Moderators: Alyrium Denryle, Edi, K. A. Pital
"Better Dead than Red" —that's the way it is for literally millions of Americans as far as their thinking goes. Better Dead than Red.Darth Wong wrote:I honestly don't understand how people in the world's wealthiest nation can put up with this. Not everyone is lucky enough to get free care from these Shriner folks, as welcome as their help is.
Oh yes. Believe it.Stark wrote:Whoa, really? You mean, the doctor comes in and says 'pay or we stop treatment'? That's pretty stunning.Sea Skimmer wrote:No sometimes they would just die. If you can’t pay anything and you don’t have insurance you just won’t be able to get certain expensive treatments at all. Hospitals must provide emergency stabilizing care and that kind of thing, but they don’t have to give you 100,000 dollars in chemotherapy (no idea if that’s what it costs but just go with it) even if they do diagnose you with cancer. Organ transplants are another thing you wont be able to get, but then the supply of organs is always much smaller then the demand already.
From what I understand, the US hospital or clinic simply doesn't grant you admission without an adequate payment scheme....Stark wrote: Whoa, really? You mean, the doctor comes in and says 'pay or we stop treatment'? That's pretty stunning.
Head over the spacebattles...... The current healthcare debate there will once again argue that Medicare and Medicaid is WHAT is distorting the US health system and causing the problems.MarshalPurnell wrote: People selling universal health care in the US have been enormously incompetent at countering this message. They tend to stress their limited, moderate aims of insuring everyone has some form of coverage, or at most claim that universal health care will be better than the present system in some vague sense. People who are not presently struggling with major health issues are apt to be complacent and to take the present system for granted, without recognizing any of its flaws, and are therefore vulnerable to the scaremongering of forces opposed to any government role in health care. Simply put most Americans do not realize how broken the system really is and won't until they're facing the enormous bills and looming bankruptcy of a disaster. They don't think that their health care is already going to be rationed, not in the public interest, but by private sector bureaucrats out to insure healthy profits for their bottom line. The structural-economic benefits of relieving employers of the need to provide expensive private health insurance by granting universal health care under the government is never even brought up in the debate. That we already spend enormous sums of money on the inefficiently structure Medicare and Medicaid, and that requiring hospitals to eat the costs of emergency room visitors that can't pay, is not used to show how absurd the compromises of our present system are. In short there are a great many arguments that can be used to undermine the "raa, raa free market good, government evil" approach taken by opponents of universal health care that simply are not made.
Maybe for you they aren't, but for the "rugged individualists"? It seems they are perfectly aware people will start dying, they just don't care.Darth Wong wrote:They just aren't tolerable ones.
King-Harbor was a shithole. It was a disgrace that people weren't jailed for that.The Yosemite Bear wrote:Not to mention they have been known to Dump patients on skid row, who come in via ER/paramedic cases. At least in LA they have.
This is one of the truest statements I've seen in a while.The Yosemite Bear wrote:Hell I'm union, I'm biased, currently I have one of the better US healthcare plans, and we have to fight to keep it every three years during contract time. I would hate to be a normal health consumer.
In addition to that, if your receiving constant prescriptions with lots of items (The £7.20 is per item) you can buy a pre-payment certificate for 4 or 12 months which then covers all prescriptions. The costs for prescriptions and certificates in Scotland are about a third that of England, however the Scottish pre-payment can't be used in England.Minischoles wrote:You only pay for everything indirectly (anytime you get a paycheck, a percentage of it goes towards your National Insurance), which you don't pay as a student, as a pensioner or if you're unemployed obviously. You are never actually paying beyond being taxed throughout your working lifetime, but for that you get essentially unlimited care (the more expensive drugs and treatments can be denied in some cases), you can visit a Doctor with a complaint at anytime, your surgery and hospital stay will never cost you anything extra.What's it actually like with a proper national healthcare system? Do you pay anything to visit the doctor? What about prescriptions, or surgeries?
Prescriptions do cost a very small sum (£7.20 as of this April, so about $11), but even then theres a ton of exemptions to that; people over sixty, children under sixteen (or under nineteen if the child is still in full time education), patients with certain medical conditions and those with low incomes are all exempt from paying even that nominal charge. And thats regardless of the medicine you're being given, it can be a simple migraine tablet or a cancer medication, its still the same.
And the major downside is you get treated like crap; like the official line is "okay fuck, we have a union worker and all these damn benefits, lets milk the fuckers for all they're worth"Glocksman wrote:The one real economic advantage my unionized workplace (TJ Maxx distribution center) has over a non union DC is benefits.
That, or crime rates would skyrocket as desperate people looking to save themselves or their loved ones start robbing businesses and create extortion rackets. Hell, I could easily see a poor patient draw a pistol, press it to the temple of the doctor or his accountant, and saying, "I have your payment plan right here!"Darth Wong wrote:I can tell you what would happen if we killed Medicare/Medicaid. People would start dying. En masse. This would eliminate the problem by eliminating the people. So they're right, in a sense: the free market does have solutions. They just aren't tolerable ones.
With the way the US is going, it'll effectively become the world's biggest Third World country.Stas Bush wrote:Robbing people or taking hostages or kidnapping to get the necessary money for healthcare is actually quite there in the Third World. Not to mention the black market of robbed organs. If that's the future people want for the US - they should go right ahead.
"DO YOU WORSHIP HOMOSEXUALS?" - Curtis Saxton (source) - PeZook Actually, it's US Law somewhere that you can't be turned away from a hospital because of your lack of ability to pay. It's how we have such a high survival rate in the inner city.Stas Bush wrote:If that's the future people want for the US - they should go right ahead.
Yeah its law, you can't be turned away for emergency care.MKSheppard wrote: Actually, it's US Law somewhere that you can't be turned away from a hospital because of your lack of ability to pay. It's how we have such a high survival rate in the inner city.
The Feds and State government do provide certain levels of funding to reimburse private companies for the costs of uninsured emergency care, particularly in the cities, but its not nearly equal to the actual costs involved.
What happens is that the cost gets passed on to someone else, I think the SOP right now for Hospitals who deal with ER cases of the obviously uninsured -- gang members coming in with gunshot wounds etc -- is that they charge it off to medicare/medicaid, or to the State government. I'm not exactly sure on this, someone else can do a better job of digging through the mass that is our medical system than me.
It's the truth! You have to swear that oath in order to become a Postal Worker.Shroom Man 777 wrote:I find it very amusing that Shep starts off talking about unions and stuff and eventually descends into the destruction of America's enemies. I love you, Sheppy-poo!
Conversely, reading this thread makes me want to emigrate to Canada. Of course, I'm about to spend 5-7 years on a student health plan...hope I'm as healthy for those years as I have been for the last eight.Darth Wong wrote:I am never, never, ever moving to the United States.
Exactly, which means if you end up with government not absorbing these costs ("scrap Medicare/Medicaid") for at least some form of universal treatment, either the laws will have to adjust to have someone else pay for it, or deny people care. Denying care will result in deaths, and a deeply criminalized health care market. That was the point I guess.MKSheppard wrote:What happens is that the cost gets passed on to someone else
I'd say it's more an issue of "it's not my problem". By the time it is their problem, they'll be too busy going bankrupt and dying to whine, and the rest of society will hadwave them away with a new "it's not my problem".Patrick Degan wrote:"Better Dead than Red" —that's the way it is for literally millions of Americans as far as their thinking goes. Better Dead than Red.
Another perspective from me: the Polish system is notoriously underfunded and riddled with problems. Still:Rahvin wrote: What's it actually like with a proper national healthcare system? Do you pay anything to visit the doctor? What about prescriptions, or surgeries?
