The poor have no dental or optical. They are on their own and wind up pulling teeth because a root canal is more than 1000 bucks.
A large portion of the bankrupsies in America are due to illness. No insurance is very dangerous. The poor wait too long before they go to doctors and suffer for it.
Whoooooooooooosssssshhhhh!!!
Honestly, I think with our current system, we’re just a short wait away from disaster. It cannot continue like this-something’s gotta give.
I would very much like to see statistics on that subject.
We have a collections agent that handles our delinquent patients. He’s heard the statement that “it’s medical bills that made me go bankrupt!” too, but he gets to see their credit card statements. Often (he says), the person has bought himself vacations on his credit card, motorcycles, cellular phone bills, and is spending every penny that comes in without any margin for saving for a rainy day. I would wager that that is why people go bankrupt: they don’t plan ahead. They don’t prepare for the worst.
Sure, it’s the sudden injury, or the car accident, or the unforeseen medical expense that pushes them over the edge, but it’s the habit of instantly spending every penny you earn that causes you to be so near the edge in the first place. That’s a strategy that works fine as long as nothing unexpected ever happens, but when you do, you blame the doctor — or the auto mechanic, or the guy in the other car, or the fire department, or whatever it was you didn’t plan for.
Another reason people are wary of centralized health care is that it might encourage state and federal legislatures to pass intrusive nanny laws to try to drive down medical costs. Once “taxpayers” are paying for something, they’re going to want to point figures at the people who they think are using more than their fair share.
As an example, on the question of whether the Indian government should require AIDS tests before issuing marriage permits, one BBC reader commented:
(http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jspa?threadID=5073&&&edition=2&ttl=20061221044740)
Ironically, the poster was an American, but I think this is the kind of endgame that many libertarian Americans fear.
Medical Bills Leading Cause of Bankruptcy, Harvard Study Finds Causes of bankruptsy. Mr. Fish
But it’s not like those costs aren’t being absorbed now, and paid for by you and me. And it’s the companies who are trying to reign in their healthcare costs that are playing the nanny role today. For example…
Nobody is reigning in health costs. They are double inflation for years. Plus you get diminished coverage on a steady basis. Not to forget larger copays and loss of prescription benefits.
Shuffling around the cost won’t help things. If you make the doctors pick up the bill, you’ll get, across the board, the worse but less expensive treatments that currently only the crappier HMOs are pushing.
Cite? Never mind, Here’s mine (warning PDF, and from gasp Democrats. I’ll just mention the percentages.
So you see this is not just a problem of the poor.
Thanks for the cites. You saved me having to find them.
As you can see Book Monster, many conservatives have ideological problems with “socialized” medicine. Part of the problem is this American habit of thinking we are the best in everything. We think that about health care also, though it is demonstrably not true. Then there is the belief that the government screws everything up. The Veterans Administration system is quite good, actually.
A lot of the proposals are for a single payer system, in which the government basically takes on the role of all the insurance companies today. The doctors would still be private. In any doctor’s or dentists office you go to here, no matter how small, there is at least one person working full time on insurance issues. Insurance in the US is not rocket science - it is much, much harder. 
One thing that no one has mentioned is that lack of insurance tends to keep people from seeking preventative care, or delaying care until the problem gets worse - and more expensive. That’s one way a universal system would save money - reducing the paperwork is another.
The other common objection to universal healthcare, not mentioned in this thread yet, is the idea that people would use too much of it if it were free. I’ve never seen any data to back this up, and it’s not like there aren’t any hypochondriacs now. You’d think HMOs - often with low co-pays - would have this problem, but I’ve never heard of it.
Banking Even the middle class are not safe from the financial impact of getting sick.
The only ones who would suffer with nationalized medicine are the insurance companies.
Question-Do nationalized medicine programs cover dental or optical?
Your site says:
In other words, the “cause of bankruptcy” is whatever the filer said it was. I’m not sure that disproves what I said, that people tend to blame their bankruptcy on whatever bill it was they hadn’t planned for.
Even so, your cite also said that many of those filers had medical insurance, so it instead of proving your statement that “not having insurance is dangerous,” it seems to suggest that the insurance people have isn’t working either.
Or it shows working people can not afford to pay for health care. I provided more sites in anticipation of you trying to work around that one.
It’s not. It allows insurance companies to cherry-pick. If it were up to me I would desolve HMO’s and go back to the use of catestrophic insurance. What stops that from working is the point you are making. If people are turned down for insurance then there’s a problem with the system.
I live in the States and I see healthcare as a right. If we can provide police under general welfare and security, then we can do healthcare under the same umbrella. We’ve been programmed a certain way for a while and it’s hard to break that programming. It’s even harder to break that programming when THAT much money is divested into keeping the programming a certain way.
Now, if we can somehow figure out how owning guns is a “right”, then you’re on your way to that Nobel Prize.
Work around? I think you misunderstand me.
I work in a medical billing office, as I said. I work with weasely insurance companies daily. I have heard every excuse from them why they won’t pay for something, and you wouldn’t believe some of them. Moreover, most of the time the insurance company won’t tell the patient these excuses directly, but they make us tell the patient instead. I’ll tell you, if I ever switch insurance carriers, I know which ones I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.
I also work with weasely patients daily, why they won’t pay a bill “on principle” because they find every reason in the world why it’s not their responsibility to open their mail, who seem to think that we have to mail them a bill, call them personally to explain it, call the insurance company on their behalf without being asked and appeal for more money, call the patient back to explain why they owe it, then drive to their house and hold their hand while they write the check, and if we don’t do all those things, the patient shouldn’t be expected to pay anything — and any bill that’s “too small” we should just write off so they won’t be bothered, and any bill that’s “too big” we should send back to the insurance company until they pay 100%.
People are the same whether they work for The Big Faceless Corporations, or whether they’re the little guy trying to get by. Some people are responsible for themselves and plan ahead and save money for a rainy day, and some don’t.
I can’t blame bankruptcies on “medical bills” because I know some of those patients put themselves into their positions. I speak to 'em on the phone and I hear 'em say, “Go ahead and send me to collections! I don’t think I should have to pay that, because I have insurance.”
Well, yeah, they do have insurance, but they denied their claim, so they can wait around until hell freezes over, or they can call their insurance company to dispute their denial, or they can pay the damn bill. But some people simply won’t take responsibility.
Trust me. I work personally with many people who put themselves into these positions, and I also work with the ones who had catastrophic medical claims whose insurance companies abandoned them. I see personally where the problems are. I know the system of medical bills and insurance doesn’t work and I’m not arguing otherwise. I just can’t categorically say “Medical bills are evil and patients are all blameless victims,” because I know it’s not true.
Thank you for clarifying the differences among all the above facilities.
Question: does an urgent care facility/clinic, by definition, fall into a category somewhere between a doctor’s office and a hospital?
Lately I've been wondering why more patients don't go to urgent care. It can be paid for out-of-pocket or billed to insurance. I found the co-payment to be the same as I would have paid to my doctor, but the waiting time isn't usually as long, since one can be seen by any doc on duty or by a physician's assistant who can perform the same duties. You can also get the prescriptions filled right there, and they can do labs as well. It sure as hell beats hanging around the emergency waiting room.Cite? I have a friend who works for an insurer and he says that margins are razor-thin: premiums only cover the outgoings and they make their profit on the interest from the premiums. Secondly, I know someone who’s a Name at Lloyds of London, and while there’ve been many good years, he’s only now recovering from the losses in the bad years.
Those are significant salaries to someone in the U.K.
As for socialised medicine, I’ve seen both sides. Here in the U.K., if you need emergency treatment (heart attack, broken bones etc), you’ll get it. Non-emergency treatment is a whole different matter. Over a decade ago, I had trouble with my wisdom teeth - I was in constant pain. I would have had to wait 6 months just for the initial consultation. I had it done privately and had the consultation within days and all four removed shortly thereafter. I now have private health insurance. But the NHS is a huge bureaucracy and consumes vast amounts of money. And it grows. I want a safety net, but I have no answers.
That study is completely flawed.
Another researcher examined it and concluded, “only about one-quarter of bankruptcy filers have debts that are primarily medical in nature. Far more common are bankruptcies related to credit card debts.” (http://www.aei.org/docLib/20060719_MedicalBillsAndBankruptcy.pdf)
http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/full/hlthaff.w5.63/DC1 Have another . I knew the Libertarian/Ferengi group would never accept any study that contradicts its preconceptions.