dianaiad wrote:]You made the following point several times in your post...'free healthcare."
It ain't free, bud.
Free at the point of delivery. so I was talking about a system based on the European model or something like it.
dianaiad wrote:YOU may not pay for it, or at least, not in a way you recognize, but your taxes are high, your care isb, and you do not get to choose much about the health care you do get.
Yes there are a lot of problems with the NHS. We seem to have a “more managers than nurses� problem for a start. There are serious questions surrounding quality of care particularly for the elderly. But these kind of problems partly arise from “culture� problems and how hospitals are managed. We still run our hospitals on a model that looks like it is designed to make the system fail. One in which people working at the bottom who see and point out problems have no say, and learn it is safer for their job not to say anything, or give up trying. If ever there were organisations whose management structure ought to be turned into a cooperative it is our hospitals. There have been several on going scandals about the care of the elderly in some of our NHS care homes. Whilst again this is partly down to pretty awful management, pay is the problem here I think. We pay the folk who work in these homes shoddily. If the pay rate was £30 per hour instead of £8, this work would attract folk with higher personal skill levels, and the folk in the job would care much more about keeping it, and it would allow the people in these roles to start valuing what they do in a different way.
Presently there is great fear the government is trying to dismantle the NHS. But here’s the thing. Per capita it still costs something like half the US system. Maybe if that figure was raised to US levels some of those problems and queues would diminish.
And here is another thing: for the vast majority of folk, besides some bad press most people’s experience of the NHS is pretty darn good.
And don’t forget we also have private healthcare if you wish to pay for it or you have private insurance that pays for it or your company provides additional healthcare benefits. For example a few years ago my mother had her varicose veins done privately.
Personally, I'm a post menopausal woman who really does not need insurance coverage for prenatal or pediatric care. However, I get to pay for it anyway.
It has come to my notice that I am not a woman and yet through my taxes I get to pay for all that female stuff too. Why do I have absolutely no problem paying through my taxes for someone else’s hysterectomy? In fact I go to the doctors on average about once every 10 to 15 years. Personally I hardly use the NHS. My son as a child had the need for some operations, and my mother has a chronic back condition...but I'm ok....so I have little need....and there I am paying for all these operations and treatments on other people some of which – being a fellah - I would never need myself. The answer is because I live in a community, and the system is a safety net.
dianaiad wrote:My children are young and healthy. THEY would prefer to get insurance that provides for catastrophic illness and injury, but would prefer not to pay more in premiums for stuff they don't need than if they were having to pay for the entire visit out of pocket.
THAT is the choice we are talking about here.
The logic seems simple enough. If your kids insurance did not cover the stuff that effected older folk... osteoporosis for instance....then that cost is put on to the older folk....just as some of those older folk see their incomes decline. Basically the system would be weighted so that the folk with the greatest need have to pay more, just at a time where they are least able to meet that cost.
Nobody in the USA is turned away and refused health care if they require it. The problem is paying for it; who does so, and WHO gets to decide what care is appropriate.
Let’s stick with the who pays for it problem otherwise this thread is going to get derailed.
So let me put it this way around. What is morally wrong with the European model of social healthcare where we pay our taxes and get “free care�. Whilst it is true that the UK system seems to creak at the seams at times, The French and the Scandinavians have traditional been able to provide excellent systems. The French have historically spent more on their system that the UK.
Now me, I am a member of a group that has a fairly rare condition; I hear the stories from all over the world in our support groups: what nations OK 'novel' therapies that will work, how long one must wait for life saving procedures in those nations that have 'free' health care...
If there is some new highly effective therapy it is likely in the UK that you would have to wait years before the NHS adopted it generally. If you mean that there is a standard procedure maybe something like chemotherapy.....or heart bypass....there is not a major problem here...maybe there are marginal delays compared to the US. But then we know that the US has one of the best health services in the world......so long as you have full medical coverage.
Do you have any idea how long you have to wait for a bone marrow transplant in the UK?
I don’t. I know there is a shortage of donors and finding matches.
Shoot, way back when, when I first needed a knee replacement, I had three friends from Canada who were put on the waiting list. Now I belonged to Kaiser, an 'HMO,' which works pretty close to the way some European health care systems work. I had to wait for nearly a year for a surgery date. That has improved; my second knee replacement was scheduled less than six weeks from the decision to have it done, and then only because the Christmas holidays interfered.
In the UK we have an “18 week right� diagnosis to treatment, and that is 2 weeks for urgent treatment. In reality hospital trusts massage the figures to make their average weights seem shorter than they are and I think at times the reality can be as long as six months for non urgent treatments.
HOWEVER, the Canadian women had to wait for THREE YEARS for one of 'em, another had to wait for five, and as far as I know the third might still be waiting, ten years later. Do you have any idea how much mobility you lose when you have to wait that long for something like this?
3 years! Yikes. To be true if we go back a decade or so these kinds of waits were more common but still they did exist (maybe 2 years not three) but there has been a lot of effort gone in to getting those waits down. More can still be done though.
Now I would love to see health care be a right, not a privilege. I like the idea. The problem is, the way it's done most everywhere I've seen it is that it's not the patient's right to get healthcare; it's the government's right to distribute it to whomever they deem worthy.
So let’s follow best practice, spend per capita roughly what the US spends, get
our socialist healthcare system running more on the cooperative template. But seriously look around the world, and given expenditure levels per capita which systems get the best results? I think we factor in just how much the US spends on its healthcare actually gives a terrible return and is the worst example of organising resources.
Here in the USA, Obama care is fixing it so that there is no such animal; or rather, it may look like there are, but the standard of care will no longer be determined by that physician and the patient. It will be dictated, to all, by committees in the IRS.
Let’s not make this a thread about Obamacare. So let’s put it this way, why is the healthcare system – the one you have been used to prior to Obamacare more Christian than say the socialist systems available in France, Scandinavia, Germany, UK etc.
Here is the (slightly out of date2004 figures but they have not changed much since) infant mortality rates per 1000 births round the world. (
source). You can’t blame Obama or Obamacare for the US ranking.
1. Singapore 2.0
2. Hong Kong 2.5
3. Japan 2.8
4. Sweden 3.1
5. Norway 3.2
6. Finland 3.3
7. Spain 3.5
8. Czech Republic 3.7
9. France 3.9
10. Portugal 4.0
11. Germany 4.1
11. Greece 4.1
11. Italy 4.1
11. Netherlands 4.1
15. Switzerland 4.2
16. Belgium 4.3
17. Denmark 4.4
18. Austria 4.5
18. Israel 4.5
20. Australia 4.7
21. Ireland 4.9
21. Scotland 4.9
23. England and Wales 5.0
24. Canada 5.3
25. Northern Ireland 5.5
26. New Zealand 5.7
27. Cuba 5.8
28. Hungary 6.6
29. Poland 6.9
29. Slovakia 6.9
29. United States 6.9
Even Cuba does better than the US. Now not only is the US one of the richest per capita and is the richest economy, it actually spends more on heath care per capita than anyone, and nearly double the next nearest. This tells me that the US system of healthcare is simply not value for money. It also tells me that the system itself holds people down and hinders their access to better quality of life (along the lines argued in this thread) or the US for some reason produces more feckless idiots per capita than the rest of the world. Which is it? And how does greater laissez faire, smaller government, de-regulation, conservative right policies, and more capitalism going to allow the US to get greater value for money for the heck of a lot of money they do spend on healthcare.
I think this is the kind of statistic that kills of the “free choice� argument, and folk have a chance to do better for themselves if they make the right choices. Clearly this list shows that the material conditions of a nation (which include how the economy and political system are organised) effect the health of the nation.
) - but not this time.
it's ok Furrow Browed.
