This is in the pit only because it was born in the pit originally.
In this thread I asked John about an assertion he made. I guess he never saw it, so I’m brining it to his attention, because I am genuinely interested in his response.
He said:
John: Could you please explain the underlined part of your statement, and what you mean? I just can’t imagine how universal health care could in any way screw the poor
a. more than it would screw you
and/or
b. more than they are getting screwed already
My understanding of universal health care is that the group of people who would unquestionably benefit are the poor. Everyone else, maybe some downside. The poor? None.
I’m not John, but if you are interested in a scholarly look at his viewpoint, see this article from the Cato Institute:
There are several kinds of proposals, but the one most damaging to the poor and elderly is called “Single Payer”, and is the one being proposed by Wellstone and others. From their report:
And so on…
The elderly will pay more. Corporations will pass their costs on to their consumers (meaning that prices at WalMart will increase). Self-employed people, who already struggle, would pay more. And people who ordinarily fuel the economy with investments will have to put that money into the health-care pot.
From that study, which was done in 1992 by the way, I read this statistic. Just using this as an example.
Would anyone here from Canada offer any current information as to whether it takes you 5 months from the time you call your GYN until you get your pap smear? I’m not offering an opinion, just asking for current info.
So does PNHP. If, y’know, Lib would like to study the matter.
(NOTE: I believe both LibandStoid have studied the matter already. I just thought I’d offer a partisan viewpoint from the “other” side of the issue.)
I’m curious-what is the average wait time in the U.S. for these procedures if one is poor and has no insurance? What might the average wait time be if all government health programs were stopped?
Well, considering how efficiently Social Security, the DMV, and other gov’t “services” are run, I shudder to think what would happen if they got their noses in my health care.
For God’s sake, it takes two years to built a courthouse or a school administration building, but it takes three months to build a fast food restaurant. I don’t want to have to rely on the gov’t for my health care.
My mother is a poor Canadian. She is going blind. She’s 68 years old and is suffering from cataracts and other eye problems. Last year, she had internal bleeding in an eye which was destroying eye tissue. The sooner she could get treatment, the better it would be for her eye.
I don’t remember the exact time interval, but it took her weeks to get in to see a specialist, and then she was scheduled for surgery something like three months down the road. On the day she was supposed to go, her ride didn’t show up (she had to go to another city for the surgery), and since she could no longer see, she couldn’t get herself there. Well, the hospital got pissed at her for missing her appointment, and in retribution scheduled her next surgery date for six months down the road.
She finally got that surgery and stopped the internal bleeding, but she’s almost completely lost the use of that eye. Her other eye was clouded over by cataracts, leaving her without the abilty to manage her little country store any more, so she had to sell it. A couple of months ago she finally got the cataract surgery, but it was screwed up and left her cornea scarred. So she still can’t see. She’s now scheduled for a retinal peel to correct the scarring - two months from now. And after that, she needs another eye procedure that will be months down the road from that.
So she has been effectively blind now for almost two years, unecessarily. That’s how the public health care system treats people who are her age and who have these kinds of problems.
Now compare that to something like LASIK surgery, which is the same kind of procedure but done in private faciities for profit. You can get in for an evaluation for LASIK here within a week or two, get the surgery the next week, and be done, for maybe $1500. If that kind of option was available to my mother, she would have taken it and paid the $1500 even though it’s a lot of money for her. That’s a lot better than two years of blindness.
The UK has had a single payer system for two generations. They must be awfully dumb over there if their needs are being met so poorly. Especially condsidering that the country had a conservative supermajority in Parliament (and no intervening Executive to veto) for eight years. But we all know what a pinko Margaret Thatcher was.
Statscan has a little chart about who is satisfied with their healthcare among Candians, insured Americans and uninsured Americans. I guess the uninsured Americans would be the poor people.
I’m Canadian and I know very few people who complain about health care. I know 4 people who had cataract surgery and had none had complaints about wait times. Any time I hear someone complain about healthcare it’s second or third hand. I know there are people out there who have bad stories, but there are Americans with bad stories too. I’m grateful for my healthcare.
Sam… do you comprehend the difference between making difficult choices with money you have…and having no choices because you have no money?
I used to be poor. Not lower income, not on a budget, poor. If you had said this to me when I was in that position, it would have been a tossup whether to laugh in your face or spit in it.
I’ve got to gig you on one thing Sam. Your mother HAD the option of purchasing LASIK if desired. A short plane ride and she could have had it done in a day or two. I had it done on Jan 2, 2001 and it took less than two weeks and $2500 to get it done.
Two points here:
I agree with the argument that if some form of NHS (Canadian model or English model) is so terrible then it would have been done away with some time ago.
I devoutly believe that some form of NHS will be in place in the United States within 20 years. Whether this is good or bad from your political point of view is utterly irrelevant. Utterly. As healthcare continues to become more expensive both to employers and individuals the political demand for something to rein in health care costs will become one of the decisive issues of congressional campaigns. At some point shortly it will become ‘don’t want the government to provide health care then you lose’ in terms of congressional races.
As an aside I’ve been of the growing opinion that insurance plays a role in actually increasing the size of healthcare’s share of GDP. By setting up a system in which large costs are acceptable because insurance pays for it there’s been less restraint on health care costs than would occur in a natural market. If insurance stopped covering many procedures incentive for those in those fields to find ways to deliver the results at a retail cost would spur some serious innovation. Doctors in specialized fields are no fonder of unemployment than the rest of us. And unemployed they would be if no one could afford to pay for say, an MRI.
Ehhh, my condo was pretty well damaged in last years hurricanes and the association still hasnt gotten it repaired. I’m sure that if I wanted to live in a Walgreens, I could be good to go in 2 weeks – literally.
The one thing they both have in common? The private sector.
One thing gov’t buildings and houses have in common? Custom architecting. While I’m not averse to cookie-cutter gov’t buildings, depending on the cost savings, the large scale and limited land space for many of them would limit cookie cutter architecting.
Stoid, I guarantee you that I’ve been at least as poor as you have been. So let’s not play the, “I’m poorer than you, so you don’t know what it’s like” card, okay?
And if people are so poor that they can’t afford $1500 to keep themselves from going blind, wouldn’t they be generally poor enough to qualify for Medicaid?
In any event, if my mother were in the U.S. she would also qualify for Medicare.
