American Healthcare Reform

Chad wrote,

You think your healthcare is free?

Link | August 19th, 2009 at 9:07 pm

Simon wrote,

Seriously, you don’t know what you are talking about. Those of us who *are* Americans and don’t want *this* reform are not saying we don’t want some sort of reform…we just don’t want government run health care. We are watching our neighbors to the north (Canada) and their health care is imploding….9 hour ER waits and 7 week life threatening cancer treatment waits. Their own government is saying it is a major crisis. Here if I want to go get cancer treatment I can get it done in a day or two…that is the beauty of a free market.You say that most Europeans countries have socialized health care and that they are way better than America? Then why do we get hundreds of thousands of Europeans (and Canadians) coming to America to receive treatment every year because their country won’t pay for it? Yes that is true.

And trust me it won’t be “basically free” here. Estimates are an average of 50% of your income will be taxed after this (ex. $100,000 salary = $50,000 after taxes).

Make no mistake we have the greatest health care in the world, our media and administration are just out to demonize it to get more control. And also, here, poor people do not die in the ER. We do not deny ANYONE treatment. Americans, Non-Americans, Illegal immigrants, wealthy, poor, pre-existing or not…they all get treated, no questions asked.

There is something different about us Americans, our country was built on the ideology of freedom, choice, liberty, small government and prosperity. These ideas are all based on free market, and government run industries are the complete opposite of free market. So when you say these insurance companies make a profit off of our health that is a no-brainer…of course they do. That is the complete point of a free market. That is the point of a company. No company can run off of a deficit. Economics 101. This is a lot more complicated then meets the eye…..We are not Spain, so please don’t tell us what we need, when you have no idea about us or our country.

Link | August 19th, 2009 at 10:51 pm

teqjack wrote,

Um…

I might go for a system like the French or other continental-Europe countries (Spain?) have. I don’t know a whole lot about them, but it seems that the government routinely pays basics and optionally reimburses other stuff. Thing is, insurance/hospitals/doctors/etc are not government agents. Contrast with the UK where you may lose ALL government healthcare if you buy medicines approved by the government for use but for which it will not pay. And it is largely the UK system being proposed here in the US.

Not that the NHS is terrible, I would rate it as pretty good – better than many, in fact. But not something I would wish the US to emulate. The bills proposed this year do not quite do that, more like establishing a Federal version of the first few years of HMOs.

I am in Medicare (by necessity, all assets lost several years ago), so I do not think I can be called against government help. And yes, our system has flaws and could certainly stand some reform. But none of the bills are really about reform, like stopping tthe practice common with [non-employer-offered] private insurance refusing to pay for pregnancy by saying it is a pre-existsing condition even if you took out the policy years ago. They may accomplish that point, but by taking over the whole business.

Link | August 19th, 2009 at 11:39 pm

Cindy wrote,

Free? Really? And nobody pays any taxes that fund that “free” healthcare? The money magically appears? What, is it a healthcare fairy that pays for everything?

What a dumbass. And you think the same government that is doing such a stellar job with social security, the post office, medicare, public education, and cash for clunkers, is going to continue their streak of success with a healthcare program. Yeah, THAT doesn’t scare me in the least…

Link | August 20th, 2009 at 4:00 am

nadie wrote,

Simon,

You fail in your logic in one simple thing: Universal Healthcare does not replace Private Healthcare.

In Spain, Germany, France, etc. you can pay for medical if you have money enough just as happens in EEUU. But If you don’t have money you don’t have to die lyied in the street like a dog or go broke and become homeless only for had been ill.

The only real difference is: Health companys in EEUU are very much profitable than european one, thats why they spend millions in marketing to make people think like you do.

Link | August 20th, 2009 at 9:37 am

Paging Dr. Cavadas | Hola Valencia Blog wrote,

[...] my country seems to lose its shit — for example, the current health care debate, which has descended into incoherent madness. “Obama is a Hitlahr! Y’all is socialisms! Stay away from my liberty, [...]

Link | August 20th, 2009 at 5:03 pm

Simon wrote,

Yes we do have some out of control markets but that is because they are not entirely free….the government is too involved. When government stays out, the market handles itself appropriately. When government gets involved, the market is not free or balanced anymore and does not perform as it should. Government is an unfair player in free markets since it runs on your taxpayer dollars and can run on deficit….no company can compete against that.

Link | August 20th, 2009 at 5:51 pm

Joey Diamond wrote,

Just stick to the products dipstick and let us worry about how the government is going to kill us with all the free medical advice.

Link | August 20th, 2009 at 9:26 pm

Tracy wrote,

This actually strikes me as quite funny because I would LOVE to know what part of Spain you are living in, because my experience is COMPLETELY different.
I’m originally from the US (Spanish father, American mother), and have lived in Spain for about 10 years, and must say that my experience has been quite different than yours.
My experience:
Luckily I’m quite healthy, so I haven’t had too many experiences as a patient personally, but the few I have had, and those where I was a visitor, have been deplorable.
No doctor I have ever had has ever told me to go for checkups or told me what tests I should have done regularly nor what vaccines I should have and when (Not enough time to talk to you. So, I’m pretty sure I’m long overdue for tetanus again, but noone seems to care. Anyways…). Even though there is a strong history of breast cancer in my family, I have been denied the possibility of having a mammogram done (I’m 35).
When I have made appointments, I’ve had to wait very long for my appointment, and each doctor has about 5 minutes with each patient. Being a dentist myself, I know how important it is to have a thourough knowledge of your patients medical history before prescribing treatment, but no doctor here has ever bothered to ask me about mine.
I went to the hospital once, and it took 5 hours for someone to actually check on why I was in the ER. I had had a fever and sore throat for over a month. The health centers each week had been prescribing me a new, different antibiotic without ever having done any throat cultures to check to see that my infection was really bacterial. After about a month in a half, I had my first throat culture done, so they finally realized that I didn’t have strep throat, and I was needlessly on antibiotics. (They love to abuse antibiotics here- it takes too much time and would cost the gov. money to do cultures that could help prevent antibiotic resistance, but who cares about creating antibiotic resistant strains when one can save money by not worrying about it).
Annual blood tests? You get herded in with hundreds of other people, and stand next to 7 other people wo are all having blood drawn at the same time. No panels between you- no place to sit- no privacy.
In Spain, at least there still exists the possibily for private care- sort of (Yet in the US Obama and Pelosi have admitted that their goal is more radical yet- to completely eliminate the option of having private insurance. Remember, they are horrible demons.). If you have something small happen to you, you can still go to a private hospital-clinic here (To answer the other poster: yes, in essence paying twice- once for your “free” public care, and again for either private insurance or paying per visit to a private clinic), but if you have a real problem, the private clinics aren’t developed enough to have the equipment available to take care of you (with the possible exception of a big private clinic in a very big city like Madrid or Barcelona). people don’t like paying twice for medicine, so not enough money is channeled into the private clinics for them to be able to fully develop. So, when something serious happens to you, you are forced to deal with the mediocre care of the public hospitals, despite having paid extra for private insurance.
The real problem, though, comes in these more serious situations.
The hospitals I’ve been in are generally horrible. They are definitely not kept up like private hospital where competition from other hospitals forces them to keep things nice.
If you are lucky to get a room (most likely shared with 2 other patients and their family members, and no privacy, once again) in one (in my city, there is one small hospital for the whole region, and the halls are lined with cots, with the pleasant smell of urine in the hallways from the bedpans- people with no privacy having to urinate in the hallways in a bedpan because they don’t have a room.)
If you have someone in an intensive care unit, forget about being able to visit them. Also forget about knowing anything about your loved one-especially on the weekend. They will tell you that their assigned doctor is the only person who can tell you anything about your loved one, and that person might have 15-30minutes set aside every one or two days to talk to ALL family members of all patients there. (That means maybe 1-2 minutes of info every 2-3 days for you). Of course on a weekend, no info. is available.
My husband was in an intensive burn unit for over a month with serious burns covering 35% of his body, and I couldn’t visit him. I was allowed to see him through a window for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening most days (think jail visits in movies). Of course, most hospitals don’t bother to have a burn unit (or a cardiovascular unit even…), so I had to commute almost 2 hours daily to be able to visit him (like we did when we visited his father after his heart surgery. Our region doesn’t have a burn unit nor does it have equipment for heart surgeries available). He was there for 5 days before anyone was able to give me ANY information about his condition. He was there in the summer, and the air conditioning was broken in his unit. For higiene, fans aren’t allowed, yet they were unable to fix the problem during his stay (so we know that it was left unfixed for over a month, at the very least.) If you can imagine, the burn unit was closed off, and was made up of many windows, so it basically was a greenhouse (think unbearably hot). The phones used for communication with patients were broken (once again, think jail visits in the movies), and if you wanted to talk to your loved one, you either had to buy walkie talkies or pay to use a cell phone-both difficult with a patient like my hsband who had both hands burned and bandaged.
Maintenance in general wasn’t great.- He was kept in a special bed that floats the burn patient on warm air (there was only one in the hospital- so heaven forbid that there be more than one burn victim at a time in a 2 hour drive radius that might need it). The problem, though? The thermostat was broken, so they had to keep the temperature higher than what they wanted, not a great thing for a burn patient who can’t regulate his temperature well (a function of skin- of which he had little remaining)- especially in a burn unit whose air conditioning doesn’t work. Being a burn victim is painful and devastating enough without being forced to stay in such deplorable conditions.
Sadly the burn unit (famed to be the BEST in the country) is supposed to be an intensive care unit with people always there watching over the patients, but any time there was a new burn victim with extensive burns, everyone would go to treat the emergency, and noone was left. My husband yelled for help several times (there were no call buttons for help from nurses, btw- too expensive for the government, I guess), and noone was around to answer- help him.
I could go on and on (like about how noone wore gloves, workers regularly go outside to smoke in their scrubs and return to the unit without changing or even covering up the scrubs with anything, female workers left long hair hanging down so that it would touch the patients when they bent over them…- remember this was a burn unit where I couldn’t enter because of “infection control”‘ but infection control was very minimal), but I’ve been in three different hospitals here in Spain, visiting people for extended periods of time, and have had very similar experiences in all of them.
Things in common? 1. Treatment of patients as an annoyance (workers are overworked and underpaid in general) 2. Worse treatment of family members- and very little information available to them 3. Hospitals basically shut down on the weekends 4. Very long waiting periods in the emergency room (like hours before anyone checks you out to see if you have anything serious or not), and even longer waiting periods for tests to be run (like a couple of months for my mother-in-law to have a lump she found on her leg biopsied). 5. No privacy 6.Not enough rooms for all of the patients

The really funny part was how you stated that here “POOR PEOPLE DON’T DIE IN THE EMERGENCY ROOMS AS THEY AWAIT CARE”- hahahahaha
Do you never watch the news? I have seen many stories about people who have died while awaiting care in the ER here. It seems quite common, actually.
I don’t know if they were poor or not. I guess they are indiscriminate about who they let die in the ER while awaiting care. Is that what you meant?
No matter how much money you have, you can’t escape the system here. They send you where they want. They treat you how they want. Period. The goverment controls you and your health. You have no choices left.
No choices, no privacy, no incentive to have a nice hospital that treats you well. (No competition, you’re stuck with them no matter what, so who cares what you think about the lousy treatment).
I’ve always figured that as I got older, I would return to the US because I didn’t want to ever get really sick in a hospital here. (I’d never had a fear of doctors and hospitals until I got here)
Unfortunately, if the US system becomes even more radical than it is here, I really have no incentive to do so.
I’m guessing that you’ve never really been in a hospital here with something serious, or your outlook might be a bit less optimistic about care. If you’d only listen to the radio or the tv, though, you’d have heard numerous stories from the “defensor del paciente” about how bad conditions have become in hospitals here nationwide.
I’m not saying that reform isn’t needed in the US, but I defnitely wouldn’t wish the Spanish nightmare on the US, ever!!!

Link | September 5th, 2009 at 10:43 pm

Julia wrote,

Just say some comments about Canada’s system and wanted to clarify some things, having been through the Canadian health care systems a few times:

We all hear there are huge wait times up here, in truth, I’ve never waited more than an hour AT MOST to get treatment. And much less if it’s urgent. My longest wait was to get a shot to travel.

You do not wait weeks to get needed operations etc. If your condition is life threatening, you are placed into immediate care. My friend had an ulcer in her intestine that was causing her to bleed out and she was admitted into icu upon immediate arrival to the hospital via ambulance and got surgery that night and also the next day to repair the ulcer. She has been in and out for other ulcers and it was the same situation. I’ve also had family with cancer that got treatment the next day. I’ve never heard any stories of anyone waiting weeks for treatment.

Yes, I will say its not perfect. I have waited three weeks to get into the radiology clinic when I tore my rotator cuff in my shoulder. However, this is hardly life threatening and therefore the wait was not bad. They diagnosed me when I went to my clinic and just wanted radiology to confirm, which it did.

We are also not drowning in taxes. As a low-income person, I’ve never found the taxes a burden. They adjust to your income and they CERTAINLY don’t eat up half your pay, no matter what you make. Far from it. Frankly, its nice to know if you slice off a finger working your kitchen job that its not going to cost you a cent to get it put back on. I don’t know how I’d survive, personally, if every time I had to go to the hospital I was wondering about whether I was covered.

We do have some added insurance companies up here (Blue Cross etc.) that operate very much the same as the ones in the States. And yes, they will do anything they can to make money off of you. These are in place as the government usually doesn’t fully cover things that are non-life threatening. Generally, these insurance companies will cover the rest. Or at least, that has been my experience.

Don’t want to step on anyone’s toes, but just offer a view from this side of the border for everyone else.

Good health,
From Canada

Link | September 11th, 2009 at 3:12 am