• Welcome to the new Internet Infidels Discussion Board, formerly Talk Freethought.

Why people are afraid of universal health care

gmbteach said:
And these sorts of properties are popping up everywhere - that or townhouses. I think Logan City (Where we live) still has tight restrictions on how you can build on your property depending upon its size, but I also think they are looking at changing it. I laugh when I see 'large 500m block of land'... we have 725m and I would like a bit more. Ours is just too small to put a duplux on I think - but something like the plan above would be doable.
Click to expand...
500m block of land?? The only way I can see "m" as a reasonable unit is in street frontage and I'm sure you don't mean that. Thus I presume you really mean m^2. We are on ~650m^2, it was somewhat larger than the lots around (the lots don't exactly evenly fit the space, we bought the one with a little extra slice.) There's no way you could put a duplex on this as it's shaped. Make it shorter and wider and it could be done but you wouldn't have much of a yard.
 
Henry-Finland said:
I don't get it; Many here seem to love the insurance companies more than their countrymen (and -women)?
Click to expand...
I don't see anyone who feels that way.

It's just we don't trust the conflict of interest inherent to UHC. Keep the regulators separate from what they regulate!
 
Bomb#20 said:
Henry-Finland said:
I don't get it; Many here seem to love the insurance companies more than their countrymen (and -women)?
Click to expand...
In case you're talking about me, as I wrote in my first post, "Not commenting on the merits of the NHS model for health care delivery, just pointing out that moral philosophy is an utterly garbage way to decide how to solve the hard technical problems of economics.". I have no love of insurance companies; I just think that whether they're a better way to deliver health care to the majority of a society's people than a single-payer system is an empirical question that needs to be resolved by cost/benefit analysis and by experience with both models*, rather than by believing a popular pro-NHS internet meme engineered to preempt economic reasoning and appeal to unexamined intuition.

If you're talking about someone else who prefers private insurance to single-payer for non-economic reasons, no, it's not because they love insurance companies more than their countrymen. Nobody loves insurance companies. They prefer it because single-payer is coercive and private insurance is non-coercive, and a lot of people have a gut-level problem with coercion.
Click to expand...
I do think it's something society should do, I don't mind the coercive aspect. It's just I don't trust it. We see too many cases of lowering standards rather than doing it right. And looking at the US system the private model delivers better care to those it serves than the public models.
 
Bomb#20 said:
gmbteach said:
What makes our system a "complicated, messed-up, cobbled-together hodge-podge of a system." If you are sick you go to a doctor. If the doctor demands payment instead of bulk billing, they take care of the claim for you. I walk in to my GP, have an appointment, get my scripts, and walk out. If I need a follow up phone call, he gives me a form, I sign it and he gets payment for my phone call. If I get seriously hurt, I go to hospital, I get sorted - no drama. AND NO BILLS OR COPAY REQUIRED!

The only time I Co-Pay is if I go to a private doctor or hospital and even then, it's a pittance. My Shrink costs me $50 I think.

FFS - Medicare (our UHC) even pays for my annual check up at the optometrist, and up to 5 health care visits per year - physio, dietitian, psychologist... All walk in, do and walk out.

How is that 'complicated..... '
Click to expand...
Hey, I'm sure you'd know better than I. All I know is what I read on the internet.

en.wikipedia.org

Health care in Australia - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

Looks complicated to me.
Click to expand...
Umm.. what’s so difficult about being able to go to a dr and not have to pay? Okay - here it is in a nutshell.

1. I pay 2% of my taxable income as a Medicare levy. This allows anyone medical treatment.
2. The government pays 30% of any contributions to a private health fund that I make through tax rebates.
3. Number 2 means I pay fuck all for medical treatment.

4. If I choose to, and I do, I have private health insurance that allows me to choose a private Dr if I want, and to be treated in a private hospital if I want. This is useful for non-urgent surgeries.

Ambulances are covered by a surcharge in your electricity bill.

We also have the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme which means that all PBS scripts are no more than $35, and there is the safety net which means that once you have paid a certain amount for scripts the rest are free for the remainder of the calendar year. Pensioners only need to spend 1/3 of wage earners. Any private scripts, or medicines not on PBS are more expensive. One of my brain meds is private and I pay about $50 a month for it.

Still confused? Can’t see why. It’s simple!
 
Loren Pechtel said:
gmbteach said:
And these sorts of properties are popping up everywhere - that or townhouses. I think Logan City (Where we live) still has tight restrictions on how you can build on your property depending upon its size, but I also think they are looking at changing it. I laugh when I see 'large 500m block of land'... we have 725m and I would like a bit more. Ours is just too small to put a duplux on I think - but something like the plan above would be doable.
Click to expand...
500m block of land?? The only way I can see "m" as a reasonable unit is in street frontage and I'm sure you don't mean that. Thus I presume you really mean m^2. We are on ~650m^2, it was somewhat larger than the lots around (the lots don't exactly evenly fit the space, we bought the one with a little extra slice.) There's no way you could put a duplex on this as it's shaped. Make it shorter and wider and it could be done but you wouldn't have much of a yard.
Click to expand...
Ours is 726m^2 (thanks for showing me how to do that thingy). It’s almost duplexable but not subdividable.
 
Loren Pechtel said:
Henry-Finland said:
I don't get it; Many here seem to love the insurance companies more than their countrymen (and -women)?
Click to expand...
I don't see anyone who feels that way.

It's just we don't trust the conflict of interest inherent to UHC. Keep the regulators separate from what they regulate!
Click to expand...
Who's this we, Kemosabe?
 
Bomb#20 said:
Elixir said:
I do believe that you would favor caring for society’s needy, @Bomb#20.
I just don’t know how you envision such care being administered, because you seem to find fault with every institution or mechanism that purports to try to do that.

Perhaps clarifying your vision of how caring for society’s needy could/should happen, would silence some of your critics.
Click to expand...
My vision doesn't really involve me telling others how to do it -- I'm an electrical engineer, not a health care economist. In my ideal fantasy, American politicians would admit to the public that they aren't health care economists either and aren't competent to design a better health care system, so they're outsourcing it to somebody who's good at it. They'd collect quality-of-results statistics from all the single-payer and mixed public/private systems in other countries, identify who has the top-rated system, and hire that country's experts to rebuild the American system in its image. Based on the WHO's numbers, that means we'd bring in the French.

(But that said, I know my country, so I'm confident that if we actually tried to hire French experts to tell us how to duplicate French health care in America we'd find some way to screw it up. And in any event, the chances of us following their instructions correctly, while low, are quite a bit higher than the chances of our politicians admitting they aren't competent to design a better health care system.)
Click to expand...
I think we don't need to simply pick which is best and go with it. Instead, how about setting up some competing systems and see what happens?

Make a UHC system. Maybe even more than one. And at the same time adapt the ACA a bit. UHC becomes an ACA option, if you take private coverage you get a subsidy equal to the age-adjusted amount the government spends running the UHC system. Yes, that means the insurance companies won't know exactly what they'll be paid until the end of the year but they're in the business of dealing with risk, I don't see this as a serious problem.
 
Loren Pechtel said:
laughing dog said:
Why would anyone assume that a YHC would not have some form of outside rsgulation?
Click to expand...
Who? It's the government setting the standard of care. It's the government providing the care. That's a fox guarding the henhouse.
Click to expand...
That is normal with many things - the government creates the law, and also the police; the government creates regulations and also the regulatory authorities; and so on.
 
Loren Pechtel said:
laughing dog said:
Why would anyone assume that a YHC would not have some form of outside rsgulation?
Click to expand...
Who? It's the government setting the standard of care. It's the government providing the care. That's a fox guarding the henhouse.
Click to expand...
Funny, you don't seem to think the same of the police or the courts or any other gov't function. More importantly, UHC does not require complete gov't provision. Germany has UHC but everyone is mandated to have health insurance.

It seems to me that you rail against a straw man.
 
Loren Pechtel said:
Make a UHC system. Maybe even more than one. And at the same time adapt the ACA a bit. UHC becomes an ACA option...
Click to expand...
It appears that you have utterly failed to grasp what the "U" in "UHC" stands for, or that it is a critical, as well as a defining, feature of such systems.
 
Loren Pechtel said:
laughing dog said:
Why would anyone assume that a YHC would not have some form of outside rsgulation?
Click to expand...
Who? It's the government setting the standard of care. It's the government providing the care. That's a fox guarding the henhouse.
Click to expand...
That's no less absurd than saying of any system "It's humans setting the standard of care. It's humans providing the care. That's a fox guarding the henhouse".

"The government" is not a monolithic entity. It is a society in its own right, and is divided into competing departments and divisions.

Would you suggest that an officer from the airforce could not fairly referee an army vs navy football game, on the basis that it's all "The Military"?

No wonder American politics is so fucked up; The people can't seem to grasp that they don't live in a dictatorship. Shit, even one of the two candidates for this year's presidential election can't seem to grasp that the US government is not the power apparatus by which the President rules as an autocrat.
 
Several years ago I called my doctor's office telling them I had pneumonia and I need some antibiotics. The woman that answered the phone waited for a moment then said "I can get you in in two weeks. How's Tuesday at eleven for you?" I was sick as a dog and didn't have the energy to argue so I just said "I'll be dead in two weeks." and hung up.

Someone from the office called the next day and had me come right in. The doctor listened to my chest and said yup, pneumonia. Prescribed me Z-Pak and I was out in ten minutes. I don't know why they called back. Maybe the person I spoke to first told someone else who said ,yes, it's entirely possible the patient will be dead in two weeks. If someone tells you they have pneumonia you get them in as soon as possible.

No UHC system anywhere near. Frankly, I believe my true story is worse than Loren's example.
 
ZiprHead said:
Several years ago I called my doctor's office telling them I had pneumonia and I need some antibiotics. The woman that answered the phone waited for a moment then said "I can get you in in two weeks. How's Tuesday at eleven for you?" I was sick as a dog and didn't have the energy to argue so I just said "I'll be dead in two weeks." and hung up.

Someone from the office called the next day and had me come right in. The doctor listened to my chest and said yup, pneumonia. Prescribed me Z-Pak and I was out in ten minutes. I don't know why they called back. Maybe the person I spoke to first told someone else who said ,yes, it's entirely possible the patient will be dead in two weeks. If someone tells you they have pneumonia you get them in as soon as possible.

No UHC system anywhere near. Frankly, I believe my true story is worse than Loren's example.
Click to expand...
That doesn't surprise me and it doesn't disappoint me. You got the care you needed. If someone is expecting any system to work in some perfect manner they need to crawl out from under their rock. This is how the world works. Everyone needs to take their pie-in-the-sky expectations and shove them up their asses and start using the adult functions of their brains.
 
Loren Pechtel said:
laughing dog said:
Why would anyone assume that a YHC would not have some form of outside rsgulation?
Click to expand...
Who? It's the government setting the standard of care. It's the government providing the care. That's a fox guarding the henhouse.
Click to expand...
Yeah, and it's kinda fucked up. I have been billed for stuff that had a subtle coding difference that it is ridiculous for a surgeon to need to know. Now they have to ask not only what is this person's condition and what can I do for it, but also stuff like what are the conditions under which x,y,z screenings I might order fall under which subset of codes that depend on things like differences between diagnostic or preventative (the ins co's definitions), and what will or will not leave the patient liable for the bill.
Anyhow I got billed and told them to go back to the surgeon and get themselves an new code.
"We can't do that, you have to do it".
"Will I need to pay a co-pay for a visit so I can explain it to him?"
"I don't know..."

I was pissed but I booked an appointment with the cardiologist.
They asked what it was about, and when I told them, they said they'd check with The Doctor and call me back.
They called back the next morning and said no need to come in, they understood and would get the bill re-coded and re-sent.
And that was that. But it took a lot of digging just to figure out why they were billing me in the first place, what would have kept that from happening - the whole system seems to just suck the life out of you, even as it heals.
 
Loren Pechtel said:
Bomb#20 said:
Elixir said:
I do believe that you would favor caring for society’s needy, @Bomb#20.
I just don’t know how you envision such care being administered, because you seem to find fault with every institution or mechanism that purports to try to do that.

Perhaps clarifying your vision of how caring for society’s needy could/should happen, would silence some of your critics.
Click to expand...
My vision doesn't really involve me telling others how to do it -- I'm an electrical engineer, not a health care economist. In my ideal fantasy, American politicians would admit to the public that they aren't health care economists either and aren't competent to design a better health care system, so they're outsourcing it to somebody who's good at it. They'd collect quality-of-results statistics from all the single-payer and mixed public/private systems in other countries, identify who has the top-rated system, and hire that country's experts to rebuild the American system in its image. Based on the WHO's numbers, that means we'd bring in the French.

(But that said, I know my country, so I'm confident that if we actually tried to hire French experts to tell us how to duplicate French health care in America we'd find some way to screw it up. And in any event, the chances of us following their instructions correctly, while low, are quite a bit higher than the chances of our politicians admitting they aren't competent to design a better health care system.)
Click to expand...
I think we don't need to simply pick which is best and go with it. Instead, how about setting up some competing systems and see what happens?

Make a UHC system. Maybe even more than one. And at the same time adapt the ACA a bit. UHC becomes an ACA option, if you take private coverage you get a subsidy equal to the age-adjusted amount the government spends running the UHC system. Yes, that means the insurance companies won't know exactly what they'll be paid until the end of the year but they're in the business of dealing with risk, I don't see this as a serious problem.
Click to expand...
We have two ( at least) public options already: Medicare and Medicaid. There is an enormous issue with both of these: The pay for services is inadequate which has resulted in providers limiting the number of Medicaid patients they serve because reimbursements fall short of cost of service. Medicare is approaching the same issue with the providers limiting the number of Medicare patients they accept. In my area, more and more health care systems are declining patients with Medicare Advantage plans.

My concern with UHC is that politicians campaign on saving money/tax dollars and patients and providers suffer. I know it works in other countries. I do not know why we are so fucked up that it is a huge issue here.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom