I’m suprised that nobody has brought in the role of the evil legal-medical malpractice industry, in keeping the cost of drugs and health care so high!
In the US, doctors have to buy expensive malpractice insurance-in the case of neurosurgeons, this can run upwards of $500,000/year! My ex-wife’s oby-gyn quit practicing because the insurance got too expensive!
Of course, you can always have your friendly local lawyer do your appendectomies…
As an American living in London, I had heard all the scare stories about long waits to see doctors and all that. Just two days ago I walked into my doc’s office to try to make an appointment to get this terrible cough I’ve had for the last three days looked at.
Now, the last three times I’ve tried to get something out of the health care industry, I was in the States. They were: 1) Called in to make an appointment to check out a sore throat. Prescribed antibotics by phone. 2) Allergies were bugging me. Prescribed Allegra by phone. 3) Needed Hep-C vaccine for trip abroad. Insurance company refused to pay for it. It cost me about $300.
So, based on my experience, I wasn’t too optimistic about getting any service through this horrible “socialized” healthcare system.
I ended up waiting five minutes to see a doc, had a checkup, and was out of there in 30 minutes flat. On the way out I noted that this clinic offers that same Hep-C vaccine for 30 pounds.
Sign me up. Government may be inefficient, but I’m tired of being a source of profit for insurance companies and the ever-increasing number of for-profit hospitals in the States.
Health Care in Britain and Canada is very hit-and-miss. Depending on where you live, how the government’s budget is doing this year, how powerful the local politicians are, etc., the care can be astoundingly good or astoundingly bad.
Here in Alberta, we had phenomenal health care for a long time, because we’re a wealthy province, and because our government was running big deficits anyway. Politicians were buying re-election by having hospitals built all over the place, to the point where a new hospital would be going up across the street from another one that only had 50% of its beds filled.
Then times got hard, and we had to cut healthcare funding to the bone and close most of those hospitals. A terrible waste. Then we were overstaffed with nurses, and layed them off by the thousands. Now we have a nursing shortage and a shortage of beds.
So it goes in a socialist system. If you look at any ‘managed’ economy you usually see the same cycle of oversupply and shortages, because the top-down management system doesn’t work in a fine-tuned way.
You make it sound like the same problems don’t occur in capitalist systems. I work for a manufacturer, and our business is pretty hit and miss, depending on different factors but nonetheless fluctuating so that at times, there are tremendous shortages of our product, and at time we’re liquidating huge overstock in our warehouse. This is normal for our operations, and we do $100 million a year in business.
I’m reminded of a story on 20-20 I saw several years ago, about mental health institutions that were collecting reports of local people acting in any way unbalanced: the hospital sent the police to compell the person to a psychiatric evaluation, where they were legally committed to the institution if it was even borderline possible. This way, the hospital brought in revenue from insurance, and defended it under laws that remove a person’s rights when they can be judged insane. It was fundraising for poor hospitals and nothing more.
This is finely tuned?
Never attribute to an -ism anything more easily explained by common, human stupidity.
dhanson,
I asked earlier - how does a private system treat poor people who become chronically ill?
Can insurance companies refuse to cover such people?
If you do have a safety net, isn’t that socialism?