Posted on 04/24/2008 8:01:21 AM PDT by britlabour
Firstly - apologies for this not being a news story but I really wanted to ask this question! As you know, in the UK we have universal healthcare. A couple of weeks ago I had an interesting conversation with a conservative American tourist outside Buckingham palace (we were both spectators at the London Marathon event). I was telling him about a hospital visit I had had recently and he replied that he had originally been opposed to socialised healthcare - until he suffered from chest pains at Heathrow, an ambulance arrived within six minutes. Basically what I wanted to ask was - what are the reservations that many Americans have to free healthcare, funded by the taxpayer and evenly spread nationwide (or statewide as the case may be). I know that it SOUNDS socialist - but sometimes it is a good thing to borrow ideas that are good from an otherwise failing ideology, as the British Conservatives did with the NHS. Any thoughts?
So 7% of your pay is forceably taken from you for National Insurance, yet you claim this isn't a tax. If the government takes it from you by force, its a tax no matter what they call it.
Oxymoron alert...
Here you run into issues with our principles of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. In the USA we're not all equal in front of the doctor because the skilled specialist who graduated Johns Hopkins with honours has a right to charge what he sees fit and not just accept the same compensation as a GP who graduated from Grenada with a C- and then barely passed his boards and his residency.
The doctor has a right to charge what he wants and his patients have a right to go see someone else if they don't like it.
Let me give you an example: my employer provides vision care via an HMO (Kaiser Permanente) and the vision care is adequate. But I'm extremely picky about my glasses and a five minute appointment where I *might* get a decent prescription correcting me to 20/30 is not what I want. So out of my own pocket I usually pay for a one hour visit and a full exam, not just an eyeglass prescription. My correction is to 20/10 which suits me fine.
This cost me $150 for the hour exam and then $850 for the glasses and frames. So while I could have had them 'for free' I chose instead to get exactly what I want and I am happy to have that option. I'm also happy to have been able to have had access to an eye doctor who has a Lasker Award hanging in his office. I would not have had this access at my HMO.
Are you following this?
To try and meet this requirement, emergency rooms are having ambulances keep the patient onboard and in the parking lot until such that time they will be seen within 3 hours after they enter the building. The clock doesn't start ticking until the person actually is brought inside.
So the ambulance can sit in the parking lot for 5 hours, and then the person wait in the emergency room for 2.5 hours, and technically, they have met the 3 hour requirement.
You’ve been polite with your questions. I hope you understand now why we object to socialized medicine.
Our system isn’t perfect. It needs improvement. (Less government might improve it, imho.) But it’s not the terrible system the universal healthcare-proponents claim it is.
We rest our case on socialized medicine! Waiting a month for dental care is outlandish!
Yes they can, and they are denied care routinely, every single day.
I’ve spoken to several lawyers, they’ve ALL said no doctor is obligated to treat people.
Heart attacks, sure, but take a pain crisis...OBVIOUSLY a warranted ER visit...a doc in an ER after hours once told my wife to go somewhere else ‘cause he “didn’t do pain control”...I could not find an attorney who would take my calls, let alone the case.
And this was the ONLY hospital in our area our plan would pay for!
So...I could have taken the chance to go elsewhere and pay out of pocket ABOVE and BEYOND the $700+ we pay per MONTH...but...
I may as well have been talking to someone at burger king when I chewed out the hospial administrator.
I’m a nurse, was an Air Force medic, I’m definitely NOT for gov. healthcare; but this busniess about “by law people can get healthcare regardless of ability to pay” is smply not true at all by any stretch and certainly not true in all cases.
And we’ve heard all the stories about pt’s dying in the hallways, or sent home, and sure, they sue, but ummmm....it’s kind of late AFTER the funeral...and the threat of a lawsuit isn’t the deterrent people make it out to be!
If you’re too poor to pay for a doctor, how then are you going to pay for an attorney? Unless you’re literally dead, most lawyers won’t touch you!
PERIOD.
I’ve seen it all too often, both pesonally and in my practice!
We pay that much per month, and too often much MORE, once deductibles and co-pays are factored in (you know, when we actually USE it), here in Georgia a very unregulated area compared to others...and I’m a nurse!
Your situation is unbelievably good, and very much NOT the norm!
And you are right, all doctors are not obligated to treat you regardless of ability to pay. Walk into any private practice and demand to be seen by the doctor for free. They will rightfully throw you out.
I remember several years back when I didn't have insurance. I became ill and needed attention. There was a Doc In A Box around the corner. I walked in, told them I needed to see a doctor, why, and that I didn't have insurance so could you "go easy on me with the cost". An hour later I was outta there with a bag full of samples instead of a prescription and my total bill was in the neighborhood of $125.
Well, again that’s true of most situations but there are exceptions...being a nurse, I can tell you I get ZERO favors and I’m IN healthcare...
and promotions?
What’s that?
When the goal is predefined, achieving the goal is more a matter of engineering than of economics. So, when “national health service” is (thought to be) a well-defined set of services, it is somewhat arbitrary as to whether it is provided directly by the government, or the purchase is finannced by the government, or even if it is left to the private sector (if we abstract from the possible connection of free provision of medical care to the motivations to work and save).
Economics is essentially about choosing goals in a dynamic and progressive world. Thus, the real issue of national health insurance, or even universal (private) health insurance, is one of securing the same quality of health care that the middle class receives today for everybody (which is actually not possible, which matter I will address in a minute), versus having an ever higher quality of health care for those who can afford it. In between these two cases is a combination of securing a minimal level of health care for the poor while still having an increasingly higher level of quality for those who can afford it.
Let me now return to the matter that it is not possible to provide everybody with the same quality of health care that the middle class enjoys. This is because providing health care involves more than providing money to pay for the service. We have limited numbers of doctors and other health care resources. Hence, when you provide people who currently are not consuming what is viewed to be enough health care services, they will bid away some of the health care, and there will be less for others. The available health care will then have to be rationed by waiting lines and even moreso by non-availability, as when entire communities don’t have a general practitioner.
There is a third alternative to the hodeg-podge U.S. health care finance system and the national medical care systems of Canada, Great Britain and Sweden, and it is the Japanese model. In the Japanese model, the vast majority of health care services are purchased out of pocket, and almost if not everybody has what we would call catastrophic health insurance to cover big medical bills. In Japan, the doctor-patient relationship is very strong, everybody has access to good quality health care services when these are needed even if costly, and the total cost is even less than socialized medicine (and a lot less than the cost of our system).
tpanther,
I’m sorry to hear that you and your wife had a bad experience. No one here has claimed that our healthcare system is perfect. I personally have many complaints about our current system. That’s why I didn’t mention the horror stories I’ve heard about socialized medicine. We have some horror stories here, too. See my tagline: My poor father had a terrible experience, and our family continues to question and regret the decisions we made in doctors, surgery, etc.
However, all of those problems we experienced would be worsened under increased government control.
The poster is asking why we oppose socialized medicine. Our question should be: What would be the advantages to socialized medicine? In what way would it be better than our current system, which already is partly controlled by our government? The onus is on the poster to convince us to change our current system to his.
Who says anything about favors? I know many nurses who, on their own, improve their situations, starting from LVNs, going to school in the evening to become RNs or other practitioner specialties. I have an aunt who started as an LVN and over years or hard work, started her own sourcing business for nurses and is very well off now. No one is holding you back, as long as you don't look for favors.
Presuming you're not a complete moron and got that right, I was not aware that each taxpayer paid the exact same ("even") dollar amount into the system. But even so, you still have taxpayers (ie., people who work) funding health care for bums and parasites. (Uh yeah, that's "socialism".) You really think that's a good idea?
I posted that, by law, hospitals must accept patients, regardless of their ability to pay. I said nothing about private practice.
Hospitals are required to accept all patients: See: Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act Many hospitals in my state are closing down and consolidating now because they're going bankrupt. Because they have to accept everyone. Just like socialized medicine.
As we all know, the answer isn't socialized medicine.
“Who says anything about favors?”
Ummm.... I just did!
I was an air force medic (10 yrs, incidentally looking to go back on active duty in the fall), got out on the GI Bill...got my LPN, then associates degree RN, then bachelors degree RN...
I’m not complaining about being a nurse, not even asking for favors, hell I’ve got good job security.
I’m complaining about our broken health care system and people like nurses that work within the industry that can’t get the deals like well YOU say you got for 1K a year was it? Can’t even come CLOSE!
The point I was making is as a nurse I’m not allowed to see the doctor I want, go to the hospital I want...and pay humongous premiums, deductibles and co-pays. Nurses traditionally don’t whine and cry and form unions, like say teachers... it’s nothing like what people so often assume or assert!
IN FACT, my wife works in a school cafeteria and HER healthcare plan is head and shoulders over ANYTHING I can get as a nurse! ANY nurse, be it my own business, working in an ICU, what have you...
It’s not that I’m LOOKING for favors, just some common sense!
Again, I’m not for universal or gov healthcare, but to pretend what we have is working, or people continually misunderstanding the facts like: “anyone can get healthcare reagradless of ability to pay” is only going to lead to gov. healthcare!
Our system is broken. Ignoring that fact will only bring about universal socialist healthcare that much quicker!
Since this thread is full of anecdotes, I thought I might share an interesting one.
My best friend is the CFO of a large hospital in the southeast. During our last visit we discussed this very issue. They write off hundreds of thousands of dollars every month in charges from care given to illegal immigrants or the very poor who claim no means to pay.
And further, they will gladly take pennies on the dollar to collect anything for services. Any cash payment is usually better than what they endure trying to comply with and collect from the government and some insurance companies.
Our system is not perfect, but more government makes it even worse. The biggest problem is that there are too many people who think they deserve first class healthcare, but refuse to even pay one single dollar for a doctor visit.
Socialized anything creates and even larger pool of dependent people too lazy to pull their own weight.
BTW - A true Conservative would NEVER see the answer as more government because that always results in less freedom.
I disagree, I will admit there are cracks in it, but to say it is broken is to have a better standard to weight it against. There are problems, but those are caused by too much government in it, the solution isn't to add more government solutions (the cause of the problem in the first place.)
Problems don't equal broken. If you believe it is broken, what standard do you weight it against. What is a real world example of a better system that doesn't have problems?
Thanks for the kind words...but...No no no...it was a series of episodes of inadequate care, broken billing, fraud...over a series of years! Not A (single) bad experience...sounds like you’ve had some tough times too. And this is what I’m talking about, once you actually need it, it’s an UTTER nightmare!
This was HARDLY an isolated incident, I only wish it were!
My wife had a mis-diagnosed bladder tumor that nearly killed us both (me from stress) for 6 YEARS...
AS in 365 days times SIX! MRI’s, CT scans...labs...surgeries, medicines...And once you have a $400,000+ bill, 20% of that is NOT a small number, particularly when she’s out of work and I’m missing alot of days too!
And keep in mind ‘m a nurse, in fact, had I NOT been a nurse (and Air FOrce medic prior to that), I’M CERTAIN she’d be dead!
Additionally, I worked at a nursing home, where the CEO and CFO are now in the Fed. pen for medicare and medicaid fraud, and oh yeah...bilking employees...ME by taking health insurance premiums but NOT passing that money along to the insurance company leaving hundreds of employees without coverage...and then filed bankruptcy, so they couldn’t be touched and the lawyers in NY got the funds after 5 years later...WE never saw a dime.
Soooo...we paid out nearly $700 in monthly premiums AND got to pay for for our dtr’s birth...100%!
No...I’ve also got dozens of stories both inside and outside the industry, and I’m not alone: and unless people wake up, we’ll have universal coverage...and THAT is my warning! Take it or leave it!
What we now have is CLEARLY a broken mess also.
But let me be crystal clear AGAIN, I’m NOT for socialized medicine...that would be even worse. I think I’ve mentioned that in every single post!
BUT that IS my warning...unless we honestly address the nightmare of these insurance companies, it’s what we’ll get! Sure as I’m sitting her typing! Frankly, I think it’s already too late!
MY point is the rosy picture some people paint are based mostly on anecdotes from people that simply haven’t been through either too many issues or a major one with our system, that’s all.
And I’m busy now with trying to determine today why my healthplan will not cover eye drops for allergies...CVS wanted $50 for some eye drops because the pollen is KILLING me today (here in Atlanta it’s not just high, it’s high on steroids!)...
I get SOOOOOOO tired of trying to get a prescribed med. and it’s not covered for some kooky-assed reason or another!
SHEESH, We pay $700 a month to have the crap and they don’t want me to have eye drops that actually work (patanol)...NOTHING OTC works...
and I won’t start with our dental plan...not today! :(
I think we agree here. We agree that there is much that needs to be addressed in our healthcare system but also that socialized medicine is not the answer.
Btw, we pay a fortune for health insurance, too. It depends on the plan your employer offers. Some companies cover insurance. Others don’t. We have a PPO, and the employer doesn’t cover the cost. HMO’s are cheaper, but what a nightmare they are. When I think of socialized medicine, I think of HMO’s.
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