I disagree.
Smart folk are all alike; every fool is foolish in its own way.
And then what? They come over here with their socialistic ideas, and start trying to impose their unAmerican values on us, and then the next thing you know, we have affordable healthcare and there you are!
I don’t have the link, but I read an article last year about the work US congressmen and senators have to do for their party. A lot of it is calls for donations.
… ok… soooooo… the people who should be working on legislation are doing the same kind of work that’s considered barely above “sewer cleaner” in most developed countries, only for higher salaries. Makes perfect sense, right?
There are several obvious similarities between Donald Trump and Charles Manson but this video finds that the similarities extend to several details of their rhetoric. The video is a little slow (9 minutes), but it demonstrates that the resemblance in the speech of these two men is uncanny.
Anderson Cooper offers some comments about the people of the “shithole country” of Haiti. The ignorant racist dolts — you know who you are — are invited to keep your ignorant barfholes shut until you watch the video in its entirety.
Thanks in advance.
This is total bullshit. First of all, bringing up transplants is irrelevant because there is a wait everywhere for organ donations, since they don’t just grab them out of a freezer. But let me address a couple of really fundamental misunderstandings you seem to have.
With regard to “something major”, you appear to have a common misconception about how single-payer health insurance works. Paying for major procedures without question is precisely where it excels. Unlike private insurance, there is neither mechanism nor motivation for meddling in clinical decisions in the interest of shareholders and the bottom line. Cost concerns are effectively dealt with on a policy level, not a clinical case level – for instance, contractual negotiation of medical fees, and various minor amenities that they don’t cover. This absence of meddlesome bureaucracy in government-run health insurance may seem counterintuitive and indeed it is – it even has a name: Reinhardt’s irony. I talked about it here.
Now the business of wait times. Having recently been through a medical episode, I have a great anecdote about that. I had an angiogram after my heart diagnosis and the recommendation was cardiac bypass surgery. As you may know this is a huge deal – it’s otherwise known as open heart surgery and requires the chest to be opened and the heart stopped during the lengthy procedure, and needless to say is both dangerous and has a lengthy recovery period. I was in shock at the prospect of this and pushed for some alternative.
Long story short, the cardiologist popped into my room the next day with a big smile. He said he’d had a meeting with the bypass surgeon and the head of the catheter lab and they’d agreed that I was a good candidate for an advanced form of angioplasty, which is a minimally invasive procedure done in an amazing robotic lab while you’re mostly awake and just pleasantly drugged.
Now here’s the crux that I’m coming to about the horrors of the Canadian health care system and its wait times. I asked him when this might happen. The doctor looked at his watch and said the following: “Oh, in about an hour. You’ll be home tomorrow.”
Now here is some pertinent terminology to all this.
triage: A medical term that refers to prioritizing cases by medical urgency, so that critical medical needs are served in an appropriately timely fashion. The wingnut alternative is to prioritize critical medical needs by the patient’s monetary wealth or the coverage level of their insurance. For outpatients triage may mean the difference between “in a month” versus “tomorrow”. For hospital inpatients it typically means the difference between “in about an hour” versus “right now”. It’s a rational, cost-effective system that works.
queuing theory: The science of resource optimization, which says that the optimum way to schedule expensive resources that have unpredictable demands is to buffer the requests in an appropriately prioritized queue – in medical terms, that would be triage. The wingnut alternative is to have expensive resources sitting around idle and wasted, idly waiting for the rich and famous while the less well off are dying in the streets, and the middle class paying through the nose for the whole broken system of waste and uncontrolled costs.
facts: Statements that correspond with reality instead of ideology.
You’re describing the problems of scheduling a driving test, not a license renewal. Still, I’ve not experienced anything like that. The important point to understand here is that the single-payer model for the health care insurance system is intrinsically very simple. When people need health care, the need and extent of it should be entirely in the hands of health care professionals and not subject to second-guessing by bureaucrats, so really, the main job of the government is to budget for annual expenditures based on actuarial numbers and then just pay the bills. Turns out, governments are very good at that kind of rote paperwork. See “Reinhardt’s irony”, above.
Wait, governments won’t pay for certain life-saving treatments, but private insurance companies will, out of the pure goodness of their blessed altruistic hearts? No. Insurance companies have literally killed people. Single-payer doesn’t even have a mechanism for denying anything, because individual cases aren’t even scrutinized, just automatically paid. The very rare cases that have made the news once in a while are situations where a patient asks for special coverage for a new or experimental procedure that has not yet been introduced into the fee schedule. The general policy guidelines in the Canada Health Act are that if something is medically necessary and a hospital normally provides it, then it must be covered.
This reflects a profound misunderstanding of where America’s excessive health care costs come from. No one claims that it comes from insurance company profits, although, to be sure, it doesn’t help to have these useless parasites sucking blood out of the system:
Doggett pointed out that the pay of Aetna’s CEO is more than $17 million, and Cigna’s chief executive tops $13 million. Most, if not all of their pay, could be written off as business expenses if the Republican bill becomes law … The CEO of UnitedHealth, Higgins pointed out, alone made $66 million last year.
But the real problem is the ripple effect of all the downstream costs that are entirely due to how the insurance-dominated health care system has to be structured, costs that are so huge that, ironically, even this giant industry’s profits are a drop in the bucket, yet it’s directly responsible for all of them. Point #1 is that there is no effective means of cost control; insurers may negotiate in-network fees but by and large providers can pretty much charge whatever they want, and in fact the absence of set fees is a unique hallmark of American health care: no one really knows what anything costs, and everyone seems to have a different price, and it’s usually many multiples of what it is in other countries.
Point #2, and part of the reason for those costs, is the inordinate overhead of filing and adjudicating claims, and what providers have to go through to get paid. Even Medicare is pretty bad in its complexity because it’s tied into the same system and has tons of exclusions and limitations. It’s no exaggeration to say that in single-payer it works like this: person gets medical care, provider electronically files a claim using the appropriate procedure code, provider gets paid in full via EFT. Done. No muss, no fuss, the patient isn’t even involved, and doesn’t pay a cent. The difference is astounding. So are the cost savings.
And just to fuel the conspiracy, there was a Quisling Clinic that I biked past every day…
I see it’s the Quisling Terrace now. So my friends, er, operatives, can still lounge outside in our fedoras ‘n’ shades ‘n’ trenchcoats, with briefcases handcuffed to our wrists.
OMG, just saw that Elvis Costello’s line “Somewhere in the Quisling Clinic” from “Green Shirt” is based on that building!
Notes on “Green Shirt”: ‘Quisling’ is a term for a traitor.
- EC got the line "somewhere in the Quisling Clinic...' while
riding past a Quisling Clinic in Madison, Wisconsin. There are
several medical clinics in Wisconsin (first one founded 1931) by
relatives of Vidkun Quisling, who took power when the Nazis
invaded Norway.
I’ll make fundraising calls for a $200k a year salary. I’ll even be as enthusiastic as Cruz campaigning for Trump, without that $2500 housing allowance Chaffetz needed!
I love you and want to have your child (notwithstanding the fact that I’m male, have undergone a vasectomy and have already cared for all the children I’m going to have in this life)
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The Glorious Leader spent MLK Day on the golf course, and sent his flunky (er, Vice President) to the MLK Memorial.
That was actually quite gracious.
You know what ducks call that?
A decoy.
That’s an amazing compilation; that poster is astonishingly worshipful of Trump. I’d guess he might be personally financially dependent on Trump (as in, a staffer) except for a bit of criticism of Himself posted, apparently, in May 2016:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=19349544#post19349544
That rules out anyone actually employed by Trump, surely. But in any case, this is one serious case of devotion!
Cool story, bro, but this time I don’t think those tactics are going to keep enough Democrats away from the polls…
Meanwhile, in the real world, better work and better compensation have become decoupled over the past half-century.
I am and was being sincere and genuine. No worries.
The amazing thing about Starving Artist and his little foot-cozy buddy anomalouswhatever is how completely 180 degrees wrong they are about the facts on the ground and the historical path that got those facts there. Conservatism is a hell of a drug!
I’m still consistently amazed that more rational, liberal Dopers bother trying to talk sense to SA, to be perfectly honest.
SA’s going on about “death panels” shows that he is ignorant of the fact that conservative states, such as Texas, literally created hospital-based death panels which cannot be sued if it is determined they made a mistake. Going by the name of “medical futility”, the conservative government here in Texas literally implemented death panels back when Dubya was our governor.
Why do y’all talk to this guy?
Thing is, if I’m paying someone $200K a year, I want them to do $200K work.