You know, it would have taken you a whole 30 seconds to google Universal Health Care, and see the systems where the government only provides the insurance aspect, allowing for plenty of private hospitals/clinics/doctors/labs to offer service, to find out that is blatantly wrong.
Clothahump has no youse for your Golgoe, mortal!
And the French, Dutch, German, etc…systems don’t meet this description at all and also work well enough.
There isn’t any need to have every doctor, etc… become a state employee to implement an UHC system, and stating otherwise only underlines Clothahump’s ignorance.
My word, just what do you base that claim on?
I was really pleased to see this today: Hope for Alzheimer’s treatment as researchers find licensed drugs halt brain degeneration
This is now 2 years on from the basic research. What’s brilliant is that it’s a compound of two proven human-proof drugs.
It’s not American so it probably doesn’t count as progress though.
If the US were to cut its fucking defense budget in half, we would have more than enough financing to enact UHC on an annual basis.
That’s what drives me up the wall whenever the inevitable conservative “we can’t afford UHC” retort invariably arises.
Bullshit, if the US can afford a blank check to the military every fucking year, then we can afford to take care of our own Gawddamned people.
Lemme see, the budget for medicare 2015 is $600 billion. The population of the US is 320 million.
The UK spent $180 billion providing UHC for 64 million people. Scale that up, you’d need an extra $300 billion to provide the same funds per person (although that’s silly, as you’d really expect economies of scale would save you some money)
The US allocated $1.1 trillion for defence for 2015. So if you allocated 1/3 of that to health, you’d have more than enough money.
But for some reason socialised military is perfectly acceptable, while socialised medicine is a terrible thing.
Then have a look at this little effort from Cuba:
Or last week’s one from the UK about synthetic blood trials
Just as well the US is doing all the heavy lifting in medical research, eh.
BOOM!
This is the problem. 15% of the population doesn’t have access to healthcare and the other 85% said “we don’t care about you, fuck off”. So let the 85% keep their “insurance”. Give the 15% government provided healthcare. Win-win.
In 2010:
Number uninsured at the time of interview: 44.3 million
Percent uninsured at the time of interview: 16.6%
Percent with **private** insurance at the time of interview: 61.0%
I am sorry, I appreciate your position. But I don’t think you fully grasp the enormity of US healthcare spending and waste. The US military budget is just over 4 % of GDP. A bit over 600 billion dollars.
US healthcare is almost 19 % of GDP, about 2,8 trillion dollars. Or 2 800 billion. This is roughly double what other nations spen, as a fraction of GDP or on a per person basis. So half of that is waste. 1 400 billion dollars. Which is more than twice the US military budget.
Also, the entire worlds biomedical research budget is about 300 billion I seem to remember.
The problem is, the US is much more expensive per person than any other nations. Per person, the US spends about 8600 $ per year. That is about 4200 public and 4400 private money.
The UK spends about 2900 public and 500 private per person.
The point of that is that the US is already spending more per person than the UK spends to get the NHS. Only US public spending only covers 28 % of the population. And in fact, the US government spends more per citizen than the vast majority of developed nations do on full universal health care. To cover those 28 %.
That is why the system needs fixing, not more money spent.
Administration is anything that health insurance companies do that isn’t dollars paid out as claims. Included are the examples of counseling and prescription drug followups (A lot of older nurses come to work for the health insurance company I work for when they’d rather talk to patients all day rather than empty bedpans), but things like employee salaries, the light bill, and profits (if they’re a for-profit company).
You’ll note that I excluded private spending (deliberately), purely to point out that on medicare you’re already spending 2/3 of what would be required for UHC.
You’d have thought that all the people out there, paying thousands of their own money each year for private care, would have been interested in getting it for free. The issue appears to be one of mindset - there’s some hideous revulsion at the idea that poor people would also be properly covered.
It really is very strange indeed.
Interesting, the terms in which this is debated in the US. In Britain, in public debate it is an essentially moral question: “I am my brother’s keeper”, and all that (to the point that one exasperated Tory once said the NHS is the closest thing to a religion most Britons have).
But in pragmatic fiscal terms, it has actually served as a massive cost containment exercise: a near-monopsonist customer dominating those suppliers it doesn’t directly own (essentially, primary care doctors, dentists, etc., and the big pharma and medical supplies companies). No-one’s prevented from paying their own money on private medical care or private insurance, but the NHS is big enough and adequate enough for most people - crucially, the tax-paying middle classes - to be broadly satisfied enough to take it for granted that that’s what you use.
On the other hand, it is very much the child of its time (1948): just at the point where antibiotics were coming in, where public health issues were to do with bad housing, industrial disease and accidents (rather than personal lifestyle issues, like smoking and obesity - the latter hardly an issue after nearly ten years of food rationing), where no-one foresaw the massive increase in expensive techniques and equipment leading to increased longevity and an extended period of frail old age, and where government mobilisation of national resources had pulled the country through a war that had very nearly been lost through the old ways and attitudes. They really did believe that, once the backlog of untreated medical conditions had been cleared, costs would reduce overall and national productivity would increase to pay for it all with ease. We’re in a very different world now.
One factor you’ve not discussed, I think, is the sheer size of the US. Britain is a small, densely populated country. We do have problems with “underdoctored” rural areas, but few people are that far from a large enough city to support a major hospital. I’m guessing that there would be massive disparities in cost to provide medical services in the different areas of the US?
Another factor may be that, from what I hear, you have itemised bills, where the NHS works on the basis of block contracts and budgets per patient or per course of treatment, rather than setting up a separate accounting transaction for every test, pill, bandage and patient transfer. But if too many people have a vested interest in maintaining that sort of thing, it must be hard to take it away from them by legislation, and market forces are unlikely to do it - being sick and in pain is not the best place to start being a discerning, pick-and-choose customer for services you haven’t had years of medical education to evaluate.
Inpatient hospital reimbursement has already moved to per patient per course of treatment with DRGs, but they still tally up ever little pill in case it winds up the patient is private pay.
Well, of course there’s Canada as the counterexample to that – geographically even larger than the US and with one-tenth the population, and universal health care works just fine.
Bone, are you ever coming back to defend the whole “No other country demonstrated success in R&D and innovation” claim?
It will also be interesting how UHC in places like Canada explore the potential with drones - always the pressure in UHC systems to save costs so services can go further.
Actually — as always, since I am fond of the Germans — I do think one country developed science and discovery at a rate that outstripped their competitors. But that was them and in the 19th century particularly.
And their competitors at the time were pretty good at scientific discovery, particularly France, Italy and Britain, so being top wasn’t easy compared to, say, 300 AD. ( And the 19th century was such a physically uncomfortable time compared to now, since those inventions and outcomes were necessarily not extant. )