In his (limited) defense, the “uninsured Canadians” point was likely just imprecise phrasing used in a questionable analogy; I don’t think he meant to imply the existence of uninsured Canadians per se.
If so, I wish he’d just say so.
In other news, who needs electric light when gas works so well.
Have I missed it or is the ACA not an issue in this election- has it got to a kind of critical mass of time/experience/knowledge now where there’s no value in opposing the fundamentals?
Because a catastrophic plan typically doesn’t cover anything until the large deductible is paid. Your claim that that is no different from an Obamacare plan is bullshit; even the lowest-tier Obamacare plans have all kinds of preventive and routine care things — i.e. the exact things that uninsured people couldn’t get before, even from an ER, and the exact things that do the most to reduce the overall cost of healthcare and the most to enhance quality of life — with either zero or a very small co-pay, not subject to deductible.
In fact, that is the reason that some people couldn’t keep their old plans, and have been wailing about it. They were shitty plans, but since they hadn’t been sick or injured, they didn’t know how shitty they were. Yes, they pay more now, but the plans are much better if they ever actually have to use them.
Plus there’s no pre-existing condition clause that lets insurance companies cancel your policy without warning, once you make a claim and they put their team of “researchers” on your case to find some little detail you left out of your medical history. Plus there’s a yearly and lifetime cap on what you pay, so even a serious, long-term illness won’t bankrupt you.
Hope that helps.
It’s also what people with insurance sometimes do. When I had a UTI earlier this year, I went to a walk-in clinic. Sure, I could have seen my PCP, but although she’s a terrific doctor, she usually has a long wait to get in to see her, sometimes even when I have an appointment. I was in and out of the walk-in clinic with a bottle of antibiotics in less than an hour.
Really I think that except for the treatment of chronic conditions, the walk-in clinic is the way to go. Even with insurance if you have the typical overbooked PCP.
If I call my primary care doctor’s office with an urgent problem, their STANDARD advice is to head to the urgent care clinic (or the ER); if it’s slightly less urgent, they can probably fit me in with her physician’s assistant in two or three days. If I really want to see the doctor herself, two weeks is about par for the course, and that’s with good insurance. (For routine physicals and the like, figure two months.) From what I hear from friends and co-workers, these are pretty typical waiting times in the capital city of Kansas. Where are these places where people get to see the doctor within a day?
London 
I think it varies between Practices but mine runs a combination of appointments and turn up and wait - I like to see the same GP so either I wait for 2 weeks (for an appointment), or for an hour in Reception (she work through the appointments first then has open Surgery).
The GP’s work until the Reception is clear: Boom 10% GDP
Seattle. Stabbed myself with a screwdriver and let it get infected. My PCP clinic saw me immediately for treatment and a later follow up.
I’m in St. Louis and can pretty typically see my PCP in one or two days if I’m sick. My kids’ pediatricians have always had slots for sick kids and I’ve never had to wait at all to see them.
I see a number of family practices in Topeka that advertise same-day appointments.
When I lived in (very, very rich) Redmond, WA, same-day appointments were typical. It was culture shock moving to a small town (very, very, less rich) in Oregon, where same-month appointments are uncommon.
And they’re less well-equipped in general: the Urgent Care sites here don’t have X-ray, MRI, or CT scanning available; they send you to the ER for that sort of stuff. In Redmond, you could practically get an MRI at a convenience store’s first aid kit.
Yeah, I go to one of those family practices in Topeka that advertises same-day appointments. They don’t mean you’ll get to see your doctor the same day; they mean they’ll fit you in at the urgent-care clinic or with the duty PA/ARNP that day. That’s certainly nice, but it’s not the same thing as seeing your regular physician.
Lately I’ve been hauling an elderly relative to appointments at a different practice; said relative has lots of health problems, and we’ve had to obtain short-notice appointments a number of times recently. It’s always with the duty PA, who then decides if you really need to be seen by the doctor himself, usually sometime next week. Again, it’s nice to be able to obtain an appointment within a few hours, but it’s with somebody who wasn’t the one who saw you last time and won’t be the one to see you next time, which gets to be a real drag when trying to explain complex interlinked problems.
Since people are sharing experiences… I’m an American in New Zealand and I was out with a Kiwi friend at a concert and she broke her leg. Took her to the emergency room and everything is paid for by the government, she doesn’t have to have insurance. All of her treatments, xrays, splints, casts, wheel chair, paid for by government.
She was disappointed though, because the government no longer sends people to your house for free to cook and clean for you while you recover. Evidently they used to do that and it was free but they’ve stopped.
I think anyone who doesn’t believe the US should have a universal healthcare system should watch this video about a woman from the US who immigrated to Australia, even though she didn’t want to leave her family, because she had a health problem that bankrupted her parents and couldn’t get insurance in the US. She discusses the differences in the systems and what her healthcare is like etc… Australia has really taken care of her as a citizen, and America did not. US Healthcare VS. Australian Healthcare - YouTube
What’s that phrase … something about the imperial US military spending $hundreds of billions each year protecting poverty, injustice, homelessness, etc, at home
^ This.
Actually, death is the most expensive part of our healthcare, even when we are insured. Doctors are taught…and get paid for…to give ascmuch care as possible. They will carry out expensive procedures to give just weeks or days more of life.
Bring back the death panels!
A lot of the crappy insurance plans that didn’t meet the standards of the ACA weren’t catastrophic plans. They were the opposite of catastrophic plans and covered things like doctor visits and prescriptions with very low deductibles and copays. And they were cheap and they were frequently offered by businesses such as Walmart and McDonalds that hired a lot of low wage employees. These people thought they had insurance for something like $50 a month.
But there was a catch. These plans weren’t really insurance plans, they were products designed to help people with everyday medical expenses. And the maximum benefit was something ridiculously low, like $2000 a year.
And it’s easy to see why a person who never had a serious health problem would love this plan, it was super cheap and it seemed to cover everything. Those who needed real healthcare had some rude awakenings when they discovered they didn’t really have insurance, but a lt of people never had that awakening and were mad when their great cheap “insurance” got canceled.