No, that’s one of the idiotic things about UHC.
One of the great things about a free market is that if someone provides a shitty product or service, they go out of business.
Yes, with only their offshore billions and exile in Tahiti to comfort them in their failure.
You sure about that?
You know what, never mind that, let’s apply this scenario to free market health care: Insurance company A does exactly as described in this example, providing a shitty service. Enough people switch to Company B causing Company A to go out of business.
But what happens to those that CAN’T switch? Did you think about that?
If this woman’s health insurer when out of business, she’d be far more fucked than she is now.
In the US this woman would never be able to get private insurance, you do realize that right? Any insurance she does get is going to be insanely expensive, and explicitly prohibit her from receiving treatment for a pre-existing condition (her cancer).
As a working doctor in the US she would have employer based health care, meaning she has no other choice, unless her employer is nice enough to offer TWO companies to choose from. But even then, it’s not like she can switch. She has to wait until the once-yearly open enrollment. Mine isn’t until next October, I’m sure she wouldn’t mind waiting. So what is she supposed to do if her provider doesn’t cover an experimental treatment?
It’s already been established that private hospitals won’t treat her if she’s paying cash.
You proposal fails to prevent or alleviate this situation. I see no reason to choose it and all it’s addition problems over UHC.
As it stands, she always has the option of going into debt so she can get care in the US–just like Americans. But at least with UHC she can go back home and continue to get coverage without further debt (that’s right, there will still be medical costs after treatment).
You know what, it’s clear the rest of the world needs the US to continue with their ridiculous system. I would like to formally thank all Americans for taking one for the team.
Do NHC doctors take chickens in payment?
I guess from your point of view, one of the great things about a free market is that if someone can’t get coverage, they’ll just die.
Yep. I love it when poor people die. It just makes my fucking day. Could you perhaps share some stories of poor people dying? I’ve got the tissues and lube all ready. Thanks.
Good question - what does happen to the people who have plans with badly-run insurance compaies that fail? Shit outta luck?
A local talk-radio blowhard said something interesting once. He was talking about television networks being responsive to their customers. The only thing is, we in the audience are not their customers. The advertisers are the ones who give money to TV networks, and that’s who the networks ultimately work to satisfy. (In a sense, the viewers are the product that the networks sell.)
So who do health insurance companies serve; who buys their products? For the most part, it’s not us. With health insurance so tied to employment, they market themselves to, and are paid by companies.
“If someone provides a shitty product or service,” shitty to whom? Suppose an insusrer had a track record of denying claims and cancelling policies. To me, as one of the insured, I see that as a shitty product. But do its customers see it that way? Do they care enough about their employees to look for a new insurance carrier? (Since we’re talking in purely Free Enterprise terms here, they’d better not; caring costs money.) How high up does a purchasing decision like that get made; is it the CEO or a vice president, and do they have the same coverage as a rank-and-file employee?
Yes, insurance companies must provide a competitive product to their customers or face going out of business. That’s part of the problem.
Robot Arm–I agree. The current US health care system is not free market enough, and government involvement is screwing it up. Specifically, the tax preference for employer-based insurance severs the consumer from the market.
Plans are most likely identical. Of course, if the CFO of Wally’s Widgets calls the insurance company that WW contracts with, on an issue of whether or not massive cranial liposuction is covered, he is likely to find a sypmathetic ear. More readily than a the document duplication specialist, whose name he doesn’t know but whose breasts he admires.
So why didn’t you say that before? Why cite the influence of a free market if our market isn’t free?
And I’m not sure it’s purely a tax preference that drives employer-based health insurance. Larger groups will have more leverage in negotiating deals than individual consumers, so there is a natural incentive to band together to get coverage. Aren’t there, or weren’t there, laws (not just tax preference) prohibiting such groups outside of employers?
And I guess from your point of view one of the great things about UHC is that people’s cancer can be misdiagnosed FOUR times, followed by denial of life-saving treatment.
Why do you hate beautiful young doctors, Equipoise? 
I keed, I keed. I still love your smarts, Equipoise.
And then to get back to the death panel issue, how’s about that sidebar article on Nikki Phelps?
*"A primary care trust initially refused to pay for the mother of two-year-old twins to have the £100-a-day-drug Sutent, which her consultant said was the only treatment that could help treat her glandular cancer.
The former teacher spent nearly £10,000 of her live savings on the drug and put her house in Leddesdown, near Gravesend, Kent, on the market.
However an appeals panel at the West Kent Primary Care Trust reversed the decision not to fund the treatment and agreed to repay Mrs. Phelps and her 45-year-old husband Bill the £9,150 they had already spent."*
So,
a.) We have a death panel in the form of Phelps’ “primary care trust” refusing to pay for treatment to save her life.
b.) We have that denial being based on monetary concerns.
c.) Once again the situation is rectified once the victim’s plight becomes publicized.
(I wonder if she is attractive, too? It looks like if you’re gonna get ill under government health care, you’d better be pretty and have young children in order to get your plight publicized.)
Now, based on the things that get trumpeted around here, I thought:
a.) No one would die under UHC. (As opposed to the 45,000 who die each year now in the U.S. for lack of it.)
b.) No one would have to bankrupt themselves in order to get treatment.
c.) Money would not be a factor for government in approving treatment.
d.) Care would be quick and immediately forthcoming.
e.) There would be no “death panels” passing judgement on who gets treatment and who doesn’t, and yet here we have two such instances - from the U.K. no less - in one article.
So we have a situation in which one young woman’s cancer was misdiagnosed FOUR TIMES under UHC, and then once discovered, life-extending treatment was denied.
And another situation in which a young woman was denied life-saving treatment by her death panel, apparently due to cost.
Now, can somebody tell me in what way all this has differed from my descriptions of the way government operates in the other threads I’ve been involved in? We have the bureaucracy, the red tape, the financial considerations, a cold-hearted refusal and/or inability to take a look at the patient’s particular situation and attempt to find a solution, and arbitrary pre-set rules and regulations that allow treatment for some patients in some parts of the country while denying the same treatment for patients in other parts of the country.
But, as we see, all of this means very little to UHC proponents. No, to them these people have merely “slipped through the cracks”.
Well, my whole point with regard to government is that cracks exist right and left. They’re built-in, and - given the size, complexity and bureaucracy involved in government anything - unavoidable.
And this is why I don’t want health care for me and my family (or hell, almost anyone else, either) in the clumsy, bureaucratic and uncaring hands of the U.S. government.
What? I was talking only about a free market. You are the one that brought up the current US system.
I have never heard of a law like that, but it would be a state-by-state thing.
This might be the dumbest thing you’ve said yet. Well, the dumbest thing would actually be your claim that “you thought” which you clearly did not do. Do try again with a different strawman, but do be careful, you haven’t a good track record with them lately, those suckers tend to get tippy when you make them so large.
So a few people slipping though the cracks here and there is somehow worse than 45,000 people slipping through the cracks every year?
Cite that only a few slipped through the cracks.
And besides, those two women never slipped through any cracks in the first place. That notion is a red herring on the part of UHC apologists. They were treated exactly the way their respective systems were set up to operate.
You state as an accepted truth that such cracks are built in, without offering, ever, at any time, a rationale for why that must be so. Again, you posit some quality inherent in government, as compared to any other human organization, which ensures and entrains inefficiency. Is it metaphysics? Where is it Written? The Book of Og? The Book of Love? Karl Marx? Harpo Marx?
Perhaps if we accept your premises, the Gospel According to St. Arving, we might accept your conclusions. But your premise is dogma, supported by nothing but your insistence that it is so.
But I did offer a rationale for why it’s so. Size, complexity, bureaucracy. Remember?
And my “dogma”, as you call it, is supported perfectly by the cases of Diana Smith, Dr. Becky Smith and Nikki Phelps. As I said, their cases illustrate perfectly the way I’ve been claiming government operates all along. There it is - and they are in life-threatened flesh and blood, helplessly turning to the media in a last-gasp effort to save their lives - and yet here you are still claiming that there is no evidence. :rolleyes:
So lemme ask you a question. How many instances of governmental indifference, red tape, bureaucracy, and financial or regulatory-based denial of life-saving treatment will it take for you to grant that there is significant evidence that such things really do exist? How much proof will it take?
Or does any such proof even exist? Why do I suspect that even an Encyclopaedia Brittanica-sized volume of proof would still find you in denial?
I’ll tell you why. It’s because you don’t care. You are simply committed to the socialist model and that’s all there is to it. It matters to you not a whit whether the great majority of people get excellent care through private insurance or whether thousands upon thousands suffer and die under government-run UHC. You simply want the one-size-fits-all solution of government (which I suspect is because it galls you no end that someone might have it better than someone else) and that’s all there is to it. You don’t really want lives saved at all, and you don’t really care how long people have to suffer. You only care that everyone is forced into the same boat, so that then everything will be “fair”. And it’s that overriding concern with fairness - even if it results in greater pain, suffering and death than is occurring now - that keeps you on the side of UHC no matter what.
We have no free market. How many times has Pfizer been fined for dangerous drugs.
Of course in America , if we successfully sue someone like Pfizer part of the settlement is non disclosure. You can’t tell anyone you were poisoned. The reason would be to cover up the crime and not hurt business. You can repeatedly make bad products in America.
HuffPost - Breaking News, U.S. and World News | HuffPost Her’s Astra Zeneca doing the same thing Pfizer did. Are they going out of business?
What do you think “slipping through the cracks” actually means? It’s not like a bureaucratic system that exists only on paper suffers wear and tear and develops literal cracks, rather, the “cracks” are places where various compromises and arbitrary decisions were made. “Slipping through” means that, although nobody planned it, one’s particular case is outside the specifications. The system is working as designed, but the designers overlooked something.
Of course these things exist and they always have and they always will. The argument is that fewer bad outcomes are likely to occur if this particular situation (i.e. health insurance) is handled (at least in part) by fixed-salary government employees than by bonus-seeking insurance claims adjusters working for a for-profit corporation.