For real. Having to deal with my own medical condition is enough to keep me out of America. Paying out the ass for epilepsy meds and waiting months for a neurologist to accept new patients and months more for an appointment is not my idea of a good healthcare system.
Took me 3 days in the CR to get a neurologist and 2 days later I had my first appointment. Zero paid out of pocket for my meds. Zero paid for EEG. Zero paid for MRI.
It’s amazing what years of right wing propaganda can do… We’re in this massive uphill fight for improvements because more than enough Americans are convinced that SwankyWilder and superuberbob would be getting quicker, higher quality care here and desperately waiting in line hoping not to die oh shit they’re dead anywhere else in the world.
I think this aspect of Canadian/Australian/similar healthcare systems is really misunderstood in the US.
You can accomplish in 1 week in the US what might take 6+ months in Australia. Of course this assumes a privileged position of private health insurance etc. I am not saying the US system shouldn’t be changed, just noting that these other “free healthcare” systems have their downsides and I don’t see them talked about much.
Such as?
“You can” should obv read “some can”, with “some” being the population with amazing insurance or that is rich enough to not worry about thousands of dollars of bills
Not very many can.
For the record, there’s an interesting(?) string of posts about M4A in the New Hampshire primary thread, which is now closed.
Recent string starts here:
By the way, on the topic of Bernie’s single payer plan, I think it’s a pretty big failure that he doesn’t have a website set up where you can plug in your AGI and see how much you’d save (or how much more you’d pay) per year, demonstrating the cut off point between it helping and hurting you financially, then letting you plug in a medical condition to see what’s covered and what it costs you out of pocket.
People would go on there, and 99% would see their medical problems covered at no cost out of pocket, while probably 90% would see savings.
It’d take some time to set up, but he’s had ~3 years.
One of the problems with his plan politically is we don’t know who is going to pay more to help cover the working class and poor. We know it costs less overall, but we don’t know where the income cutoff is where it costs more. I’m guessing I’d pay more, but I don’t really know. I support it anyway, because I would get better coverage, more peace of mind, more stability and of course it’s morally right and I was there once and suffered through having shitty coverage and losing sleep/expended energy worrying about it, so I get it.
That said I’m guessing that a lot more people think they’d pay more than actually will pay more.
Ehh not really - a significant percentage of people will pay more, not just 1%. Probably 5-15%. But regardless people need to see the amount they’d save and the quality of care they’d get to really change minds IMO, telling people we’re saving 10 trillion over a decade nationally is about as relevant to their voting decisions as telling them apple pie will fall from the sky if they vote for Bernie.
I tried to cover for that with
“Of course this assumes a privileged position of private health insurance etc.”
and not that I disagree with the overall sentiment - my post was just meaning to indicate that things can and do take a lot longer in some of these other systems which has its own negative impact on health outcomes. I am not saying “you shouldn’t change because of that”, just that it’s an impact that I don’t see spoken about a lot.
The “some” is a quantity becoming smaller and smaller as time goes on. Right now, nearly 40% of Americans couldn’t handle an emergency $400 bill. Now imagine that emergency bill is for chemotherapy and the price of the bill is $40,000.
How many people can afford it now?
Nobody’s gonna go to that site. It reminds me of when Chapo mocked that PSA book for bringing up how they fought against anti-Obamacare messaging by building a website that nobody gave a shit about or even heard about until it was written in their book.
The Australian model for example works on kind of a hub and spoke system. You need a referral from your GP (PCP equivalent) to see specialists. So if you have a health condition that doesn’t have a straight forward diagnosis, they will send you to one specialist to evaluate, you wait for results to come back to the GP, they assess and if you have a plan you work to that, otherwise they refer you to another specialist to try and diagnose the issue.
Sometimes getting an appointment for a specialist can take many months. Colonoscopy’s for example have a 6-9 month waiting period in some capital cities in Australia.
From what I have experienced sometimes a GP can send referrals for two different specialists at once, so you can make an appointments with them and at least the waiting periods for both are happening concurrently.
Of course for a lot of people (probably the majority) in the US, having a longer waiting time for procedures/tests is much better than “I can’t afford to go to a doctor and find out what is wrong with me”. I believe free access to healthcare should be a basic human right. All I was trying to say in my earlier post is that I think a lot of people don’t understand that there are some serious issues with healthcare in the countries that offer it for free as well.
I still don’t understand why people go to medical school. There is just no way the payoff on the training time + debt is there (not to mention the insane hours). It’s twice as true for those who go into primary care. I’m all for killing the debt part of it and probably also for reducing the training time. The limited number of residency spots, which are funded by Medicare, seems to be a policy outcome of AMA lobbying. Although, it’s not that simple since there’s a real problem of doctors choosing to locate in desirable areas–a complex optimization problem with a lot of constraints for sure. Imagine thinking that a game show host could fix it.
People aren’t going to a website, just LOL. We are the exception. Most of these people (and by these people I mean persuadable voters) are infuriating button clickers who vote entirely on how a candidate makes them feel. They know absolutely nothing about policy.
I agree with all of this. Hopefully my most recent reply to Lawnmower_Man explains a bit better what I was trying to say.
I just read/hear a lot of comments (not on this forum) to the effect of “it works fine for these other countries” - but it feels more to me like it’s not “working fine” there either. I speak about Australian healthcare because its where I am from, and I know there are significant problems with it. To me though it is still much more humane than a system where people don’t even have a choice about whether to seek treatment because they can’t afford to.
Yeah - I know this is all a very complex probably that I have at best a very superficial grasp on - but it seems like for a medical practitioner your path is a long, expensive degree which then leads into a working position where being overworked seems normal. I know to some extent this must screen for people who see it as a “calling” but I personally have these angels on a really high pedestal and am in constant awe that they continue to persevere.
If you could plug that in and see your numbers, I think people would go. Especially if you advertised it well, or maybe that’s all it takes and they don’t go to the site… Just show average folks like “Wow I didn’t realize I’d save $4,000 a year AND get great coverage!” Then show a man in a power suit like “Whoa, my taxes don’t go up??? That’s awesome!”
It’s so gross. My aunt was really sick in the early 80s and ran up 7 figure medical bills. The bill collectors hounded my uncle so much he committed suicide.
Part of the problem is dealing with creditors is entirely jurisdictional so there is a massive difference in people’s rights from one place to the next. Some places you end up in defacto debtor prison, in others you tell them to get their shine box.
Old people watch Fox and post conspiracy theories on social media. Nobody who isn’t already a M4A advocate is going there. If anything, people who support it in principle might go, realize they’re going to lose money, and not support it.