[tjic]

The treatment she got from the government doctors was horrible.

This bit gives me chills: "We were told that we would wait at least four months for an NHS appointmen"

Uggh.

I'm glad that we still have free market doctors here in the US.

Well, at least for the next four years.

[thaumaturgy]

Yeah. My former technician, who I still keep in touch with, needed surgery to remove a long shunt that had been surgically implanted when he was a child, due to hydroencephaly.

It took months for him to even get the first appointment, an x-ray which did little for diagnosis. Months later, he got an MRI, which supported the diagnosis of calcification of the shunt, but wasn't completely conclusive. More months later, a biopsy was taken, and again, that wasn't entirely conclusive, but at this point the doctors were suggesting that it be surgically removed.

So, he goes in for surgery -- nearly 6 months after the last round of tests. The surgeon begins removing sections of it, but it's slow going because the shunt keeps breaking apart and falling back into the body.

The surgeon actually runs out of time to finish the job and sews him up, having only removed around 6 of the 18 inches of shunt.

Then, only a couple of hours after the surgery, my tech was asked to leave the hospital, because they were out of recovery rooms and couldn't put him up any longer. They also couldn't spare a gurney or, apparently, a wheelchair; he was walked out of the hospital while still groggy.

Now he'll have to go back in for more surgery, all at further public expense, to finish the job that should have been finished last year.

...Oh, except for one thing: this is in the U.S.

He's a young kid by the way, and the only reason that he isn't completely bankrupted by all of this is that he's covered under a public care option specifically for children that had hydroencephaly.

--

I've done my best to respond calmly and civilly here; I know that it's easier to win opinions that way. At least, that's what I want to believe. However, this "free market health care" nonsense absolutely infuriates me. Its proponents will point to any weakness they can find in socialized health systems, while simultaneously wearing rose-colored goggles for our own ailing health system. They're lying to themselves, and they're lying to other people, and it's absolutely embarrassing that a modern, first-world country doesn't consider health care to to be an import aspect of an advanced society -- one that, like education, should be provided to the greatest number of its citizens possible.

I've had an aunt die of stomach cancer, and my grandfather slowly dehydrated away in a hospital because that, apparently, is how congestive heart failure is handled in the U.S. I keep in mind that most doctors do the best they can, and most hospitals are understaffed and overbooked. But, to ignore the ills of our system here and be "glad" for it is preposterous.

[lotharbot]

It's also preposterous to pretend our system is "free market". It's a highly regulated market with significant barriers to entry, as well as substantial government intervention.

It's sad that whenever the topic comes up, half of all people seem to think the blame lies with the "free market", while the other half seem to think "at least we're not socialist".

We can do so much better. We can make sure that more of our citizens have access to health care. We can improve its quality. We can reduce wait times. And we can reduce costs. Some of those things can be accomplished by taking a more socialist approach to certain parts of health care, and others can be accomplished by taking a more free market stance to other parts. Use socialism where it works; use free market principles where they work; don't get so caught up over the "evils" of either system to dismiss it when it's actually good.

[noonespecial]

A better way to measure a health care system might be "how many stops does the money make on its way from patient to doctor?". You can name it socialist, capitalist, or Dr. Suess, but if the money has to go through dozens of thieving and incompetent hands on its way to the doctor, the system is a failure.

My fear for the "new" US health system is that we're just trading one set of middle-men for another (likely equal) set. People already trained in 2-party thinking will decide that neither works and health care is actually impossible and give up.

[tjic]

> he's covered under a public care option

So you're arguing that the British socialized system is good, and free market systems are bad ... and the evidence you hold up for this is about a horrible event in socialized portion of the US health care system?

That sounds like a pretty defective argument in favor of socialized medicine.

[thaumaturgy]

No, that wasn't my argument at all.

Maybe your habit of describing these things in "good" versus "bad" has stunted your ability to understand this situation.

I'll try just one more time: unless you're independently wealthy, U.S. citizens are subject to much the same wait times for specialized care as British citizens are -- or, I suspect, the citizens of most other first-world nations. And, again, unless you're independently wealthy, the quality of care in the U.S. is not any better than other countries -- and may even be worse, by some measurements. The usual counter-example that gets trotted out here are the various people that travel to the U.S. from abroad for various serious procedures; but, those people tend to be financially resourceful, and we're not talking about health care for the rich here -- we're talking about the level of health care available to most people.

In my technician's case, the "public care option" part of the anecdote merely covered most -- not all -- of the expenses after the fact. Short of having enough money to bribe hospitals and buy doctors, his experiences wouldn't have been any different if he were paying entirely out-of-pocket, or if he were covered by insurance, or if he were in his sixties and on Medicare.

The idiots that keep spreading FUD about "socialized medicine" keep trying to say that the quality of care will go down, or that our wait times for care will become terribly bad -- without bothering to notice that we aren't exactly the envy of the developed world in terms of either quality or speed. They also fail to ever explain exactly why a socialized payment system should have any negative impact on actual treatment; I for one would actually expect the opposite in a well-run system.

I'm pretty sure that all of the arguments against "socialized" health care pretty much boil down to, "the poor don't deserve health care", which stinks.

[dwwoelfel]

Where in the US was this?

I ask because the health-care system varies from state to state,

[thaumaturgy]

California. Surgery was in Davis IIRC.

[raimondious]

Let me finish that quote for you, since you didn't seem to like the second half of it: "We were told that we would wait at least four months for an NHS appointment so for the first time in both our lives we went private. We were told we would get an appointment in about six weeks."

[Super_Jambo]

There are free market doctors in the UK, I shouldn't worry that all yours will vanish.

[amalcon]

This does not seem unusually high for me. I live in the U.S, in a city with some of the best hospitals in the country, and it looks about median.

[Vivtek]

Back when my son had some kidney problems, the wait in the States would have been 72 days to see a specialist. In the lousy Hungarian public system, he saw a specialist the week we arrived. (Dual citizenship hath its privileges.)

Later, we lived in Puerto Rico, also cursed with a public healthcare system that had us in a specialist's office in two weeks.

We're in the US proper now (the real estate is just so damned cheap here and the school system is good for both our kids at the moment) but the lack of working health care will probably drive us out again in a couple of years.

The only people who think US health care is good are people who have never experienced any other system.

[abstractbill]

My wife and I always refer to our multiple citizenships as "the backup plan" for exactly this reason ;)

[rayval]

Agree. I live in a mid-size city with a couple of world-class medical facilities. The waits for specialists are about 3 months.

[miri]

Which is about the same time (well, a little bit more) as the wait times in public hospitals in awfully socialist Norway. State covers 62% of the cost up to a maximum copay, after that they'll pay the rest for you. Having various chronic illnesses, I don't mind this at all.