You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Every Child in the US Regardless of Economic Situation Deserves Free Healthcare
As someone from a country with quite decent healthcare laws (The Netherlands, it's not perfect but it works well enough for most), I really don't understand why so many Americans are against social health care. Somehow a lot of people still associate anything social with "communism", which is apparently the devil.
Easy, make it "free" and the wait times/rationing will be astronomical. Not dissing yall over in the Netherlands, but we have over 300 million folks here.
Yes, we have more people, and if the full 300 million population of the US was pushed through a healthcare industry that only had the bandwidth to appropriately handle say, 150 million, then yes things would be backed up and messy quick.
The solution to having more people in the market using the services is to expand the market, not to limit the customers. This whole critique that too many people going to the doctor would be too much for the health care industry to handle makes no sense to me, unless you assume the healthcare industry would remain exactly as it is and not expand in any way to accommodate the increased traffic. But why would that be the case?
All you have to do is look at the VA system. I think the number that currently uses the VA is around 9 million. I very well could be a little off on that number. But, it is bogged down by waste, fraud, and extremely long wait times. Not to mention the travel distance many have to endure. I just don't see a single payer system ever working here.
Yes, the VA system needs more facilities and doctors to properly handle the bandwidth they are expected to deal with. It's like I said above.....if you have 9 million people being funneled through infrastructure and personnel that can only deal with 6 million, you have a problem. The solution is to expand the market, get more personnel and more facilities. That seems like fairly easy common sense to me.
Also, it is worth noting that "single payer" does not mean what the VA is. There is a difference between Single Payer and State run healthcare. It is entirely possible to have a system in which the medical industry remains private, doctors still have their offices, hospitals are still privately owned, nothing at all about the way they hospitals are run changes at all, but the difference is that one entity, the government, the single payer, pays all of the bills. This allows the private industry to continue to run privately, but also allows for one massive negotiator to have the clout to haggle down medical costs, something that quite clearly a nation of individual payers is categorically incapable of doing.
So, you don't think the "single payer" will put caps on salaries or dictate every facet of future care? I don't know, but I have zero faith in the US government of improving much of anything. I mean, the government have run the VA since inception and it it still riddled with these problems.
And I have zero faith in the private sector that runs the medical industry to do anything other continue to raise prices and the private entities that run insurance to continue to raise premiums and, unless specifically forbidden by law, refuse and turn away people with preexisting conditions to go bankrupt or die.
We are in a sea of bad actors here amigo. The health care industry and insurance companies have been pretty much allowed to set their own prices and control its own supply for decades, and that got us where we are now.
But you say if you give a large single payer the ability to negotiate prices that they may abuse that power. And that's true. The government may potentially abuse any power you give it. Clearly the private sector that controls health and insurance now has amplying abused the power it has. And here we are, with the biggest burden of healthcare costs in the modern world, a private sector happy to continue making gobs of money, and a government that folk like you don't trust to help fix it.
So then what do we do?
If you ask me, I have 0 faith that any profit driven business will do anything other than aggressivly seek the highest possible profit. That is what they do. The normal natural check against that is the ability of consumers to simply not consume the product. If the new state of the art 4K TVs are more expensive than people want to pay, not many will sell, until the industry finds a way to lower costs, and then people start buying them. That is how it SHOULD work, those are the free market pressures people are always on about.
The problem is with healthcare there is, and probably can't be, a true free market. The consumers don't have the option to turn away the service, they are captive consumers. When you product means the difference between life and death, people will pay what you ask for. They will sell everything they own and go bankrupt if that's what it takes, cause the only alternative, the remaining option if they refuse your product, is death.
If you ask me, that is the inherent problem with healthcare and why normal free market logic simply does not apply, so non-free market pressures must be brought to play.
You do bring up a very important topic with regards to healthcare/insurance. And, that is pre-existing conditions. It is absurd to use the "insurance" model to cover these folks, imo.
This group of people need to be entirely taken out of the insurance pool all together. It is not "insurance" if you already have made a claim. If you truly want to curb price increases, this must be done. This is where the government should step in. The government should help take care of children, the elderly, and folks with pre-existing conditions.
On another note. Obamacare. What is up with "children" staying on their parents policy from 18-26? Isn't the whole point to make the young/healthy offset the cost of the older/sick? Am I missing something here? That is a huge chunk of change missing from this dismal system. It is amazing to me that the "free market" works for everything except healthcare.
the issue isnt the cost of insurance its the cost of health care, and no it would not expand they limit the number of people that can go to medical school (regardless of grades) so the doctors sort of have a monoply adn there is no way they are going to give that up, what needs to happen is tort law needs to be reformed(unfortunately about 80% of our legislatures are former attorneys , so that aint gonna happen) i think there are 330 million legal citizens in this country and as Rand Paul said we should be able to insure (with o deductible and 0 copay) everyone for about a1.00 a day as opposed to the 1500 a month for a family of 4 and that plan has a 7000 dollar deductible (per person) and a 80/20 split on the insurance, to many politicians too many administrators too many attorneys are getting filthy rich and the rest of the nation has to suffer.
I agree that the cost of insurance is a symptom not the illness, and the problem is that the health care industry is just too damned expensive in this country. The problem is, there really is no way to get a free market entity to voluntarily agree to make less money, there is no way to incentivize a business into being less profitable. There is simply no carrot here, so it'd going to have to be the stick. But as soon as you start using the stick you have droves of people shouting at your that you are a socialist and infringing on the freemarket.
look up the Oklahoma Surgery Center, they post their prices on line and are 10s of thousands of dollars cheaper than the hospitals in the area, it can be done and these are the same surgeons and anesthiologist (i know i spelled it wrong) that work at the major hospitals, there are people from all over the country going to that place for surgeries, one of the main difference is they are self managed and rarely accept insurance.
If they don't or rarely, accept insurance, then I am guessing the vast majority of people can't conceivable afford their services.
I mean if I need a series of surgeries that going to cost say 30k, along with a year of physical therapy and various prescription meds to recover, let's say somwhere in the neighborhood of 40k total cost for the whole shebang....if I am told "Hey, there's this place that will do it for 23k rather than 30k, but they don't take insurance so you have to pay for all of it yourself".....that doesn't really help me. It might as well cost 500K and be done on the moon for all that helps me. I still can't even remotely afford that, and I would have to go with the overall more expensive, but less expensive directly to me, insurance option somewhere else.
The problem is that healthcare just cost too damn much, I would love to live in a world where insurance was only needed for occasional rare catastrophic medical conditions, and that most citizens could pay for most medical expenses out of their own regular income.
That is the world I would like to live in, but that is not the world we occupy. We occupy a world where you have to be pretty damn well off to have even a reasonable shot at affording care out of your own pocket, even at places like the Oklahoma Surgery Center, and the overwhelming majority of people have utterly no hope of affording medical expensive stuff without insurance, making them a neccesity.
Here at Primary Health Partners, our pricing system is very straightforward – which probably isn’t what you’re used to. If you have questions, don’t hesitate to ask. In the meantime, take a look at our Membership Fees, browse our Frequently Asked Questions, or sign up to become a member below.
Monthly Membership Fees
Adults ages 22-99, $69/month (enrolled after 1/1/17)
Adults 100+ years old, FREE
Children 0-21 years olds, $15/month with at least one parent membership, otherwise $69/month
At this time we are not able to provide routine vaccinations, call to discuss how we can help arrange these for you.
ADULTS
AGES 22-99
$69
Monthly
enrolled after 1/1/17
JOIN NOW
CHILDREN
AGES 0-21
$15
monthly
if enrolled with parent
JOIN NOW
Very simply it is a direct relationship between provider and patient. The patient pays a reasonable monthly fee and then is taken care of by the provider. You will have a personal physician that you can contact anytime by several methods. There are no other financial obligations for the patient. We don’t bill any insurance so we aren’t worried about generating charges the patient may or may not be aware of. There are no office copays.
The practice will offer patients the opportunity for further healthcare savings by offering to pass on our wholesale pricing on prescriptions and labs. These are a service and not profit centers. Time is the biggest commodity gained in DPC by limiting the patient panels. We take care of only about a third the number of patients that are in a traditional practice so less visits and more time per visit.
they are creating a network of free market doctors from every discipline, all the way up to brain surgery and rapidly spreading across the United States, check out the Oklahoma surgery center website
None of that seems to be any kind of response to my point above. If I need a knee replacement surgery along with the related physical therapy and medications....how much will that cost me through membership in this network? Will I even remotely be able to afford it? Based on a quick perusal of their website, no, it appears to be far beyond my financial means or those of most of the nation.
Sooooo......what's your point? Being only kinda ridiculously unaffordable instead of utterly and completely ridiculously unaffordable isn't exactly a real improvement.
Don’t fall victim to the corollary lie about government regulation
by Surgery Center of Oklahoma | Jun 12, 2017 | Blog
Hello, Dr. Keith Smith with you on behalf of the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, thank you for joining me. We’ve reviewed a lie that many of you believe, that government regulations are meant to protect us from corporate abusers. When, I think I’ve made the case and Dr....
Don’t believe the “single-payer system” hype
by Surgery Center of Oklahoma | Jun 9, 2017 | Blog
Hello, Dr. Keith Smith with you here on behalf of the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, thank you for joining me. Here’s a lie that many of you believe: single-payer in the United States, a system of that type would result in all the insurance companies being kicked to the... here are some of their blogs.
Because there is only so much resources to go around. Nationalizing doesn't create more. It's the skimpy bikini problem -- tug the resources in one direction and now something else gets uncovered.
i think the idea that someone else can and will take the money you earn and spend it on what they see fit is the issue, i dont know the level of corruption in your country but it is over the top here and everything our government touches turns to shit in a hurry.