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If it was me I'd have universal healthcare with something like $100 fees for doctors visits and $500 fees for ER visits just to discourage people from using the ER for stupid stuff like their kids having the sniffles. It would still be far more affordable than the thousands or more people have to pay for actual procedures.
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Originally Posted by BruSan
That's just the thing; I do not believe any of the countries with a Universal Healthcare system experience the kinds of abuse you're seeing in the U.S.
Having coverage for everything means you're pro-active in your personal health decisions to the point that you don't end up using an ER as a form of health maintenance but rather only go there when you actually need emergency care for an unforeseen event injurious in nature.
IE: If your history shows you being susceptible to bronchitis; you call your family practitioner and inform the desk that you are displaying the usual symptoms. A call back in a number of minutes suggests you visit the office that afternoon and the doctor will verify so he can "legitimately" write a prescription after an actual examination and you're on your way to the pharmacy or home to have the prescription delivered to your door. That has been the practice for my family for well over 60 years.
I'll take these two together. I see no evidence that people are abusing health care in this country. That is something else the RW likes to believe.
And yet people from all around the world come here every day for health services. On any given day The Cleveland Clinic looks like a meeting at the U.N.
Another one straight out of the Tea Party playbook.
Not only is it completely irrelevant (people come to Australia for health services, too), it's, again, a completely different issue to health insurance. It's like saying "Poor people are dying of starvation in the United Arab Emirites" -- "Oh, that's a load of crap, people come from all over the world to dine in fancy restaurants in Dubai!" It's not the same topic. If anything, it proves how good, Canada, for example, has it. I regularly used to see/hear Republicans that I worked with in Nevada nodding knowingly as they spoke of all the "Canadians hopping the border for treatment because their system is so crap". I'd always take this opportunity to point out that lack of available specialists is not the same issue as health insurance and, by the way, did you know that Canada's health system pays for their treatment in the USA? It's precisely because of their system that it is feasible to do this.
The US rations more than any modern nation on earth. We are so brain washed it boggles the mind. Again we ration like this: I pay for medicaid and medicare and VA and Indian health and I do not qualify to use any one of them. I'm not old, disabled, poor, not an American Indian, nor am I a vet, yet I pay taxes for all of them. I can only use insurance I pay additional for and still I have to pay co-pays and deductibles on top of that. THAT IS RATIONING!
My health insurance in Nevada was only prepared to pay for three nights hospital stay. My mother, in Australia, had a hysterectomy and a seven night hospital stay. The whole thing cost her $0 and she's nowhere near being "rationed". In fact, Medicare in Australia has an "out of pocket safety net". Not all doctors "bulk bill" which enables them to offer the free treatment so there's quite often copays of about $30 or so and if done outside of a hospital where it would be free, CT scans or MRI's attract a couple of hundreds bucks in copay. The safety net limits the amount of out of pocket cost to you in a calendar year. Seems like the opposite of rationing to me.
I'm not sure I understand. A team of professionals in a very expensive facility performed life saving surgery. Is he saying his life isn't worth $11k? Maybe he should have tried the do-it-yourself approach with an Exacto knife and tequila.
I think the point is that why teams of professionals in the same sorts of facilities in other western nations can do it for around 10% of the pre-insurance price quoted here?
Another one straight out of the Tea Party playbook.
Not only is it completely irrelevant (people come to Australia for health services, too), it's, again, a completely different issue to health insurance. It's like saying "Poor people are dying of starvation in the United Arab Emirites" -- "Oh, that's a load of crap, people come from all over the world to dine in fancy restaurants in Dubai!" It's not the same topic. If anything, it proves how good, Canada, for example, has it. I regularly used to see/hear Republicans that I worked with in Nevada nodding knowingly as they spoke of all the "Canadians hopping the border for treatment because their system is so crap". I'd always take this opportunity to point out that lack of available specialists is not the same issue as health insurance and, by the way, did you know that Canada's health system pays for their treatment in the USA? It's precisely because of their system that it is feasible to do this.
I should clarify this to say that Canadians, if they don't have access to a particular treatment in Canada, may be approved to come to the US and have it covered by their national health care.
I should clarify this to say that Canadians, if they don't have access to a particular treatment in Canada, may be approved to come to the US and have it covered by their national health care.
Sometimes it's a whole lot cheaper to send a patient to the US, rather than build a specialized facility.
I'm not one on here defending our system but I've known many people who got cancer and I don't know of a single one that was cut off from coverage. I don't doubt that one could find examples but I'm pretty sure they aren't countless.
How many people do you know who had cancer? I know hundreds through my work in the young adult cancer community - dozens of which have been cut off from their insurance due to reaching lifetime caps (in their 20s and 30s, no less) or digging through medical records to find preexisting conditions to use to retroactively cancel coverage. That's of course not counting those who lost their jobs due to their illnesses, therefore losing insurance or any hope of ability to pay for insurance or medications, much less rent and food. And again, THESE ARE PEOPLE IN THEIR 20s AND 30s. It's bad enough to face a life threatening illness at 22 or 23 - but then to lose health coverage at a time of your life and age where you are least likely to be able to afford hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical bills? It's a joke.
Meanwhile, 4 months before my diagnosis, I was denied health insurance on the private market at 22 because of preexisting conditions that included getting psychological counseling for a rape I faced at 17. Apparently developing an anxiety disorder following a violent rape (despite not receiving treatment for it for several years) is grounds to deny health insurance.
Because I essentially came of age while spending every other Friday getting poisons pumped into my veins in hopes of living to see my 25th birthday, I'm intimately familiar by all of the ways that insurance companies make the lives of the sick that much more difficult. That said, I never would have wanted to go through treatment without insurance - even if my insurance company has denied scans, optimal chemotherapy regimes, and various pieces of follow up care. And all of those things my insurance company denied? Standard of care in Canada and the UK.
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