And people who already live in the US who cannot afford the simple procedures or the diagnoses to determine that they require said procedures are the ones who are forced to let simple medical issues become complex and dangerous ones, until they’re clogging up the emergency rooms with problems that would have been easily treatable if caught earlier, or entirely preventable to begin with, if only they’d had access to basic health care that wouldn’t bankrupt them in the first place.
Huh? You realise medical research is still in the hands of private business in pretty much every country with UHC, right? This seems to be a common misconception amongst American opponents of UHC: drug companies aren’t state owned in the UK, nor any other European country that I’m aware of. Why, then, would they be less motivated in a system with UHC?
What’s a good measure? I suggest this one: Nobel prizes in medicine; in total, the US is ahead of the UK, however, dividing this total by population size, the UK is ahead of the US. Hardly what I’d call “far ahead” in fundamental research terms.
I just spent 11 years living in Manitoba, and I agree. Plus, people remain more productive and employable if they aren’t forced to let simple, treatable medical issues get out of hand because they can’t afford diagnosis and treatment. Before then I spent 28 years in the USA, and the only time I had decent medical coverage as an adult was when I was poor enough to qualify for welfare benefits including health care for me and my daughter.
Being able to take her for well-baby and other regular checkups, as well as treatment for actual health issues, surely contributed to her growing up into a reasonably healthy adult and productive, contributing member of society. In fact, if she hadn’t still had such State coverage up to age 19, then a bit over a year ago she would have either died of acute tonsillitis, or my family would have been driven into even more abject poverty by the cost of her emergency room visit and surgery for same.
Having just moved to Scotland, I’m not yet on the NHS, but from what I’ve heard thus far it’s superior in several ways even to the Canadian provincial health care system. I’ll surely be drawing comparisons between the three at some point.
It will be very interesting to hear a comparison from someone who’s experienced all three. Canadians are fairly proud of our UHC system, but we are well aware that it isn’t perfect.
Lobohan, dial it back a lot. While your comments have tended to be borderline insults, you have posted a lot of unnecessary personal remarks.
Stick to debating the issues and leave comments about other posters or their education or their understanding out of Great Debates.
[ /Moderating ]
So the US health care system is elitist?
Well, sure. There is that elite of people without health insurance who are no doubt spending their time interviewing doctors and getting rates in order to make informed decisions, meanwhile reducing prices, no doubt, as doctors drop their rates relative to insurance companies for fear they’d go elsewhere.
Here’s to our elite who are supporting the free market so loved by the right - by dying.
Oh, sure. I don’t know any country that claims its system is perfect, though from what I hear France comes close purely in terms of service to its citizens. But at least in Canada I could go to the doctor without worrying about whether I could pay the bill. I could be seen in an ordinary clinic without clogging up the emergency room with minor ailments - or neglecting them until they became major. I could get diagnostic procedures like MRIs and colonoscopies when I needed them, and if I had to wait a bit longer because someone with cancer or some other more urgent need than mine took precedence, I had no problem with that. I could get assistance with my prescriptions even before I had Blue Cross drug coverage through my employer. The biggest gap I could see was the lack of dentistry and vision care in the provincial plan. I understand that those are covered here. We’ll see.
Israel is pretty much the same. Sure, it isn’t perfect, but when my wife woke up last week with a nasty throat infection she had an appointment with a GP that same afternoon, and was better the next day; and when my little brother fell off a cliff three years ago and needed complex spinal surgery and 8 months of rehabilitation, my parents weren’t forced into bankrupcy.
This is basically true for Sweden, too. And you’re damn right we wouldn’t want to switch with you. 
What exactly constitutes BMW vs. used Kia healthcare? And why should healthcare for anyone be anything less than BMW standards. Who, exactly, should be getting low quality healthcare?
Back to this point – one of the biggest problems we have with our current economic crisis where it intersects with healthcare is that a large number of the people who have been recently laid off cannot afford to retain health insurance because COBRA payments exceed their unemployment, or would take up so much of their unemployment that it would be impossible for them to continue to pay for housing, food, etc.
Before we do that, we need to do something about the communities in which junk food is the only available food, or only available prepared food, and incentivize urban development that includes full service supermarkets and greengrocers and farmers’ markets. It’s also important to recognize that there are a lot of poor people who eat at McDonald’s because $2 gets you two breakfast burritos or two double cheeseburgers and that’s sufficient calories to get you through a shift at work. A $2 bag (on sale) containing 6 ounces of lettuce? A $1 6 oz. cup of 80 calorie yogurt and a $1 protein bar? Not nearly so useful as fuel for a laboring body.
You brag now, but you’ll never know the feeling of freedom that comes from being forced to sell your home to pay for chemotherapy or adding financial terror on top of medical terror because your insurance company is checking your policy with a microscope to look for any technicality to cancel your policy.
Which again comes back to the fact that almost nobody in non-US OECD nations wants our health care system, but you can easily find tons of people in the US who want a French, Canadian, UK, German, etc system. Even though that is the reality, the media and politics is so disconnected here that people are still told to think we have the greatest health care on earth and we are lucky to not be Canadian. The problem is people aren’t falling for it as often.
I remember a few years ago when it wasn’t kosher to say the US is going down the tubes. Not so much anymore. Our country needs to grow up, its embarrassing how we have all these serious problems and we are in denial about them. Climate change, health care, financial regulation, plutocracy. We don’t even want to admit they exist, we are just told by the media & politicians to think that we are the greatest country on earth and stop asking questions.
I’m always amazed at the people who are against socialized medicine in the U.S. - what the hell do you think the health plan you currently have is? You honestly think what you pay goes to your medical treatment alone? It’s a huge pool that’s used to provide care for a bunch of strangers who have the same plan, and some of them don’t even have jobs - they’re dependents. How on Earth this is different in concept from UHC is beyond me, except it’s not the government (mis)managing it in this case. It baffles me. “Why should I have to pay for somebody else’s medical coverage”? As if you’re not already, be they insured or not.
No matter how many examples we have of other countries with UHC facing none of the catastrophes continually theorized by opponents, they cling to their ideology in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It’s truly one of the most absurd debates I’ve ever witnessed. And I’ll add that the idea that government inevitably screws everything up while the private sector handles shit efficiently has rarely been my experience.
But America is different. We’re special in the world. All that foreign stuff doesn’t apply to us.
For some damn reason or another, that is.
Truthiness.