Health care is not efficient. It cant be. Its about keeping people alive without profit.
Honestly the whole “government doesn’t work” 80’s religion over here is just bizarre, it even has infected intelligent card carrying liberals. Usually accompanied with the old “except the military of course… because. mumble mumble. some reason mumble mumble” :)
And of course ALL large organizations are inefficient to a certain degree. As anyone who has worked in a large corporation can attest.
Reagan and Thatcher are dead. They were wrong. Time to move past the myths they peddled.
Show me proof it’s not a myth. We’re not talking about the UK running a NHS. We’re talking about our government. Have you looked at our government lately, really looked at it?
And just in case it’s not clear, I do not want Trump in control of my healthcare. Period. The people he listens too would wipe out entire races if they could figure out a way to do it.
I have been the DMV does that count? Takes about as long as it does in England. I mean what kind of example do you want?
I can give you a very clear example that in healthcare the private system in the United States is worse than the public system UK in terms of dollars in and health care out.
Are you willing to let the USA government, the one we have today, take over your system? If government solves it, it shouldn’t matter which government… right?
The guy your article is bitching about… guess what he is in charge of right now, our government.
Oh of course Republicans are fucking idiots and Trump is the worst. I agree with that! :)
But your average US government employee vs ones in any other country? Bout the same in my experience. They do their jobs as well as anyone in the private sector.
No matter what anyone thinks today, the Republicans will one day, hopefully soon, lose office and one day they will regain it again. Any system we have in place has to look different than what other countries have or, for example, women will have no access to birth control every 4 -8 years. And that’s just a start. Our health is hugely politicized.
That’s a very interesting perspective. I’d never really thought about that before. If we had medicare-for-all type system that you could buy into, you could potentially have republicans and democrats fighting every 4-8 years in what’s covered and what isn’t covered in such a system. I hadn’t thought about that side before.
Despite popular belief, not all our inefficiencies were created due to greed and fraud. We have a system heavily pushed by employers, tied to employment and the beliefs of them (their owners).
I know there are better systems, but I don’t trust our government. I’ve worked with their ridiculous programs, their half thought through ideas, and their systems that are so outdated we send shoeboxes sized packages to them with paper charts.
Our government payors are the worst in the system today.
This is correct. The biggest clear and present danger to the United States today is the Republican party. I find it bizarre to be typing that having grown up during the cold war when it was clearly the USSR and its evil. But today it is the Republican party. Strange times.
I think that there is ample evidence that US pays way too much for healthcare, with mediocre results compared to most other developed countries.
But as Nesrie points out there is virtually no evidence that US government run healthcare would be better.
The (mostly) single payer single provider Veteran Administration serves about 9 million patients at cost of ~13K/year/patient. This is the most similar to NHS
Medicare covers 44 million (nearly as many as the NHS at 64 million). It is an essentially single payer, multiple providers (similar to most European systems) it cost ~11-12K/patient/year
Medicaid plus CHIPs now cover 70 million America. It is hybrid system primarily funded by the Federal government and jointly run by the states and the feds. It cost between $7-8K/patient/year making it slightly less expensive that nationwide average of $10.3K/patient/year.
As has been pointed many times on this thread, that patient population between the three systems are very different from each other and the nation as whole, so making comparisons is dangerous at best. Still, I think it is fair to say that none of the government-run healthcare systems are particularly cheap, nor particularly good.
America is really good at some things, for example by almost any metri,c crop yield per acre, or corp yield per worker hour American farmer are near the top in the world. It is clear to me that taken as whole the US healthcare system is quite inefficient on par with Japanese or Italian farmers.
If there was a way of using a star trek transporter to beam me to doctors appointments in UK, Canada, Australia, NZ, or anyplace else where they spoke good English, I’d jump at the chance and happily pay for the privilege At this point, I think there is about equal chance of developing transporter as fixing the US healthcare system.
I accept all that as true. I would hope (and I think you do) accept that private healthcare in the USA is also terrible.
I guess my position is, before the United States waves the white flag and says “we are just not good enough to have a healthcare system as good as other modern countries” I would like to give it a shot and see.
I still believe as I have believed since the moment I arrived here, that the United States can do anything better than the rest of the world put together. Because “the rest of the world put together” is exactly what it is.
Universal free government healthcare is a big task for sure. But beyond the powers of the United States? When other lesser countries have already achieved it? Nah. It can be done here. Americans can do whatever they put their minds to. Dont let Trump & Republicans “little America” vision fool you. This is a great country and will be long after Republicans are gone.
Depending on your insurance, your provider, and affordability, it’s not actually terrible. There are reasons people come here to get treated. There are problems with efficiency, access, affordability and accountability.
I think going to Universal Health asks me to trust my government, my existing government more than I do my employer, my insurance company and my provider, and right now, I will not do it My government, right now, is trying to starve ObamaCare because it has the word Obama in it, which they put there.
I stand by my original inclination. We need to take healthcare out of the hands of employers. Several large systems and areas are already shifting toward capitated rates, roughly no longer paid per visit but overall health of the patient year to year, and as we shift away from fee for service we can make more efforts to bring people back into the system, healthy and poor and then, of course, address the supply side issues while we’re at it.
It will be a cold day in hell before I think having someone like Trump, who caters to the praise of his evil touting base, in charge of my healthcare is a good idea. At least today if I don’t like my insurance, i can get another job… hopefully in the future, that will change to just to shop around and keep the job.
Canadians heard all these arguments before implementing their plans. Now they’d happily burn any government to the ground who tried to mess with it. I’m sure the Brits heard the same as well.
The rest of the world figured this out, we can do it.
I think should the US adopt an European/Canadian/Fucking developed world system, it would have to be given constitutional protection.
That’s what they have here. And this way when politicians try to deny service due to budgetary reasons, they go to trial for homicide (case is real, hasn’t been ruled on yet, but it does look bad for politicians, since the judge accepted the grounds).
But yes, if you do this without constitutional protection it’s going to be a clusterfuck.
According to online articles, there are a number of plans in Canada that don’t cover birth control either, but of course they cover erectile dysfunction drugs. I guess that’s one way around it… just screw women. I had no idea.
British NHS is on fire. The Tories are destroying it. It’s underfunded by some enormous factor due to their malice and greed, and now they’re excluding competent European doctors, nurses, and orderlies from the system due to Brexit. A spectre is haunting Westminster. The spectre of Aneurin Bevan…
