It’s true, though. I had one of them free Canadian colonoscopies a while ago. When I woke up I not only didn’t have a single gun on me, but I had lost all memory of ever having owned any. This is the mind-control dystopia that is universal health care, which leads ultimately to Communism and the End of Days.
It'll now cost a 65 year old couple $275,000 to cover their medical costs in retirement (in America)
Besides being ridiculously expensive the health system is too convoluted for anyone to understand. I had a drs appt in July of 2016, insurance didn’t pay him until March of 2017. Several years ago he gave up his private practice and joined the hospitals clinic because he couldn’t afford the extra staff to wade thru the insurance mess.
Maybe insurance rates when subsidized by employers. But our COBRA (same deal as my big employer got without the subsidy) was $800 a month. Sure you can get cheaper insurance in the US (maybe) but that would go with gigantic deductibles.
When I went on Medicare I found that only one Medicare Advantage plan covered the very good set of doctors I use. Plain old Medicare isn’t adequate, I agree, but I’m happy with the Medigap coverage I have. Option F isn’t that much more than the others, and covers nearly everything. Haven’t paid a penny since I went on. (Except for drugs, of course.)
Course it helps to be able to afford this stuff.
HaHaHa! The nihilist club meets weekly, over there by the lava pools. Don’t forget your swimsuit!
Screw you! you don’t have a storm bearing down on you. Just go to hell. OK? Go to helll.
I suggest then that you concentrate on helping yourself and others then, and refrain from posting nonsensical “everyone will die eventually, so who cares” nonsense.
Best of luck to you in the storm.
Dude what is your problem?
People say they’ll end it when things start going downhill, but I wonder how they feel when that time is truly at hand. I would guess there are lot of people who decide to keep going. And sometimes you’re not all there to make that decision. You could get in an accident and be in a coma. Or get a stroke or dementia and you may rack up medical bills for decades without being able to do anything about it.
Maybe there should be a registry for people to opt out of care they can’t pay for. Like a DNR directive but it would be “Do Not Treat”. So if you get cancer or whatever, the policy for you would be to pay up front. That might suck if you got sick, but you could opt-out of paying into any sort of government healthcare.
A storm, at a guess.
They call it stormy Monday, yes but Tuesday’s just as bad.
Wednesday’s even worse; Thursday’s awful sad.
I’m OK, asshole. whirlwind, Why can’t you be a good person? Really, try to be better.
-Cheer up sunshine. This too will pass.
My point was that some people pushing health reform think that single payer or medicare for all will solve our problems.
But it won’t. Our problem is that we spend 18% of GDP on health care while every other wealthy nation spends 8-12%. Even americans on medicare are struggling.
Single payer and medicare are an improvement, but they won’t fix the issue. The only thing that’ll fix the issue is making our health care costs in line with other OECD nations.
I wasn’t aware you could opt out of taxes in the US! How do you avoid paying your share of the public funding for health care?
This is nothing really new, just that it’s getting more and more extreme. The bulk of spending that people will ever do happens in the last 5-10 years of life. The real problem is that Americans have access to technology that can extend life, but they’re usually in bad, bad shape when they need that technology. The American lifestyle leads to diabetes, congestive heart failure, cancer, and other chronic illnesses. And the American healthcare economy is horribly inefficient and costly. If the average American realized how badly they were getting ripped off, they’d probably riot. So-called “socialized” care not only provides more access to care for more people; it’s a better product, and a cheaper one, too.
Americans lead a bad lifestyle, but so do people in other countries. Australia, New Zealand and the UK have rates of obesity and overweight about as bad as the US and they spend half what we do on health care.
People in Japan and France are much more likely to be smokers than in the US but their health care still costs much less than ours.
Lifestyle doesn’t explain why our system costs so much. Also neither does advanced technology because other wealthy nations have advanced technology too.
Its really just, like you said, our system is run poorly. But at this point so many powerful interest groups are lined up at the 3.2 trillion dollar a year trough and they aren’t giving it up without a fight. If our health care were as efficient as Europe or Canada, we’d save over a trillion dollars a year. Business interests aren’t going to give up a trillion dollars a year in revenues without a fight.
But what about diet? The American diet is pretty awful–soda, chips, candy, etc. Lots of foods high in calories but low in nutrition. If one person is getting X calories from things like soda/chips/candy and someone else is getting X calories from cheese/nuts/wine, I would assume the latter person would be healthier.
Also, what about fitness? Many Americans have very low levels of activity. If two people weigh the same but one is sedentary and the other is active, the active person will be healthier.
It does explain at least some of the costs, though. Yes, there is a steadily growing population of people who abuse their bodies in other countries, but people elsewhere, on average, are still fitter than we are. I believe this is less and less the case in Canada and Australia, which are rapidly ‘Americanizing’, if memory serves me correctly, but most other countries still eat less junk and exercise more. I lived in Japan for a few years and while there are still more smokers, they are much, much more active than Americans, and they eat a diet that is far more balanced than ours, both of which probably reduce the risks associated with cancer. When the average American hits retirement age, he is more likely to either have or be at serious risk of devastating chronic illness, which will wipe out his/her retirement.
LBJ implemented medicare/medicaid in large part to fight elderly poverty and it has been the difference between being able to afford life beyond retirement and destitution. It was true then, and it’s even truer now. If affordable healthcare programs like medicare and medicaid are gutted, it will send millions from the middle class into poverty almost instantly. I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that cutting these programs it could cause an instant recession in and of itself. When you take that much economic spending power out of the economy, there are consequences. I wouldn’t expect the average Ayn Rand reading moron to understand it though.
No, they’re not, which is why it will probably take the collapse of the health system to make it happen, or a dumb legislative move by the GOP like killing medicaid or medicare’s functionality. Hurting Obamacare might be what Republicans think they want but it would probably cause a groundswell of anger and give more fuel to the movement for universal medicare.
Single payer – or some other type of regulated system that works like single payer – is the only way to fix that. In essence, it’s a necessary but not sufficient condition. You need to leverage the central management of single payer to regulate health care fees, and incentivize health care providers to accept lower fees by offering them prompt and hassle-free payment. A major reason that health care costs are so high is that half of it is spent trying to get paid and subsidizing those who can’t or won’t pay. How do you think hospitals cover the costs of having to provide emergency services under EMTALA, for instance?