Question for people in the UK. Can you retroactively buy private health insurance? Example, can you buy private insurance after you're diagnosed for a procedure that isn't covered by your UHC?
There isn't the situation of "you're diagnosed for a procedure that isn't covered by the NHS". If your doctor says you need the procedure, you will get it. Your concept literally doesn't make sense.
No, you can't go take out insurance to pay for something you already have. As the Americans (and those involved in flood insurance near rivers) keep telling us, it's insurance against things that
might happen, not provision for things that
certainly will happen.
There wouldn't be a lot of point though, because you will get the treatment you have been diagnosed as needing, on the NHS.
What may happen is that you might decide you want treated
sooner than the NHS is prepared to treat you. Waiting times are based on clinical need, so if you have an uncomfortable but non-life-threatening condition, you may not be dealt with immediately. This is possibly the main reason for taking out private health insurance (well that and snobbery, those swanky private hospitals where the Great Unwashed are never encountered....). If you don't have insurance prior to finding yourself in this position, then just put your hand in your pocket and pay for it. Or if you don't want to do that, wait for the NHS to do it for you for free.
I understand that. This is an issue that needs to be solved. What's important is determining why the US spends so much more in health care and the reason is not, because the US is not single-payer.
I've linked you to a very detailed article discussing this before.
You need to distinguish between universal healthcare, and "single-payer". The NHS is what you call single-payer, but many universal healthcare systems are not, and they don't seem to cost any more than the NHS. This has also been quite well studied believe it or not.
In my personal opinion, the reason the US system costs so much is because so many people are getting a cut of the action without providing any actual healthcare. When it gets to the point that one doctor has to employ four secretaries just to deal with insurance company paperwork, you
know you're in trouble.
How is only having one option more "freedom?" Remember it's call single-payer, which by the very definition of single means no choice and you are required by law to pay for this system, which yet again by the very definition of require means no choice.
There you go again, making up bogeymen to attack, which have no actual basis in actual reality.
First of all, not all universal healthcare systems are "single-payer". The British posters discuss the NHS because that's what we're familiar with, but we know our cousins in France and Switzerland and Japan and many other places have apparently excellent universal healthcare systems which are not single-payer.
Second, even a system like the NHS leaves you with a stonking amount of choice.
You can choose your own GP, quite freely. There used to be a law that said you had to choose one within a certain distance of your home, for obvious practical reasons, but that was recently abolished so that people could choose one near their place of work if they thought that suited their circumstances better.
If you require specialist treatment, you can choose your own specialist. The NHS has web sites that let you see which services are offered where, how they compare, and even how any waiting times compare. You can choose to go to a hospital in a different health board area from the one you live in or your GP is part of - it's completely flexible. There's no funny stuff about having to go to someone your insurance company will deal with, or anything like that.
Sure, we fund this through compulsory taxation. Just like you fund Medicare and Medicaid through compulsory taxation. And you pay more per population skull for that that we do for the entire NHS. So it's not like it's costing us some terrible burden of taxation that you don't have to bear.
But you still have the choice not to use the NHS if you don't want to. In fact, you could turn that whole argument right round. You have
less choice than we do, because you cannot choose to make use of the system your tax dollars are paying for. We can.
But like I said, if you're a snob, or you don't want to wait your turn, or just have a bit of spare cash you'd like to donate to BUPA or Norwich Union or one of the other health insurance providers, you're completely free to do that.
Or if you have no insurance, but find you need something done and have a fancy to have it done right away in one of those nice shiny BUPA hospitals, then just pay for it. I've done that. It's not that expensive even to do that.
Under UHC, NICE decides what care you are eligible for. Under PHC, various insurance companies with different policies decide what care you are eligible for.
We've already had a current, experienced healthcare worker say that procedures have been denied by both Medicare and private insurance. I think that we can agree that it doesn't matter if the health insurance company denies your request or the single-payer gov agency denies your request.
I find it quite strange that when an insurance company denies a procedure they are evil rotten capitalist who are only after your money, but when a single-payer gov agency does this it's to control cost and distribute healthcare fairly and equally. Maybe a little bit of a double standard?
You absolutely, totally don't get it. Are you simply not reading what people are posting, or is your strawman so deeply entrenched that nothing will get it out of your head?
(I live in Scotland, so NICE has nothing to do with me. But for the sake of the argument, I won't get picky - it's just that Scotland has a separate system which works in much the same way.)
NICE approves drugs and procedure for use in the NHS. This approval is to make sure the NHS isn't throwing its money away on someone's cleverly-marketed but essentially useless snake-oil. There is always going to be some bickering round the edges - desperate people have a tendency to want the expensive snake-oil anyway.
NICE does not decide what care any individual is "eligible" for. Once a procedure or product is approved, then it is approved for everyone.
I'll play the game. My PHC is free-at-point of use too. After all, I get the bill in the mail a few weeks later. And after my deductible is paid my medial bill is paid in full.
That's just ridiculous. I could say my car service was "free at point of use" too, because the garage owner said he was too busy to make out my bill when I collected the car, and he would bill me later. It wouldn't make it true.
However, if in the USA everyone had health insurance such as you describe, and that pesky "deductible" was never unaffordable, you would have a universal healthcare system, and we wouldn't be having this argument. The entire point of the discussion is that many, many people do not have this facility, and to counter it from a position of privilege by saying "I'm all right Jack" is little short of insulting.
Shalamar said:
This is one of the top problems I have with living in the US... That people who need health care, can have it denied for a number of reasons. Or they can lose everything they have.. even if they are insured.
Are there no examples of this happening in countries with single-payer? I'm the first to admit that the US's system needs to be changed, but that doesn't mean that the only solution is a single-payer system.
Er, not that I know of. There are individual examples of people who have decided to sell their house to pay for some unapproved treatment because they were convinced it was what the needed and it wasn't approved, but I don't think you'd get off the fingers of one hand in counting those.
And get this. If someone does pay out for something NICE didn't approve at the time, and NICE later approves it, they can sue to have the money returned to them. This has happened once or twice.
And
once more, not all universal healthcare systems are single-payer. You don't hear the Brits criticising the French because they don't have a single-payer system, do you? You hear us remarking that the French system seems to be excellent, is there anything we can learn from it.
You need to work on the concept of how to deliver
universal healthcare. There is probably no one single "right answer". With all these various systems in operation to learn from, you'd think a country that prides itself on innovation would be able to do a rational analysis of the options and come up with a workable solution.
Or maybe not....
Rolfe.
All that freedom you lose."
