Can I be the first non-US citizen in this thread express my incredulity that anything less than universal health care is tolerated? "Barbaric" is the term that seems to strike me whenever I hear of it, hyperbolic though it may be.
Opinion polls have shown for decades that a majority favor a system more like those of Canada or Europe - here it's called "single payer". But the interests of the majority have little relevance here.
The "single payer" alternative is considered so radical in USA that it's mentioned in the corporate media only apologetically, as if it were advocacy of leprosy. When they can't avoid mentioning the obvious, the rejection of it is euphemistically explained by saying that it is "politically unrealistic" - before a quick change of topic. The "talking points" the owners provide for their followers call it "socialism", and the latter, in US political culture, is an epithet like "child molester".
The ugly reality this charade is designed to avoid acknowledging is that the US is ruled by what has lately been called "the one percent" - and there is nothing the majority can do about it. Voting for one of the practically identical, freak-show, major-party candidates is made useless by the two-party system; the increasingly hollow pretence of democracy mocks any thought of reform.
Of course it's barbaric. It is also perfectly rational on the part of the rulers: their families need not worry about getting first-quality treatment of any health problem, and from their view the rest are disposable labor whose costs are still too expensive.
What, exactly, would you propose we do about it? Protest in the streets? People can't afford to lose their jobs, nor even time away from their daily responsibilities. Write to Congresspeople? Pointless for those who can't afford lobbyists. Revolution? No one has a realistic plan. It's almost miraculous that Obama managed to (temporarily?) install a plan that even purports to help - and it forces citizens to pay the insurance industry, whose presence in the healthcare system is exactly what keeps 30-40 percent of the population an illness or injury away from destitution.
You're obviously in a better place (news of which does not penetrate the info-tainment here, BTW), but it's rather naive to suppose that we in the US chose this situation. For us, it will get worse before it gets better.
Yes, yes, Americans are practically drooling Cro-magnons for not having universal health care. We know, we've heard it countless times before, and I'm not sure it contributes anything to the discussion other than a smug sense of self-superiority for the non-American readers.
As an American I agree, it's terrible not having universal healthcare. What's the point of being a large body if we don't take advantage of that? And if we don't, we really aren't anything except individuals. Nothing wrong with being an individual, but we can be and accomplish so much more together. Apart, we're just living in the same place.
I fail to see how, when a group decide to take from the minority, it could be seen as anything else than barbaric.
It saddens me to see one of the last first world country coming closer to the universal health care trap. Sure, the US medical fees are insanely overpriced, but you don't solve a problem like this just by hiding the costs in a social program.
> It saddens me to see one of the last first world country coming closer to the universal health care trap.
We're still quite a ways off and there's been quite a bit of pushback on the small steps Obama took. It's entirely possible the whole thing will be scrapped during the next presidency.
I hope so. It puts an unusual amount of financial pressure on small companies who are trying to make that step into big companies. I know of quite a few companies who are artificially keeping their employment count below 50 to avoid the costs of obamacare.
Is it really any different from traditional insurance? Don't most insurance companies take money from all their clients, and use it on a fairly small number of those clients?
I personally don't see the "trap" you reference. I'd really like to understand your position there...
Traditional insurance will/can reject some individuals.
For example, you don't take an insurance against theft AFTER you've been stolen hoping that they will reimburse you.
In addition, insurance companies can target a certain demographic to offer lower prices:
An insurance for office workers will not be the same as an insurance for football players.
This is a really key point. Market forces push insurance to offer specialised coverages that match your risks. Start smoking? Hey, we're going to bump you in the next bracket...
And in case the only insurance offered are a clear rip off (extended warranty kind of thing), you can always walk off and say "no thanks".
Now, imagine a new government program that decides to accept everyone because capitalisms is obviously flawed and full of greedy people.
The cost of such an insurance will be, for certain individuals, higher than what they would be with a targeted coverage. (The office workers for example.) Those individuals have now every incentives to leave this insurance and either take a private one, or even take none at all.
This causes the remaining few in the government insurance to have higher premiums, causing even more people to leave and check for alternatives.
The only way to prevent this exodus is to force everyone to stay with a single, monolithic insurance coverage. Even (especially!) those who are healthy.
Let's assume that you are OK with the concept, because without the government, the sick, single moms and children are facing certain death...
Because this super insurance is working outside of the market, you can't evaluate the value it provides. (If you force someone to buy an ice cream cone $36 at gunpoint, is it really worth $36? Maybe, maybe not...) This in itself is a huge problem, because you never know when you are wasting too much resource to try to solve a problem. Would this money better spent financing schools? Perhaps it would be better to distribute better food to poor families? Again, it's outside the market so you'll probably never know. While there's an infinity of bad/suboptimal ideas, there's only one or a handful good. Now pick one and 'hope'. Throw in a little political games in it, and you'll probably never end up with what you were expecting to begin it.
But there's yet another, more 'local' problem. Now that you have your too-big-to-fail insurance, how can you keep it in check? Should it cost $1k to process a claim, or $10k? When is your administration too big? You can compare yourself to some other insurance companies, but that's assuming you didn't wipe out the entire market (which you have to, eventually, to prevent the exodus). Even with comparison, you never have a decisive proof that it's too big. How do workers react, when you try to resize an industry, without the proof that it needs to be done? If, in addition, it's a government subsidized industry, good luck ever making it smaller.
The end result is a "service" that not a single soul knows how much it should cost, but with a constant pressure to increase the funding.
Also, this is without taking into consideration some pharmaceutical firms' lobbying.
Imagine how happy they would be, if none of their consumers were the payers!
(It's already a problem in the U.S. IMO; people use drugs but just forward the bill to their insurance.)
These problems only grow with time. While a government insurance might be "not so bad" in the beginning, every structures and forces around will deteriorate it. And before you know it, you won't ever be able to talk against any of its part, because then you'll be a greedy capitalist that wants to leave the poor and sick die a painful death.
This is the trap I'm talking about. When you're in it, there's no way out.
Ironically, you're close enough to the truth. The only thing that stands in the way of dignified living for everybody is people like you. There is enough resources in this world (especially the US). Why should kids everywhere live in poverty, starve and not be given the same opportunity under the same conditions as more fortunate kids (well fed, good schools) because their parents couldn't find or hold down a job? Instead, kids grow up hungry and can't focus on school, and even if they want to, they live in a poor neighborhood with bad schools, perpetuating the situation for yet another generation.
because we all know that then all kids would be hungry and not educated not only the poor ones. Somehow socialism always ends up making everyone equally poor and not equally rich.
I read recently that in Canada waiting time for some surgeries are 6 months. For everyone. People who can afford and people who can't afford. Everybody screwed over. But of course that's what socialism is all about - making all people equal. In their poverty.
What a bunch of nonsense. If you look at aggregate numbers, people in socialist countries on the average are healthier and live longer. And the children of Canada, France, Britain, Norway, and so on do not go hungry. Amazing!
I don't even agree with a lot of western European style socialism, but it sucks that because of people like you we can't even have an honest, adult conversation about it. Thanks loads.
Well said good sir! Your grasp of basic facts about the world is truly impeccable. Why, I myself just got back from Sweden where I had a layover on the flight from Mozambique. Or did I stop in Mozambique on my way back from Sweden? Now that I think about it, I can't be sure! I mean, honestly, who can tell them apart? Not me! Or you!
Did you check out the author of what you read and what agenda they may have had? Plus the term "some surgeries" is pretty vague, indicative of hand-waving.
But consider the alternative - without insurance or money your waiting time for surgery is...forever.
All health service is rationed. Our system simply doesn't ration it to those needing it most, instead rationing it to those with the most money. You can see the effects of our system with all the new "designer hospitals" they're building these days. By focusing on the affluent we're pricing health care out of reach of those of modest means. There are reasons health care costs in the United States have been rising several times more than the rate of inflation for the past 30 years. And none of those reasons paint a good portrait of our health care system.
You might want to base your opinion on more than one thing you read somewhere. I have a friend who was diagnosed with cancer in Canada and was in surgery with one of the top surgeons in the country in under a week. That plus a lengthly stay in the hospital and all of the drugs associated with cancer were 100% covered by our healthcare system. How is this poverty?
Because your taxes are so high that people who might otherwise be able to afford a private jet now cannot? Not having a jet is quite embarrassing and really harms the jet-less that have to fly in merely first class.
Of course the proper way to order surgeries is to give priority to the wealthy persons so they can quickly get on with creating jobs. Lazy poors aren't going to do anything significant anyway, so they can wait eight or nine months and it doesn't matter.
I cannot imagine raising taxes any further, if a wealthy child's parents couldn't afford to send him to a private school imagine what a terrible education he will have! He might even end up poor himself, which, I'm sure we can all agree, is a fate we should reserve for the already poor.
you don't understand what it means to be a minority. We don't get anywhere near equal quality coverage and are basically forced to subsidize better medical care for white folk. For years, my father was prescribed a drug (simvastatin) that actually did damage to his body because it's nearly universally assumed to be good for him (it is for most white people), and strongly subsidized by the government (he's a military vet).
I only found out because I got 23andMe, and I actually know biology. It was dismaying to find out that very few of the tests on 23andMe are useful for Asians like me (fewer still if you're hispanic and if you're pure African, the affymetrix chip they use is basically useless). As we move into an era of personalized medicine, we'll be subsidizing better healthcare and better outcomes for some ethnic groups over others.
The faulty assumption behind universal healthcare is that a one-size-fits-all prescription is good for everyone, but there are some really ugly disparities that no one talks about; and these disparities serve to reinforce preexisting social inequality. While I'm lucky to be in a minority group that's likely to live a long time - if we have it, a lot of universal healthcare coverage will wind up being plowed into gerontological care costs, which tend to be super-expensive; so in a way, it's a subsidy for rich white people.
Now, I do think the american healthcare system is awful. In particular being able to be put into permanent lifelong debt from healthcare costs is only one small step above barbarism. But I don't think that universal healthcare is the solution we're looking for. Obamacare is even worse, it combines the worst parts of universal healthcare with the worst parts of the crony capitalist system we have, and I won't be surprised when it turns out to be an even bigger albatross on the shoulders of this country.
Oh, it reduces his cholesterol level[0]. But he has at least one allele that increases the risk of myopathy when taking simvastatin (Assuming there were no milkmen - I do look quite a bit like him - I'm homozygous, and this allele is not terribly rare).
The part about being asian is that asians tend not to catabolize statins as effectively, so his plasma levels are probably higher, since I found out he was taking a full "white person dose" despite advisories that simvastatin should be given at half dose for asians.
[0]I also recall hearing somewhere from a biochemist that while statins decrease cholesterol levels in asians the effect on coronary heart disease (which is what your really care about) is attenuated, and that there may be a secondary mechanism for CHD in asians... But I cannot find the source he was quoting.
That's not a consequence of being non-white so much as it is a consequence of your doctor being uninformed, which impacts people of all races.
I'm not saying it doesn't suck, I just take issue with your narrative of how race is the issue at hand, and how the medical system is bigoted towards minorities.
Fine. But government is required to treat all people alike. I think this is a reasonable requirement, given that you cannot 'opt out' of government. If you want to set up a private universal health care charity fund, I would happily cut a recurring check to help your cause, assuming some basic transparency and accountability. At least, if you mess up your charity and start, say, embezzling funds, I can opt out.
Your misunderstanding of the equal protection clause has no basis in reality. The government is absolutely allowed to treat different situations differently. There is no legally recognized interpretation of the constitution -- none -- that would require the government to give person A a treatment inappropriate for A just because it gave person B the same treatment which was appropriate for B.
of course, the government SHOULDN'T give person A an inappropriate treatment just because it's what it would give to person B. Becuase that would be stupid. But what does it give person A? Perhaps it can offer person A nothing. Then, how is that fair and equal?
that's exactly why the only solution is the null solution.
Bottom line: we need to live in a society where people actually help each other and actually show compassion, not create rediculous byzantine bureaucracies that marginally help the rich and politically well-connected that are an empty simulacrum of compassion.
>>As we move into an era of personalized medicine, we'll be subsidizing better healthcare and better outcomes for some ethnic groups over others.
I think you miss the point of universal healthcare. It is not that one group has a higher utilisation of the healthcare system and therefore should pay more - the principle is that everyone is guaranteed the same provisions for healthcare, regardless of their risk factors.
Personalised medicine contributes nothing to the concept of universal healthcare; except for the noble aim of enabling better treatment of people through understanding individual responses. '
The idea that someone should be restricted in their level of healthcare utilisation under a universal system is absurd; As is the notion that someone should be forced to contribute extra (apart from the incremental addition of a high income earner through increased taxation) due to a perceived increase in risk.
>>The faulty assumption behind universal healthcare is that a one-size-fits-all prescription is good for everyone,
Again, I feel like you are trying to talk about personalised medicine inside of the concept of universal healthcare. Forget about personalised medicine. What the US needs first is access that won't bankrupt.
The fact is we don't know enough about personalised medicine to give people different treatments based on genetic characteristics. And we won't for years. Sure, you can look at 1 or 2 isolated instances at the moment (ACE-inhibitors and ARBs in Black people for instance) - but none of this matters when it comes to life-saving care, for which the treatment is going to be the same for everyone anyway, unless you happen to have some rare blood disorder in which case racial profiling and blood tests at the time of intervention will dictate management.
>> so in a way, it's a subsidy for rich white people.
How so? Because they live longer anyway? Because they are less likely to indulge in the risk factors that result in early mortality? Again, Universal healthcare doesnt discriminate. But since rich black/brown/yellow/white/green people pay a higher proportion of taxes anyway, shouldn't your argument here be that Universal healthcare is a tax on rich people?
Additionally, just because you are on a high dose of a Statin, in a high risk population, doesn't mean you are developing myopathy. CK levels should usually be checked after a month or 2 of Statin therapy in line with followup for new lipid levels, and in the absence of symptoms it can be fairly safely ruled that you aren't experiencing a complication of a statin drug. But you probably already know this.
>is that everyone is guaranteed the same provisions for healthcare
You're missing my point. If those provisions are the same, that's exactly the problem. It's only worse if they aren't the same (because who chooses?)
CK levels warnings are only triggered when you are having a serious complication from the statin. When you have a lesser complication, like, "going to the gym sucks instead of making you feel good", and you aren't aware of what's happening, and it's making you fatter, and your quality of life is going down, then what?
Again i'll have to insist you are missing the point. Not my point, although I am advocating it; but the point of universal healthcare is to enable everyone access to the same level of healthcare for free. (Or, paid for by the taxpayers if you insist).
The principle is not about ensuring that someone with a specific amino acid substitution receives a specific drug, because this is an example of the specific medical management of a specific patient. If you are going to continue to insist that your dad was treated inappropriately, and I have no reason to be able to assume one way or the other from my current position on the other side of the planet without a through examination of your father and his medical results, then what you are complaining about is not universal healthcare per se but in fact poor care by the treating physician. Which could happen under any system, anywhere.
can you define for me what you mean by "the same level of healthcare"?
>universal healthcare ... poor care by the treating physician
These issues are entangled. I should let you know, that despite being in the US, my father is effectively being treated by a "universal healthcare" system - the VA.
The rationale makes a twisted sort of sense when you realize that, to the people in power in the US, access to healthcare is no more a 'right' than is access to a luxury car. It's just another good, and suggesting otherwise is tantamount to legalizing theft.
And yet, our specialists are the best in the world and people fly in from all over the world to be treated by them.
I'm not saying our system is perfect or can't be improved, but "Barbaric"? You win the prize for the most ridiculously hyperbolic statement I've read all today.
the only difference is that in socialized medicine you wait for life saving surgery for months even when you have money to pay for it. So everybody suffers.
No, if you need lifesaving surgery, you get it. And you don't get a bill that ends up costing a second mortgage.
Elective procedures - that's a different story. But it is location specific, and in many countries with mixed public/private systems you can pay through your nose if you like anyway
Currently the insurance company does, and since they were most likely selected by your employer whose objective was to hold down costs, what do you think that insurer's priorities are going to be? Plus, who's the customer in this situation? For whose business is the insurance company really working for?
no doubt having your employment being tied to your insurance is a really, really bad idea, but may I remind that state of affairs is because of a government incentive put into place by FDR.
In australia if you're in a hospital and you need surgery, you get it. Today if necessary.
Nothing needs 'approval'. Because everyone has the same insurer (The government), if you present to a hospital you are triaged according to your risk and treated appropriately. No 'approval' and no 'rejection'. It just happens.
And if you have osteoarthritis of your knees and want surgery in the private system (which can generally happen on demand instead of - because it is an emergent/elective condition - some time between now and 12 months from now) then you can go ahead and organise that.
If you would like to read a media release by the College of Surgeons have a look at [1] which not only describes emergency and elective but talks about about how surgery is managed in the hospital.
yeah, like bribes to doctors so they actually perform this cancer tumor surgery to my dad instead of asking him to wait in line for months more. Seen a doctor? Has a belly and a family. Needs money. Simple. But some idiots believe in "free". There is no free. You pay a ton of money for healthcare in any system.
go outside US and you will see that societies are concerned about people with deadly diseases like cancer having to wait months for surgeries. Because there arent enough doctors. Because there arent enough beds in hospitals. Because there just aeent enough medications. People have much more serious problems with socialized medicine than cost. ie waiting line of 6 months for prostate cancer surgery when every day counts. There are many much more important aspects of healthcare than affordability. Wouldnt you trade this 6 months waiting line for bankruptcy? Really?
You do realize saying "in socialized medicine" is as vague as saying "in every other country in the world" don't you?
There are 193 members states in the UN, of those 192 have a health care system that I would bet nearly 100% of americans would call "socialized medicine" in a poll. That includes countries like Sweden with completely state controlled top of the line healthcare, also England with state regulated prices for the private sector and also a top 5 in any reasonable metric health care system, or Panama/Argentina/Brazil with a mixed public and private not-top-of-the-line-but-reasonably-working system that includes very cheap private health insurance. It also includes Cuba, that has a very dfferent system than lets say Russia or Chile.
Your remark is as vague and irrelevant as saying "the only difference between HN readers and the rest of the world is that the former usually make vague and irrelevant remarks based on their personal beleifs".
> They also enter a social contract that promises to provide them affordable coverage when they’re older and no longer healthy, as a form of back payment for cross-subsidizing today’s aged and ill.
This is only true if the law requires younger people to pay more than their cohort consumes on an average basis, so as to transfer even more wealth from the working young to the retired, wealthy elderly.
Exactly, if I had any confidence that the insurance companies and congress weren't going to screw me out of tons of money, I might buy into socialized medicine.
I'm not clear on to what extent the mandatory coverage requires young people to pay more than the expected cost of their cohort, or if it simply requires them to carry their own expected cost so that the older insured people (or, perhaps, simply the taxpaying citizenry) don't have to pay health care costs of the younger uninsured generation.
The author of the article also says, "Young people are typically healthy. On average, they incur very low medical costs each year. In any social insurance system, most of them will end up paying in more than they get out during their early years"
It's not just the early years, it's all years. The way insurance works is that most people pay in more than they ever get out. You're insured so that in the unhappy event that you end up with a huge, abnormal, way above average expense, insurance will cover it. This is possible because, on average, most people pay in more than they ever get out. This fact in itself is not anything specific to insuring the youngest and healthiest people. The value of insurance is not measured by how much you "get out". It's measured by how much coverage you had, regardless of whether you used it.
I hope to never use my health insurance, or to use it (i.e., "get out of it") as little as possible. So far I've done great at that. Does not "getting out" what I've paid make me think I've been paying without getting value? Hardly. And my belief in that value is not conditioned on my expecting to get payments out of it in the future, any more than my belief in the value of my auto insurance is. I hope also to never get any money out of my auto insurance policy, this year or in any future years, yet it will still be worth every penny I pay.
I'm sure this has been pointed out many times when these posts pop up, but what is shocking to me is that we tolerate $200k medical bills for this sort of emergency care, as long as we aren't the ones paying for them ourselves.
The healthcare industry needs a lot more transparency. Every hospital should be required (if they choose to accept Medicare/Medicaid patients) to publish prices in an easily comparable format tied to standard medical codes for every service/procedure they provide, and should be required to charge individuals without insurance no more than the government or other large insurer pays. This would seem pretty simple to implement and would, over time, help keep prices lower simply by making them public and allowing people to compare them. The information asymmetry in the industry has created a situation where people are powerless to help themselves and make smart choices with regard to getting healthcare, and has led to the creation of another expensive program that we can't afford.
Sadly, we have a system in which the industries being regulated control the dialog, and they are all too happy to tiptoe past prices and on to who is footing the bill.
> The healthcare industry needs a lot more transparency.
OK, yes. What it really needs is to be an open market both for care and insurance. Competition has amazing ways to both improve quality and affordability. This has been proven time and time again across a myriad of fields both within and well outside of medicine. Nothing beats open market competition. When providers and insurance companies truly have to compete for your business things change.
The ACA (Obamacare) is a disaster full of typical government-driven unintended consequences. We are just starting to see the tip of the iceberg. Funny that the very people who passed it will not have to live within this monstrous framework. And now the very unions who helped push it forward had an "oh-shit!" moment. They learned just how fucked it's going to be and want out.
I say, we are all on the same boat or shred the damn thing. If we are going to have socialized medicine the only equitable approach is that everyone, without exceptions, has to use it. All exceptions granted by POTUS need to be rescinded.
That is exactly what got my attention. I think the problem with USA's insurance is not that it is private, but that it is really expensive.
I've been taking son analysis myself: ultrasound, x-ray, endoscopy, and had a surgery some time ago. All this amounted to $2000. And that's because I chose to go the private route in my country (Mexico). I have no idea how much would I have to pay in the USA for all that... it scares me.
"One of the less obvious consequences of serious accidents is that victims often become uninsurable on the individual market as a result.... Obamacare really will change that."
Making this sort of insurance available amounts to a wealth transfer to people who have been victims of injuries. That's fine, if you're into wealth transfers and all that, but...
wouldn't it be better if we just admitted it was a big fat subsidy to the sick and injured, and paid for it out of the general fund, instead of paying for it by making insurance more expensive, especially the young healthy twenty-somethings who struggle to afford it? so that these twenty-somethings wouldn't be tempted to skip it, among other things, and would be less vulnerable to these $200,000+ risks (and further undermine the system)?
I mean, all else being equal, it is probably a good idea to be insured if you can, Obamacare notwithstanding, but the fact that it incentives people this way is a fundamental design flaw, not a feature or a fix.
Oh, wait, I know why we're paying for it this way. It's so we can pretend that it doesn't cost anybody any money. :P
Just because Obamacare isn't perfect, doesn't mean you are better off without insurance. His post is not addressing the policy, his post is addressing the individuals who are deciding whether to enroll.
> But there’s no equity, dividend or residual value in a splenectomy.
I'm gonna go ahead and disagree with that. The residual value is every day afterwards that you get to live. (not that I disagree with the sentiment, just sayin)