I just can’t imagine how you Americans can still tolerate this state of affairs. :mad:
Each industrial country has free or semi free health care ,even poorer countries in south America and Asia have better systems than in the USA.
What about that girl who made headlines last year for getting an organ transplant with the wrong blood type? Her parents snuck her into the United States illegally… I doubt she was covered by Medicare/Medicaid, and her parents probably weren’t rich enough to cover it.
My understanding is that while you can’t be turned away bleeding to death from an emergency room, what happens after they stabilize you depends on the hospital. Not all hospitals have indigent care.
Here in town, I know that Providence Hospital does indeed have indigent care, while at least some of the other hospitals do not, but caveat emptor as, being a Catholic hospital (run by the Sisters of Mercy, I think), if what you need involves, for example, a termination of your pregnancy…
It’s become something of a family joke that my dad has a habit of developing conditions that need some exotic treatment that is only just being developed - all on the UK NHS, without them he would be deaf and blind. He did have a standard cataract op done privately, but this revealed underlying problems that required very specialized care, (only three specialists in the world IIRC,) he could never have afforded the treatment without the NHS (the nurses used to joke about how much he was increasing in value as they injected the expensive photo-active drugs into him ready to be zapped by the laser thingy).
I know of others who have received experimental and extremely specialized treatment on the NHS.
The NHS is very far from perfect- but there are good reasons why it’s so well loved in Britain. Politicians might argue about how to make it more efficient, or how much funding to allocate to it, but none would openly call for its destruction and expect to get votes.
If you have ANY doubts as to the unsuitability of for profit medical systems check out what this poor girl went through. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3706631.stm
She got her operation, but had to suffer for months while the bean counters argued over who gets to pay for the follow up.
And then there are folks like our family which my self employed husband has supported by his lonesome for the past year. We have Blue Cross policies with $2500 deductibles PER PERSON at a cost of $450+ per month and only cover hubbie and I. Essentially, we’re screwed unless we suffer a major accident or come down with a dread disease. Our monthly maintenance meds run us $300+ per month IF hubbie isn’t in cluster migraine mode, which then costs us over $1K per month. Our income is too high for hubby or I to benefit from any assistance, but our children are covered under a medicaid card (praise God!).
Luckily, I just got a very nice job with terrific group health care coverage at reasonable rates, which will help us tremendously. Had they not offered group coverage, I could not have accepted the position because the income would disqualify our children from the medicaid program. :eek:
Something is really screwed up in this country. :mad:
I would say, no, you aren’t going to be left to die as such, but,
if you take someone who is working on the lower end of the income scale, for a company that does not provide health insurance, or provides it but the employee’s premiums are so high they can’t afford to pay, you can end up with situations where people end up dying of treatable diseases because when they first started to become ill, they ignored the symptoms because they couldn’t afford a doctor’s appointment. Here in Vegas, a trip to the doc is probably going to cost a minimum of $120, out of reach for a low-income worker. So, they get worse and worse, until one day they drag themselves to the emergency room and find that they are now in the terminal stages.
I thought the problem was preventative care? That is, if you need drug X to sustain you or your organ Y will collapse in 2 years time, but you’re unemployed, uncovered, or, WTH, a foreigner or a fugitive, then you might not be able to get it, and then 24 months later turn up in an emergency ward where they have to give you an urgent transplant.
But if someone had given you the drugs the cost would have been less.
OK, this isn’t always the way it works, but it’s pretty common, especially if you consider other combinations than drugs/transplant like condoms/pregnancy or transplant/coma care.
I’m not saying this is a moral failure (though it may be) but a practical failure. One of the problems with healthcare as-is, is that in cases like this the governement’s footing a larger bill than was necessary. And someone was sort of left to die.
The scenario in the above mentioned movie, happens about as often as kidneys are stolen on the subway.
The transplant lists take the most in need first. That’s nation wide.
If a homless person, came to the ER with liver failure and they have no other life-threatening problems, they get listed for a liver transplant.
If the mayor or the chairman of the hospital or a student, or a minimum wage earner without health insurance came in to the ER with liver failure and no other life threatening problems they would get listed for a liver transplant. If one of these people became sick enough to require life support, they go to the top of the list.
There are funds even for the “through the cracks” patients, who have to much income to qualify for goverment assistance, They are usually from philanthropic organizations donated directly to the hospital. They aren’t advertised so they are under utilitzed.
You are correct, in that there aren’t enough organs to go around, but the available ones go to the best tissue match in the most need.
So, does everyone here have a donor card? And does your family know you have that donor card?
Health care isn’t quite as unsocialized as people think. Colorado has a well developed indigent care plan. You go in for an interview, and they determine what you will owe for office and hospital visits. For the completely unemployed it’s cheaper than the copays of normal work supplied healthcare. And surrisingly the doctors are actually much better and more caring than those most health insured people end up with. It’s not a well known program, and there are limited slots available, but they are still possible even in the crappy economy we have now. You just have to find out and apply ahead of time, rather than showing up at the ER without it.
My sister’s friend essentially died of cancer because she had no insurance. Part of the problem was that she couldn’t afford a regular doctor so she could have a physical when the initial symptoms began Also once it got serious enough that she had to go to the emergency room and they knew she needed surgery and treatment the run around of contacting social services and the wait to get anyone to see her case caused the cancer to spread. She never recieved any treatment for it except painkillers until the day before she died and walked on her own two feet into the hospital.
Maybe if she had been healthy enough to have the energy to fight for her own case the results would have been different, but it shouldn’t be that way. She was also disabled with severe arthritis which made it even harder for her to do anything. She actually had medical professionals start to schedule folllow up office visits until they found out she had no insurance and then they just handed her pain killers.
We all would have done anything to help her but she never told us until it was too late.
But it isn’t free, though is it? The UK uses extortionate taxes to fund the health service that you are claiming is free, whether you ever need to use it or not.
Here in Texas, most of the above statements are true. However, we also like to shift the cost burden around. Recently, the legislature, with the governor’s blessing, has removed thousands of children from low-cost state-subsidized health insurance (CHIP - Child Health Insurance Program). This was done to cut the state budget.
Okay. Now these children who might have gone to the doctor when they caught a cold now go to school where they get my kids sick. Now my children pay for the budget savings by being sick. My insurance company and I pay through doctor visits and lost work. The state’s budget, however, is “balanced.”
Some kids who might have gone to the doctor get so sick that they need to visit the emergency room. As others have mentioned, this is the most expensive place to get medical treatment. Who pays? The local taxpayers (of the hospital’s taxing district, if there even is one), other users of the hospital, and insurance companies. So, to save the state’s paying for a $75 doctor’s visit, we incure the costs of a sicker kid and higher medical bills. The local taxpayer gets squeezed for more money, when his state taxes could have done a better job for less.
And this is what we call a “balanced” budget.
Yeah I agre, but if I’m unemployed or poor bumm on the street and I need urgent
Health care for whatever reason I won’t be refused even transplating any organ would be performed on me .
What we have in USA is unethical and simply horrendous.No country in the World should follow USA examples in any field, ANY!But I guess people are so blinded by prospect of short term profit ,and if someone tries to propose free national health care, that person is vilified and called communist.
Americans are rightfully in many cases opposed to paying higher taxes ,but look what government just did over last few years-increased bureaucracy ,defense budget is humongous long after cold war ended.Who is paying for that?USA easilly could afford good health system following French or Greman model,and slashing defence budget would free some cash to fund free healh care for the poor.
One thing the hospitals can do is close the emergency room. Then they can examine, maybe stabilize, and transfer the patient elsewhere.
See this column . Some quotes: “ERs all over the state are overcrowded, understaffed and–here’s the kicker–going out of business. Since 1990, 15 percent of California’s emergency rooms have shut their doors” “[doctor speaking]‘What gets me…is when you hear these government officials saying, post-9/11, that we are ready for the next big one, they are either totally clueless or just lying’…‘The only thing they forgot is some sort of funding source.’”
The columnist C.W.Nevius makes several other points of interest.
The proposed solution is Proposition 67, the Emergency Medical Care initiative, on the fall California ballot, to be funded by a 3% surcharge on phone bills.
This applies to the OP in that people (those with the best insurance, as well as the uninsured) no doubt die on occasion before they reach a proper ER, due to funding issues.
It is indeed a resource-allocation problem, and it would be Great Debate material to compare Homeland Security budgets with public health ones, in terms of dollars per life.
Back to the OP, note that everyone, whether prosperous or poor, is vulnerable here.
No, it’s far from free, IIRC the NHS is the biggest employer in Europe, and like any bureaucracy, waste can be phenomenal (I’ll not start a discussion on the word “extortionate” though, 'cos this is GQ) - but the I will point out that “whether you ever need to use it or not” applies to medical insurance as well, plus anyone buying US-made goods from companies with health-plans is forced to pay for the health-care of the company’s workers
At least according to Ford Vice Chairman Allan Gilmour
Health-care isn’t like any other part of the economy, people can’t choose to only have the diseases they can afford - I’d better stop before I go further into GD territory, I’m guessing this has all been discussed a billion and three times before…
Not true at all. The UK spends about 7% of GDP on healthcare, the US spends about 15% of GDP. The US also spends abotu $750 billion in taxpayer funds to support healthcare, meaning the US spends almost as much as a % of GDP as the UK government does, only difference is the care provided by the US gov only covers 1/4 as many people as teh care provided by the UK government. The US and UK governments each tax about 7% of GDP for healthcare purposes, only difference is the US also spends another 8% of GDP on private healthcare on top of that 7%.
Basically, we spend 2x as much for healthcare as the UK, the same as a % of GDP comes from government spending via taxes, and we still don’t have universal coverage like the UK.
If you need stats I can dig them up later. or you can type my name in with keywords like ‘taxes’ or ‘healthcare’ on straight dope.
This has been my experience. For about the past two years, we’ve had no health insurance (our kids are covered under the MCHIP plan, but hubby and I have none). In those same two years, I’ve been hospitalized six times for kidney-related problems. I’ve had 4 surgical procedures and spent probably a total of six weeks in the hospital. I get great care, both in the ER and as an admitted patient. The hospital seems totally unconcerned, when I go in, that I still owe money from my last stay. We’re slowly chipping away at the bills, but I can certainly say I’ve had all the care I needed.
Yes, indeed. And after they “stabalize” the patient, instead of admitting them for treatment, they can put them back on an ambulance and send them to the public-supported hospital emergency room. So the actual admission to a hospital, and the expensive treatment that takes place after that, is charged to the taxpayers.
I’ve worked with figures for a local hospital well-know for it’s emergency room, and this was a pretty common occurrence. And our doctors were sometimes pretty incensed about the condition of patients that the other hospitals claimed were “stabalized”. It isn’t uncommon to have patients come in by ambulance from another hospital, and send them immediately into surgery. Patients that our doctors send to surgery on stretchers with many attendents, but who were ‘discharged’ from the other hospital. The other hospitals will even pay the ambulance service themselves to get this ‘uninsured’ patient out of their hospital.
And this isn’t something out of the past. It’s happening right now, on a regular basis.
I did about 20 of these in my 2 years in the field. I did plenty of transfers for legit need. One of our smaller hospitals (was mostly scheduled surgery and inpatient physical rehab). They had an ER but it was like 2 small rooms, with little more than the basics. Every so often someone would drag their buddy in with a knife wound or something so they would do a quick patch up and have us zip them over to county because this little hospital did not keep staff for maintaining operating theatres at night.