Maybe he's right and maybe you're right. But who cares? Emergency room treatment is hardly the only aspect of essential health care. There is chronic care as The Spartan pointed out, there are annual check ups, consultation with specialists, etc...Prannon wrote:I'm asking if they're gonna keep serving you if you don't pay and you keep coming, again and again and again. I had a friend whose mother had to go to the ER or clinics or somesuch regularly without insurance and no way to pay. I recall that she was eventually told not to come back again. It's an anecdote, but it puts me in doubt of his statement.
Ahh, the "America is unique" argument. Point out that Americans pay roughly double per person for health care compared to nations with socialized health care like Canada, the UK, Germany, etc... If anything, they can't afford not to adopt UHC.The argument he and I have had is actually really long. He argues that UHC won't work in the US because it's too different from other countries. He implies that it's too big, has too many people, can't pay for it, has an eroding economy, and culturally it isn't acceptable because it's SOCIALISM and comparable to Russia, China, Venezeula, Cuba, and he lists Poland for some reason. He believes that the better solution is to reign in insurance companies through strict regulations and serious oversight. He also derides me as being ignorant and not understanding how the political system works, and implies that I didn't learn a thing at college.
You can also hit him the the World Health Report, the Perinatal Mortality Rate and the Under Five Mortality Rate. The fact that U.S. seems to do poorly on all these statistics, relative to nations with socialized health care who enjoy similar socio-economic prosperity (and indeed, some that are well below their level of economic prosperity, such as Cuba), would seem to indicate that American health care simply isn't doing as good a job at saving lives as UHC systems are.I'm arguing that even though quality of care is lower in places like Canada and the UK, it's more accessible. I'm also arguing that Korean Public Health Care is better because it's more accessible, even if it's comparitively lousy (he cites a friend of his who has an injured hand, who's been to several doctors, and can't get it fixed). I've cited Life Expectancy figures from the CIA World Factbook, polls from this article, and the article from Bill Moyer's interview with Wendell Potter.
GPs will refer you to specialists under UHC if necessary.I still believe that UHC is the better option to solving this whole mess. Heavily regulating the insurance industry is almost the same as creating a public option anyway, based on my limited understanding of how this stuff works. His argument that the uninsured can just go to the ER for treatment made me trip up though. I argued that one can't get specialized treatment at the ER. He dismissed that saying that virtually no GP offers specialized treatment. In hindsight, that wasn't really a rebuttal. You need insurance to see a specialist for things like cancer.
