I do understand people like you. You feel that the rest of us owe you something, and have no problem with us paying for you. Fuck that.
**
The system work for the majority of people on it. I agree, it needs to be tweaked. The whole malpractice mess needs to be resolved, but can you imagine the gnashing of teeth from the lawyers on that one?
People have no inherent ‘right’ to free healthcare. You, and people like you, are trying to change America from the ‘Land of Opportunity’ to the ‘Land of Guarantees’. The process, of course, involves rasing taxes by quite a bit, and getting the ever-so-efficient gov’t intimately involved in our lives, but hey, you want free heathcare. Can’t make an omelette with breaking a few (other peoples) eggs!
I’m not trying to be “inhuman” here, but franklly, Sven, the majority of your posts consist of “woe is me, I don’t have a job”. I live fairly close to Santa Cruz. If you’d like, you can e-mail me your resume and I’ll get you a job, with health benefits, in a few weeks, max. I’m quite serious about that.
Keep in mind that these countries with “better” health care than the US have a net outflow of people emmigrating to the US. We must be doing something right here, although you’d never know it from many of the posts one reads on this board. If we turned the US into Canada, where would all the Canadians go when they wanted to get jobs?
The vast majority of the medical staff where I work was trained in Canada and/or Great Britain. But they are all practicing in the US. Why? Well, they make more money! When a political discussion comes up about socialized medicine, guess which side they are on? Powerful lobby there.
Then think of all the folks employed in the insurance industry. Powerful lobby there.
Like was already brought up by Jonathan Chance and others, in America the healthcare consumer is seldom the healthcare payer, so there is no incentive to keep bills lower.
Another point I want to bring up: the 40 million is spurious - a portion of those people have no health care coverage becuase they choose not to. Until someone comes up with the figure of how many want healthcare coverage but are unable to get it due to cost, we really can’t even make an argument.
Addressing another point that was brought up: In most states (maybe all - I worked for the largest hospital chain but even they weren’t in all states) the only remedy the provider has for unpaid bills is to report it to the credit bureau. No forcing bankruptcy, no seizing property, no garnishing wages.
I’m a little confused by your post.
Getting treatment here is not dependent on how much money one has. It’s more dependent on whether you have health insurance coverage, which depends mostly on whether your employer provides it, the case with most employers of size. It is quite possible to be far from wealthy, but fortunate enough to be able to have health insurance paid for with a modest deduction from your paycheck and a small co-payment for each doctor’s visit.
If you are mostly without resources for whatever reason, many medical centers provide charity care. To qualify for this one does have to go through some bureaucracy to demonstrate that you really are without resources. This is to prevent fraud, obviously.
There are also federal programs such as Medicaid that cover very low-income people. Many states have programs to try to assure that the children of low-income parents have medical care available. Organizations such as Planned Parenthood will provide routine gynocological care, with fees based on income.
What does fall through the cracks are the needs of those whose income is low, but not low enough to qualify for charity care, Medicaid or other programs. In emergency situations, as has been thoroughly explained in other posts, care will be provided and payment looked for later. However, routine and preventive medical care and non-emergency care will be a problem. IMHO this is one major issue here. A working person who can’t afford insurance will tend to skip preventive and other care that may well ead to more expensive care needed later.
What scares many people is this: HMOs were supposed to be a boon to the general population and a means of controlling health costs. Instead, many people found that these organizations limited their options and placed barriers to getting the care when and where they wanted. In some cases the very best doctors were not associated with any HMO. Patients found themselves having to switch to new doctors that they did not have confidence in. Continuity of care became a problem. Treatments that doctors and patients considered necessary were sometimes deemed unnecessary by HMOs. People have gone through years of appeals to get legitimate payments made by HMOs. Now, most governments are believed to be filled with bureaucrats and arcane rules and regulations. Anyone who fills out an income tax return knows that. They imagine that health care payment would become even more convoluted and arbitrary, with less chance of appeal. They envision it as a super-sized HMO of the worst kind.
In addition, people know that sometimes doctors and patients opt for tests and treatments that turn out not to be, strictly speaking, necessary. They look at the number of people who seek antibiotics for viral colds, or tests done “just in case,” or to minimize the doctor’s liability if something goes wrong. These are often people who believe that since it’s covered by insurance, it costs nothing, and they need not worry about cost vs. benefit. So we are anxious that if the government covered everything, that even more people would go through unnecessary treatments, that health care costs would rise even faster, and that the taxes on all would go still higher.
Finally, some have a simple fear of government involvement in the intimate details of their lives. Whether this is justified or not is a separate issue, but it is not without reason.
The concern about government inefficiency, bureaucracy and control is a major factor.
Check the 2000 census figures John. There are fewer Australian-born people living in the USA than vice versa (61 K versus 90 K).
Brutus,
It will only ever be the ‘Land of Opportunity’ for some people. Some people have mental illnesses or physical illnesses and will not ever be employed and it aint their fault. I’m pleased to hear that you are employable but try to imagine what it is like for others.
[list=1]
[li]Canada (and, I assume, other countries with socialized insurance–Canada does not have socialized medicine) lack a lot of funding for big-ticket medicine: MRIs, advanced cancer treatments, radical surgeries, etc. A millionaire with a headache gets an MRI that afternoon; a Canadian waits months for one. While that may not seem like a bad thing to limit expensive treatments that are more about convenience than about health, consider that all new medicines and procedures start as radical, big-ticket medicine. The U.S. is the source of a lot of that, because the medical system overall can afford it. Without somebody having a system like the U.S., medical progress slows down.[/li]
[li]In the U.S., where employers are usually responsible for health care, it creates an incentive for employers to provide bad health care: to not hire or to constructively discharge employees with high medical costs; to limit treatment for financial concerns, at a cost of the employee’s health; or to coercively deny health care altogether. My employer is self-insured, and there’s constant pressure to “limit our exposure” on benefits costs (fortunately the president of the company views taking good care of employees as a responsibility)[/li][/list=1]
Well there are two things wrong with those stats. Since the US has roughly 10x the people of Australia, an imbalance of 10x would be needed to make the situation “equal”. But I’m talking about immigrants, not temporary expats.
Well, according to onestudy, medical bills are a factor in roughly half the personal bankruptcies (Chapters 7 & 13) in the US. Assuming that these bankruptcy filings aren’t fraudulent, I’d say it happens more frequently than your statement implies.
Medical progress does slow down, but you have to ask what medical progress is that? For example you can find that in America sometimes the advertising budget for the drug is larger than the R&D budget for the drug. In America we have all kinds of anti-depressants as well because they sell well.
Groundbreaking new proceedures are risky and really not that good of an idea to profit compared to something like another anti-depressant.
Health insurance depends. If it is just you as an individual who is in their 30s and doesnt smoke, health insurance with a high (5k or so) deductible is about $35 a month. With a family of 5 insurance with a high deductible is about 300 a month.
We also pay taxes for medicaid & medicare. i think those come to 500 billion a year together. So that is about $2778 in taxes (there are 180 million taxpayers in the US) per taxpayer for medicaid & medicare.
So if you have a family to support, your medical insurance & medicaid/medicare taxes come to about $6378 a year.
Think again. Your statement just doesn’t make sense.
Let’s take an example. the country with the smallest population (apart from the Vatican) is a Pacific island (Tuvalu? Can’t remember which one…) with around 10 000 people living there. So, roughly, the US has 28 000 times more people. Let’s assume that there’s one Tuvalian emigrating to the US, and 20 000 americans emigrating to Tuvalu. According to your “reasonning” you would still state that Tuvalians are more eager to emigrate to the US than American people to Tuvalu.
Of course, one should compare the actual numbers. People are less likely to emigrate to a small country, and a small country with a low population is unlikely to send out many immigrants. So, if 10 000 american emigrate to some small country and 2 000 people from this small country emigrate to the US, you can tell that this country is more attractive to american citizens than the US for the citizens of this small country.
As for the difference between immigrants and temporary expats, it’s not necessarily that easy to tell them apart. Some “temporary expats” tend to stay essentially forever. You can’t even compare the figures for citizens in the host country who were born in a foreign country, because that would rule out many actual immigrants who never get citizenship, either by choice (they think that a “green card” is perfectly fine, or they’re illegal aliens), either because becoming a citizen in one country is way easier than in another (look for example at Germany, with plenty of third-generation immigrants who still aren’t German citizens despite their dad and grandad having been living there).
It would be more costly. If the government runs directly an insurance scheme for these 40 millions people, it will have to pay for their healthcare expenses. If it hands them out the money for them to buy private insurances, it will have to pay for their healthcare expenses plus the profit made by the private insurance companies. Doesn’t seem a very bright idea to me.
It could makes sense only if the private insurance companies were significantly more efficient than the government-run insurance scheme, i.e. , that providing the same level of service, their cost + their profit would be lower than the cost of the government-run system without profit. And that’s a pretty big assumption, especially since the US private healthcare system seems to be less cost-efficient than the other develloped countries’ public healthcare systems (though of course 1) this comparison involves all aspects of healthcare, and what we would need to compare is the cost of the insurance scheme alone and 2) you can’t really make a valid general assumption with only one counter-example)
Thanks to CoL and amarone for answering. According to the link provided by amarone, “Overall, Americans spent an unprecedented $1.42 trillion on healthcare in 2001, which averages out to $5,035 per person, according to a federal report released Wednesday. [January, 2003, my note]”.
Doing some googling I found the average income in the US to be about 30,200 in 2002, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Sorry for asking this (slight hijack) but at least I want to understand the numbers. If we say that the total paid in insurance & tax is equal to the consumption (1.42 trillion), and there is 180 million taxpayers (we presume the healthcare is bought by those who pay taxes), then the average cost per taxpayer is $7,888 (those $5035 per person is the average consumption in a 282 million population)
So, since the average income is $30.200, taxpayers on average contributes 26% of their income to healthcare.
Can this be correct, or am I way off? It does sound like a lot of money.
That is a different case. If a person absolutely cannot under any condition work, then the largesse of the state is a valid option.
A better option would be families taking care of there own, but modern Western culture seems to encourage the seperation of one generation from the next. How many people ignore the option of having their parents or grandparents live with them? I know, I know, how dare they put a crimp in our lifestyle!, but still, the saving recognized by having several people split the bill can often leave enough for insurance to be aquired. Beats mooching off me.
Brutus, John Mace et al, I do not see why you are resisting a the idea of a government providing a minimum good standard of healthcare to it’s people.
The government is there to look after all its citizens. Thats why they are elected.
Private health care companies are not there to look after the wellbeing of everyone in society - it is not profitable. So the government has to do it - because it is benefitial to society as well as all individuals.
Why stop at health care? antechinus, the same argument could be made for any industry. Lets shut down the automotive industry and let the government make all our cars and SUV’s. The government providing “free” transportation to all of society as well as individuals would certainly be better than the evil companies that are only interested in terrible profits, right?
That way, it would be fair. The mean old millionaire would have to wait in line for his checkup like everyone else. And he and even sven would be driving the same government manufactured car.
