Absolutely. However, there isn’t only insurance. People can pay cash for medical care, if it’s legal. Cash enables them to skip the lines.
…as expected: you have been unable to prove that “but few know that theirs is the worst performing of the wealthy European countries.” The goal posts have moved. You never bothered to define “wealthy European countries.” You didn’t define the metrics. Instead you posted a couple of wiki links that show the state of healthcare in the United Kingdom (are you actually talking about England, Great Britain, or the United Kingdom?) is pretty damn good. Was that what you were trying to show us? That healthcare in the United Kingdom is pretty darn good? Because we already know that, that is what we are telling you.
As I said: you are throwing darts at a dart board and hoping you can make it stick. You can’t prove that “few know that theirs is the worst performing of the wealthy European countries” for a couple of reasons: 1) the assertion is completely your own invention so of course there will be no stats to back it up 2) you haven’t defined the set of “wealthy European countries”, 3) you haven’t explained the metrics that would determine Britain’s place on the table. Until you do that: no matter how many wiki links you post up your assertion is still invalid.
You don’t really have a case against UHC: so you will continue to throw around unsubstantiated digs like " bitterly clinging to their outmoded model of the government directly supplying health care."
The model is not outmoded, it works and it works better than that horrible mish mash of services that the United States offers. It is cheaper to run, doesn’t leave many of its recipients bankrupt and has comparable outcomes to the United States model as well.
Now you are wanting to compare insured people’s in the United States to UHC systems. Why would you want to do that? Surely you would want to compare outcomes between insured people in the United States to insured people in UHC countries? Because then you could compare outcomes for uninsured people in the United States to uninsured people in UHC countries. Surely that would be a more logical comparison?
First, it is outmoded. No one uses that model except for Cuba and North Korea other than Britain. It was a purely ideological idea at a time when leftist ideas were in vogue and as we’ve seen at the Olympics, it’s basically a cult.
Secondly, infant mortality. The Uk was in the top 10 in the 1950s. Fell to #11 in the 1960s. #14 in the 1970s. #16 in the 1980s. #15 in the 1990s. Before truly plunging to last in Western Europe by 2000, a sterling position which it holds to this day. I wonder if Britain will fall to 30th by 2020?
…look: are you going to stop inventing stuff? Are you going to stop throwing in buzzwords like “outmoded” as if they mean anything? Your calling it a cult now? Why are you posting in Great Debates if you aren’t interested in debating, just inventing stuff?
Can you point to specific parts of the NHS that you would consider outmoded, and why they would benefit from a change to a different model? Can you show me the evidence that people like UHC because “they are in a cult”, and not because they simply prefer it because it works? Can you show me any evidence that it doesn’t work?
Would it matter? Are healthcare outcomes now determined by league tables? Are you talking about Great Britain, the United Kingdom or England? What does the position on the table actually mean in actual outcomes? The table, outside of context, says nothing. It absolutely does not back up any of your assertions that UHC is outmoded or a cult.
With every post you prove my point: you have no argument, so you keep throwing more and more random stuff up and when challenged you change the subject. But now, with the accusations that the NHS is a cult, you are bordering on the absurd.
I think this, more than anything else, shows your ignorance, naivety and impartiality.
No-one has suggested that Americans with insurance have bad outcomes, nor that someone on a purely UHC system necessarily have better outcomes than USA citizens with really good insurance.
Anecdotes are pretty worthless but I know that when I was offered a job in the US, on a fairly large salary, I still would’ve had to pay a further $1000 a month to cover my family to anything approaching the same degree of cover afforded by my NHS services and modest $300 UK private health care insurance.
Even allowing for tax reductions to pay for the NHS, I would’ve paid more over there for less.
(and don’t get me started on out-of-pockets, ante and post natal care etc.)
Obviously I mean, partiality and deductions respectively
That’s a good point, one that I had not thought of yet. But it’s not a very satisfying one considering that universal health care would increase the demand for doctors, who are already fully employed as it stands now. So unless we create more doctors or use the ones we already have more efficiently (how?) there will still be a shortage of doctors.
It’s just that the ACA will not be the one creating the shortage even if it makes it less appealing to be a doctor, because like you said, there is already a big waiting list on the doctor-track in medical school.
As an example, this is how stokes are considered in the NHS:
This is an entry point into the outcomes framework and data:
http://www.ic.nhs.uk/statistics-and-data-collections/audits-and-performance/nhs-outcomes-framework-indicators
Just throwing this in here: not all countries appear to use the same metrics in working out infant mortality- there is a widespread tendency to count deaths of very premature babies as ‘miscarriages’, rather than including them in the infant mortality rates.
If you look at the charts on that, England appears to be much less prone to this than most of Europe, which certainly affects the stats. The laws regarding birth registration are also very different in each country, with some only requiring registration of babies surviving 24 hours or more.
I’ve certainly heard that anecdotally as well, that the English ‘non viable’ cut off is a much lower birth rate than in many other Western European countries, which often don’t attempt to save extremely premature babies, and just declare them ‘too small to survive’, whereas in England (as in the US) it is standard to attempt to save any baby, regardless of how tiny, if showing any signs of life, which naturally increases the apparent death rate.
Like FPTP elections, right? 
Sweet screaming monkeys. To see someone argue so hard against public hospitals in a thread titled, “Socialized Medicine and Single Payer Systems” while the other side argue for “UHC [Universal Health Care]”–it’s kind of sad, really.
By the way, Spain has rather highly socialized care too. So you’re kind of full of it.
I don’t think you understand what “disposable income” means, Adaher. There are a lot of neccessary expenses that have already been covered in those households -except the American one. Incomes there are pre-expenses, because those expenses are not covered by taxes.
The average health care insurance cost of an American household is $ 12 000 roughly. Suddenly, that disposable income doesn’t compare so well any more. Then there are college expenses for the kids. How much is that? And that is probably not the end of it, I expect there are more expenses only Americans have to worry about. Which would be an internsting subject for another thread.
The fundamental issue is that the US tax payer pays far more money for worse outcomes.
Today, government health care in America includes Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, VA, IH, etc. Each with their bureaucracies, bureaucrats, forms and schemes. For which the American tax payer pays -unsurprisingly, more than the average European tax payer does for their single government program and its one set of bureaucrats.
Basically, having loads of departments with different procedures doing the same job each for a limited number of people is much more expensive than having one that does it for everyone.
No surprise to anyone who has ever worked for a large organization.
About 1/3 of the US population is on some kind of government health care at the moment. The majority of these are the people with the most expensive health care issues. The over 65s, the medicaid patients, the war wounds. (The ones who do not enjoy these programs are the ones who pay for them. The one who would be cheapest to insure -the people healthy enough to work and pay taxes)
Additionally, there are 600 000 people working in health insurance in America, most a salaries well above average. What do they do? They do not nurse, do surgery or produce medicines. Their one function is to decide who gets health care, and how much. They work for lots of health insurance companies, each with their own bureaucracy, reimbursement and billing schemes, which the actual health care providers have to work with. Not to mention all the hospital emplyees whose only job is billing.
This is a middleman that in most other developed nations are considerably smaller or nonexistent.
This graph from the Wall Street Journal illustrates the point quite well.
The red bars are public money, coming from taxes. The pink are what citizens spend privatly after that. Notice how Americans pay more tax money towards government health care than the average European?
There are seconday issues too of course. Medical bankrupcies, competitive disadvantages, poor medical outcomes, reduced ability of Americans to start new companies, withdrawing of cover etc.
But fundamentally, Americans pay a 100% surcharge to keep healthcare away from a segment of the population.
… and to keep the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries healthy and profitable. Never mind that the citizens are less healthy and can be bankrupted by the US approach.
I just wanted to come back to this and say “huh?” There’s no “Canadian medical record system” to begin with, and your own records that your doctors have of you are only accessible by them.
I wonder if Nava vanity searches her name. She’s lived in several different countries and could give you some points of comparison. Maybe I should PM her. But then, she may have had her fill of this argument in the big giant health insurance threads of 2010.
Agree with this. A patient’s care records are held by his or her primary care physician, and held in confidentiality. There is no “Canadian medical record system.”
Don’t forget you pay National Insurance on your salary, Council Tax on your home, and VAT on your purchases. Further, your employer pays NI for the privilege of employing you.
You do realise that that’s the deaths of all children under 1, not just death at childbirth? So it includes infanticide, accidental deaths, deaths in car accidents etc etc? And we’ve gone from a death rate of 1 in 40 to 1 in 200?
Yea. And for my taxes I get access to a health system without having to run a gamut of gate-keepers parsing the small print and torturing the large print to find some way, any way to stop me going through just so that their bottom line looks better.
In the US,a doctor recommends a treatment ,the insurance company then denies it. In the NHS, the doctors just don’t recommend treatment at all if it’s not covered. You never find out what could have saved your life. And even if they do know, if they have to meet their bottom line:
The head of the government’s drugs rationing body has claimed that a number of NHS trusts are “breaking the law” by denying patients access to approved treatments and drugs to save money.
Sir Michael Rawlins, the chair of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), said there were many examples of primary care and NHS hospital trusts using “delaying tactics in order to circumvent the legal obligations they have to provide treatment and drugs recommended by Nice within three months”. Rawlins urged doctors to “show leadership” by naming primary care and hospital trusts they believe are “breaking the law” by denying patients treatments to which they are entitled. Set up by the government in 1999 as an independent organisation, Nice decides which drugs and treatments are available on the NHS in England and Wales. Rawlins claimed there were “numerous” trusts stalling to allow them to spend money on other things.
http://www.nhs-exposed.com/nhs-trusts-breaking-the-law-by-denying-access-to-treatment/