Posted on 09/06/2009 2:17:36 PM PDT by Shellybenoit
Australia has a health care system which is similar in some aspects to what the Democrats are proposing. There is a public plan which covers about 70% of the country and private insurance which covers the rest. In a short time (the system was set up in 1983) the country became divided into one group that gets good medical care (private insurance) and the group whose insurance is not as good.For example those in the public system have to wait longer for surgery.
There are also extensive waiting times for non emergency surgeries at public hospitals. Although waiting lists for the most urgent elective surgery for heart disease and cancer are almost nonexistent, there are long waiting lists for orthopedic surgery (median wait for total hip replacement is 88 days; 10% of patients waited over 345 days in 1999 to 2000), and cataract surgery (median is 73 days; 10% waited more than 316 days). One of the attractions of private health insurance is the ability to bypass public hospital waiting lists.
One of the reason for the long waits is a shortage of Doctors. In fact Doctors in one Australian State are worried that they are working so hard, their exhaustion is causing them to make errors and lose patients:
(Excerpt) Read more at yidwithlid.blogspot.com ...
In Obammycare there will be no private system!
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Before expanding coverage, shouldn’t you expand the numbers of physicians necessary to handle the influx of patients? As Massachusetts has shown, universal coverage does not insure universal access.
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