RE: Vote Universal Healthcare

RE: Vote Universal Healthcare (Full Version)

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Sanity -> RE: Vote Universal Healthcare (9/15/2007 10:29:16 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: kiyari In the USA, patients are referred to as "revenue streams" Seriously Physicians have been reprimanded for not exhausting the litany of "acceptable" various and sundry "tests" [all billable, of course], in cases where the diagnosis was clear from the start. Meh Who do you claim "reprimanded" them. In the USA Doctors are usually their own employer. I could see it if their malpractice insurance did it to try to stave off the trial lawyers... Is that what you're talking about?

meatcleaver -> RE: Vote Universal Healthcare (9/15/2007 11:42:48 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: Archer Real life tells anyone that you get to pick only two out of the following three charateristics in any product or service. Cheap, Fast and Good, You get to pick any two at the sacrifice of the remaining one. It's a fact of life you cannot avoid. Fast and Good means it wont be cheap, Fast and Cheap means it wont be good, Good and Cheap means it won't be fast. No matter who is providing the service these three things get traded off between them, how well they make the trades depends on the decission makers involved. When the Government gets involved I tend to think they will actualize only one as opposed to two of the three. I've lived at least 3 years each in five European countries. UK, Holland, Belgium, Germany and France. All have good, cheap(relatively) healthcare. All are bloody fast too in an emergency. Where you have none life threatening ailments, things do slow down somewhat. From my experience they slow down the most in Britain, probably because tax payers pay less for healthcare than say, Germany and France, where tax payers pay the most and from my experience get a great deal for their tax euro.

TheHeretic -> RE: Vote Universal Healthcare (9/15/2007 12:05:43 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: Sanity In the USA Doctors are usually their own employer. Not so, Sanity. Medical sole-proprieterships are pretty rare. Most doctors work for some larger organization, at least on a partial basis. Just like traffic cops, you have to meet that quota. Maximizing the billing to insurance companies is pretty standard practice. That's one of the better arguments for some serious reform.

Sanity -> RE: Vote Universal Healthcare (9/15/2007 12:27:42 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: TheHeretic Not so, Sanity. Medical sole-proprieterships are pretty rare. Most doctors work for some larger organization, at least on a partial basis. Just like traffic cops, you have to meet that quota. Maximizing the billing to insurance companies is pretty standard practice. That's one of the better arguments for some serious reform. I'm not buying it, Rich. If anything they belong to co-ops of a sort, medical groups. And they're most always packed, the ones I've been in. If your apointment is for 10:30, expect to see the doctor at around 1:00, because they're so damned busy. And the way they herd people through like cattle, why would they need excessive tests to further their income (when they could just moove more people through instead). I think the excessive tests are mostlyu to cover their asses in case John Edwards comes around trying to sue them back into the stone age.

NeedToUseYou -> RE: Vote Universal Healthcare (9/15/2007 12:36:13 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: meatcleaver quote: ORIGINAL: Archer Real life tells anyone that you get to pick only two out of the following three charateristics in any product or service. Cheap, Fast and Good, You get to pick any two at the sacrifice of the remaining one. It's a fact of life you cannot avoid. Fast and Good means it wont be cheap, Fast and Cheap means it wont be good, Good and Cheap means it won't be fast. No matter who is providing the service these three things get traded off between them, how well they make the trades depends on the decission makers involved. When the Government gets involved I tend to think they will actualize only one as opposed to two of the three. I've lived at least 3 years each in five European countries. UK, Holland, Belgium, Germany and France. All have good, cheap(relatively) healthcare. All are bloody fast too in an emergency. Where you have none life threatening ailments, things do slow down somewhat. From my experience they slow down the most in Britain, probably because tax payers pay less for healthcare than say, Germany and France, where tax payers pay the most and from my experience get a great deal for their tax euro. So, your endorsing the nearest thing to the EU example, a state based solution? Because that is what each of those countries is like a state, or two. So, you living in the EU, have the option at least of traveling here or there relatively freely for different options. We in the US would be left with absolutely only one option. If it gets busted, or mismanaged, there is absolutely no jumping the border, or whatnot like you could do in the EU. Or even looking to the Federal government to help out a ailing state mishap would be off the table. With a one plan for all solution it is all or nothing. That is a terrible way to manage anything. It doesn't seem worth it to me, when one could just let each state handle it, and then even if one fails, or is mismanaged, it doesn't sink the ship like a federal fuckup would do.

kiyari -> RE: Vote Universal Healthcare (9/15/2007 12:37:09 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: TheHeretic quote: ORIGINAL: kiyari He is suggesting that otherwise able bodied GROWN UPS would [for reasons he has not elucidated] CHOOSE to spend their time employed at sufficiently low wages so as to... what? Defies logic to me, presuming these GROWN UPS could have made a 'living wage' but have -for some incomprehensible reason- CHOSEN not to. Not that many years ago, Kiyari, I had a job I loved. I looked forward to going to work every day. The light schedule allowed me to pursue other interests. The job paid minimum, plus a token to my being good at it. When I needed more money, it was easy enough to make a few bucks under the table. I liked the lifestyle, even if it meant living on the cheap side. I could have had a better paying job any time I wanted it ( right next door, in fact. I drank more than a few beers with a contractor who was always bitching about how hard it was to find workers with skills I never told him I had ). Eventually, I did decide to follow a more comfortably materialistic path. Better health coverage was one of the motivators. Of course, whether or not I should properly have been considered a GROWN UP during those years would be another conversation. Ahh then, you were a wealthy man in your ability to do something that was a plus-not-minus for a livlihood, and you are no example of the lazy lag-abouts that CL implicitly vilifies, or not so that you have admitted to. Were that we each were free to do something we enjoyed, irrespective of the "wages" Ah, but I suppose, that borders upon... something vaguely "Un- . 'Mercan" =( I used to have a job I loved, as well. Was good at it. Made going to work something to look forward to. IT. Been outsourced and insourced up the wazoo. Meh.

kiyari -> RE: Vote Universal Healthcare (9/15/2007 12:46:22 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: Sanity quote: ORIGINAL: kiyari In the USA, patients are referred to as "revenue streams" Seriously Physicians have been reprimanded for not exhausting the litany of "acceptable" various and sundry "tests" [all billable, of course], in cases where the diagnosis was clear from the start. Meh Who do you claim "reprimanded" them. In the USA Doctors are usually their own employer. I could see it if their malpractice insurance did it to try to stave off the trial lawyers... Is that what you're talking about? No. Those who work under the aegis of hospitals or other agencies. Profit motive.

Sanity -> RE: Vote Universal Healthcare (9/15/2007 12:51:17 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: kiyari No. Those who work under the aegis of hospitals or other agencies. Profit motive. That's why insurance companies had to come up with contractual agreements as to what they'll pay and what they won't. Again, the free market working its magic where government control would at best bury everything in ineffecient, wasteful bureaucracy. Who would want to be a government doctor. Or even a government patient? What we have now is bad enough!

kiyari -> RE: Vote Universal Healthcare (9/15/2007 1:15:28 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: Sanity quote: ORIGINAL: kiyari No. Those who work under the aegis of hospitals or other agencies. Profit motive. That's why insurance companies had to come up with contractual agreements as to what they'll pay and what they won't. Again, the free market working its magic where government control would at best bury everything in ineffecient, wasteful bureaucracy. Who would want to be a government doctor. Or even a government patient? What we have now is bad enough! ...and so if they will pay for BLOOD TESTS [yet the admitting doctor can diagnose just from what the patient presents] ...Then if that doctor fails to prescribe BLOOD TESTS anyways [billable, ya know] then said doctor is not MAXIMIZING THE REVENUE STREAM and may be reprimanded. Seriously [as in, For Real]

CuriousLord -> RE: Vote Universal Healthcare (9/15/2007 1:17:44 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: NorthernGent quote: ORIGINAL: CuriousLord (To get straight at the point, I think we disagree on the idea that we take intellectual property, so we should return on it by sharing capital, if I understand your position correctly.) I don't think we do. You implied that your education is a result of your effort alone. My point stands: it is not, you benefit from the group; give and take is a core part of human existence, so the idea that one group taking from another renders health care a non-starter, is a meaningless one in my mind. As said, health care is underpinned by knowledge sharing; for a kick off, the idea of a hospital was not conceived in the Western world. We all grow as a consequence of the effort of others; put it this way, left to your own devices, you'd be swinging in trees literally shitting yourself at the prospect of an alpha male selecting you for a spot of retribution, the same applies to everyone. Okay. That's just absolutely ridiculous. Because I'd be the alpha male. That, plus I'm not great at swinging in trees. Heh. Alright, I see your point that contact with other humans helps us to know a lot more useful things. I'm not entirely sure how this is connected to socialism, though; in both a capitalist society and a socialist one, people do learn from eachother, right? I understand there's this idea of "intellectual property", but I feel it's a limited concept meant to help inventors indepedently derive more capital for their concepts to inspire the system as a whole to become more innovative, but not meant to actually redefine the system at its base.

philosophy -> RE: Vote Universal Healthcare (9/15/2007 1:20:02 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: Sanity quote: ORIGINAL: kiyari No. Those who work under the aegis of hospitals or other agencies. Profit motive. That's why insurance companies had to come up with contractual agreements as to what they'll pay and what they won't. Again, the free market working its magic where government control would at best bury everything in ineffecient, wasteful bureaucracy. Who would want to be a government doctor. Or even a government patient? What we have now is bad enough! ...ok, according to you the current US health system is a crock, universal health care wont work......so what will? What system puts the patients needs first, regardless of their economic status? What system ensures that the children of poor families get physio if they need it? What system recognises that good health across the board has knock on economic benefits for all society?

Sanity -> RE: Vote Universal Health care (9/15/2007 2:52:39 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: philosophy ...ok, according to you the current US health system is a crock, universal health care wont work......so what will? What system puts the patients needs first, regardless of their economic status? What system ensures that the children of poor families get physio if they need it? What system recognises that good health across the board has knock on economic benefits for all society? You seem to be after perfection, but alas, you will never find it. What we have now (minus the propaganda) really isn't that bad. We have free clinics and sliding scale clinics, emergency rooms that turn no one away, as well as many other positive things going for us. If we face the facts, we'll see that everyone is going to die of something anyway... and that the government really can't fix everything. Probably the biggest improvement we could make is to reign in the greedy trial lawyers. Going Socialist obviously doesn't work, and why should trial lawyers like John Edwards get filthy rich by working overtime to make MY health care unfordable?

QuietlySeeking -> RE: Vote Universal Healthcare (9/15/2007 4:57:40 PM)
Honestly, what many Europeans fail to realize that it is relatively simple to provide "universal healthcare" to a population that is close, geographically speaking. My state (GA) is larger geographically than many of the EU countries; the population in my county exceeds the populations of several European countries. When you have an answer that works for the former USSR, then come and talk to me about how great socialized medicine can work...until then, I've seen the attempts here in the US that failed and I'm not interested in financing another failed attempt and then being prevented by our legal system from trying to correct that failure.

existentialangst -> RE: Vote Universal Healthcare (9/15/2007 5:29:49 PM)
Why? Talk! Please? XOXOXO

submittous -> RE: Vote Universal Healthcare (9/15/2007 5:42:51 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: cyberdude611 So instead of the HMOs making your healthcare decisions....you want the government to make your healthcare decisions? That's the fundamental problem with "universal healthcare." You make the government one giant insurance company. The person or entity paying the bill will always be the one making the decisions. Unless you opt to pay for your own healthcare out of pocket, you usually dont get the care or treatment you want. Well one example of the difference would be medicare is administered by the deadly government beaurocrats for about 3 % overhead, private insurance companies do the same job for about 40%.... My experience is medicare and even the VA does a better job of following their own rules than any HMO or current medical insurance company. The bottom line is eventually the government is accountable to the public who votes, insurance companies and HMO's are only accountable to stockholders.... which group do you want making the FINAL decisions? If taking 35% of the cost we are now spending on health care out of being distributed as profit and putting it into actual health care doesn't improve overall health in America what will? or of course since America spends a higher percentage of GDP on health care than anyone else maybe we could reduce that and improve our position in international business. I know that the billions of dollars of profit at stake will bring out the silly ads on TV again and fools will fall for that crap, but there is no way that single payer public interest run health care isn't the only rational choice for America. I know that doesn't mean it will happen. Bill

NorthernGent -> RE: Vote Universal Healthcare (9/16/2007 12:43:44 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: QuietlySeeking I work for a healthcare company who owns private hospitals in the UK. Those facilities are some of our most profitable facilities...and they are private, consumer-pay facilities in the midst of a "universal healthcare" nation. If "universal healthcare" is so good, why are people still paying for anything out-of-pocket? I know nothing of the US system, and I'm not remotely interested, you could have the best or worst quality in the world for all I know. In terms of the British system, universal healthcare is not "so good". There are flaws in the system: the primary one being a lack of investment, taxes are directed to the more humanist approach that is killing people in foreign lands. The principle, however, is a sound one: providing support for those less fortunate is how I personally like to see life. In terms of privatised healthcare, it's required because the burden on the public health system outweighs investment; privatised health care takes some of the burden of the public system. By the way, the British health care system isn't free for 95% of us; we pay progressive taxes to maintain the system, and in keeping with the original ideals of the British National Health Service and wider welfare system, high earners pay more tax towards the system.

NorthernGent -> RE: Vote Universal Healthcare (9/16/2007 12:52:07 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: QuietlySeeking quote: ORIGINAL: meatcleaver Ever tried having cancer, a heart transplant, legionaire's desease or anything else that is life threatening on private healthcare? Private healthcare in Britain is a luxury top up, it doesn't function as a primary care service and functions at a profit because it creams off short term easy to deal with patients who have money to jump queues. When people with cancer choose private healthcare over the NHS, I'll admit the NHS isn't working. The internal figures that I've seen show that those who can afford to stay away from NHS....do. a) Many people I know can afford to stay away from the NHS, including myself, but do not. Your statement above is complete rubbish, really, completely uninformed and serving no purpose whatsover with the exception of a thinly veiled attempt to further your political agenda. b) The main reason people opt for private healthcare is time: money means you can jump to the front of the queue. c) Private health care uses the same NHS trained doctors. The quality of the service is exactly the same: the only difference is that you get a cup of tea and a reduced waiting time.

NorthernGent -> RE: Vote Universal Healthcare (9/16/2007 1:01:36 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: Alumbrado But if that's the best the gummint has come up with, at what point should a better solution than just chanting the 'Universal Health Care' mantra be found? That's a very good point. The British system was conceived in the aftermath of WW2 for all sorts of political reasons, but chiefly because we had a high proportion of the population who could not afford private health care. 60 years on, we're a different nation; most people can afford to go private, and the reality of a far more competitive economic environment means that the National Health System lacks the investment and is struggling under the burden. I believe it's time for a change; the idea of a National Health Service was suitable for another age, but not this one. I'd suggest something similar to CuriousLord in that those most in need have free access to health care, and those of us who can afford to pay, do so. Obviously, this a case of increasing wealth redistribution. The alternative is to lobby the goverment to redirect our taxes from Iraq to our health care system, but as only 55% of us take the time to exercise our stake in the nation, I'm not banking on any progress on that score.

seeksfemslave -> RE: Vote Universal Healthcare (9/16/2007 1:11:50 AM)
Lawyers always say never ask a question to which you dont know the answer but I am not a lawyer so In the US who pays for the pure medical research, say operation techniques, methods of aftercare things like that. I dont mean at the time you get this treatment I mean who devises it. If it is done at medical colleges who finances this aspect of research. In the US are there any state/federal financed/subsidised colleges to produce medical professionals ? In other words who pays for the high cost low profit "bits" of the medical system.

farglebargle -> RE: Vote Universal Healthcare (9/16/2007 3:14:00 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: Sanity quote: ORIGINAL: kiyari No. Those who work under the aegis of hospitals or other agencies. Profit motive. That's why insurance companies had to come up with contractual agreements as to what they'll pay and what they won't. Again, the free market working its magic where government control would at best bury everything in ineffecient, wasteful bureaucracy. Who would want to be a government doctor. Or even a government patient? What we have now is bad enough! That sorta presupposes that the relationship between The People, Insurance Companies, Medical Providers, and parasitic organizations such as HMO's isn't already an artificial, highly regulated construct OF the Government. And the relationship is artificial, and highly regulated, and therefore, I would think a pretty shitty example of the "Free Market"...

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