Universal Health Care in the US. Yea or Nea?

[DaN K. StAnLeY]

Afraid of the the dark side?

We like it here, in Denmark

Scared!?!? Heck no!! Scandinavian-Lutherans do creep me out a little, but more like an "Ewww" creepy than an "AHHHHH!!" creepy.

 

[Toke]

Don´t worry about the lutheran part, we are the least religious people in the world.

(And we still don´t get why the muslims were so upset about those drawings?)

 

[kellyb]

Moving away from insurance would be great. Or at least changing insurance so it isn't attached to your job. That way when you switch jobs you can take your insurance with you. Ideally you would only need insurance for major surgeries or treatments like cancer, heart attack, etc....

Getting caught up...

Ideally, "we the people" could become our own insurance company, no? Everyone pays in (it could be on an income sliding scale so the working poor don't get left behind) and everyone can keep their coverage when they move from job to job?

 

[kellyb]

No, it's really not. I really want what is best for the most people. I really hate the idea of people getting something for nothing, but I usually find myself playing devils advocate here because it will get me the best side of the opposing argument. I just wish I could argue more eloquently for the free market/capitalist side but I just don't know enough about either. I'm not being productive now because I'm too tired, but I feel like if we let socialism take hold in too many places we are screwed. I know people in here think that is a fallacy but just look at Social Security, food stamps, public schools, the post office. They are all either impossible to get rid of now, or they are horrible quality services.

I really hope if I start to P anyone Off that you put me on ignore. Sometimes it takes me hearing/reading stuff several times before it hits me. I will keep arguing against soc HC until I'm satisfied with what I know about it. It's just how I seem to learn best.

I understand. I'm the same way.

Regarding the infant mortality rate, you're not understanding the way rates work. It's "deaths per 1000 births". It doesn't matter how many births are happening...because it's deaths per births. Like, imagine if in Canada, 5 out of every 10 babies died. That would be 500 per 1,000 infant mortality rate. If in the US, one in 10 died. Per 1,000 births, that would be a 100 per 1,000 infant mortality rate. It wouldn't matter if Canada had a billion births a year and the US only had 100 thousand. It's (in this hypothetical scenario) still half of the Canadian babies dieing, vs one in 10 here. Canada would be a scary place to be an infant odds-wise.

Make sense?

I see you're concerned with waiting times. Do you want to do a compare and contrast with the US vs a few countries with UHC? (I've done this before...a few minor things are, like, 25% longer of a wait in the US. But it's all non-emergent stuff like knee replacement. The wait might be 4 months here, and 5 months in Canada. And that's not factoring in all the people in the US "under the radar" of these studies, who will never get knee replacement surgeries, and are not on a waiting list, because they're uninsured.

Regarding pharmaceutical companies, they still have the incentive to develop new drugs under UHC. Most of their drugs are developed in academia, anyway, and pharma buys the technology. This happens equally worldwide, UHC or not. UHC has no impact on the demand for both better and cheaper drugs.

I can't help you with your philosophical objection to the "mandatoryness" of UHC, other than to suggest that those in those systems view it like we do our police force. Do you feel as though it's theft to be taxed for it? Do you resent the fact that homeless crackhead Bob will be defended by the cops if an officer sees him being assaulted? Or is that really sort of irrelevant in the grand scheme of things?
Those in the UHC systems don't feel robbed, because they're getting good healthcare back.

 

[Corsair 115]

...but I feel like if we let socialism take hold in too many places we are screwed.

Well, all I can tell you is up here in "socialist" Canada our banking system is not in crisis. Our financial system is stable, and the government is not having to pay out hundreds of billions of dollars to buy stakes in our banks in order to prop them up or otherwise keep them solvent as has been happening recently in the United States. Indeed, late last year, the World Economic Forum rated Canada's financial system as the soundest in the world. The U.S. system was... well, down the list considerably.

Given this, perhaps some types of "socialism" are not so bad after all.

 

[DaN K. StAnLeY]

I understand. I'm the same way.

Regarding the infant mortality rate, you're not understanding the way rates work. It's "deaths per 1000 births". It doesn't matter how many births are happening...because it's deaths per births. Like, imagine if in Canada, 5 out of every 10 babies died. That would be 500 per 1,000 infant mortality rate. If in the US, one in 10 died. Per 1,000 births, that would be a 100 per 1,000 infant mortality rate. It wouldn't matter if Canada had a billion births a year and the US only had 100 thousand. It's (in this hypothetical scenario) still half of the Canadian babies dieing, vs one in 10 here. Canada would be a scary place to be an infant odds-wise.

Either way, Columbia's IMR dwarfs ours, so why are they ahead in the WHO rankings? Others have waaaaaay worse life expectancy and INR, what gives there. Was just the fact that they could physically see a doctor enough to make their health care worthy of a higher ranking. My point is that the WHO may have an agenda to push and it's not good to just accept one ranking system as the final word in who has better HC.

 

[kellyb]

Either way, Columbia's IMR dwarfs ours, so why are they ahead in the WHO rankings? Others have waaaaaay worse life expectancy and INR, what gives there. Was just the fact that they could physically see a doctor enough to make their health care worthy of a higher ranking. My point is that the WHO may have an agenda to push and it's not good to just accept one ranking system as the final word in who has better HC.

I've already agreed that them ranking Colombia over us is evidence of bias. Let's ignore the WHO study and look at....everything else, ok?

 

[DaN K. StAnLeY]

I've already agreed that them ranking Colombia over us is evidence of bias. Let's ignore the WHO study and look at....everything else, ok?

Okay, if you agree the WHO study is biased, then we only have to address the issue of cost. Unless you know of another ranking system that says the US is worse than countries it's obviously not worse than.

 

[kellyb]

Okay, if you agree the WHO study is biased, then we only have to address the issue of cost. Unless you know of another ranking system that says the US is worse than countries it's obviously not worse than.

No, we can look at other things besides cost, too. % of people who survive cancers, IMR, life expectancy, waiting times, etc.

 

[DaN K. StAnLeY]

No, we can look at other things besides cost, too. % of people who survive cancers, IMR, life expectancy, waiting times, etc.

That's fine by me. Things like life expectancy will be worse in the US though, because there are a bunch of fatties with guns, who can't drive living here. Someone posted a comparisons link in the other thread I haven't had time to read yet. Maybe there are some good comparisons there.

 

[kellyb]

Things like life expectancy will be worse in the US though, because there are a bunch of fatties with guns, who can't drive living here.

Are you sure a higher rate of obesity (among other factors) is the reason we have shorter lives?

 

[oggiesnr]

That's fine by me. Things like life expectancy will be worse in the US though, because there are a bunch of fatties with guns, who can't drive living here. Someone posted a comparisons link in the other thread I haven't had time to read yet. Maybe there are some good comparisons there.

Hey they're only exerting their free will to be fatties with guns who can't drive. If that's what your system gives you then you have to cope with that. If they've got insurance then so what? If not then they can die on the streets and it's not your problem either way.

Steve

 

[kellyb]

That's fine by me. Things like life expectancy will be worse in the US though, because there are a bunch of fatties with guns, who can't drive living here. Someone posted a comparisons link in the other thread I haven't had time to read yet. Maybe there are some good comparisons there.

Also, I doubt there's any evidence that Americans are worse drivers than people in other nations.

 

[Rolfe]

This is sad. A whole bunch of pages earlier, Dan seemed to agree that he understood why it is that universal healthcare systems are both cheaper and deliver better overall health outcomes.

I thought he even agreed that at the moment it is the people in the countries which have such systems who have the greater freedom, liberty, whatever you want to call it.

It's sad, because even at that point, he was disappointed that this was the case. He didn't want it to be so. But he agreed that is was so.

Now he's come back with nothing but an apparently biassed popular TV show to argue from, simply incredulous once again that the world isn't how he thinks it ought to be.

I'm guessing he has little experience of life. If he doesn't know anyone who can't afford a car, then I'd say that's a certainty. (Dan, it's not just about buying one, it's about keeping it on the road and running it. I remember when I was a junior university lecturer going around on a small motorcycle, observing that while I actually had enough money to buy a car, I simply didn't have the income to pay for the running of the thing.)

If he doesn't personally know anyone who's been sick and unable to scrape together the money for their treatment, in the USA, then I'm thinking he must be either very young or very very privileged, probably both.

Dan, which is your main objection to universal healthcare? Is it that you don't get to opt out of contributing?

No, you don't. Just as you don't get to opt out of contributing to Medicare and Medicaid right now. We merely observe that for the same level of contribution, in countries with universal healthcare, you get to ACCESS the system you're paying for. What's not to like?

In the dog-eat-dog world you seem to desire, you'd have to cancel Medicare and Medicaid, so that you wouldn't be compulsorily paying for anyone else's care. So that's the real, grinding poor and the elderly who can't work any more just denied access to healthcare. Nice world, this one.

You'd also have to cancel the legal requirement that hospitals treat everyone who shows up needing emergency care. In case you forgot, the way that gets paid for is by hospitals jacking up their prices to insured and self-funding patients.

There are going to be an awful lot of people dying in the streets in this brave new world.

[Dan]
But that's OK, they're lazy wasters who didn't get ahead like I have. Everybody is perfectly able to afford to fund their own healthcare if only they quite slacking and work hard enough.
[/Dan]

Which brings us to your second objection, that you don't want anyone to get anything they haven't paid for.

Why is it that you constantly focus on the Rab C. Nesbitts of this world? There really aren't so many of them as you seem to think. Yes, there are people who are lazy and who play the social security system. And who get access to policing and the fire brigade and education for their children and roads to drive their very very cheap cars on, without contributing.

But why focus on these people, and not on the people who simply haven't been born with your advantages? Those not bright enough to hold down much more than a minimum wage job? Those with chronic medical conditions who aren't well enough to work full-time? Those whose employers went bankrupt, taking their insurance coverage with them, the week before they were diagnosed with Hodgkins disease? Those who worked hard all their lives and saved what they could, but who had insufficient savings to pay for the quadruple bypass they needed when they had their heart attack, aged 70?

Is it really OK by you that these people are left to suffer and die, just so that
1. You do not compulsorily pay for anyone else's care
2. Nobody who has possibly not worked quite as hard as they might have done every day of their lives receives any benefit?

This conversation reminds me inexorably of the argument Jerome da Gnome was putting forward about the time he got banned (for unrelated matters). He was convinced that a "free market" would mean that all healthcare would be affordable by everyone, with just some very very cheap insurance to cover "catastrophic events".

He was completely unable to support his posiiton. Dan, you are much politer than the Gnome, but you don't really have any more substance to your arguments than he has. There's no way the cost of a quadruple bypass or surgery for a brain tumour or even for appendicitis is going to come down to where someone on the minimum wage or a retired person is going to be able to afford it, just by "free market". Laser eye surgery just doesn't begin to compare for too many reasons to type.

A couple of weeks ago I started to go through this and related threads for actual case reports of ordinary, non-freeloading Americans who were in real distress because of their inability to afford access to healthcare. I was going to ask how, in the system you're trying to advance, such people would be cared for. Unfortunately a computer crash lost the references, and I need to start again.

But just declaring that if there was no taxpayer-funded healthcare and nobody had insurance (except maybe for catastrophes, and even there you have to define catastrophe - might be Hodgkins disease for the well-off, might only be cystitis for the low-waged, where do you put diabetes by the way?) then the price would be as low as a can of beans, isn't going to convince anyone who knows anything about how much medical procedures actually cost in real terms.

Rolfe.

 

[kellyb]

The argument against UHC is basically that it's more moral to let vast amounts of people die preventable deaths than it is to tax people for healthcare. The supplemental argument is that maybe poor people can get some charity care sometimes, too.
The end, really.

I don't find this argument particularly persuasive myself, but people and their "core beliefs" can be funny sometimes, so whatever floats your boat.

 

[Rolfe]

Actually, I should maybe explain my perspective on the last point I raised.

I'm a vet. I'm right in there in a completely free-market healthcare system, and I had a lot of my experience in the days before pet health insurance was as widespread as it is today.

There are irreducible costs to complex medical and surgical interventions. Some of it is the cost of drugs, which are expensive to develop and manufacture. Some of it is the cost of equipment, which is often complex and expensive to manufacture. And unlike consumer electronics, the size of the market is never going to be big enough to bring these costs crashing down. Some of it is overheads. And a lot of it is manpower. You need professionals, who have undergone expensive training. And you need lots of other people, just to deliver the care.

So, a lot of this is about people. The people who develop the drugs and the people who make the anaesthetic machines and the MRI scanners and the people who do the actual surgery and the people who clean the kennels and load the washing machine.

You want all these people to take the minimum wage? Even the ones who spent five years doing a very expensive university course? So where does that leave them? Unable to afford their own healthcare, by the sound of it - because they didn't "work hard and get on".

I know what happens in healthcare when the price of the needed intervention is higher than the client can pay. The patient gets substandard care. And then when things get worse, and there is real suffering, we have a fairly cheap solution. It's a blue solution, and the commonest brand name is called "Euthatal".

That's what happens when you leave it entirely to the market. Is that how you want human healthcare to be organised?

Rolfe.

 

[kellyb]

In Libertopia, Euthatal-For-Humans(TM) is available at the local pharmacy, OTC.

 

[DaN K. StAnLeY]

Question: If there were laws put into place that prevented patients from being able to demand procedures they didn't need, the medical records system was overhauled/modernized, and laws passed that would prevent filing of bogus lawsuits against doctors, why would someone want to switch to UHC? It'd be cutting per capita spending down to almost the median level of other developed countries.

and..
Where are all of these "vast amounts of people dying" I keep hearing about?? I've never known anyone who has died from not being treated in this country (sorry if that means I have less life experience). We aren't in the business of letting people die here, that's why we have the semi-soc system we have now (something is better than nothing).

 

[DaN K. StAnLeY]

This is sad. A whole bunch of pages earlier, Dan seemed to agree that he understood why it is that universal healthcare systems are both cheaper and deliver better overall health outcomes.

I thought he even agreed that at the moment it is the people in the countries which have such systems who have the greater freedom, liberty, whatever you want to call it.

It's sad, because even at that point, he was disappointed that this was the case. He didn't want it to be so. But he agreed that is was so.

Well, I agreed to concede the point at the time. I admitted I didn't have enough evidence to go further and I even said I'd be back with more info/questions. Sorry if I gave everyone the impression I had gone soc. I also reminded anyone who might be getting annoyed that the the ignore list is just a click away.

Now he's come back with nothing but an apparently biassed popular TV show to argue from, simply incredulous once again that the world isn't how he thinks it ought to be.

I'm guessing he has little experience of life. If he doesn't know anyone who can't afford a car, then I'd say that's a certainty. (Dan, it's not just about buying one, it's about keeping it on the road and running it. I remember when I was a junior university lecturer going around on a small motorcycle, observing that while I actually had enough money to buy a car, I simply didn't have the income to pay for the running of the thing.)

If he doesn't personally know anyone who's been sick and unable to scrape together the money for their treatment, in the USA, then I'm thinking he must be either very young or very very privileged, probably both.

Again, I said I'd be back and it's no secret I'm keeping, that I don't like soc-anything if there is a better way. Are you revealing something to everyone else here they didn't know or just being annoying? I'm sorry that you think it's somehow a sign of lack of life experience that I don't know anyone who can't afford a car but its true that even my unemployed friends can afford to get around and keep their cars going (barring some severe problem).

Since we have soc HC to a degree already, I also don't know anyone who has gone bankrupt from medical bills (or struggled to pay for them for that matter). All I know is that my pop was able to afford to have insurance for me my whole life until 19 and from then on I've never had a problem paying for it, ever. When I first started working I didn't even make 15k a year and I still had very good coverage. I've been broke before and made even less and still never had a problem being covered. I guess that's just my "lack of life experience" talking.

 

[Rolfe]

Hey, hold on! You now boast that the "socialised" part of your healthcare system "stops people dying". Probably does, too.

But you've said you don't want to contribute to the healthcare costs of other people. This seems to be a hardline position for you. That would mean that the part of your system you just credited with stopping people dying, would no longer exist in your perfect system.

Sorry, but please could you be consistent? It's hard to address your arguments when you continually change your position.

Rolfe.