Covered California Rate Increase 12.5% for 2018 (Los Angeles: for sale, cities, registered)

[2sleepy]

Originally Posted by CaliRestoration

That's why Canadians have to wait 22 weeks in some cases to see a specialist. How can something be a right when no one is around to provide it? Yeah, because healthcare is not a right.

The Fraser Institute's findings are always the same, horrible horrible news about Canadian Healthcare, but if you take a closer look at how they acquire their data you might not be so willing to quote it as though it was fact. They don't use hospital data to determine wait times, they ask physicians what they "think" the wait time might be, and they can only get 1 in 5 physicians to even participate in their survey.

"Fill out this survey and have a chance to win $2,000 — that's the annual enticement from the Fraser Institute, an offer made to thousands of doctors whose names appeared on a mailing list. But it wasn't tempting enough to get doctors to participate. No medical oncologists in Saskatchewan, Manitoba or New Brunswick took the bait. Zero responses came back from radiation oncologists in New Brunswick or from cardiovascular surgeons in Manitoba. Not a single plastic surgeon in Prince Edward Island or Newfoundland answered the questionnaire. Across Canada, just seven per cent of psychiatrists on the list bothered to answer the short survey asking them to estimate how long their patients are waiting for care. The Fraser Institute is a think-tank that has long advocated for more private-sector options in the Canadian health-care system. Every year for more than two decades it has published a gloomy report about wait times for health care. This year's came out on Wednesday"
Fraser Institute's wait-time survey: Does it still count if most doctors ignored it? - Health - CBC News

[CaliRestoration]

Originally Posted by 2sleepy

The Fraser Institute's findings are always the same, horrible horrible news about Canadian Healthcare, but if you take a closer look at how they acquire their data you might not be so willing to quote it as though it was fact. They don't use hospital data to determine wait times, they ask physicians what they "think" the wait time might be, and they can only get 1 in 5 physicians to even participate in their survey.

A 20% sample size for a poll is actually pretty darn good. That actually helps the case that it's an accurate poll. Plus it's the most thorough study done yet on wait times unless you have one you want to present?

Here's an article from Lefty Huffington Post that has actually advocated for single payer in the U.S.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry...b0db570d3778ff

She was put on a waiting list for a hip replacement at the Hip and Knee Clinic, which manages a centralized surgery triage process for Alberta. But her doctor advised her to explore private treatment options she might be able to access more quickly, because her pain was so severe and her mobility was becoming impeded.

After a worldwide search for a suitable clinic, taking into account the additional costs of flights and weighing up a range of options, she decided to seek treatment at Health City Cayman Islands in 2015.

Angela paid approximately $18,000 Canadian dollars ($14,100) for the cost of the surgery and hospital stay. She feels the overall investment, including additional travel and lodging costs, was worth it.

“We went off-season and stayed for a glorious three weeks,” she said. “The total cost was $25,000 Canadian to regain at least one year of my life. I would have been waiting at least one more year in our system.”

Bugera is far from alone. While Americans have been crossing the border for years in search of cheaper medications, it turns out there are a growing number of Canadians seeking medical treatment abroad as well, raiding their bank accounts and choosing to pay for treatment instead of being treated through their nationalized health care system. In 2014, more than 50,000 Canadians left the country for medical treatment, a 25 percent increase from the previous year. A similar number left the country for treatment in 2015.

I can see a specialist same day if I call in the morning.

[CA4Now]

Originally Posted by CaliRestoration

But saying "healthcare is a right" makes zero sense.

You came up with the "right" issue. I was discussing the free market as it relates to health care. Scroll back.

[CaliRestoration]

Originally Posted by CA4Now

You came up with the "right" issue. I was discussing the free market as it relates to health care. Scroll back.

You posted articles that mentioned "right" so you should probably check your sources before you post them?

[CA4Now]

Originally Posted by CaliRestoration

You posted articles that mentioned "right" so you should probably check your sources before you post them?

Or you just can't refute any of the arguments about the free market not applying to health care. It's kind of your standard reply. (See your post about who creates medicines, who sells medicines, why people go to med school....what on EARTH did any of that have to do with this topic?)

[2sleepy]

Originally Posted by CaliRestoration

A 20% sample size for a poll is actually pretty darn good. That actually helps the case that it's an accurate poll. Plus it's the most thorough study done yet on wait times unless you have one you want to present?

yep, it's a great way to conduct a poll, ask a doctor how long they think their patients will have to wait for a procedure, sort of like asking passerbys what the temperature is rather than looking at a thermostat. And asking a doctor in Quebec how long the wait time for knee replacement is has no relationship to the wait time in British Columbia or another province or territory because they are all independently operated.

Canadians wait longer to see doctor than international average - Health - CBC News

[CA4Now]

Originally Posted by CaliRestoration

Uh, get a job?

Originally Posted by CaliRestoration

I'm unemployed now, I've talked about this before.

So where do you get your health insurance, Cali?

[Tulemutt]

Originally Posted by CaliRestoration

Healthcare is not a right. It isn't even a "right" in those countries you claim it is. .

what are you spewing now?

Source:
University of California - Los Angeles
Summary:
More than half of the world's countries have some degree of a guaranteed, specific right to public health and medical care for their citizens written into their national constitutions. The United States is one of 86 countries whose constitutions do not guarantee their citizens any kind of health protection. That's the finding of a new study that examines the level and scope of constitutional protection of specific rights to public health and medical care.

And why do you only quote Canadian wait times for specialist appointments?

Any discussion of waiting times must begin with the observation that France, Germany, Switzerland and many other developed nations manage to combine universal access to care with rapid access to care. It’s an unfortunate quirk of international health-care policy that Canada and England, the two countries that do struggle with...
https://www.washingtonpost.com

... oh, right ... because it best fits your narrative, ignoring all the other 85 nations with Universal Care. Some have efficient systems. Some don't. And your anecdotal claim of being able to see a specialist within 24 hours isn't backed up as common experience in the American world of healthcare either. In fact, not too many years back the average wait time in the US was 21 days.

[SportyandMisty]

Those who call for Universal Care or Single Payer typically do not focus on the underlying economics.

One definition of Universal Care is something like the VA Healthcare System scaled up to take care of everyone in the nation. However the economics don't support such a system. In Microeconomics (Theory of the Firm) there is a concept called the optimal firm size (sometimes called the socially optimal firm size). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social...imal_firm_size. The idea can best be explained in terms of "economies of scale," which most people understand. When there are long run economies of scale, a firm (in this case a health care system) can expand and spread its fixed costs over more customers, thereby resulting in a decrease in average costs per unit of output (patient served). The flip side is, depending on the industry, "dis-economies of scale." With diseconomies of scale, a firm can get too big -- its own bureaucracy gets in the way of being nimble, and average costs per unit (patient served) can be reduced by shrinking the firm.

Most economists say the VA Healthcare System is suffering from dis-economies of scale. It should shrink. It cannot do so for political reasons. For example, many of the VA Hospitals were built 50-60 years ago when planners built hospitals for a WWII-style war with many hundreds of thousands of casualties. Those hospitals are inefficient by modern measures and probably should be torn down & replaced. Those huge hospitals might only be used at 20% capacity, but every attempt to close them fails because of the political pressure from the US Congressmen in whose district the VA hospital and its jobs reside.

Another alternative is Single Payer to pay for local firms in the business of delivering healthcare. When people say Single Payer, they typically mean someone else is the single payer -- the Federal Government. A federal Single Payer system would likely also suffer from diseconomies of scale (excess bureaucracy). But the bigger issue is that it doesn't solve the underlying problem that the health care itself (the thing paid for by the Single Payer) is too damn expensive in the USA.

We consume, on average across the USA and in total, north of $10,000 per person of health care services per year in aggregate (doctors visits, hospitals procedures and hospital stays, durable medical equipment, physical therapy, imaging studies, etc etc etc). So, a hypothetical Federal Single Payer could pay for all of that -- and then our federal income taxes (and other taxes) would need to go up by, on average, north of $10,000 per person per year, plus the administrative costs the Federal Government would incur.

The canonical family of 5 -- mom, dad & 3 kids -- would need to pay the Federal Government an extra $50,000 per year in taxes (plus more for federal administrative expenses) to pay for Single Payer, and that is partially offset by the parents' employer(s) not having to purchase health care services on their behalf and also offset by the parent's not having to contribute to the purchase of health care services through their employer.

Nevertheless, everyone agrees that it isn't feasible to ask that hypothetical family of 5 to fork over an extra $50,000 per year in taxes to pay for their portion of Single Payer, even if, say, the family saves $40K by not having to purchase private health insurance or employer-sponsored health insurance.

So... the call for Single Payer is really a call to have a Federal system where someone else (usually "The Rich") pays more in taxes so the common man can incur the benefit.

And at the end of the day, total expenditures on healthcare in the USA would go up unless something else is done. Why would they go up? The administrative costs to be incurred by such a Federal Single Payer System would be higher than the sum of the administrative costs incurred by the private health insurance system (dis-economies of scale) and of course there would be more fraud in the form of health care providers gaming the system to extract the maximum possible revenue out of Uncle Sam.

********

So where does that leave us? Damned if I know. It will take someone far smarter than I am to figure it out.

[CaliRestoration]

Originally Posted by CA4Now

So where do you get your health insurance, Cali?

I pay for it.