bkmk
Thank you GOPe for doing NOTHING except flush America down the toilet the first two years of President Trump’s first term in the Oval Office when you had the chance to repeal this monstrosity of socialism and corruption, aka Obamacare. These RINOs will never be forgiven.
I bet most health issues are self-inflicted:
Obesity
Cardiovascular (not enough exercise)
Diabetes -
Too much sugar
Drive the independent practioners out of biz.
Truss health systems to the government teat.
Refuse to allow needed increases to the number of slots for medical students.
Ensure that there’s no reform of medical malpractice law.
Regulate the health insurance industry so that it serves the State’s needs instead of its customers.
We now have a de facto NHS.
And ours works as well as the UK’s does.
Medicare destroyed balance.
Physicians are now corporate, not patient advocates.
“A man cannot serve two Masters”. The patients don’t
Pay the bills, the insurance companies do. The physicians get paid by Hospitals, which are owned and controlled by conglomerates, often under insurance companies.
Congress has taken the money from the physicians and reassigned it to Insurance and Hospitals via lobby. Those acts killed private practice, and killed patient and health advocacy.
Honest Independent Physicians have been forced into
Employment by 1. Insourcing 2. Re-imbursement rates cut every year for almost 3 decades that weren’t really balanced in the first place 3. Not pot
Profits that abuse the 501 status by controlling for profit entities.
The US government declared war on private practice physicians, and now the balance is gone. Nobody really cares about patients, it’s corporate and about the money.
One of the major reasons our health care is so expensive is due to the invasion of legal and especially illegal foreigners. Go to any emergency room and it will most likely have several illegals getting free health care. U.S. citizens are paying higher premiums to pay for the freeloaders. Obummer care caused this mess. “Free health care” is not free for those who work and pay taxes.
When medicare came in, almost no one had health insurance. After it came in, everyone wanted health insurance and when the majority of people were no longer footing the bill themselves, those bills started rising. As a result, we have what we have now.
From chiropractors to brain surgeons, the medical industry is robbing us.
A patient cured is a patient lost.
And an employment center for the lower rung hamburger flipper wanna bees.
Getting past the front door of a medical care facility has become an education in itself , since the so called affordable health care bilk was thrust upon us with lies and great cost and grift.
Who pays for all the special taxi cabs transpouting all the privileged to and from their! Appointsments?
After the Obama unaffordable care act went into effect where the anti-constitutionalist SCOTUS Judge John Roberts ruled that the fine for not buying it “a tax”, things have only become much much worse.
And incredibly the Biden regime of treason as well as the Rat/RINO uniparty of treason had no issue with giving tens of millions of criminal foreign invaders free healthcare.
We don’t have a Medical Care system, we have Obama’s Medical Insurance system - and a drug dealer.
This is a bogus comparison. Those countries count children we try to save as still born.
same as it ever was.
And this is how we got Luigi Mangione, folks. And this is why half the country is not mad at him, including me.
My wife just got diagnosed with breast cancer. Instead of just dealing with the illness, she’s stressed out beyond belief worrying about if the doctors have her best interests or the insurance company’s best interest in mind.
We fully distrust the medical establishment, especially after the last few years.
Some of that distrust was confirmed a few years ago. Our son had surgery. A few hours later I was in the hospital elevator and the surgeon and another doctor came in. She introduced me to him and discussed my son for a couple minutes. The dirtbag other doctor subsequently added a $800 bill for his “consult” to our bill. We found it buried in the line items and refused to pay.
I haven’t looked into the numbers carefully since the Obamacare wars, but at that time:
Obama and the socialized medicine crowd were making bank on the comparison of U.S. life expectancy stats with other countries. Among peer group countries, however, the U.S. life expectancy rates jumped from relatively low to #1 if you corrected for two factors: automobile fatalities and homicides. The latter figure, of course, is driven by extremely high homicide rates among the usual suspects; look at people by ethnicity, and Americans of German, English, and other European origins look quite comparable to their cousins who stayed on the other side of the pond.
If we corrected for obesity and its various complications, the U.S. advantage would probably grow. Obesity is primarily a question of diet and exercise, which is in turn driven by lifestyle and that loops us back to Americans’ automobile habit. European cities, for example, are generally much older and much denser, and people do a lot more walking. Aside from some of the older, denser, most eastern cities, we have designed most American cities and suburbs for lard-butt couch potatoes who jump in their cars to do just about everything. In a lot of places, just getting suburbs to put in sidewalks (which, properly designed, can double as functional bike paths, since most of the lard-butt neighbors are in their cars anyhow) is a big fight. It’s not just our food and dietary choices that make us fat; our transportation system is designed to make us fat.
The U.S. spends vastly more on neonatal interventions and intensive interventions for the elderly, which are extremely expensive. A very high percentage of Americans’ lifetime medical costs are incurred in the last six months and last year of life. We do major medical interventions — hip and knee replacements are a familiar example — far past the point at which other OECD countries simply make people comfortable and wait for them to die. That’s how rationing works. Worker drones are kept alive. The sooner retirees shuffle off this mortal coil, the better, because that is a cost saving to governments.
It requires getting down into the weeds, but one of the clearest tests of the effectiveness of national healthcare systems per se is life expectancy AFTER diagnosis of a major medical problem. The U.S. is almost invariably at or near the top of the list. Again, the U.S. excels at the high tech end of the scale — and that is expensive.
Other factors include the statistics themselves. The U.S., for example, counts as “live births” many infants who are very premature or who have serious problems and that other countries count as stillborn. The other big factor in the infant mortality stats is demographics; the higher U.S. numbers are driven heavily by the drug addicted baby mommas on the Cheetos diet who don’t bother with any of the maternal care that is available to them, don’t follow through on medical instructions, and pop into emergency rooms to deliver low birthweight preemies. The healthcare system can’t fix stupid, ignorant, and self-destructive. Nor can it fix meth and fentanyl addiction.
The U.S. system is excellent if we compare apples to apples and correct for confounding factors. Socialized systems are reasonably good at dispensing routine, cookie cutter care — and for most people most of the time, that is most of what is needed until something bad hits or aging becomes a factor. If all you need is aspirin and routine inoculations, the Canadian system is fine. If you have a major medical issue and would like to bypass the long queue, and are not part of the nomenklatura and can skip the lines ... well, the U.S. border is close if you can afford to pay for U.S. quality care.
Public perceptions are confused by the U.S. third party payment system, which is the outgrowth of a WWII gray market improvisation that became popular with the unions and with politicians, for whom it provided a tool for hiding subsidy costs. At this point, the whole pricing system is a sham designed to conceal true costs from consumers in order to facilitate cost shifting in favor of politically favored groups. The impact of the tort lawyers and, in response, defensive medicine that over-relies on excessive testing is significant.
The basic choices are pretty clear. We can continue to drift towards a heavily rationed socialized system that dispenses cookie cutter clinic medicine, or we can shift to a more market driven system. The latter would require greater price transparency and consumer choice.
The big related question is whether Americans are overinvesting in high tech care, especially end of life care. Much of the demand for this is driven by the absence of price transparency; as long as insurance companies or the government will pay for it, why not? Even at this point, however, we need to keep in mind that this very high tech stuff leads to technological breakthroughs that, over time, dramatically change outcomes at earlier and earlier points of disease progression. It’s like many other high tech fields in which the early adapters pay “insane” prices for capabilities than in 20 or 30 years — a lot sooner in consumer electronics, where it may be five years — will be mass market. The U.S. continues to drive most of the innovation.
But that costs $$$$$$.
#1 The U.S. spends about 5 trillion dollars on healthcare each year.
#2 What the United States spends on healthcare is greater than the GDP of the United Kingdom.
#3 If the U.S. healthcare system was a country, it would be the 6th largest economy in the entire world.
#4 Federal, state and local governments account for nearly half of all healthcare spending in the United States.
#5 Today, more than 68 million Americans are enrolled in Medicare.
#6 If you can believe it, more than 71 million Americans are enrolled in Medicaid.
#7 Does it seem like almost half of the commercials on television are for pharmaceutical drugs? You may not be surprised to learn that pharmaceutical companies actually spend more than 15 billion dollars on television advertising in the United States each year.
#8 According to one survey, 61 percent of U.S. adults are currently taking at least one pharmaceutical drug.
#9 Globally, the pharmaceutical industry brings in about 1.6 trillion dollars in revenue each year. That is more money than the Pentagon spends.
#10 There are 10 pharmaceutical industry executives that received total compensation of at least 20 million dollars in 2023.
Covid did a pretty good job of proving that.
Here’s some fundamental problems:
1) government should not be in the charity business, nor paying for health care.
2) government should not be dictating the content of insurance policies.
3) government should not force someone to get insurance for someone else (employer provided).
4) government SHOULD be making sure insurance companies are clear in their publication of what they cover, and have them publish records of paid/unpaid claims.
5) government SHOULD be making sure providers publish accurate information concerning the cost of treatment, much like you’d get for a car repair - paying for an estimate first to diagnose, then the cost of proposed solution along with cost of typical problems that may come up.
While I agree the US Health care System has its problems, a lot of these “FACTS” are nonsensical.
Yes, the UK’s GDP is less than the US spends on health care... but the UK also has a total of less than 70million people, vs the US’s 330 Million people and the UK’s GDP per capita is less that the GDP per capita of the US’s poorest state!.. That’s right the entire UK GDP per capital is lower than the GDP per capita of Mississippi. Also the UK other than some outlying territories has a smaller territorial footprint that is smaller than 11 US states. SO, the fact we spend more on health care than the the UK GDP is a nonsensical fact in proving anything, other than the UK is an economic mouse compared to the US.
As to facts on State and federal spending.. let me let you in on a “secret”... here’s the truth, unvarnished and a fact that ALWAYS is ignored when this topic comes up.
80%, 80% of what is spent on an individual for health care, over their entire lifetimes, on average is spent during the last 2 years of their life. And for most people, guess what, that’s when you are on medicare. Want to cut US health care spending by 80% overnight? Start letting the old folks die, rather than giving them expensive treatments to extend their lives for a few more years, just like the UK does, and the total health care spending will instantly be 80% less. SO hello Mr 72 year old, with chronic liver failure from being obese your entire life, no, we aren’t going to provide treatment. Here are some pain killers, go home and enjoy the last few months you have.
I will happily critique the US health care system, but this sort of article is a garbage article that clearly was written by someone who hasn’t spent a single second in the industry.