would he have received sufficient health care to carry on as he has been ?
I particularly wonder about the fact that he was diagnosed with motor neuron disease at the age of 21 while in school and hence would have had a preexisting condition prior to any employment.
If he had money sure. I think Professor Hawking is reasonably well off.
Even without that he would likely benefit from his company’s health plan. As a tenured professor he’s good to go pretty much as long as he lives.
As an aside and just to throw some fuel on the fire here is a right wing nutjob (bolding mine):
:rolleyes:
Sounds like he might have been wrong about Hawking. What about the rest of his post?
Except, as the OP points out, he had motor neurone disease long before he was a tenured professor, or indeed before he had employment of any kind.
In the US, would his pre-exisitng, incurable and extremely expensive condition have prevented his being accepted into an employer’s health plan in the first place, or have meant that he would only have been acccepted subject to exclusion and exceptions regarding treatment for MND?
For that matter, before he ever became an employee of anybody, in the US would he have received treament and support to enable him to complete his educatation and become a candidate for academic employment?
As for being “reasonably well off”, I don’t think he inherited much, if any, money. I doubt if his capacity to earn money would have been the same if he had not completed his education and become a professor.
Well, there’s a fundamental misconception – or possibly a deliberate lie. The NICE does not decide “who deserves treatment” by looking at quality adjusted life years, or any other criterion. It does not decide who deserves treatment at all. It does not provide any treatments, or evaluate any patients.
What it does do is to appraise the clinical effectiveness of treatments, in general or in the abstract, in part by looking at their typical or expected outcomes. Cost-effectiveness measure by quality-adjusted life years is part of that process, but the article is wrong, wrong, wrong in suggested that the fact that Hawkins is already wheelchair bound would be a negative factor. The appraisal looks at the improvement wrought by the treatment. The citation of Hawkings is particularly ironic. Diseases like MND are so very debilitating that, for such diseases, even treatments which have only a limited effect can make an enormous difference to a patient’s quality of life, and so are very likely to be approved.
If a particular treatment is recommended by NICE on the basis of its appraisal, then local area health authorities are legally required to provide it (to those for whom it is clinically indicated). The selection of patients for whom it is clinically indicated is a clinical matter, and that decision is taken by clinicians.
If a particular treatment is not recommended by NICE, then local area health authorities are not legally required to provide it, but they are free to do so, either generally or in specific cases. In fact a wide range of non-recommended treatments are routinely provided. The reason for this is that the NICE appraisal system was introduced to avoid what was called the “postcode lottery”, in which the availability of novel or expensive or disputed treatments was determined by where you happened to live, and what the policy of your area health authority was. Thus it is the novel, expensive or disputed treatments which tend to be referred to NICE for appraisal.
The NICE process is not beyond criticism, but the article quoted is so far off the mark that it can hardly be taken seriously as criticism. The author plainly has no idea what NICE does, or why, or how.
Thanks. It’s late and my eyes are crossing. I’ll take another look at your post and try to learn more about NICE tomorrow, but it sounds like you know what you’re talking about and I thank you for the information.
As an undergraduate student, he’d be covered under his parents’ insurance. As a graduate student and researcher, his health insurance would be provided by the university. A quick scan of his wiki bio makes it appear that he’s been in academia since he was 18, so I don’t think health insurance would ever have been a big problem for him. Or did I miss something?
From what I understand this would only be case because he was born to middle class parents who would likely have had insurance. What if, for whatever reason, his parents did not have insurance?
Would also just like to point out that Hawking’s himself appears to have stepped in to defend the NHS:
OB
Well, rolled in.
Considering that Hawking has been receiving treatments for 45+ years now, and that treating ALS is very expensive, there’s a decent chance that he would have hit up against the lifetime cap of whatever insurance policy he would have been on in the US.
Edit: Sorry, it’s early, and I completely forgot this point: Americans diagnosed with ALS get covered under Medicare, so Hawking would have been covered by the government, even in the US.
That is the most unintentionally hilarious editorial fuckup I’ve ever heard.
Sadly they have re-edited the piece, and misrepresent their idiocy with the following disclaimer:
Not mentioning that “live in the UK” illustrates very strongly that he had been successfully treated by the very body they were attacking, for four decades.
The exceptionalism! It burns!
Although only once they qualify for Medicare - which means they pretty much need to go bankrupt first - then Medicare would cover him. And Medicare would only cover him as long as he qualified, so he’d probably have to go in and out of bankruptcy several times as he spent book royalities on his own treatment when he had them.
I think (but I’m not positive) that group health insurance has to take all comers. So, he would be accepted as part of an employer’s health plan, but not necessarily an individual health plan.
(Why does group health have to do that? Well, the gummint mandated it. Some bureaucrat stopping those death panels at the insurance companies, I guess.)
In Hawking’s case under HIPAA (which of course didn’t exist when he was diagnosed), his pre-existing condition might have been excluded. It would depend on when he was diagnosed and treated.
From here.
I brought this up in a different thread, but a good deal of Hawkins care has come from private foundations. He says as much on his own website. His 24hr nursing care, his wheel chair, his synthesizer, etc, all were donated from private foundations.
Tony, the skateboarder?
Yeah. No way would he have gotten a rad skate board from NHC. Sponsors all the way.
As I understand it, if he is “disabled,” he would be covered under Medicare. But if he start earning good money, he wouldn’t be “disabled” according to the Medicare rules. Disability is about how much money you can make, not about how ill you are.
Hawking may not have suffered, but others have:
It is far easier to nitpick at the opposition rather than meet their arguments head-on.
That’s priceless.