Posted on 07/28/2017 6:25:40 AM PDT by Colonel Kangaroo
Don’t fall for this tripe.
They “save” by throttling treatment if not outright denying it to people:
-Want that knee replaced? Nope, you’re too old.
-Want that knee replaced? Ok, you’ll have to wait till we tell you to do it.
-Want that cancer treatment? Ok? you’ll have to wait, but if you die in line, it’ll save us some $.
We spend more on healthcare in the US because we are at liberty to do so.
It’s easy to “keep costs down” when you strip away people’s rights and tell them what they can do and when they can do it.
Even I could keep costs down with that kind of absolute power.
This is such a sad case. If he was here, the US healthcare system would do whatever it took to try to save his life.
If private care is allowed, of course it can.
And the question of "who is paying" ABSOLUTELY changes the fundamental dynamics of the marketplace (which is really not a marketplace at all).
Here's an example:
In 1944, my Dad rode ambulances in Brooklyn as a medical student. Sometimes, when they went to a fifth-floor walkup and found grandpa in the back bedroom in a bad way with a heart attack, they would tell the big family with the little apartment atet there was nothing they could do for him, because they know taking him to the hospital would ruin the family financially.
In 1968, when MY grandpa had a heart attack in the little town I live in, he got a bed in the hospital, a cot for grandma to sleep on, nitroglycerine, morphine, and a view of the lake he loved until he died.
Now, in the same little town, or back in Brooklyn, when grandpa has a heart attack, a mobile coronary care unit arrives within 15 minutes, administers a cloned human protein, takes him to the cath lab or meets a helicopter which does that, and minimally invasive coronary surgery is done within about 12 hours.
Now, the rise in cost from zero in 1944 to a few hundred dollars in 1968 to several hundred thousand dollars now is not a function of the marketplace.
If families were paying the $200 000-$400 000 for a modern grandpa heart attack out of pocket, grandpa would still be in the back bedroom.
It is the taxpayers promise to pay without limit for all this stuff that has created all these stuff. The "marketplace" has nothing to do with it.
The only reason we haven't had a single-payer system already is that Americans expect the cost of their health coverage to be covered by their employers. You can't blame them for thinking this way, since it had been that way for about 50 years by the time we got to the 1990s.
This was not a problem when health insurance really was insurance and was intended really to cover moderately expensive medical procedures for common injuries and not-so-serious illnesses. SERIOUS illnesses were not a problem because most of them weren't curable anyway; cancer or a cardiovascular episode would usually be fatal.
As treatments improved and medical technologies improved, the types of medical procedures that were covered increased exponentially -- along with the expectations of the insured. So insurance naturally got more expensive, and at some point in time -- I suspect it was around the mid-1980s after the memories of the malaise and low expectations of the 1970s had worn off -- it got to the point where insuring employees became an enormous financial burden for employers. I worked in a fairly typical office environment in the 1990s, with a group of fellow employees who were pretty typical cross-section of American workers, and I do know that by the early 2000s our insurance costs were almost as high as the rent costs on some very expensive office space in a major city.
And that's really what it comes down to ... and it explains why every major employer in the U.S. would love to have a single-payer system tomorrow. It pushes one of the major line items off their operating expense sheet.
This guy does not even understand the basics. He thinks all will be well under a single-payer system.
What this guy forgets that most all of the Western Democracies in Europe went to socialized healthcare after W.W. II.. Costs were cheap and you have almost 75 years of the system going.
Now it is impossible to compare those systems to a country like the U.S. in this day and time trying to switch over to a single-payer system when Health Care is now about 20% of GDP.
If were look at the estimated costs of California trying to establish a single-payer system the estimated costs is about $400 Billion for them alone. So you extrapolate that costs for the whole country then what is it, maybe $2 to $3 Trillion a year, then how would it be paid for? We are already broke, this would consume the whole federal budget and then some.
Bottom line is it will not work and can’t.
That is the way Obamacare is designed. If you want low deductibles you have to buy gold coverage. But it doesn't make any sense to buy gold coverage unless you know you are going to use it. If you have a lousy plan at work(bronze level) you can mitigate some of the deductible costs if the employer offers FSA or HSA plans.
Killing baby Charlie is a key feature of government healthcare. Then the elderly who are no longer useful to the regime. Then the unfit. Then the political dissidents. Then...
It’s been 25 years since I tore up that knee playing basketball. I can wait a while longer!
They’ll do the same thing for your blocked coronary artery.
So in reality, you could have had insurance, you just didn’t take the steps necessary to get it.
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I didn’t state that clearly enough. We were denied coverage by every major insurance company, but were able to find health insurance through a boutique insurer. It was VERY expensive and didn’t cover much. A simple pregnancy/delivery, for instance, had to be paid for out of pocket.
Kansas, my state, theoretically allowed one person groups, but major insurers didn’t go there. I talked extensively with our state insurance commissioner throughout this period. What we were able find was great in her book. She was more of a representative of the insurance companies than the residents.
If you are an advocate of moving from state to state to chase simple health insurance, you should fully embrace the system we have...good luck with that. I think the model will rot out from under you.
I had a great job and made a great living. I chose to stay in the job and to pay a high rate for substandard insurance. It was a roll of the dice that worked out for us, but it was a stupid outcome of a broken system that caused the gamble to be necessary.
I think what the author is arguing for is what we have already (third payer system) except the third payer is Uncle Sam. But the hospitals and everything would still be privately run. Most if not all of the problems with healthcare in the UK, Canada, and elsewhere exist because the government runs the facilities. Hospitals are built with tax revenue and doctors are government employees. I don’t think he’s arguing that hospitals should be government-run (I hope not).
NO — PRES. REAGAN WAS RIGHT THEN & RIGHT NOW WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO CONSERVATIVES?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnLa1BvtaxM
No, I am not the problem. I demand nothing of you. I am utterly and completely opposed to single payer health care. However, should I find myself living in a nation where such a system exists, I will avail myself of the services available, just as I may apply for unemployment if I get laid off even though I oppose such a system. That is the reality of life and I was merely using my own situation as an example of the author’ bogus premise. I do wonder about your reading comprehension, I must say.
Well they’re not clogged at the moment, but if you think I favor a single payer system, as another poster does, you are dead wrong.
I was completely and totally against single payer for years. However, I took the family to England and France a few years ago. I made it a point, when I could, to talk about their health care systems. Out of the 20-30 people I talked to, mostly working class, not one had a negative thing to say about their system. When I mentioned that I can call my civilian doctor (I have a civilian DR under Tricare and I also have a DR at the VA)and get in same day or next day they said if it is not an emergency you usually have to wait a week to get into your Dr there. I heard no horror stories of death panels or someone not given treatment and allowed to die. I also noticed that there was no movement in either of these countries to change the healthcare system.
Long story short is this experience made me reexamine the single payer issue. The author is correct when he says a lot of insurance dollars go to profit instead of health care. Also that having a single payer system would make our companies more competitive. Society is always a trade-off between freedom and security. We all give up some freedom for security. I think this idea should be discussed in a reasonable and logical manner comparing the pros and cons of both systems. And then if the American people want a single payer system a constitutional amendment should be adopted to give the federal government the power to create and manage such a system.
This thread is really beginning to depress me.
Let’s say we go to a single-payer system, guess what the insurance companies would run the system. Medicare is not run by the Government but by insurance companies that have a guaranteed 10% profit no matter what.
Then as a I said in a previous post, almost all of the European countries went to Socialized Medicine 75 years ago.
I am not sure we can afford it. If California thinks it will cost around $400 Billion just for that state then how much for the rest of the country?
We have a problem with cost, not insurance. If we were to break the backs of the Medical Monopolies we could lower real medical costs by as much 90%, which should be the goal.
Cost of the healthcare is already over 1/3rd of the Federal budget, where do you think costs will be with a single-payer system?
I am not saying I support single payer. I am just saying that from my personal experiences and my research I do not reject it out of hand anymore.
There will always be pros and cons to any system. I see some of the pros in our system being quick access to medical care and having state of the art treatment. Some cons being not everyone has access to basic care and if not covered by insurance they can be bankrupt because of needed medical care.
Single-payer; Pros-everyone is covered and no fear of your life being destroyed by medical bills you can’t pay because of a medical emergency. Cons-having to wait for care and not having access to the most advanced medical care.
As far as death panels and such. In either system some one will have the authority to deny treatment. Whether it’s the government or a health insurance company. Both systems have a finite amount of money to spend on care.
I will say this, I am very open to some type of medicare for children through the age of 18. I think the fact that we provide medical care to all those 65 and over but don’t cover our children is horrible. I know there is Medicaid but there are the working poor (Like my daughter’s boyfriend’s family) who aren’t eligible for Medicaid. I also believe it would save money in the long run, especially at the state level.
Now being a believer in our constitution the only way that such a system should be adopted is by a constitutional amendment empowering the federal government to create and manage such a system. Not by saying it’s a tax.
You make a great point.
I used to listen to G. Gordon Liddy’s talk show for reasons that I don’t completely understand. The guy had a weird charisma. Anyway, he had a tic where he repeated the same damn lines over and over. One of them was “When I was a kid, you went to the doctor and when you were done, you paid him.”
I used to sometimes yell at the radio, “And then you went home and died.”
We live in an age of medical marvels. My wife just went through breast cancer. And the expectation from us and everyone around us was “This is going to be a tough year, but in the end, you’ll be fine.”
As a kid in the 70s, I remember that the second “cancer” was mentioned at the kitchen table, everyone seemed to start mentally making funeral plans.
My father in law has leukemia and has been receiving experimental treatments for the last three years. At this point, if you gave him a test to determine if he had leukemia, it would come back negative. They have essentially devised a cure for it. In five years, it will be the standard treatment everywhere. You get leukemia in South Dakota and an outpatient center will administer this to you. (My father in law happened to have a prestigious doctor who knew of the study, be a perfect physical candidate for it, and live within an hour of the university where the trial was being conducted).
It will be monstrously expensive, and everyone will want it. There aren’t enough health savings accounts in the world to pay for it.
So, what do we do?
I work on the reimbursement side of healthcare. With CHIP, a child who does not have health insurance is the victim of someone who does not know how to do paperwork.
There’s a reason 72 million people are on Medicaid is because 9 million children are on CHIP.
I deal with numerous hospitals. The happiest ones are Children Hospitals, because they know that they will received some type of third party payment on every patient that comes through the door.
Compare that to some larger “metro” hospitals where 75 percent of the A/R is “true self pay.” That means the patient owes everything. And half the time, these patients don’t even have fixed addresses.
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