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Do you guys think healthcare in this country should be universal like in Canada, germany or Sweden..............???????
Universalize Healthcare In Us????
- Thread starter francisdoss
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francisdoss said:
Absolutely not. That is, not if you want a healthcare system that provides GOOD care and not just one that can supply everyone with basic and only basic treatment. Why is it that Canadians come to the US when they get really messed up? hmmm....
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nmnrraven said:
I actually live in a country with Universal Healthcare (Sweden). While everybody does get some care, and basic care, I don't think it even compares to the high level of care you can get in the US (if you are one of the lucky ones with insurarance, etc).
When you give care to care to everyone you limit individual choice. I was assigned a health clinic to go to for any medical need. It is not the clinic that is next to my house, rather is a one where there was room. I don't get to chose my doctor, and I probably won't get the same doctor every time I go. I guess this wouldnt be a problem for someone who is accustomed to no medical care whatsoever..but, i have higher standards I guess.
If it was possible for everyone in the US to have health insurance...do you think this would be equivalent to Universal Health Care?
On a side note: I shadowed an MD in the emergency neuro clinic the other night. I saw a man wait for 11 hours for treatment...and this was a man who was sent to the hospital via ambulance due to seizures (and he is not prone to seizures). I wouldn't necessarily call that good care.
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francisdoss said:
Oh Jesus, not another one of these threads. If you want to listen to people with very little healthcare experience attempt to discuss policy, there are about 60,000 of them in the archives. Just do some searching. Nowadays they tend to get moved to the "Topics in Healthcare" forum.
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slb830 said:
i'm not going to comment on the obvious bias in this paper, but i think the graph they produce on page 3 is neutral enough:
http://dll.umaine.edu/ble/U.S. HCweb.pdf
among the highest-income oecd countries, u.s. had the highest 1998 per capital health care spending. it was 1.5 times as high as the next highest spending country (switzerland). compared to sweden it is 2.4 times as high. compared to canada it is 1.8 times as high.
so i don't think it's fair to see the hypothetical future of socialized care in america by looking at countries that currently have it. they simply don't spend nearly as much as we do on it. what are some of the things that we are more likely than them to pay as medical costs? among them are unnecessary procedures that don't improve quality of care, administrative costs associated with a private third-party-payer system, and insurance corporation profits. this is money that in a system of socialized medicine could go to paying for medical research and care instead.
so if we used our current level of per capita health care spending in a system of socialized medicine (i'm assuming relative spending hasn't changed too much relative to other countries since 1998) i would expect our situation to be substantially better than in other socialized-medicine countries that spend less per capita. i wonder what the above poster's experience in sweden's health care system would be like with 2.4 times their current per-capita spending level.
i've been spending too much time on these debates in other threads. this all i'll type here. cheers.
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Heh we should pass bills for government takeovers of all the insurance industries (auto, life, flood...etc.). After all, the system would be leaner without all those "private insurance company profits."sanford_w/o_son said:
Lol
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sanford_w/o_son said:
One thing I've never understood about these debates is that people don't realize that: Guess What, we ALREADY HAVE SOCIALIZED MEDICINE HERE IN THE US. It is just implemented in a bizarre, and _possibly_ inefficient form -- not like other countries that have socialized medicine/universal healthcare/whatever you want to call it.
No one goes without the care that they need here in the US, even those that can't pay. The cost of medical care for these people is borne by the rest of the public in the form of higher insurance premiums, etc. That society as a whole, rather than the individual, bears the "average" cost of medical care, is essentially socialism.
The only non-socialized form of medicine would be to outlaw health insurance, and allow the free-market to set prices where everybody had to pay cash. This, of course, would be morally unacceptable to most people, because those who couldn't afford medical care wouldn't receive any. Thus, it's not really a realistic possibility.
I guess my only point is that it seems silly to debate whether or not we should adopt socialized medicine. What we are really talking about is whether one form of socialized medicine is better than another.
I am, by no means, an expert, but I think that society might benefit if a level of basic coverage (i.e. that covered basic exams, etc) were provided to everybody that needed it, which would encourage people to go to the doctor at the onset of problems, rather than waiting until things became more serious. I have first-hand knowledge of a number of situations like this, where someone without insurance didn't go to a doctor at the first sign of trouble, and instead waited. Had society paid the hundreds of dollars for the check-up in one case, MILLIONS (patient became paralyzed from a Staph. infection that they had known about through discomfort for over a week) would have been saved.
I DON'T think that the govenrment should take over any aspect of healthcare, because our government pretty much screws up everything it touches (i.e. takes over and actively runs.) The most efficient "public goods" are generally those that are privately administered, but regulated by the government. This is essentially what we have now. So, while I think that some changes/fine tuning are in order, I don't think that drastic, major changes in the fundamentals of the US healthcare system will be very productive.
JMHO,
Jota
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chef_NU said:
Actually, the auto insurance industry is government-run in Quebec - and the premiums are about one-fourth the cost of private premiums in other provinces. Getting benefits and claims isn't a courtroom crapshoot either; you get a decent amount, guaranteed. However, you don't get the multimillion dollar payoffs for whiplash
I know you were being sarcastic, but you are actually correct in your statement. Besides, isn't there already a nationalized flood insurance program in the U.S., borne of the needs of people living in risky areas who just couldn't be insured by any private company at any cost? Thought I read about something like that in the news...
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trustwomen said:
The point is that, generally speaking, any government entity is run much more inefficiently than a private incarnation of the same entity, even including the profits of the private company.
In a free market, it HAS to be that way, because where there is competition, there is pressure for improved efficiency. Where there is monopoly (a government controlled enterprise is similar to a monopoly) any inefficiency can be easily passed to consumers -- there is not as much pressure to run an efficient business.
I don't know anything about auto. insurance in Canada, so I cannot refute any of your claims about that.
However, I DO know a little bit about flood insurance. It's probably enough, for now, to say that it is administered by FEMA. If that's not enough, and you want to talk about it some more, I need to look a few things up, but my point is that FEMA is such the poster-child for an incompetant Federal agency, that its existance is threatened right now.
Jota
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medcine is a business of saving lives...
you pay less you get ****ter products...
you pay less you get ****ter products...
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You cant give everyone the same plan and not ration healthcare. If you have a bad knee in canada and need a knee replacement. It takes up to a year just to see an orthopod and another 18 months to get the surgery done. Thats just flat out rediculous if its you that has to limp around for 2 years no one will put up with that. Its just a few month process around here. If you think we have a two tiered system now, put in universal coverage and see if the wealthy wait. They won't. Lots of docs will drop the single payor and go boutique. It takes 6 months to get an MRI in Canada. We had a patient injure his wrist on Monday, he had an MRI on Tuesday. We went over his options on the following Monday cast vs perc screw. He decided on the screw and was fixed the following tuesday. He would still be on a one year waiting list to see and orthopod in canada or 6 month wait to get an MRI.
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No.
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Not universal healthcare exactly, but the opportunity to opt-in to universal health coverage. We already have universal health coverage for old people. I think that Medicare should be available to anyone who wants it, regardless of age. And that people who don't want it should be free to spend the extra $$ on the private plan of their choice, but still pay the taxes to support Medicare, kinda like people who send their kids to private school still pay local school taxes. And that some of this extra tax would be offset by not having to pay your healthcare premiums out of pocket or deducted from your paycheck.
But I'm just a naive idealist, and I'm sure someone will be along to poke holes.
But I'm just a naive idealist, and I'm sure someone will be along to poke holes.
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dawg44 said:
Beats being un/underinsured in America. In that case you wait until you're 65 and qualify for Medicare, which can be a helluva lot longer than 2.5 years. Actually, I know a waitress who needed double knee replacements. She had the first one done at the state indigent care hospital, and then immediately declared bankruptcy to protect her meager assets.
Ah, what a great system we have.
P.S. The waitress in question was 51 at the time, so her wait would have been about 14 years.
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First of all, you are just making stuff up. This is complete BS.dawg44 said:
Second of all, have you ever tried to get a derm appointment. There is a 3 to 6 month wait. Or an non emergent OB/GYN. 2 months there. In America.
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Do some research before you pop off about something YOU know nothing about.Mutterkuchen said:
Need surgery?
Here's how long you'll wait
by Jason Fekete
July 28, 2004 Calgary Herald
Susan Warner swallows addictive painkillers every day to ease the crippling pain she endures waiting for knee-replacement surgery.
One of her knees gave out in October and the Calgary woman has been waiting for the surgery since. However, Warner, 51, is lost in a lineup for the operation at the Rockyview General Hospital that she says could last 18 months.
"It's inhuman. The quality of my life is horrible and there's absolutely nothing I can do about it," she said Tuesday.
Waiting lists are crippling Canada's health-care system and frustrating patients and doctors alike. The Canadian Medical Association released a 10-point prescription on Tuesday that targets waiting lists for surgery and diagnostic procedures like MRIs and CT scans.
It proposes setting benchmark waiting times for surgery, hiring more health professionals, and expanding options for Canadians to get treatment in other jurisdictions.
In Calgary, as the city expands, so does the pressure to get people treated at local hospitals in a reasonable amount of time.
There are about 25,000 Calgarians waiting for surgery or scans at the city's four major hospitals. And the Calgary Health Region estimates waiting times for surgery are growing at an astronomical rate of 12 to 18 per cent every year.
Alberta Health's website says waiting times in Calgary are as follows:
- 62 weeks for a hip replacement at Peter Lougheed Centre;
- 62 weeks for general surgery at Rocky- view General Hospital;
- 30 weeks for MRI scans at Foothills Medical Centre;
- 54 weeks for knee replacement surgery at Rockyview General Hospital;
- 11 weeks for cardiac surgery at Foothills Medical Centre.
For Warner, the wait has come with a heavy price. She says she has become addicted to painkillers that are a daily staple to help her hobble through her workday.
Warner's a photographer, a job that keeps her on her feet most of the day, with or without her cane.
"I know I'm addicted. When I wake up in the morning, I'm shaking and have headaches," she said with a sigh. "I'll have to deal with that after the fact."
In their report, Canada's doctors and nurses are sending a direct message to premiers meeting this week in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., for three days of talks largely on Canada's ailing health-care system.
In its report, titled The Taming of the Queue, the Canadian Medical Association and Canadian Nurses Association argue the Canada Health Act should be revamped to help Canadians get quicker access to better health care.
Waiting for care is part of the "normal functioning of any health system," the report says, but warns excessive waits can have "significant health and economic impacts."
During the June election, Prime Minister Paul Martin identified waiting lists as the top issue facing the medicare system.
He vowed to spend $4 billion over the next five years to reduce waiting times, including focusing on five specific areas: cancer care, joint replacement, heart surgery, diagnostic imaging and sight restoration surgery.
The medical association's report proposes a 10-point plan to fix waiting lists, including:
n Establishing reasonable waiting times for different procedures;
n Allowing hospital funding to expand or contract depending on pressures, so service delivery isn't constrained by budget caps;
n Aggressively recruiting and retaining health-care professionals;
n Prioritizing services and ailments through consultation with the public and health-care providers;
n Improving the ability of Canadians to seek care in other provinces or out of the country.
The association's president said sustainable reforms -- not just more cash -- should be the premiers' focus if they hope to wean the system off its crutches.
"Access to health care in a timely manner is job No. 1 and Canadians expect nothing less," said Dr. Sunil Patel. "If (the premiers) focus on dollars alone, then we have lost everything. Canadians will lose confidence in their health-care system."
The report does say the system needs money.
"There is no doubt that the availability of resources does come to bear on the timeliness and accessibility of health-care services," the report says.
The Calgary Health Region has thrown hundreds of millions of dollars into expediting care for residents.
In February, the CHR announced a $450-million plan to open new beds and operating rooms, and expand emergency and intensive care units at the Foothills Medical Centre, Peter Lougheed Centre and Rocky-view General Hospital.
"Our longest waiting lists are in orthopedics and general surgery," said Tracy Wasylak, the CHR's vice-president of surgical services. "We're hoping to put resources into both of those programs this year to drop those waiting lists."
Sick of waiting for her pain to be eased, Warner, meanwhile, said she looked to Montana to expedite the surgery. However, the procedure would cost $25,000 -- leaving her to wait and hope in Canada.
"It's brutal. I'm in constant pain," Warner said. "I can't work to full capacity. It's difficult to function."
- - -
Get in line . . .
Waiting periods for surgical procedures at Calgary hospitals:
Hips, knees, bones, joints and muscles: 20 to 62 weeks
MRI scans: 17 to 31 weeks
General surgery (removal of gall bladder, hernia, lumps, cysts, varicose veins): 23 to 62 weeks
