Something I wrote a few years ago, an old favorite I would like to share.
In order to oppose Universal Health Care (UHC) and support Market Based Health Care (MBHC), you have to believe the following statements to be true:
1. With my private insurer, I can select any doctor I want and there is no one between my doctor and me when it comes to decisions. My doctor does not have to consult with the insurance company my employer has selected, or my employer’s religion to see what medications or procedures are allowed. I can get whatever my doctor and I want, whenever I want it and where ever I want it. It is only with UHC that someone is in between me and my doctor. It is only with UHC that I am limited to my selection of doctors.
2. The poor citizens of Appalachia who stood in the rain for hours to receive limited health care from compassionate doctors and nurses who examined them in animal stalls because there were no suitable medical locations nearby, were receiving “The Best Health Care in The World”.
3. The family that goes into bankruptcy because one of their members is gravely ill and their insurer denies payment because of a technically in the fine print, is also getting the “Best Health Care in the World
4. Hospitals spend millions of dollars a year advertising their services to us because they want us to know where to go when we get sick. These millions of dollars are not added to the cost of our hospital visit. We ought to do the same with our police and fire departments.
5. Drug companies also spend billions of dollars a year in marketing (more than they do in research) because they want us to remember what medication we should take when we are ill and these billions of dollars are not figured into the cost of the medication.
6. The citizens of Germany, France, Canada, Belgium, The UK, Norway, Portugal, Iceland, Spain, Italy, Austria, and others with UHC have awful medical care but they are not allowed to protest it and their systems of democracy forbid these people from electing representatives in government to overturn UHC and switch to MBHC.
7. The medical and insurance corporations in the USA are spending a million dollars a day to lobby against UHC because they really care about our health and they know their system is better for us. It has nothing to do with protecting their massive corporate profits.
8. Medical and insurance corporations care about their customers first and their investors second. Every medical and insurance corporation in America puts a patient’s health ahead of the interests of the shareholders. All of them. They are saints. Money means nothing to them.
9. We need to end Medicare and Medicaid and VA hospitals immediately and switch to private, corporate profit based healthcare.
10. All of the studies from all of the research of all of the nations with UHC that prove that they spend less and live longer, are lies. All of them. It’s a conspiracy.
There is a difference between universal health CARE and universal health INSURANCE.
What’s your bait on this one?
… the sole, and precise, point of single payer health insurance is to eradicate, without hope of revival, this exact distinction. There is no other point to single payer than that.
You have neatly encapsulated the argument: your attempts to force that differentiate is an attempt to resist the eradication of same.
There is a difference between universal health CARE and universal health INSURANCE.
Okay, I don’t really care. It’s not my argument.
… that we find the answers: This is true because something you don’t know often lies in the place you’ve never been.. and it’s easy to get lost in a place you’ve never been.
I know where I want to go and it’s to one of the many nations that have universal health care, nations that see health care are a right, not a market for the wealthy to prey on.
It’s from an American who has used our system and the UK’s.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/an-american-uses-britain-nhs-2015-1
I lost two friends to pancreatic cancer last year. One lived in the states and the other in Denmark. Both were diagnosed at about the same time and both died about five years later. The one significant difference was that my friend in Denmark never had to focus on bills, insurance policies, piles of paperwork, co-pays, or worry about losing his life savings and leaving his wife in debt. That’s how it is in the “freedom loving” USA.
It isn’t all that freedom loving so much as money loving and the freedom mentioned usually is freedom to enjoy unimpaired money grubbing.
Maybe it happens, but for me:
I have been in the ER a number of times with myself or the kids. It’s been 0-1hr, not 4 hours like this guy (why would a regular person be in the ER if your problem could be untreated for 4 hours).
My normal wait time at the doctor’s office (kids too) is 15 minutes, especially if I time it right.
Other than the intake form, I don’t think I’ve ever had to do any paperwork.
That’s not to say that lots of other people have different experiences from me, but the author has a “average person uses both systems” view and I cannot relate to the US version at all.
…the universal systems do not have the waiting nightmares that many allege either.
It’s just as lousy, but you are completely covered. That’s basically the gist of what a Canadian told me at a New Years party a few years ago. She never had to worry about losing her healthcare when she lost her job, never had to worry about medical bills, never had to worry about seeing a doctor for routine medical needs. All that other stuff-bueracracy, mismanagement, high costs for delivery-all of that is still there with a single payer system. A big reason Harry and Louise were so effective is because for far too long liberals promised single payer as a panacea for every health care delivery problem. It’s not. It is a panacea for costs that can cripple a family’s financial future.
It simply ends the economic insecurity that comes with medical emergencies. Period. Full stop. And that’s a pretty basic promise that our current health care system still falls short of delivering on, although ACA is certainly alleviating that. It did for me when I was un/underemployed.
But if we get that right all the other issues with modern medicine are still there-but then you can just worry about getting better and not how you will pay.
I remain unconvinced on the financial issue, though it is true that medical institutions are pursuing bills to uninsured patients more aggressively than they once did.
But the hidden issue is that big medical bills go along with being really sick. People who are really sick don’t work, and don’t get paid. The loss of employment income is as big an issue as the jaw-dropping bill from the oncologist, and neither universal health care, nor single payer, does anything about that.
So yes, you can focus on getting better and not how you are going to pay– for the health care services. The mortgage, the groceries, the heat– those are a different matter.
I would go a step further and argue no one should need to worry about paying for food, housing or heat in a country as wealthy as ours and support a UBI, but I get that most folks are not there yet politically. The irony is, as the SeaTac experiment in living wage is starting to show, the economy actually grows and people on the dole go down when you make these structural changes to the economy. Wall Street may even come around once its customer bases start to dry up as the middle class continues to erode.
But there should be an SSD you can get on for severe illnesses, even those that are temporary, and particularly those that are terminal. An actual Christian country would take care of it’s sick.
No disagreement here. Just saying that it is a separate issue, not really solved by universal health insurance, single payer, or even socialized medicine.
Also it can’t be solved by ballot initiatibe. 😛
My Christian Scientist aunt did that. She just let cancer kill her.
The value of this is it focuses my mind on each actual day lived. If I get to 65, well and good, if I get to 90 unimpaired, fine.
But if not, so what? The US system is a model of contrived dispicability to favor insurance firms and GOP wonks.
The drug companies don’t consider marketing costs when pricing their products. They only advertise the ones they have a monopoly on, and they charge whatever they think they can get for those. They make serious efforts to have their old products reclassified as “new formulations” so that they can block the availability of generics. See: asthma inhalers.
The point of #5 is not so much about the money they spend on marketing as it is the money they claim to spend on research to justify their profits.
I realize this is just a way of organizing some facts in a rhetorically compelling way, and not an attempt to understand or psychoanalyze opponents.
But it made me think about how reality-based folks can err when they try to impute rationality to irrational actors.
I’m not sure, for instance, that very many people actually believed in “death panels.” It was just a convenient thing to chant so as to drown out actual thought.
The same with a lot of science denial, btw.
It’s the cognitive dissonance that exists in any laborer (and that’s mostly all of us in the USA) who voted Republican.