The figure (it’s 60%, by the way, not 80%, although if you read my previous posts you’d know that already) comes from a Harvard/Ohio State University study in which researchers directly interviewed bankruptcy filers and reviewed their filing statements before labelling each bankruptcy as medical or non-medical.
Perhaps you should try reading it before claiming, “no one knows if that is accurate.”
Yes, I hate it when people conjecture based on statistically suspect bases like… facts.
I think you are getting confused. I don’t disapprove of getting money from strangers at all. I don’t approve of forcing them to help. Go back and read my posts again, this time without all the strawmanning. I have helped and been helped by strangers. I have facilitated strangers helping strangers.
On the otherhand, you and others in this thread are professing a preference for help from strangers rather than a local community, or friends and family, equating the latter with begging. Why? What is wrong with being helped by locals?
I could be wrong, but don’t think people have a problem with charity from the community (and I know people, even Canadians, who have had fundraisers to help pay for things like cancer treatment). But I hate to think that people’s medical care should be dependent on how social they are, how close-knit their community is, and how many people ‘Would have given more, but I just got laid off.’
Refering to taxes as “forcing people to help” is a naked attempt to hide behind rhetoric instead of advancing a substantive argument.
If your kid was dying, would you accept tax-funded assistance to keep them alive even though it means you’re “forcing people to help”? Or would you allow your kid to suffer unnecessarily because you think government healthcare is a bad thing?
Please answer this rather straightforward hypothetical.
Nothing is wrong with seeking help from the community. The problem is that so much help is needed in the first place. Spaghetti dinners would be unnecessary if we are as a national community decided to look out for each other’s health. The most sensible and efficient way doing of that is through taxes, not charity.
Sorry - nice try, but I’ve certainly read this. I’m a member of the NABT, and they regularly publish these kinds of studies.
Because of my somewhat unique persective, I can see many issues with this study. First of all, they managed to verify the nature of debts, for the entire country, by interviewing .87% of all filers for that time period? Seems like a small sample when talking about such complex issues.
In addition, 71.9% of that vaunted 60% said “medical bills/problems” were the reason for the bankruptcy. So, they took the Debtors word for it? Could not the actual problem be that they had $600 in monthly car payments, and $26K in credit card debt, when the medical problem happened? Isn’t that more of a problem with spending habits and lack of savings?
And, although this is IMHO territory, 5.7% of these people has to take out a mortgage for medical bills, which is counted as part of the 60%. I’m not seeing a terrible problem with that. Isn’t that a way to pay for services rendered?
Look, as I stated above, I recognize that people are having serious financial problems due to medical problems. But turning a useful study of bankruptcy statistics into crazy, handwaving “look at THIS” ammunition for your side is a little dishonest.
Yes, they interviewed a sub-sample of the whole. If you are a biology teacher, you are surely familiar with this methodology. There are calculations that can be made to figure the number of samples to take in order to ensure a statistically valid conclusion.
You actually quoted Really Not All that Bright, but I’ll re-post it in bold for you:
Sure. That’s why they called it begging, hustling, and groveling.
You understand that “filing statements” are actually the Schedule F, which lists all unsecured creditors of the Debtor. It requires:
Name and address of Creditor, account number
Date debt was incurred
Amount of debt
Consideration for debt
Now, “consideration” is where a Debtor would say what it’s for. This is limited to statements like “medical bill”, “credit card debt”, “tax penality”, not an exaustive list of how, when and why each debt was incurred. In addition, many Debtors list things like “money owed” with no specific qualifier.
So, no, there is no way to verify exactly what these bills are for from the Schedule F. As I stated above, even things that say “medical debt” are often things like chiropractic care, herbalists, boob jobs and other non-necessary or cosmetic medical debt. And, like airfare to Houston, none of those things would be covered by UHC.
No, because I probably wouldn’t qualify for tax-funded assistance. And although my insurance has a rather high deductible, it would introduce a hardship, but not a backbreaking one. If, in the event my insurance wouldn’t cover the procedure, it becomes a moot issue, because there is no assurance that some sort of government plan or assistance would cover things that insurance doesn’t. In all likelyhood, they will have a similar coverage.
Now, answer this straightforward hypothetical: If your child was dying, and your government program wouldn’t cover the the care because it cost too much for the potential benefits, would you accept local charity from the churches so that your child could live, or would you let your child suffer needless while appealing to strangers in a UHC bureacracy?
Expecting people to pass around collection plates and sell donuts to raise money for basic medical care is no different than expecting them to beg, hustle, and grovel. Do you really think people spend $15 a plate for some dried up pasta because they think it tastes good? No, it’s because someone is pleading for help.
I suspect that the use of these terms is jarring because they aren’t compatible with the Norman Rockwellian images you associated with communities coming together to help members in need. But sometimes you need to call a duck a duck.
Uh, no. That would be 51.7%:
Now, your point that not all medical costs would be covered by UHC (such as lost income due to caring for a family member) is a valid one. However, that particular group is only 6.8%.
A plane ticket to Houston? Non-starter. A $60 plane ticket and a couple of nights’ lodging is not going to bankrupt anyone unless you’re already paying for medical care out of pocket.
I presume you wouldn’t call a mastectomy patient’s boob job “cosmetic”, and while many chiropractors are quacks, many are not. In any case, chiropractic care certainly would be covered by UHC, and cosmetic surgery to correct disfigurement is generally covered.
The complexity of the issues has no bearing on whether or not the population size is significant. It’s not like they’re all beautiful and unique snowflakes; they’re grouped into “medical-related” and “non-medical-related”.
If you were looking deeper, say, at the specific illnesses which cause bankruptcies, then you’d have a point.
Please do not evade the question with this kind of answer. My hypothetical specified that you did qualify for tax-funded assistance. Don’t worry about deductables either, as we both damn well know that is beside the point. You’re given a really simple choice: pay 100% of all costs associated with an expensive procedure that will save your kids life? Or only pay half, using government assistance.
Shit, forget about half. You have the choice of having all costs defrayed by the government.
Which would you do?
This is a no-brainer. My first priority is the life of my child. I could care less if the money came from charity, taxes, or a slot machine in Shorter, Alabama. I’d gladly accept money from my church. I’d also continue to push for UHC so those who aren’t as lucky as me won’t have to worry about paying for healthcare.
None! All Albertans, including myself are free to opt out of provincial health care should they choose to do so. They do not do so. Apparently they have don’t have the animosity towards other people you seem to have.
Not that I’d care if they did. Enlightened self-interest is what this is about. I don’t know them, they don’t know me, but I’m sure my tax dollars go to benefit those I would personally dislike; in return, their dollars may well be spent on a hospital bed for me. Pooling our resources reduces costs for everyone. That’s how insurance works. Feelings don’t really enter into it.
I think the problem is this: You see it as paying for health care for others whereas I just see it as paying for health care. I don’t help pay for police services for others, I help pay for police services.
I did not evade your question. I tried my best to ground your hypothetical in actual reality. If you insist on breaking from all reality whatsoever, then your hypothetical is pointless.
It’s easy to come up with unrealistic hypotheticals:
What if your child was dying and the government program wouldn’t pay for treatment and you couldn’t afford it by yourself because the taxes were so high that you didn’t have any extra income, so you asked churches for help but the members couldn’t because they had paid all their extra income as taxes as well. Would you still insist on providing taxes for gov’t health care and let your child die, or would you fight taxes for gov’t health care so you could afford to treat your child?
Come on. It’s a straight forward hypothetical! 
Well, not bankrupted, maybe, but it could be a serious hardship. Especially since the plane ticket may not be sixty bucks, because the patient has to buy it on short notice. And it may not be a “couple of nights” but a couple of weeks. And the patient may be a child or teen who needs to have a parent along.
Here in Troll Country, however, most similar expenses would be reimbursed from the national insurance fund. If the travel distance is short enough, the patient may be picked up by special bus, or provided with a voucher for a taxi. And some larger hospitals have or are building patient hotels, specifically for patients who don’t need a hospital bed but live too far away to travel home (or, for instance, who would be home alone when that isn’t advisable for medical reasons). So there are solutions, other than having a sick person worry about how to pay for a motel room and the electric bill.
(Contrary to the common view of European countries as small and densely populated, Norway has about 4.5 million people spread out over an area roughly the size of the US’ Eastern Seaboard, with about a quarter of the population in the capital region. Traveling to a hospital in another city, or even abroad, to be treated by a specialist, is not at all uncommon.)
Not at all. That seems to perfectly espouse what I have been stating. People should be able to opt out. They should be able to opt in. The availability of that choice is important. People will often freely give what they would be reticent to do if forced.
The animosity that you speak of is not mine, but rather from the others in this thread, who seem to feel that if you allow people to opt out, then all of them will, and therefore we should force them to participate. Thank you for providing a counter example. People need not be so cynical.
They are forced. They must at least register with AHC (so the Conservatives know how many beds to close), and the default position is that they fall under the provincial system. They have to make an effort to eschew their responsibilities to the society that supports them.
Oddly enough, despite the despotic health care system that some say leads to higher costs and economic hardship, very few do. So UHC, in my experience at least, is not despotic, does not lead to higher costs, and does not lead to job losses as was claimed.
And I disagree. The animosity is yours. You would have people denied health care, a necessity of life. Others in this thread disagree with you, perhaps quite strongly, but I bet they wouldn’t get their noses in slings over your benefitting from their tax dollars.
The question is about ethics. Would you have an ethical problem with using tax dollars to save your child’s life if the alternative meant you’d have to come up with hundreds of thousands of dollars that you do not have? Yes or no.
This is not some fantasy-land hypothetical. It’s clear that you can’t answer it straightforwardly because you’ll either look like an plum fool idiot or a massive hypocrite. We all see this, despite your obfuscation.
Uh huh. Notice how quickly I answered the last hypothetical you posed to me? This even though it has zero applicability to my personal reality since its highly unlikely my healthcare (completely covered by Uncle Sam, I might add) would leave me in the position where I’d need to hit up a church for assistance. And wouldn’t you know, I don’t even have a kid, but I somehow managed to answer your hypothetical! Uncanny, I tells ya.
Oh phew. I thought it was a big problem. But it’s only 30% of bankruptcies. That’s cool.
I’m calling bullshit on this claim.
Likewise with the latest hypothetical I posed to you. So what’s the point?