Interesting (if barbaric sounding) system. You’re aware that that is exactly what we DON’T HAVE in the US, right? When you get so ill that you’re on a transplant list, it’s ILLEGAL to PAY for an ORGAN, or to get put further up on the list because you have insurance or personal wealth. The order on waitlists is based on medical condition, prognosis and patient compliance (you will be moved down or taken off for continuing to drink alcohol when you’re waiting for a liver, for example.) It has nothing to do with money.
*Lifesaving *health care absolutely is treated as a right in the USA. It is illegal to not provide medical treatment, regardless of the ability to pay. The hospital must treat you, even if you are a homeless alcoholic. What’s not well laid out is who exactly *does *pay. It generally ends up being the hospital itself, which then has to jack up its rates to everyone else to cover their “indigent care” program. Then the insurance companies raise their premiums and deductibles to cover their increased pay-outs to the hospitals.
What we commies who want Universal Healthcare want is to make sure that the already existing right of lifesaving health care gets paid for in a way that doesn’t raise everyone else’s health care costs. And, yes, some of us would also like to see preventative and routine health care made cheaper by making it pre-pay. One big insurance company, as it were, covering all of us, paid for out of our paychecks just like now, but called “taxes” instead of “health care deductions”, and paid for and covering everyone, not just those lucky enough to work full time for big companies. So all those folks in the McJobs who right now don’t, would also be paying into the medical system even if they weren’t using it at the moment. But sooner or later, every single one of us needs medical care.
Naaah. The reason why there will never be a successful large-scale communism is that they have no model for decision-making authority aside from a bureaucratic oligarchy, which is going to attract the power-hungry. Ergo, police state.
Incentive-wise, the only situation in which people are likely to prefer to do nothing rather than work is when the work is godawful boring and unfulfilling. Whereas retirees tend to be bored out of their skull doing an officially-approved nothing, and wish they had a job and were still important and had responsibilities and accomplishments and whatnot.
Basically, this kid has an abcess. No insurance, no Medicaid, and when they did have Medicaid dentists were hard to find. In the end, what would have cost the taxpayers $80 ended up costing up to $250,000 and a life.
Have you heard of Medicaid? If you sit on your ass and do nothing, you can coolect food stamps and qualify for medicaid and live in your mom’s basement forever.
I just found out that I’ve inherited epilepsy from my grandfather. (yay!) My meds for this are going to cost $300 out of pocket. Even when I started Paxil and it hadn’t gone generic yet, it was only $90. I have a job, but I don’t make that much, nor do I get health care coverage. Going without meds is not an option, unless I want to end up in the hospital again.
I’m not saying this to get attention. I’m pointing out that in one of the most prosperous nations in the world, if not THE MOST, we have some of the shittiest health care systems in the world. We spend MORE than any other industrialized country, for far less.
(Fortunately, there ARE organizations out there that could possibly be of AID to me-one through UPMC, hopefully. But you can’t tell me that our system is working.)
Oh indeed, it does suck mouldy donkey balls. However, the system they have in the US is worse. Here you get people bitching about waiting lists, the latest £3,000 per hit wonder drug not being available for free to treat their grannys cancer, people being left for three days without their dressings being changed, etc. etc. etc.
Quite a few yanks get to bitch about not being able to afford their insurance payments, then not being able to get treated when they get sick because they don’t have $5,000 for a routine op. Then when their condition has deteriorated to the point of being life-threatening, they can walk into the emergency room and get urgent critical care for free, at which point they may also be lucky enough to experience the whole sleep-deprived doctors/crazy people roaming the corridors/wrong leg amputated rigmarole that happens when a large hospital is being run on a shoestring budget. They have the worst of both worlds - just check this very board for plenty of examples.
There seems to be this meme floating around that gubmint-funded=third-world bankrupt hospital and private-pay=luxury hospitals overflowing with money, staff and resources. It ain’t necessarily so.
I don’t think this board is representative of American society, and I don’t think you can take “plenty” (what, ten or twenty total?) examples as statistically significant. But just in case you really do give credence to all these anecdotes, let me throw mine in there because you forgot about medical charities, like Medical Assistance (privately subsidized care), Medicare/Medicaid, and charity care. What Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia offers is pretty typical.
When my daughter was an infant, she developed an infection that ravaged her body, moving from organ to organ as she spent weeks in intensive care. Thankfully, she recovered fully, but we were uninsured. Our medical bills were nearly $20,000 which at that time was quite a large amount. We applied for charity, and were notified after a month or so that our bill was paid in full.
Also, contrary to what you might have read here, people go to emergency rooms for colds and flu, not just when they’re on death’s doorstep. At Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, for example, about half the pediatric patients in the emergency room during cold season are there for sniffles and fever.
But I think the most telling evidence against your assertion is the fact that it is such a ho-hum issue here. Socialized medicine proposals can be the deathknell for a polititican. If people had it as bad as you say, wouldn’t the reaction be opposite? Americans have banded together on issues from civil rights to women’s liberation when they’ve felt that Washington is lagging behind. On this issue, there is noise only from campus idealists and tree huggers.
Honestly, if the Dope were representative of America in general, we’d have an atheist President and a Congress that’s eighty percent Democrat.
I suspect that any former resistance to ‘socialized medicine’ was partly due to the American’s seemingly knee-jerk recoil to anything (gasp!!) ‘socialized’ and because too many Americans bought into the myths of ‘socialized medicine’ as evidenced by the anti pinko commie posts in this thread. Fortunately, ignorance about the nature of universal healthcare is being fought and people are realizing that it makes economic as well as social good sense.
It has always been a balancing act, what type of ‘safety net’ do we want. The bigger the net, the more people will use it as a hammock, the smaller the more people fall through and get really hurt.
I also think it’s a balancing act between how much we want to spend on the immediate problems and how much progress we will make as a society. In this case we can provide a universal basic level of medical care at the expense of the rate of advancement of medical technology.
Yeah, I’m sure that $500 will go a great way towards paying for socialized medicine. So essentially people want extremely-low-cost health insurance for everyone. I too would be all for it, if it wasn’t economically impossible.
That poll (the first thing is pretty much just an editorial) shows no significant change over the years. Of *course * Americans want government to take care of people’s health care. That’s why we have Medicare and Medicaid. But look at what they’re willing to pay to make it happen. A dollar and thirty-seven cents a day. That won’t even buy a bottle of hospital aspirin.
It’s funny, they have universal healthcare here in Holland (though like everything else, the way they do it is a little different) and that’s pretty much how it goes here. My father in law had a chronic, psoriasis like condition and they just rang the doc’s office and got the scrip called in for whatever salve it was he used.
I did have to wait three weeks to see a neurologist for my kid; but the wait in the US for a neropsych, same kid, was a couple of months.
The only real difference from what you describe is that here the doctor will come by the house for various reasons.
Sure, paying only $500 per capita ($1.37 per day) on health expenditures would be impossible - but that isn’t what they mean. They mean they’re willing to pay $500 more than what they currently pay.
But would that even be necessary? Taking Canada as an example, the US already spends more on health as a percent of GDP, and the US spends both more per capita total expenditure and more per capita government expenditure. Anyway you look at it, the US system is already more expensive. Cite.
And people are saying that, to get socialized medicine/universal health care, they’d be willing to pay $500 on top of what they’ll already paying in other ways.
I’d add that spending more to get socialized medicine might not even be necessary, as the US is already spending more. Theoretically they could change systems and end up paying less.
Isn’t that one of the arguments people put forward for free at point of use health care? That under such a system, a person has a Family Practitioner to whom they can go for coughs and sniffles (as well as many other more serious things), rather than having no such relationship and ending up sat in the ER for 8 hours waiting for the attention of the only doctors who are required to see them.
As Alessan said to another poster, “Ah. Semantics.”
(Aren’t we a bunch of antisemantic bastards?)
Your post is entirely meaningless. Apparently we have the right ‘to speak freely’ but not the right to ‘freedom of speech’. We have the right ‘to worship as we please’ but not the right to ‘freedom of worship’. We have the right ‘to get a jury of our peers’, but not ‘to trial by jury’.
Conversely you think we should not have the right to ‘a living wage’… would the right ‘to earn at least a decent minimum wage’ be alright then? I’ll leave the other two as exercises for you.
It’s trivial to noun verbs, and verb nouns. You made a totally artificial distinction that can be turned right back atcha.
Re the OP, everyone has pretty much covered the basic flaw in the argument, so I’ll just entreat the OP to use empirical evidence.
Many countries of the world have universal healthcare. Are their populations indolent? Why not?
The constant, shrill, near-hysterical bleating in all forms of media about 30+million Americans without health coverage, medical costs bankrupting companies and individuals, and the giant portion of wealth being burned up on healthcare, is ‘ho-hum’? Wow. I’d hate to see an example of an issue that people actually care about then.
:dubious: