, as anyone who has moved there from any civilized country can tell you. That’s your “free market” in action. Where private companies dictate to doctors what they are and are not allowed to do for their patients, and then make it as difficult as possible for the doctors to get paid.
The problem is that human health care has unique attributes that make free-market principles utterly useless in administering it, which is why no civilized country on earth uses them for funding its primary health care systems. The conservatives’ love of free markets as the all-purpose solution to all problems in heaven and earth and everywhere in between doesn’t change that.
Back on topic, I couldn’t help but notice that when Meryl Streep uses her celebrity to criticize Trump, she is called a “play-actor” who should shut up and stick to play-acting. But when Nicole Kidman uses her celebrity to support Trump, that’s a whole different story – the knuckle-dragging troglodytes who read the Washington Times drool in approval, calling her “a courageous and charming woman” and promise to defend her right to speak out when the evil left tries to destroy her. 
I see. So there’s this vast number of medical specialists who are quitting en masse, to become what? Bus drivers? Hair dressers?
And who’s responsible for this ‘crapshoot’? The government, or the insurance carriers?
Sorry, but this is incorrect. Granted, it was this way in theory, but often times, not in practice.
This was the basis for the film Sicko.
[http://www.myhospitals.gov.au/our-reports/cancer-surgery-waiting-times/october-2014/report"]http://www.myhospitals.gov.au/our-re...er-2014/report([URL)]
That’s for the Australian system.
In Canada:
From here: [http://www.calgarysun.com/2016/04/14/alberta-cancer-wait-times-are-among-worst-in-canada"]http://www.calgarysun.com/2016/04/14...orst-in-canada([URL)]
You’ll note that when wait times don’t improve they make headlines and the system comes under scrutiny for ways to improve.
Streep is a play-actor. So is Kidman. They act in plays and movies. Kidman is Australian. Streep is from Hollyweird. Kidman says she normally stays out of politics, but if the media repeatedly keeps asking everyone in hollyweird to make a statement on the subject, it’s her opinion that the election is over. A kind of the-king-is-dead-long-live-the-king sort of thing.
What’s amusing is that so many people want others to believe that the term “play-actor” is supposed to be an insult.
Citation Fucking Needed
After reading this I was curious to see if doctors were quitting because of ACA. So I did a web search.
Typing the words “number of medical specialists who quit due to aca” took about 2 seconds. Clicking the first link took maybe a second. Reading the article took 30 seconds.
If you had taken that same 35 seconds to educate yourself rather than whining on the internet, you might have actually learned something. You should try it.
For the curious:
Well, Congress did pass that plan six months later. (You might have heard: It’s called the Affordable Care Act.)
But our doctors didn’t go away.
In fact, rather than lose 360,000 physicians, the nation’s gained nearly 100,000 practicing doctors in the past six years.
Republicans care about [DEL]corporate profits[/DEL] people. They really really care.
“Repealing major provisions of the Affordable Care Act, while leaving other parts in place, would cost 18 million people their insurance in the first year, a report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said on Tuesday.”
I’m sorry, do you need a safe space?
Except that they do.
And rather than look at the lives it saved and the number of people who have insurance they clutch their pearls and rail against this error.
The premiums are pretty much where they were predicted to be
Cititation Needed.
I personally know people who had treatment covered by the ACA that otherwise would be in serious debt or dead.
What do you have? Mutterings about premiums and imagined dragons that you see coming from them.
Repeating your lies does not make it the truth.
I saw that article some time ago when some Trumpet declared that since he knew a doctor who retired after ACA came out then all the doctors must be retiring. It was nonsense. But this kind of nonsense becomes accepted truth among the GOP lovers.
(post shortened)
Hahahaha.
Kidman is American by virtue of having been born in Hawaii and still holds American citizenship.
Is this the doctor he met at one of the Muslim celebrations held on 9/11?