Our biggest problem

Brihaha · Jun 14, 2021

Many Americans do not visit a doctor or hospital because it isn't worth the time or money. Our health system is not based on health, rather it is based on insurance and money. It continues to amaze me how politicians still ignore Americans suffering with health problems. Especially those who claim to be pro-life. I think our electorate keeps voting against our own self-interests by reelecting incumbents who may have name recognition yet do nothing to improve the actual lives of American citizens. I recall having health issues for over a year and the hospital was willing to cheerfully see me on every visit. Until my job and health insurance expired. Then I was treated like a leper. I have put my faith in God these days, not self-serving men. Praise God, He is the only truth.

GirdYourLoins · Jun 14, 2021

Kentonio said:
Central England. Which southerners consider the north and northerners consider the south.

So what you are saying is that because you are from an area that has better than average services, your experiences apply to the whole country and anyone who says different is a liar. The south east has been overdeveloped and is still required to increase new houses at an unsustainable rate. Infrastructure has not increased wth it, includign sufficient roads, schools, medical services, etc. The NHS postcode lottery is alive and well, and it looks like your area won, mine didnt.

Kentonio · Jun 14, 2021

GirdYourLoins said:
So what you are saying is that because you are from an area that has better than average services, your experiences apply to the whole country and anyone who says different is a liar. The south east has been overdeveloped and is still required to increase new houses at an unsustainable rate. Infrastructure has not increased wth it, includign sufficient roads, schools, medical services, etc. The NHS postcode lottery is alive and well, and it looks like your area won, mine didnt.

I come from an ex-mining village in one of the most deprived regions of the UK. So no, I don't think I won any postcode lottery. What I have done however is experienced the health systems of a number of countries and get quite annoyed with fellow Brits who like to grumble about how terrible the NHS is while seemingly blind to quite how much better it is than most alternatives.

You also however tried to claim the Tories deliver higher investment, and as I've illustrated above that claim isn't true.

Can people have bad NHS experiences? Absolutely they can. You also however have the option available to go private. And if you can't afford to go private then the idea that you'd get any better service in the US for instance is pretty laughable.

If you need a hip replacement or cancer drugs in the UK, you'll get them no matter what your income is. That's simply not true in the US.

Trogdor the Burninator · Jun 14, 2021

American health care not only doesn’t work, it’s bad capitalism and actually harms the US economy by making people less productive.

In countries with government-funded medical care, there is an incentive to stay in good health – because seeing your doctor is free.

For example, in Australia there are several free cancer screening services offered to anyone who wants to get tested, blood tests are free, minor procedures such as getting a mole removed and tested are free, etc. All these could potentially become much more serious and costly down the road, but there’s an incentive for people to get issues checked out early.

In the US, the cost of healthcare encourages people to avoid seeing their doctor until something becomes serious. Then they’re hit with higher costs, and probably off work for some time to recover. So the company they work for has to find someone to cover for them. Or if they run a business themselves, the business suffers.

I still do not understand why so many people in the US are so afraid of Medicare-style systems.

MorkandMindy · Jun 14, 2021

Brihaha said:
... Our health system is not based on health, rather it is based on ... money. ... I think our electorate keeps voting against our own self-interests by reelecting incumbents who may have name recognition yet do nothing to improve the actual lives of American citizens...

Most of the electorate want a sensible health care system like the rest of the wealthy World has

but this is not a democracy and that was proven many years ago by Gilens and Page

MorkandMindy · Jun 14, 2021

Trogdor the Burninator said:
I still do not understand why so many people in the US are so afraid of Medicare-style systems.

I haven't met anyone afraid of Medicare-style systems, one right winger famously said 'keep your #### government hands off my medicare!'.

Whereas most countries spend somewhere around 10% of GDP on healthcare the US pays 17.7% for a much lower performance system, and guess why? who does all that extra money go to?

MorkandMindy · Jun 14, 2021

I have to be clear as I am with all healthcare personnel, 98% of the healthcare workers are brilliant, some of the ones high up are not, but many are very good and struggling against the tide in a seriously flawed system

GirdYourLoins · Jun 15, 2021

Kentonio said:
I come from an ex-mining village in one of the most deprived regions of the UK. So no, I don't think I won any postcode lottery. What I have done however is experienced the health systems of a number of countries and get quite annoyed with fellow Brits who like to grumble about how terrible the NHS is while seemingly blind to quite how much better it is than most alternatives.

You also however tried to claim the Tories deliver higher investment, and as I've illustrated above that claim isn't true.

Can people have bad NHS experiences? Absolutely they can. You also however have the option available to go private. And if you can't afford to go private then the idea that you'd get any better service in the US for instance is pretty laughable.

If you need a hip replacement or cancer drugs in the UK, you'll get them no matter what your income is. That's simply not true in the US.

Youve done nothing but twist my words and call me a liar. And you are wrong in a lot of your statements. You said I claimed the tories deliver higher incvestment. Inever said that at all, you are lying. What I said was in my experience the service I received improved. A completely different thing.

You know what, Im not bothering woth you any more. You are not a noce person and Im blocking you.

Kentonio · Jun 15, 2021

GirdYourLoins said:
Youve done nothing but twist my words and call me a liar. And you are wrong in a lot of your statements. You said I claimed the tories deliver higher incvestment. Inever said that at all, you are lying. What I said was in my experience the service I received improved. A completely different thing.

You know what, Im not bothering woth you any more. You are not a noce person and Im blocking you.

OK, block away, but don't call me a liar when your own words are still right here in the thread. Unless you don't equate investment with being better and think more funding makes something 'worse'.

In fact I would say until covid they were better than when the Conservatives came into power. Under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown it was even worse.

MorkandMindy · Jun 15, 2021

Our profiteers are taking out huge amounts of money by boosting medical costs so even the lowest paid workers often cost a really large amount of money and are not competitive in the global market.

But the profiteers get very rich.

MorkandMindy · Jun 15, 2021

The cost of the healthcare system is crucial to America's desire to become economically competitive.

Healthcare costs add on to the costs of everyone in the country, which is a 7.7% disadvantage and that has a compounding effect because the workers priced out of the job market are a further overhead.

This graph gives a good indication that the US is paying more than anyone else as a percentage of GDP

RDKirk · Jun 15, 2021

MorkandMindy said:
Our nation's biggest problem or our own biggest fear, answer either question. To me they are both the same.

When I go for a medical of any sort, I never know how much it is going to cost, if I can afford it or not, whether my health insurance will pay or not.

A lot of people on CF are middle class and don't have money problems, but for those of us in the lower half of the income range just one CT scan can wipe out a year's savings. That's all it takes. As for chemotherapy the option is pretty simple, die. But it would be a shame to do that for something pretty simple.

For many people medical costs are the Sword of Damocles, something to be forever worried about, a perpetual stress to add to all the other stresses of life.

Fundamental to US economic thinking is that without fear there is no motivation to work, and though that may sound like a fabulous idea, in some cases it has gone too far.

If you think telling others about your biggest fear will help your state of mind then do it. I figured in most people's cases it would be something with a big political content so I put it in this forum.

Being middle class is not salvation. I don't think any of us can pay for a heart transplant out of our bank accounts.

RDKirk · Jun 15, 2021

GirdYourLoins said:
Here in the UK we have to rely on the NHS. Its great if you have a serious or life threatening illness, but anything else and they just dont do anything. I've been battling wiht them for years to get a proper diagnosis and treatment, but they just keep saying I dont know what you want tme to do. They're the doctor, they should be telling me what they will do. And then there's the waiting lists. I wwas referred for an appointment in November/December last year and it will be another 6 months before I get it. Ive spoken to a few people recently with similar stories. One this week who after 10 years of waiting for a joint replacement has been told her bones are now too far deteriorated to be done. Her daughter spent years in chronic pain and never got treated. When she said sshe couldnt live with the pain anymore their repsonse was to say are you suicidal, we'll refer you for pschiatric review. And her son had a chronic problem for 10 years that wasnt treated and then became cancer. Someone else I spke to lost his wife and daughter to cancer because by the time the NHS diagnosed it it was too late for both of them. The GP (general practice) doctors that are the first line medical contact are unsuitable for [ur[ose. Many areas they are so busy its virtually impossiible to get an appointment. Recently in my local area Ive read 3 people saying that older relatives have died while struggling to get an appointment. So maybe you havent got it too bad.

We already know the British NHS is not by any means the best health care system. There are certainly better examples.

RDKirk · Jun 15, 2021

morningstar2651 said:
This is capitalism at work. I know that this is a pretty extreme idea here, but hear me out.

Maybe the goal of businesses (like hospitals or insurance companies) shouldn't be to maximize profit or maximize shareholder value. Maybe different businesses would work much better and we would have a better-run society if businesses would focus on what's actually important for their industry and their workers and communities rather than on what will put the most money in their shareholder's pockets.

We can make changes in the right direction without a violent uprising and without relying on the state to seize the means of production.

Worker Self-Directed Enterprises or Worker-Cooperatives are alternatives to the way businesses are usually structured in this country. When the workers are the owners of the company they work for, then the company's priorities change.

For that matter, not all insurance companies have stockholders to answer to. Some are mutual insurance companies where, essentially, the policyholders are the "stockholders" and any profits go back to the policyholders as refunds.

It's been only since the 70s that health insurance companies in the US were even permitted to make profits for shareholders.

RDKirk · Jun 15, 2021

MorkandMindy said:
Our profiteers are taking out huge amounts of money by boosting medical costs so even the lowest paid workers often cost a really large amount of money and are not competitive in the global market.

But the profiteers get very rich.

A lot of money is also wasted by the sideways movement of billing. There is a huge medical billing industry that just shuffles paper sideways...and they take their cut with each sideways movement.

MorkandMindy · Jun 15, 2021

RDKirk said:
Being middle class is not salvation. I don't think any of us can pay for a heart transplant out of our bank accounts.

Different people are of different value, a surgeon in the US is worth about 200 times as much as a low skilled worker. That's Christianity, or capitalism.

RDKirk said:
A lot of money is also wasted by the sideways movement of billing. There is a huge medical billing industry that just shuffles paper sideways...and they take their cut with each sideways movement.

The paper shufflers do nothing productive, but the paper shuffling companies make huge profits for their owners, add in profits made by the doctors who own clinics and overall those profits double the cost of healthcare, and significantly reduce the quality.

MorkandMindy · Jun 15, 2021

RDKirk said:
We already know the British NHS is not by any means the best health care system. There are certainly better examples.

It is still not as bad as the US system. Even if you have the misfortune for the NHS to refuse treatment that appears to be necessary, the cost of getting it done privately in the UK is often less that it costs in the US just for the copay, excluding the premiums and the deductible.

MorkandMindy · Jun 15, 2021

The US system is a massive rip-off and that is perfectly acceptable under the rules of capitalism, capitalism as formulated by Milton Friedman in 1973 is that the sole moral responsibility of a company is to it's owners.

You can imagine what that rule would do if everyone followed it, most of the people in the US are better than the systems we work within, but we really should fix some of those systems if we are ever given the chance.

'a firm's sole responsibility is to its shareholders' - Milton Friedman

So the firm can even for a small increase in profit relocate a large manufacturing operation to another country, eliminating the hopes of thousands of employees, taking the payrolls out of the area, and the country, putting the burden of keeping many households fed and rents and mortgages paid onto the government.

It damages the both the population and the US economy substantially but it does give more money to the owners which is the only thing that matters.

MorkandMindy · Jun 16, 2021

Trogdor the Burninator said:
American health care not only doesn’t work, it’s bad capitalism and actually harms the US economy by making people less productive.

It certainly is bad economics.

Money is taken out of the economy into the pockets of multi billionaires who own the health insurance companies and multi millionaire doctors throughout the business.

Americans are only willing to pay so much, so the rest is paid by the government. Although the numbers are pretty messed around, company paid insurance totaled on average 7,188 dollars for single coverage, the employee paying 14% and the company 86% but the government re-reimburses most of that. The government provides medicare, with the patient paying a deductible and a copay on top of the monthly premiums for parts A, B and D.

The amount the government alone pays is enough to fund the whole system if the system was real simple like the British NHS. It might not be perfect but it is better than the US healthcare performance is on average and a lot less expensive.

MorkandMindy · Jun 16, 2021

Capitalism is:

'an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit'

It will eventually bankrupt any country but the private owners will get a lot of money.

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