So what happens to you if you don’t have a church congregation to grovel to? Or a large group of friends?
Charity is not an acceptable substitute for the collective provision of governmental services, but unfortunately there are too many that believe this.
I’d rather have a parent thinking about how to make sure their child gets the best possible treatment then how to pay medical bills. Let alone how to make sure that the family doesn’t lose their home because they can’t.
Some of us think children are important even when they aren’t in the womb.
More like this: there is only one means of effectively and efficiently transforming the method by which healthcare is made available to Americans, and that’s through a radical shift in the means by which it is funded, as well as mandated price controls, which can only come via the government. Anything else is only going to shuffle the problems around.
Yes, in this instance, taxation is better than charity, if taxation is the funding mechanism for a healthcare program that alleviates the need for families in the midst of the turmoil of a cancer fight or the need for an organ transplant to split their focus between the care for their ill family member and running around all over the place to try to raise money for tests and treatments that cost 2 to 3 times more for them than anyone else in the world.
Remember, the vast majority of Americans have some form of health insurance. These fundraisers, these charitable appeals are being conducted by people with insurance because our insurance system is so desperately broken that even people with coverage have to have spaghetti dinners and pancake breakfasts to avoid financial ruin when an illness arises.
Charity isn’t doing it and insurance isn’t doing it. The majority of Americans declaring bankruptcy are doing so because of medical bills and the vast majority of those people had insurance. The private system has failed us entirely. You’re damned right, in this situation, taxation is better than charity. Sadly, because of people like you, it’s not even going to be an option. And people like me, who don’t have a story that’s fundraiser worthy but don’t have and can’t get insurance? Well, screw us.
How fucking sanctimonious can you be? Give me a fucking break - “Some of us think children are important, blah, blah, blah…”
So now I’m a fucking pro-lifer? You may think your mind-reading powers are amazing, but they’re dead wrong.
Oh go fuck yourself.
I’ve actually known people personally who have in fact gone bankrupct because a child had a serious illness. Positions like yours truly and viscerally disgust me. It is bad enough coping with a child who has a serious illness. As the mother of a six year old daughter I cannot begin to imagine such pain.
It is inexcusable that a parent should have to worry about finances on top of everything else.
People like you are indeed what’s wrong with this country.
He didn’t say “in part”.
Using your logic, he could have said “relying on Republicans”. Because, you know, my neighbor Stan thinks its a good idea.
Idiotic.
Hey! Me too!
Cousin Joshua - born without a portion of his brain - currently has made it 17 years, completely and totally disabled
Cousin Danielle - 14, has leukemia
Cousin Michelle - Type 1 diabetes
Mom - lung cancer, currently dead
Uncle, Grandmother x2, various friends - cancer, some dead, some made it
So, since you have some kind of inside track, please explain to me how I don’t know anything about it?
I am not rehashing the UHC debate here in this thread. You are welcome to search one of the threads about UHC on this board I have contributed to and read my various arguments.
In addition, as part of my job, I have spent the last twelve years reviewing bankruptcy petitions. In my district (ND Indiana), I can tell you that less than 30% of bankruptcies are caused by medical bills. I review at least 80 new filings a month, and the main cause is credit card debt.
Yes, our health care system needs some serious reform. However, there are very serious questions, economically, Constitutionally, morally and practically that the current UHC bills being pushed by the government cannot or will not answer. I see no reason why we cannot slowly and carefully enact reform, directed at both insurance and doctors, and employers, patients and the government, in order to arrive at a good solution.
Remember - about 80% of Americans are satisfied with their healthcare. It is just as terrible for the government to take away by force their options, as it is a medical crisis that takes away the option of a patient.
I would love for this to be as easy as “Can’t someone else do it?” But it can’t. And no amount of self-righteous hand-wringing or ignoring the reality of a complex economic system will make it so.
Every single other fucking country does it better than we do.
They live longer than we do and they pay less for it.
What we have simply doesn’t work. It doesn’t cover the whole population. It ties your job to your access to health care. It overfunds end of life care and ignores preventative medicine.
Our system sucks. Our system is expensive, ineffecient and frankly cruel.
You can be reasonably satisfied with your own health care here and still recognize all of those statements as facts.
Slowly my ass.
The system needs to be fixed and it needs to be fixed yesterday.
Don’t keep your mouth shut. The only way ignorance can be fought is if people are actually exposed to opposing viewpoints.
I work for the government, another industry in which other people are jealous of our benefits package. Another government attorney I know recently had a recurrence of her cancer (not sure the exact type but it’s rare and abdominally based–she went in for liposuction after losing nearly 50 lbs but being unable to get rid of her “belly fat” and they found out her “belly fat” was a 13-lb tumor). Even though we have a cutting-edge cancer center in town, they can’t handle it, so she has to fly to…Houston, I believe, for treatment. Her insurance does cover this treatment, amazingly (most others would consider it out of network, I think) but what it does not cover is the transportation and lodging when she’s out of town at the only place that has the remotest chance of keeping her above ground. Poor woman.
You know, it’s funny, I bet the woman I mentioned above is putting a whole lot of hotel room stays and flights on her credit card. Would you realize that this was for cancer treatment instead of a bunch of vacations? Probably not.
Yeah! I mean, what has the government ever done for us?
My neighborhood doesn’t even have a decent aqueduct.
This is the best you can come up with and you’re calling someone else stupid?
Quibbling over whether taxation is kindness or not makes you look pretty damn dumb, but if you want a scooby snack for making that point, I’ll throw you one.
Just out of curiosity, how many benefits for complete strangers have you attended?
I just went to one two weeks ago. It was a fundraising event for a hospital in rural Haiti.
Total strangers help each other out all the time. It’s called charity.
That was my first thought. Your five year old kid is dying, but just put that on hold for a second, because these good people need a show of your grovelling gratitude.
And would this be a good time to ask what, exactly, is a spaghetti dinner? (yes yes, I get the eating spaghetti part, I just don’t get how it pays medical bills).
SanVito
Two parents survived cancer. No financial hardship. No charity. No medical bills. NHS.
“Well, Billy, the bad news is your tumor has metastasized, the hospital wants us out by the end of the day, and we can’t afford to pay for your chemo… the good news is there’s a *lot *of leftover spaghetti!”
It’s a pretty common thing around here to see posters in places like grocery store lobbies that are trying to get people to come to the proverbial “spaghetti dinner” that benefits someone who has some horrible disease. Typically they have a picture of the person, and an explanation of what’s wrong (“5-year-old Billy has leukemia and his parents have no insurance.”) The idea is that a group of volunteers get together at a church or some other place, make a bunch of spaghetti (or lasagna or burgers or whatever), people come to the dinner, pay maybe $15 per dinner, and because it’s a donated facility and volunteers make the food, the bulk of that $15 goes to the person who is sick or their family.
There is always at least one of these posters in my local grocery store. Sometimes there’s more than one.
I’ve often thought about starting a thread here to see if anyone in countries that have universal health care ever see advertisements for spaghetti dinner fundraisers in their grocery stores, but I’m afraid the answer would be too depressing. I fucking hate that I live in a country where we think it’s OK that sick people have to organize charitable events in order to pay their bills.
Do you go to every one you find out about?
That one started out much worse: 72% said yes. I claim victory for driving down the yes vote by 24% - by God, I spent parts of three whole days on there trying to explain to people that 31,000 scientists isn’t very many.
You don’t care to participate in unscientific polling… but you are perfectly happy to throw out your own even-less-scientific anectdotal evidence. Right, that makes perfect sense.
Let me clue you in on something: no matter how popular you are, your Facebook friend list is not a statistically significant population. Now, granted, Facebook polls tend to be ridiculous (rightward-slanted) leading questions, and they’re self-selecting, but they’re still a million times more scientific than “man, my friends are all in the tank for Obama!”
What jobs would be lost? The number of jobs in the healthcare industry would go up significantly, since the number of people who are financially able to obtain care would go up. A number of jobs in the health insurance industry might be lost eventually, but not under any current proposal.
Economic stagnation? Yes, reduced lost work hours due to illness and a 60% reduction in bankruptcy filings are bound to cause economic stagnation. Not to mention the competitive disadvantage American employers will no longer be at when they don’t have to provide health insurance to their employees.
Wasting dollars on government administration? Medicare overhead costs account for 3% of its budget. Private health insurance overhead hovers around the 10% mark. Why are you so keen on wasting dollars on private administration?
Do you?
I’m curious. What are you trying to accomplish with this chess move? It doesn’t look to be a winning strategy, just sayin.
I’m well aware of that article. It is quite good, but maybe you missed the bits about the premiums and out-of-pocket expenses that those 5 countries have. For example, Germans pay on average almost $10,000 a year for their healthcare. You don’t think that constitutes a financial hardship? You could have your ER trip every year for that much!
Or why would $10,000 a year in premiums not be a hardship, but paying $5000K out of pocket for a single incident is?