And for my mom’s first triple-bypass her in the US she was put on a six-month waiting list for the surgery. She got it in four, actually, because people ahead of her on the list died.
Do you think people in the US don’t wait for things sometimes?
And if you don’t have insurance and don’t have your “wait time” for some things is, effectively, infinite. The medicine you need out there, but you can’t access it.
And if we’re throwing out anecdotes, a friend who was diagnosed as needing a triple bypass had his surgery two weeks later (from which he is currently recovering), so this is not an across-the-board problem of the Canadian system. The article does not mention any possible causes for delay (for example, my friend waited two weeks due to the fact that he was initially admitted to hospital with pneumonia, which had to be treated before he could have surgery - if the pneumonia had worsened, he might have ended up counted as one of the XX# “Ontario patients died before surgery”). All delays are presented in the article as “UHC doesn’t work!!!11!”.
It also ignores the fact that the procedure wait times compared are for *all *patients in Canada, but only for a sub-set of US patients - the ones who could actually afford the procedure. The US delay for the ones who can’t afford it is infinite. In my friend’s case, he would have not even have been on a waiting list in the US, as he living on a minimal income.
Why do you think that? Genuinely asking.
This is a relatively old study (1994) but it seems to show that
I do note here that Canada did not do well in terms of getting same day attention from their GP.
Other important quotes from the study:
Interestingly, some forms of preventative care were better in the US (eg Pap smears). This might reflect better access to these services for the poor, but the study did not go into economic patient details. Perhaps the pap smear tests were in some part due to Planned Parenthood clinics in poor areas? Not to worry about these - one political party seems determined to eliminate PP.
No, I don’t think people in the US wait for things on the whole. I personally know people on medicaid who got immediate chemo-therapy and I know people on medicare who got immediate by-pass surgery. When I say immediate I mean doctor’s office to surgery the next day.
I’ve never accepted a wait time for anything. If my family doctor couldn’t see me I would go to an urgent care facility. If a specialist was booked up I deferred to a different specialist. We do not have a shortage of surgeons or diagnostic equipment. What we have are gaps in the ability to purchase insurance which is correctable without destroying our current system.
The difference between Canadian health care and US health care is that Canadians have a place to go when they are delayed. (the United States). There are no choices or remedies within the country. In the United States I’ve watched traffic accident victims within eyesight of one hospital flown to another hospital because the closest hospital was only chartered for child care.
We send care-flights to accidents not because we have to but because it changes the odds enough that it’s worth the effort. “Cost efficient” makes a poor epitaph on a headstone. Nobody asks if the person inside the car has insurance. We just do it.
Can we make it better, absolutely. Should we entrust our care to people who are hired based on their popularity? No. All a government is really entrusted to do is budget a finite revenue stream and they show no ability in that regard. It’s better that they work on the periphery of health care and fix insurance gaps.
I’d take medicaid over Canadian health care if I was poor and I’d take Canadian health care over nothing if I was near poor or had pre-existing conditions that were excluded in a policy.
OK, I understand that that is your opinion, but what facts do you base the first part of this on? (You’d take medicaid over Canadian health care if you were poor). What makes Medicaid superior to Canadian health care? Not just what you feel about it, or what happened to a friend once, but some actual factual data please.
How do you reconcile your personal feelings and anecdotes with studies that have said:
You are totally forgetting about the 50 million people who have no medical coverage whatsoever. People who have NO private insurance, NO medicaid, NO medicare.
Are you blithely assuming that poor=medicaid? It doesn’t, not anymore, not since the mid 1990’s.
If you have NO medical coverage yes you have to wait. And wait. And that’s 50 million of us. One in six of us.
Try not to need an organ transplant, then - you WILL have to wait for that.
There are shortages of certain cancer drugs these days - gosh, would such to be one of those people who need them, right?
Again, this notion that Americans never need to wait is bogus.
There are certainly those who feel that anyone who deviates from the ideal is damaged goods and incapable of being a fit parent. Me, I’m results driven. I don’t care if the parent is bipolar, paranoid schizophrenic, has ALS, or is undergoing chemo. What I care is, are the kids okay? If not, why? Is it a matter of the parents being overwhelmed and having a hard time coping, the parents not particularly caring, or
are the parents are actively neglectful/abusive? Depending on the cause, what is the most effective approach, and I place the priority on the health and welfare of the children involved.
I can certainly see where UHC would lead towards discussions of what limits to put on healthcare. What few people choose to recognize is that no matter which side of the argument they’re on, healthcare is a finite resource. It’s just some approaches are more effective and efficient than others - a vaccine for HPV instead of chemo for cervical cancer, for instance.
And then, we get caught in a very ugly discussion of the comparative value of human life. Do we legislate reproductive privileges? Do we put a ‘top dollar’ amount on the care provided? Do we spent two million dollars to keep alive an infant with an incurable chromosomal disorder - a baby whose brain will never develop, who will never learn to walk, talk, feed herself, and develops infections requiring hospitalizations four or five times a year (real case my mom’s told me about*) - or do we say ‘that two million dollars will pay for over six and a half million polio inoculations and give us a fighting chance to wipe out polio forever’?
Then it devolves down to people screaming at each other in the local food court, because one is morbidly obese and eating cheesecake, while the other is clearly high risk for skin cancer and just climbed out of a tanning booth, while the various religious orders are holding up their hands, saying “excuse me, but has anyone noticed that we live ten years longer than the rest of you, have fewer overall health problems, and report greater satisfaction with life? Just saying!”
Once the community takes responsibility for the cost of health care, it has an intrinsic interest in the individual decisions that influence health, with which comes a metric buttload of moral judgment. I’m of the opinion that in a nation of 300 million people, we have long passed the point where we can quibble about individual rights and personal responsibility. Let’s do that after we have a safety net for every individual in place.
As an outsider, it’s easy for me to do the math and say ‘provide basic needs, and when the next infection hits, give comfort care only. Let the child die.’ As a non-parent with no emotional investment, who the hell am I to make any sort of decision regarding what happens with this child? As an intelligent human, how can I not say ‘let’s wipe out a disease that’s sickened, crippled, and or killed hundreds of millions of children throughout history.’?
So, while there are enough arguments concerning health care to keep us busy for the next 1000 years, I’m extremely frustrated that this one topic, which is so self-evidentiary from every point of view I can think of (save the actively sociopathic), is so contentious and controversial.
This thread is a bitch-o-gram from someone with no insurance and yet medical care was rendered. Yes the argument exists that the near poor have problems getting insurance but that’s no reason to throw out an entire system that has real options.
I reconcile it with the fact that I’m not attached to my doctor at the hip as people are in countries with socialized medicine. If I can’t get in immediately I go to urgent care. How do you reconcile a system like Canada with no options except for the very wealthy?
You should know better then to assign “never” to someone else’s argument. In the case of your mother, she’s alive. I cited a Canadian example of where they failed and they have a better system than the UK which is a complete train wreck.
And as far as drug shortages go, I don’t understand this argument at all. Do you think it only affects the US? Canadian drug shortages.
If 50 million have to wait and 300 million don’t have to wait doesn’t it make sense to fix the problem with the 50 million? Because no insurance does not equal no medical treatment. It means the costs are passed on to the people with insurance.
Just no options for the poor. Oh well, too bad.
Huh? Your ignorance of the Canadian medical system is showing. You have no idea what you are talking about.
And your problem with medicaid is what exactly?
I cited my example. You’re familiar with the lottery system. Free treatment only counts if you actually get the treatment. You know damn well there’s a problem with delays. Tell me what your recourse is if you’re not happy with your care?
I have a friend in Canada who got a heart transplant. It was provided for fee by the health care system. in America he would be dead. He is not able to afford that kind of thing.
If you have Medicare you are responsible for 20 percent. that means with an expensive operation like that., you could well go bankrupt Not enough to suffer with health problems, but lets add some financial problems to the mix.
I know lots of Canadians and I don’t know any who would rather have our system. My wife’s relatives live outside Windsor, Ontario. They think our system is stupid.
I had to get specialist to look at a spot on my back my doctor was concerned about. I waited about 4 months for an appointment.
When i call my doctor for an appointment , I have to wait about 3 weeks to get in.
Nope, no waiting in America.
Actually, she’s not. She’s been dead for a couple years now. Admittedly, though, the surgery mentioned, nor the wait for it, was the cause of her death.
Well, how do you think we should fix the problem that 50 million out of 300 million have?
No insurance does not equal absolutely no medical treatment, but it does very much severely limit what medical treatment such a person can get, and greatly increased the chance of a minor problem turning into a catastrophe.
The problem is that is not enough to just be poor - you have to meet additional qualifications.
A non-pregnant adult over the age of 18 is NOT entitled to Medicaid simply for being poor, no matter how poor that person may be.
There are also millions of adults in the US who are working full time and making above the official poverty line who, nonetheless, can not afford insurance. By that I mean the cost of premiums can exceed all other household costs combined. Last time my spouse and I shopped for an individual policy the premium we were quoted exceeded our GROSS monthly income!
The problem with Medicaid is that there are 50 million people it doesn’t cover, and they have no other form of health insurance either.
Treating people in the ER is irrational. They don’t treat your chronic problem, they triage your acute symptoms. It’s also economically and functionally an irrational way to treat the increasing numbers of poor.
The “real” options are increasingly for the rich. Medical care costs are rising faster than wages. The system needs to be thrown out because it is trivial to extrapolate that they will consume income faster than you can earn it. You will have increasingly fewer options because you simply cannot afford them.
Thanks for that, but this is not an answer to the question of why you consider medicaid a superior option for poor people than Canada’s health system.
You seem to be misinformed about how things work- you are arguing against your perception of socialized medicine, not the reality.
I’m not sure what you mean by "attached to my doctor at the hip as people are in countries with socialized medicine. I chose my family doctor. MY choice. If I don’t like him, I will find another one and have my files transferred to his office. We’re not assigned doctors by the government you know. My wife’s doctor (a different one that she chose based on her needs/likes/preference) recently referred her to a specialist. Yes, a bit of a wait, but it’s non-urgent. If she is not impressed with what the specialist has to say, she can ask for another referral.
When I visit my doctor I can get in in a timely manner. If he’s not available, one of his partners or locums is. If I could not see one of them, I could visit a walk in cliinic at no charge. If it is urgent, I could visit emergency. They will see me quickly if it is life threatening, and more slowly if it is not.
People have plenty of options - rich or poor.
You really seem to have no clue about the Canadian system. I suggest if you want to form an opinion about it, you learn more about it first.
Not to mention…you can actually have insurance and still end up being rejected for procedures at the insurer’s whim. They are not obligated to pay for everything–even life-threatening issues. And after you’ve paid into the systems for years and years, they can drop your ass for nothing more than, “You LIED because you didn’t tell us on your application that you got treated for acne when you were a teenager!!!”
If Magiver would watch just five minutes of Sicko (I won’t be holding my breath), he’d know this.
My wife was murdered by a Blue Cross death panel. She was approved for a stem cell transplant in 2006, but Blue Cross of Massachusetts refused to pay for it. We appealed it three times, pointing out that Blue Cross in other states pay for the procedure, as well as many other insurance companies, as well as MassHealth.
No luck. No stem cell transplant for her. Fast forward to 2011; she dies a painful death after 5 years of a debilitating illness. And scleroderma patients receiving stem cell transplants are achieving recoveries that are nothing short of miraculous.
Fuck Blue Cross. Fuck private health insurance. Fuck Republican politicians who vote against any kind of solution. Fuck Democrats who lack the courage to fight for universal health care.
You killed my wife.