Rising Cyber Attacks Costing Health System $6 Billion Annually
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@Dashrender said:
I'd like to know why car insurance works yet healthcare insurance doesn't?
Easy. It's optional and transparent. No one "needs" a car. No one buys a car in a panic because they are walking to work and their feet break and they need take to a car shop by ambulance. And insurance is optional, self insuring is completely legal (everywhere that I know.)
Health insurance is not negotiated by anyone and it is a legal requirement. The hospital can charge anything that they want, you often have no choice. There is no open market here. The insurance can refuse to pay anything that they want, there is nothing you can do about it. You get no free will in deciding emergency health care, no cost assurances, no transparency and the insurance company has no need to represent you nor to pay the bills.
One is an open market, one is not. Healthcare is a utility (when it matters.) You can't treat a utility service like an open market, that's the worst possible situation. Capitalism works, but only when it is real. Without an open market, you have nothing resembling capitalism.
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Scott's previously told me that he sees the people of a country as a commodity that the country itself needs to maintain in good working order, this is why he feels that national healthcare is a good thing (at least it is how I understood what he was saying - please correct me if I misstated).
And to that end I can understand that.
What I don't understand is that I'm told that in places like Canada, Germany, etc. If you need a kidney transplant you're more likely to die than ever see that transplant. Furthermore, our media machine also tells us that the line at the doctors office is worse than what we have in the US.
Now frankly I don't know if that's true or not, I've never been part of the healthcare system in either country (or any other for that matter).I hear that the US has the best healthcare if you have a rare disease because there is money to be made there, you'll pay an ass load, but you'll get good care NOW. Unlike the socialized countries where you get put on a list, and you stand in line with everyone else who has that problem, and again, the media is telling me that most of those people die before they get treatment.
Additionally, look at the tax load the social medical situation has put on those countries. Vat is 18%. and of course it's completely hidden from you, because the price you pay is just what you see on the self.
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With car insurance, your rates go up as you become a risk. If you are too risky, you can't drive anymore. Simple. Do you want people to lose insurance when they get too sick? Is "they should die" the right answer to extreme costs?
The things that make bad drivers unable to be insured doesn't work with healthcare. The last thing we want is for health insurance to only exists for those that are healthy and the act of getting sick or insured (or old) to mean that the insurance you have been paying for goes away.
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Also, it is in the interest of the populace that bad drives be kept off of the roads. Insurance acts like a mitigated form of punishment for making mistakes.
It is not in the interest of the populace that health issues make people unable to work and be effective in society. So the logic that makes one form make sense makes the other very bad (even for the healthy people.)
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@Dashrender said:
What I don't understand is that I'm told that in places like Canada, Germany, etc. If you need a kidney transplant you're more likely to die than ever see that transplant. Furthermore, our media machine also tells us that the line at the doctors office is worse than what we have in the US.
Now frankly I don't know if that's true or not, I've never been part of the healthcare system in either country (or any other for that matter).This isn't true... just something our media machine dreamed up one day. People in areas with socialized medicine generally have the same if not better access to medical care and treatments then we do in the US. The "list" the media keeps talking about generally points to the elective surgeries that are not life threatening.
Also... if you are put on a transplant list in the US you have an equal chance of dying as any first world country.
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@coliver said:
Also... if you are put on a transplant list in the US you have an equal chance of dying as any first world country.
Transplants are a bad example - because you're right, in a fair and honorable society, the transplant should go to who has the greatest need as determined by medical personal, not societal status.
But something like heart surgery is nearly the same.. or so we're told...
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I understand everything you're saying Scott - the problem I have with it is, who's going to pay for it all?
It's completely likely that hugh percentages of people will use more medical care dollars than then even earn in their lifetimes. and if not more.. damn close to the same... when you look over the entirety of their lives.
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@Dashrender said:
What I don't understand is that I'm told that in places like Canada, Germany, etc. If you need a kidney transplant you're more likely to die than ever see that transplant. Furthermore, our media machine also tells us that the line at the doctors office is worse than what we have in the US.
But are you told that by people who live there? When you go to the third world you don't want American doctors showing up (DR without Borders), you want German, French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, etc. Better trained, likely to care more.
Also, did you notice that during the ebola outbreak that they were making a big deal that you could get better treatment, faster, in West African countries like Ghana because they had faster, better equipped lab facilities and their doctors were faster than in the US? Not that we were bad, and partially it was because ebola is rare here, but it was a huge deal that Ghana was outperforming the US at a tiny fraction of the financial resources.
Getting Americans to stop listening to the media machine is part of making them care. The xenophobia in the US allows for some pretty crazy stuff.
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@Dashrender said:
@coliver said:
But something like heart surgery is nearly the same.. or so we're told...Emphasis.
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@Dashrender said:
I understand everything you're saying Scott - the problem I have with it is, who's going to pay for it all?
What do you mean? It costs less. A LOT less. YOU are paying for it today. So it is YOU who will "stop" paying for it. It works for everyone else. Why would it be a problem in the US, other than we hate keeping people healthy?
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And they pass the cost along to you, the consumer!
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@Dashrender said:
It's completely likely that hugh percentages of people will use more medical care dollars than then even earn in their lifetimes. and if not more.. damn close to the same... when you look over the entirety of their lives.
Only in the US and the cost is not from the healthcare. It's a product of the desire to make the sick pay rather than having society take care of each other.
The culture in the US is that they would rather than the sick die than have the healthy be part of the solution (idealism.) Most of the world operates under realism and knows that taking care of each other has the best overall results.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
What I don't understand is that I'm told that in places like Canada, Germany, etc. If you need a kidney transplant you're more likely to die than ever see that transplant. Furthermore, our media machine also tells us that the line at the doctors office is worse than what we have in the US.
But are you told that by people who live there? When you go to the third world you don't want American doctors showing up (DR without Borders), you want German, French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, etc. Better trained, likely to care more.
I know people who have lived in Canadian and they say the health care is bad and that foreigners often get treatment before they would.
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One of the things that is very telling is that people who live along the US / Mexico border cross from the US into Mexico to get better healthcare. Even paying completely out of pocket as US insurance won't cover that, many people do it to lower costs (even paying the full amount) and getting healthcare that they can't get in the US (or faster, or better, whatever.)
No one crossing INTO the US from Canada or Mexico to get healthcare, they cross out of the US for that.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I understand everything you're saying Scott - the problem I have with it is, who's going to pay for it all?
What do you mean? It costs less. A LOT less. YOU are paying for it today. So it is YOU who will "stop" paying for it. It works for everyone else. Why would it be a problem in the US, other than we hate keeping people healthy?
The citizens of those counties definitely pay for it... they just don't pay directly, instead they pay with Taxes that are at or over 50%.
Another difference is shear size. European countries are considerably smaller - I'm sure that plays into the economics of it as well.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
I know people who have lived in Canadian and they say the health care is bad and that foreigners often get treatment before they would.
Canada is often considered the worst of first world healthcare, and I've heard similar things from up there - but never from someone who has come to the US and also experiences the US healthcare. once they've done that, they realize that they were comparing Canada against the good nations and that Canada, while bad, at least isn't US bad.
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My German friends all tell me that they must purchase additional supplemental health coverage otherwise they will be waiting a long time to see the doctor, etc. I'm not sure how things play out when they need surgery, etc.
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@Dashrender said:
The citizens of those counties definitely pay for it... they just don't pay directly, instead they pay with Taxes that are at or over 50%.
You need to look that up. A few things to consider:
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Healthcare cost in no leading country is even half what it is in the US. Yes, they pay, but they pay half what you do.
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The US mandates that healthcare insurance be paid, that's a tax. My US tax rate was 52% - higher than any large European nation. Europe has lower taxes if you don't use the US loophole of calling healthcare insurance something other than a tax, which it is.
European nations have high taxes because they do a LOT of things, beyond healthcare, that the US does not do and they still pay less in taxes once you consider the big picture. The whole "low US tax" scam is part of the marketing.
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@scottalanmiller said:
One of the things that is very telling is that people who live along the US / Mexico border cross from the US into Mexico to get better healthcare. Even paying completely out of pocket as US insurance won't cover that, many people do it to lower costs (even paying the full amount) and getting healthcare that they can't get in the US (or faster, or better, whatever.)
No one crossing INTO the US from Canada or Mexico to get healthcare, they cross out of the US for that.
Frankly this doesn't surprise me - the Mexican Doctors of course will welcome anyone with cash in hand to their clinics. Their citizens certainly don't have any.
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@Dashrender said:
Another difference is shear size. European countries are considerably smaller - I'm sure that plays into the economics of it as well.
Yes, that makes it much harder for them to compete as they have less scale to work with and they still do the best in the world (France is considered number one, Italy number two.) The US has the best chances of being cost effective as it is the largest first world nation. But to be fair, countries like Germany are so large that they are in a similar bracket of scale. Once you are over 40m or so, having more doesn't change healthcare dramatically.
