Can we stop with this please? Every government ever instituted since the beginning of governments has collected tax in one form or the other. Every tax is to some degree a transfer of wealth. Look around the world, do you see any country where people don’t have to pay taxes? Please stop couching your complaining about having to pay taxes in this ridiculous language as if it you’ve found some great metaphysical truth. If you would like to have a discussion about the the appropriate level of taxation and to what degree government should provide services, that’s fine. But all this transfer of wealth by force talk is really just so much hyperbole.
Whoa, hold up fella. I live prety well equidistant from three hospitals in south London. Here are the three:
Farnborough:
http://www.healthplanit.com/pics/hospic7.jpg
Lewisham:
http://www.setwest.co.uk/images/projects/lewisham_hospital1.jpg
Beckenham:
http://www.westbeck.org.uk/Beckenham_Beacon.jpg
One is new this year, one’s about four years old and the other is older but the extension doubled the size last year.
Single anecdote by you in response to my cite of wide spread problem.
Single anecdote by you in response to my cite of wide spread problem.
Has nothing to do with what I posted which was the use of cortisone shots (not a pain medication) to reduce pain. This was a cost issue (of small proportions) involving a standard procedure used in the US.
Anecdotal delays from the UK are often considerable so we could go that route. However, my references were for system wide delays, which I think are more relevant.
We’re being fed a large nation system instead of addressing the smaller problems.
Sorry about the color coding but it’s done for clarity of cited material versus my comments.
Small? Cortisone injections into the extremities are fairly cheap in the US- between $100 and $500 per shot. Figure about double for shots into the joints. Figure about five times that for cervical or lumbar epidurals.
Your cite doesn’t distinguish between the three “difficulty levels”.
Not being able to get the medication you need unless your employer offers it, though their insurer, can mean the same thing- a lifetime of agony. You say that treatments were delayed there, I say that treatments are *denied *here. The end result is the same, except that in a government-run system, we can get the system changed. Private insurance execs only report to their bottom line.
Not a single anecdote, but showing the percentage of people who, with similar ailments (brain tumors, couldn’t find any directly similar), have to go into bankruptcy getting their treatments. How much did your friend have to pay for that MRI and that treatment?
Now, how much would he have had to pay if he didn’t have insurance? How much would YOU have had to pay, without insurance?
Why does your job determine the level of health you can enjoy?
My point is that people without insurance don’t get *any *pain medication other than what they buy in the store, and with which they overmedicate themselves.
[SUB]I must admit, the blue text does make it easier for me to find your original post. Quoting should just strip out the color code.[/SUB]
The Daily Mash’s perspective.
Okay, I didn’t really find much of that funny, but this bit made me laugh out loud:
Man, I guess I missed the Hillary Clinton was a black man controversy in the 90s.
Were people rioting town hall meetings with “death to clinton” signs back then?
Ah, humor- wilt thy tender whisper ever penetrate the waxy ear of the conservative?
Wasn’t her husband once called the first black president? Maybe someone should ask her his opinion on the matter.
I get your point(s) and nobody disagrees that there are things we can do on a national level without a soon-to-expand government insurance program.
Oddly, I’m not sure people understand that people who aren’t insured will be FORCED into a plan. That alone would clean up a lot of the problem but the major fear is that it will be socially engineered to flush insurance away from companies. That wouldn’t be a bad thing by itself because we should, in theory be able to take the $8 to $10,000 that companies are paying to cover us and transfer that directly into wages. That in turn can be used to buy INSURANCE versus an HMO. The individual savings (even with taxed income) would put money in people’s pocket and cultivate active participation in medical decisions. That would be great. Anybody falling through the cracks (because of ill health) can be scooped up with tax deductions and in worst case senarios, additional government support.
There are many things we can do to hold down costs. We already have stores offering $4 prescriptions for many generic drugs. Uncle Sam can sweeten that by extending patent runs in return for cheaper prices or purchasing the rights outright for an immediate profit. We can standardize billnig and record keeping (I don’t want a national information bank). In fact, if we go to an insurance based system instead of HMO’s then people will pay for their regular doctor visits which cuts down on the cost. My doctor charges much less if he doesn’t have to jump through billing hoops to get paid.
JM2C.
Because, anecdotes aside, I think that most American’s are as content with our own system as the Brit’s are with theirs. And I think that many American’s are a bit wary of how fucked up health care COULD be given our quirky system of government, how our system works, and our equally quirky and changeable public. Personally it’s the last part that I most fear, and I could see a system getting partially introduced (as another poster said up thread, this isn’t going to be a short fix…it’s going to take year and probably decades before all the kinks are worked out and things start to work smoothly again. If that ever happens at all :dubious:), only to have the winds of change blow through the public yet again. And this discounts how the various politicians will twist and turn any plan into a complex series of compromises and back scratching exercises. Then we’ll have a partially implemented program that will be the worst of all worlds since it will be a series of compromises, but said system will be impossible to kill, and only grow and bloat all out of proportion to what was originally intended. Eventually it will become a monster that the government will have to maintain because people are used to it, and both parties will have some stake in it…and frankly because such programs are practically immortal in the US.
-XT
Oh Jesus, I am so sorry. I hope your dad at least isn’t in too much pain nowadays. 
Cite? There are more than a few of us without any health care at all - and some of us can’t get any because we have the dreaded “pre-existing conditions”.
There’s a kind of catch-22 involved with this. If you have insurance it is easier to get insurance. once it lapses you’re treated like a leper. This is also true with car and house insurance.
I just changed over from COBRA to a personal policy (with high bp and an assortment of smaller health issues). I was able to get a policy where I couldn’t before after I let my insurance lapse. All I wanted was a counter offer that took the pre-existing conditions into consideration but I got a flat denial. It helps to find someone who truly knows the process and can walk you through each question on the questionaire.
We should be able to get medical insurance as easily as car insurance (or easier).
I had health care through my employers for nearly 40 years. It slowly and steadily degenerated. When I was younger you did not worry about getting sick, but I knew if I did I would not go broke. Then less coverage seeped in. Slowly they began to ask for an employee kick in and then prescriptions co-pays came along. Soon you had to pay for your family . Co-pays kept getting bigger and you had more taken out of your check. But coverage which was complete earlier developed holes. It took 30 days to get covered when it was once done immediately. Then it became 90 days.
Now I have Medicare. I pay 100 a month ,taken out of my SS check. I get emails telling me what tests I am able to get. They actually have an interest in keeping me healthy. They do not make greater profits by limiting my care or denying procedures. They actually benefit when I am healthy.
The UK has the lowest survival rates for colorectal cancer in the OECD. The US has the second highest.
If you develop colorectal cancer in the United States, there’s a 64% chance you will survive at least five years.
If you develop it in the UK, you have only a 49% chance of surviving.
cite.
If you have breast cancer in the United States, you have an 89% chance of survival. In the UK, it’s 80%.
Overall, the mortality rate from all forms of cancer is 157.8 per 100,000 people, and in the UK, it’s 175.6
In the US, 74% of patients referred to a specialist see one within four weeks. In the U.K, only 42% do. In the U.S., only 10% of patients wait longer than two months. In the UK, 33% do.
In the U.S., there are 26.5 MRI machines per million people. In the UK, there are 5.6.
In a US hospital, the infection rate is 5.7 per 100. In the UK, it’s 9.2 - the worst in the OECD.
Asthma mortality is often used as an indicator of quality of health care, because if people are treated properly for Asthma it’s rarely fatal. Among people from 5-39 years of age, the mortality rate for Asthma in the U.S. .33 deaths per 100,000 people. In the UK, it’s .49 - again, the worst in the OECD.
If you have a stroke, you want to have it in the U.S. the mortality rate for stroke is 41.4 per 100,000, whereas it’s 58.3 in the UK. This despite the U.S. having a more obese population.
If you reach 65 in either the U.S. or the UK, the odds are that you will live about a year longer in the U.S than in the UK.
In OECD measures of various health care quality indicators (waiting times, quality of care, survival rates, rates of in-hospital infections, etc., the U.S. is consistently at the top or among the top group of countries. The UK is consistently in the bottom half or even bottom quarter of all countries measured.
I wouldn’t crow too loudly about the NHS. Even among countries with other socialized medical systems, the UK is poor.
And a larger point is that one of the main reasons the U.S. spends so much on health care is that it provides a lot more service. Americans have more caesarian sections, they have more cosmetic surgery, they receive far more elective procedures like joint replacements and cataract surgery, take more prescription drugs, their doctors spend more time on their cases, and they go to more extreme lengths to save lives all the way from premature birth to advanced old age.
This is why you should not believe a politician who says a government health system will not ration care. Of course it will. It has to. Every other one does.
I think there are a couple of major factors working against reform. One is that the majority of people here have good to excellent insurance, at very little cost in many cases. Their employers pay most of it. So these people, the “satisfied majority” are fearful of any change. The other factor is outright selfishness, expressed by the conviction that others are excluded from insurance by their own fault. They should have been more successful, and if their drudge wages aren’t enough to keep under a roof and have adequate food, let alone health care, well that’s just the way the cookie crumbles, labor market wise. That there are huge countries in the world that run entirely on this philosophy, and out of which would-be immigrants to the prosperous countries stampede in droves, doesn’t seem to bother these conservatives very much at all.
A final diversionary spin, one that is well intended but to my mind dangerously inappropriate at this time, is the diet and lifestyle mantra. This country has Puritan roots, and we are too apt to blame all and sundry health issues on our wicked ways–too much food, too much alcohol and other drugs, and, particularly smoking. These are valid health concerns, but then why does Western Europe get a pass on that, when they smoke more than we do yet offer UHC with lower per-capita costs? That alone is enough to make me suspicious of the Sober Fat-Free and Smoke-Free lifestyle advocates–even though that pretty much describes my own lifestyle.
You guys do realize that the proposed system is really nothing like the NHS, right?
Rationing does not exist, has never existed and is an utterly bizarre notion; the last ‘rationing’ the UK had was in the 1950s and that was to do with food supply as a result of a world war.
What you describe as ‘rationing’ is an imbalance as between supply (of services) and demand which, nowadays, once discovered, is adjusted. That kind of process is inevitable in all large organisations in which efficiency is strived for – if you build slack into system you can deal with any eventuality. In that sense, a statistic is intended to act as the a catalyst for adjustment, not as a tool to damn. And it’s a very long way from ‘rationing’.
Really, this stuff about the UK (Obama’s proposed answer has nothing at all in common with the UK) is a nonsense – as is talk of ‘rationing’, and the misunderstanding of how a tightly run supply/demand system has to operate is naïve at best.
For anyone interested in real life experiences and views of the UK system rather than the self-interested, scaremongering propaganda espoused by the health care lobby and its political puppets, this thread in IMHO offers exactly that – and these are people who have lived with the system their entire lives, not read a convenient stat off a website:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=528056&page=1