I don’t think healthcare “is no different from any other necessity”. I think most people accept that some people get better cars, clothes, houses, etc, but having a cheaper car because you don’t have the money for a better one is very different than *dying * because you don’t have the money for a better treatment. The latter is a bit harder to swallow.
Having said that, I don’t see how any democracy can remedy this (the state can’t tell rich people: you can’t get the expensive treatment, and it also can’t possibly give the expensive treatment for free to all who need it).
So, this is just one more thing that we have to live with, but I repeat that this does not make healthcare the same as other necessities.
I am trying to remember what I ticked on the questionaire. [I also forget what my coordinates are though they are something like (-7,-6).] I come down about where the OP does in that I agree but with reservations, because like Polerius and scule I have some trouble with the idea that having better health care is the same sort of thing as having a better car…at least in the limit where the health care is the difference between life and death.
I also have the converse concern to Shodan, i.e., I am concerned that the system not evolve to one like we effectively have in the U.S. now where everyone gets some sort of care (hospitals won’t turn you away at the emergency room if your condition is truly life-threatening but you can’t pay) but the minimum standard is very low. (And, ultimately more expensive in some ways since it neglects preventative care that could save costs down the road.)
I am not sure what you meant by the wink here. But, if you meant your statement with any seriousness then you will have to provide a cite, because my impression is that the health insurance system that Hillary came up with, which was in fact a far cry from a single-payer system, would have most definitely preserved the right for people to buy medical care privately. In fact, I think it would have kept the system largely privatized but more heavily regulated.
I do agree with Shodan that health care increasingly presents difficult choices involving rationing as our ability to come up with ways to prolong someone’s life outstrips our ability as a society to pay for these increasingly complicated procedures. I am not sure what the answer is, but I know that I am not at all comfortable with a health system that implements this rationing purely through price. (This gets back to health care being different from other “necessities” like cars, clothes, and houses.)
This really isn’t a biased question. The majority of Canadians will say that you should be prevented from buying medical care privately, at least with respect to any type of actual health care (as opposed to nose jobs or other cosmetic nonsense.)
I have, in fact, met Canadians who really, honestly, and truly believe that if you were to pay a doctor to have him provide you some kind of medical care, even if it were on his free time, you should both be arrested and sent to prison.
I don’t understand what those of you who do not want to contribute to universal health care hope to accomplish. If you think it means more money in your pocket, you are wrong. When an uninsured person gets cancer, do you really think they are just going to go home and die in the dark? I know for a fact that they will obtain the medical treatment they need to survive by whatever means necessary. This includes lying about the ability to pay, and defaulting on medical bills after treatment, which contributes to the upward spiral of medical costs as defaults are passed on to those with insurance in the form of higher premiums. This may disgust you, but you cannot change it as a reality of the marketplace simply because you disapprove.
The absence of universal health care means higher insurance premiums for all of us, and simply clamping your hand on your wallet won’t change this fact, and you are naive if you think it will.
I disagree with the caveat. There should never be any universal health care.
A proper functioning society is one in which all persons are out for themselves. If certain benevolent individuals wish to provide and establish medical care for others, that is great. If not, I am sorry. Disease and death play an important part in keeping humanity efficient. Some people die because they can’t save themselves, poor starving people are more likely to get sick and die. This is how it should be, if they are poor and starving then them dying only strengthens humanity as a whole.
The anectdotal story is mostly bunk. I’m well aware that Europeans are socialist and have universal health care. But nonethless we have about equivalent life expectancy (especially if you factor out traffic accidents, which aren’t near as much of a problem over in Euroland.) So obviously our system is working just fine.
I’ve had relatives who are quite low on the economic scale come down with very unfortunate illnesses. When I was a kid my family was about middle class. My paternal grandfather was extremely poor. He came down with leukemia and received as much treatment as could be given, but he died anyways, as most people with leukemia did back then. He didn’t have to sell his house or anything like that. His insurance came through for him, as most good insurance providers will.
I’ve had a family member with pancreatic cancer in the last 5 years who was also not very well off (annual income probably around $25,000.) She unfortunately died (as an almost complete percentage of people with pancreatic cancer do), but she did not have to sell her home or any of her personal belongings. She also didn’t have medical insurance. How it worked out, I don’t know, but it did.
So the problem you seem to think exists in the United States does not exist. Without universal health care here is what typically happens in the United States:
The very poor are taken care of by the government when they have life threatening illness.
The middle class rely on their health insurance.
The upper class rely on their health insurance, and probably get the best medical care in the world from exclusive hospitals with mammoth bills.
There’s only a few exceptions to this clause, and that is when a middle class person gets an extremely expensive and debilitating condition (like a spinal cord injury could be around $500,000+) which exceeds most reasonable insurance companies payouts. There’s usually something that can be done in the way of government support in those situations, though.
The biggest difference is the elective surgeries. The poor and lower middle class can’t afford them and don’t get them. The middle class and upper class usually can.
I find it odd how conservatives are so willing to pour billions upon billions of dollars into a bloated military budget, but when it comes to using that money to actually help people in need instead of build instruments of death they want nothing to do with it.
While I think everyone deserves a basic level of preventative and acute healthcare, I don’t think someone who wants to offer a service that the government won’t cover should be prevented from selling his services privately.
I won’t add any caveats, because the question isn’t really about universal healthcare. Consider the parallel statement “those with the ability to pay should have the right to higher standards of clean air” - I can answer that without my answer depending on the clean air standards that apply to everyone. Whether or not there are any pollution laws in place, I can still say that someone who wants to spend his own money to filter the air on his property should be able to do it.
I agree that rationing at some hypothetical cost-benefit stage (eg. expensive surgery giving 20% chance of extra 6 months of life for an 85 year-old) is inevitable, but such would be the case in any system (be it universal or not). The professionals make these hard, hard decisions and I would back them so long as correct procedure was followed.
If we can agree that “every reasonably treatable condition” should be treated, and leave that “reasoning” to the professionals, then we at least escape the Social Darwinist dystopia presented by Martin Hyde.
Actually, I can’t tell if you are right or not. This cite says that doctors could not accept fees over and above the approved rates set under Hilarycare, and that families could not be allowed to buy a plan that provides a higher level of service for the basic benefits if the alliance providers exclude it.
On the other hand, part of one version of the Hilary health care plan says “Nothing in this Plan shall be construed as prohibiting…an individual from purchasing any health care services”.
Which seems sort of contradictory to me.
It was obviously a large and complex piece of legislation, and it would not be the first time that some bill said two different things at once. But I will withdraw the statement, and rephrase it as saying that it is unclear what limits Hilarycare would have imposed on the private practice of medicine.
If you mean that the absence of universal, taxpayer-funded coverage is causing health care costs to be higher, I would disagree. The best you can say is that we are paying for the uninsured either way.
If uninsured people will get health care by hook or by crook, then the insured are paying for this in higher premiums already. If we enact universal coverage, we will still be paying for it, just thru taxes instead of private insurance. You could even expect health care spending to go higher with universal coverage, as universal coverage reduces the perceived cost of health care. By increasing the perceived supply of health care (just show up at the clinic, flash your government card, and get full benefits), you will increase the demand for it.
IOW, the uninsured person who used to hobble thru the last fifteen years of life because she couldn’t afford a hip replacement is now going to get a new titanium hip, and that increase in health care spending will show up in our tax bills.
Certainly she will have greater mobility than if she limped along without it. But that does not show up in the bottom line unless she is working, when she couldn’t without her new hip. And most hip replacements are done on older people who are retired. (I assume - no cite.)
Preventative medicine is certainly a fine thing, but I think you quickly reach a point of diminishing returns where it is problematic whether it saves money or not.
Take quitting smoking. Certainly a good idea, and if everyone quit, we could radically reduce the incidence of lung cancer and COPD in the population. But I doubt if we would save money on health care as a result. Because lung cancer is a relatively cheap way to die (since there isn’t a lot that can be done about it), and many lung cancer victims die before they get old enough to start collecting Social Security and Medicare, and then die of something else that is more expensive to treat, like heart disease. So smoking is a net gain on health care spending.
Does that make it a good thing? Of course not. But we ought to think about these factors before we say, “Gee, think of all the money preventive health care/universal coverage could save us in the long run.”
That cite you provided, which is not to the plan itself but to a study by the conservative Heritage Foundation of the plan, is long and I couldn’t find where it says what you say it says in order to see where they get their claim from. (I also think that saying that doctors can’t accept higher fees for a particular service is different from saying that they can’t perform some other service.) And, the claim that people won’t be able to buy medical care privately also seems to be contradicted by this statement in that very report:
So, I actually don’t see how it is unclear whether or not people would be able to buy medical care privately. Even the Heritage Foundation seems to be admitting that this would be allowed.
By the way, while looking through that Heritage link I also found the following amusing statement:
Wow, now with the benefits of 10 years of hindsight, we can certainly say that we are lucky as hell to have dodged that bullet by staying with a completely private system, yes?
I don’t think it makes all that much difference. Health care costs would (in my opinion) be no lower if we had adopted Hilarycare - probably higher, due to a perceived increase in supply. Nor would we have more choice in physicians - probably less. Nor would there have been much impact on life expectancy or other measures of the health of the US population.
IOW, addressing one problem - universal coverage - would almost certainly have made the other problems of the US health care system - primarily its higher cost - worse, not better.
An advantage might be that we would be closer to a genuine realization that we cannot afford all the health care that we want, and that we cannot pay for the finest health care in the world for everybody, that health care is not and can never be “free”, and that we need to be willing to let some people die in order to save money.
Sorry about your grandma, or your low birthweight baby. We are going to let them die. No, you can’t have an MRI. No, you can’t see a specialist. No, we aren’t going to treat your prostate cancer. Maybe that drug works a little bit better, but it costs twice as much - have some aspirin instead. That emergency room is closed - you’ll have to go to the one across town. That condition isn’t life-threatening - we won’t pay for it. You say you need a specialist for your asthma - I’ll put you on the waiting list. Next appointment available is eight months from now - don’t be late.
Completely private system? Hardly. This is a nice primer of how government interference in US healthcare has created the mess we’re now in.
1942: Employee health insurance premiums become tax deductible for employers, but not to individuals, discouraging non-employment based private health plans.
1965: A day in a hospital costs $39. Also, Medicare is created, starting a spending spree among senior citizens and their doctors who no longer have to worry about the costs of their care. The healthcare industry responds to the increased demand by raising prices.
1973: Healthcare costs start to get out of control. Since the bill that created Medicare specifically forbids rationing of care, Congress requires that the option of using an HMO be included in any employment healthcare plan that has 25 or more employees, in order to shift the job of rationing to the doctors and hospitals themselves. Congress also subsidizes HMOs with $375 million in order to get HMO premiums below that of its competition to create market share. Also, a new federal law allows doctors to receive pay for not providing care, which is a mainstay of HMO policy.
Today: State legislatures routinely require private health plans in their state to cover all sorts of diseases and procedures, whether consumers want them or not. For example, New Jersey insurance companies are now required to cover in vitro fertilization. Also, the amount of the maximum allowable deductible is required to be less than $2500. How does this help the average person afford health insurance?
And finally, Government now spends 60% of all health care dollars in this country.
I hope you will now agree that the U.S. does not have a completely private system.
mr_moonlight
“Everything the government touches turns to crap.” – Ringo Starr
I’m sorry but you are quite wrong. I’m mostly convinced you’ve never taken a sociology class in your life or studied sociology to any degree. A society is not defined by what you think is right, or what I think is right. A society is simply “people who share a culture and territory” end, period. Not, “people who share a culture and territory, and meet my definition of “what is right” making them a society.”
I don’t advocate complete social darwinism but there was a time when many of the great “societies” like Babylon, Rome, et al, just didn’t give a damn what happened to the sick or the dying. It wasn’t the government’s job, in fact the government was mainly concerned with keeping the elite in power and exploiting the underlings. Just because you find something barbaric and inappropriate doesn’t mean you can “disqualify” it from being a society.
I also have to say that the whole universal health care argument really is not what the question is about. If we are trying to analyze the political compass and it’s “controversial” questions I don’t think we should misinterpet it’s questions entirely.
The argument about universal healthcare is interesting and a good one, but I don’t feel it is what the question is truly about.
@Blalron I wouldn’t be surprised if that little comment about conservatives was aimed squarely at me. Yes, I am a conservative, obviously, the political compass says so anyways (although if you really look at it I’m obviously a strict free market libertarian, but in the eyes of the raging leftist there is no difference between the two.)
As to the tangent topic of military spending, I’m not in favor of crazy military spending. I’m in favor of a much more efficient military, where we don’t have billions of dollars squandered away in pet projects that have nothing to do with anything really relevant excpet padding the pockets of defense corporations.
There are very few things I think the government needs to be involved in, though, and the military is one of them. However I do not believe the government’s job is to play HealthCareSoldier, fighting off disease, or WelfareMan, fighting off poverty.
It’s easy to simply dismiss me because I seem “extreme.” But I pointed out important facts, the life expectancy in the United States is roughly equivalent to the LE in Europe, where universal healthcare is common. Obviously our system WORKS.
Also, don’t forget that the U.S. has a much higher murder rate than Europe (which lowers LE but has nothing to do with health care or the health system) and the auto accidents which I mentioned earlier.
Intriguing points all around. I especially like the idea of differentiating between covering everyone universally and covering all possible medical treatments universally. Those of you who believe that emergency room coverage is insufficient, where would you draw the lines? (SentientMeat, when you suggest that the “proffesionalls” should make such decisions, you do realize that you are talking about the politicians right?)
What percentage chance of success would you require in order to support paying for the procedure? How many years of life would it have to offer?
Those of you who believe in the libertarian ideal, would you turn bleeding people away from the hospital?
And just to nitpick:
You are conflating rights with needs. I agree that one’s health is an essential right. However, this right does not imply or impose an obligation on the services of others. Having the right to “have one’s healt protected” is distinctly different from having the right to “have one’s health treated when necessary”. One is a right that you can assert as something which no one should violate (and which you deserve by respecting it in others). The other is an obligation which you are attempting to impose on others, thus violating their right to the freedom to dispose of their own health.
Does my right to free speech impose an obligation on you to publish or broadcast my ideas? Does my right to be free from searches impose an obligation on you to turn your head when I travel past? Why does my right to life impose an obligation on you to “treat” me? Does it impose an obligation on you to feed me? Won’t my health suffer if I do not have proper or at least hygenic clothing and housing? Why does not your concept of health rights not impose an obligation on you to provide me with a clean house and clean clothes?
Its all very well to say that a certain level of health care is needed. Its even ok to suggest that taxes are the only practical way to pay for it. It is another thing altogether to suggest that this level of health care is some sort of right. It distorts the meaning of the word into some 1984ish double speak.
No, the doctors. Admittedly, their decisions are partly based on budget limitations placed on them by the electorate via the politicians, but such limitations also exist in private systems (even though the threshold may be higher): Triple heart bypass surgery is not routine carried out on weak 85 year olds in any system I know of unless the patient or relatives specifically override medical advice and pay the entire cost themselves.
Again, I would leave it to the doctors to make these agonising decisions, partly financial, on how they might get closest to treating every reasonably treatable condition.
Personally, I believe we have an obligation to minimise suffering where feasible. Only a few of those scenarios could meaningfully be said to engender actual suffering. Wearing dirty clothes or having a cold are not comparable to being homeless in sub-zero winter or developing cancer.