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I don't care what you call it. It's far better than to pay an absurd amount to an insurance company every month, sometimes as much as your house payment or more and then have to go to a doctor of their choice and they approve of and has a 3 week waiting list to get in and see. If you're lucky enough to see a doctor and don't get sicker and die first, you have to pay a huge deductible and co-pay.
How did our health care system turn into this horrible mess?
Because our middle class is split in half ideologically, and hasn't allowed or figured out how to create themselves more useful HC benefits.
The poor and elderly we take care of. For the rich this is a non-issue. The broad working middle class needs a better break. IMO of course.
Get socialized medicine and you too can be ordered to die by the courts.
If this were to happen in the United States, the insurance companies would, at a certain point, stop paying for the life support. What would then happen is the parents would either have to allow the child to die (which is inevitable, by the way) or choose to pay for it out of pocket.
Life insurance, according to the Washington Post, usually costs around $2,000-$4,000 per day. 60 Minutes found that the price can skyrocket to $10,000, but let's be unrealistically optimistic and just say it would cost $2,000 a day. By the end of the week, they've spend $14,000, and by the end of the month, $56,000. The median household income is about $54,000.
Assuming they make around the median household income, they've spent more than their yearly income in a month. And hell, even if they make a good amount more than the median household income, the cost of life support after a real would be $672,000. And this based on the low estimate of life support cost.
The family has now gone into extreme debt in a matter of months. Their child will soon die and they will never pay that money off. It may sound horrifying on paper, particularly when you word it like "the state orders you dead," but in that scenario, the state is stepping in and preventing a significant amount of suffering. The child's pain will end and the grieving process for the parents can begin. Horrifying as it may seem, I'd take the state being a voice of reason in a case of an incurable travesty over being able to go into absurd debt in a matter of weeks.
Get socialized medicine and you too can be ordered to die by the courts.
Yes, we all have the right to: be kept on ventilators in ICUs, be given industrial strength vassopressor medications injected into our veins, be fed via a tube, and get kidney dialysis, all for an unspecified period of time to keep from dying for a couple weeks longer.
Quote:
Last year (2009), Medicare paid $55 billion just for doctor and hospital bills during the last two months of patients' lives. That's more than the budget for the Department of Homeland Security, or the Department of Education. And it has been estimated that 20 to 30 percent of these medical expenses may have had no meaningful impact. Most of the bills are paid for by the federal government with few or no questions asked.
FYI - hospitals in the US also can stop treating a patient.
Also with the passage of lifetime maximum limits for insurance prior to ACA, this child would probably already have died within a few months due to insurance companies not being required to provide funding for care after the cost reaches a certain amount.
Another FYI - but the lifetime maximum limits will come back if the Senate passes the new healthcare bill as it is written so this will again happen in this country.
This is not something related to socialized medicine. It can and does happen in our system all the time when the insurance company either refuses to pay due to the limit or the hospital feels that caring for the patient is futile and so they deny to treat the patient anymore.
It is for you too. Medicare is a social relief plan administered centrally for all. Although you paid into it, most who paid in are subsidized. Most enrollees receive 1/3 -1/2 more in benefits than what they put in. And that there in a nut shell is why Medicare works so well.
I know it is for me, but I don't consider it "socialized" for me, since I've paid into all my life. It is socialized for those that haven't paid into it and use it.
I know it is for me, but I don't consider it "socialized" for me, since I've paid into all my life. It is socialized for those that haven't paid into it and use it.
Again, that is how single payer (socialized medicine) health insurance works. We all pay in from our income tax.
FYI, that would be the same payment method as "socialized medicine." We pay into it with our income taxes.
Except in "socialized medicine" we are also paying for those that can't.
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