A side note

[blamebrampton]

Dear Americans,
Outside of your strange, strange country, most of the developed world has this marvellous thing which we like to call health care for all. I'm reading an interesting mpreg (that will teach me not to read the warnings!*) story from hd_hols and the poverty-stricken pregnant one is in despair as his health insurance will not cover it. On the off-chance it was written by someone on my flist, the good for society news is that in the UK, this is not the problem you might think it is! And I have my fingers crossed that in the US, it won't be for much longer, either.

(And if anyone is planning to respond telling me that socialised healthcare is evil, I will LAUGH AT YOU, and then I will QUOTE REAMS OF STATISTICS until you FLEE.)

XXX
BB

* And yes, my dislike of mpreg is not supported by the excellent writing that occurs within that genre and the imaginative plots that many superior writers bring to bear on the concept. But I still don't like it!

Comments

[joanwilder.livejournal.com]

Having been a medical professional for the past 30 years, ten of them spent in the healthcare insurance industry, I'd have to say that the answer for us (the States) is not a universal healthcare system as you know it, but an amalgamation of employer funded/government assisted care. And here, care is care is NEVER denied in the case of mother deliveries/prenatal care/children's healthcare, nor is care required in an emergency room ever denied, REGARDLESS of insurance coverage. It's the law, and sometimes I think non-U.S. citizens have seen waaaaay too much of Michael Moore's rubbish. Both my husband and I have had cancer in the past five years: had either of us lived in Canada or the U.K., given their treatment modalities/wait times, we'd both be dead by now. The plans currently on the table for universal healthcare right now are all employer assisted plan, and would not preclude private contribution.

I made a short post about this issue a while back. You can see it here. I won't tell you universal healthcare is evil, but I will say that expecting the universal application of it as a workable fix in the U.S. is laughable.

[annafugazzi.livejournal.com]

Both my husband and I have had cancer in the past five years: had either of us lived in Canada or the U.K., given their treatment modalities/wait times, we'd both be dead by now.
Eeeeep... as a Canadian who has seen ::counting up:: four people deal with cancer, is married to a doctor, and has been following this in the news for lo these many years, this kind of statement doesn't sit terribly well with me. We do have wait times, it's true; one of my kids had to wait six months to get tubes put in his ears, and my mom had to wait for months to see a back specialist for her back pain. But for life and death situations? The stats don't bear out the claims, but few people bother to check them out.

Eg, Paul Tsongas, who ran for President in the eighties, apparently had a standard comeback to queries as to whether he supported universal healthcare or not: he said that he didn't, because he was a cancer survivor, and was only alive because the US had no socialized health care. In a system like Canada's, he claimed, he not only would've had to wait way too long to get the treatment he needed; the treatment itself would've come courtesy of the States, since Canadian doctors, being mere civil servants, didn't do the kind of groundbreaking research in Canada that they did in the States.

Americans heard and believed, and repeated his words all over the place. The irony of it was, not only would Tsongas have been just fine if he'd been sick in Canada; he would've been given the same treatment whether he was a Senator or a garbageman, and - and this was the part that made me see red - he would've been treated with the same treatment he received in the States, which was developed at a hospital in Toronto.

I know our health care system isn't perfect; I hear all about it from my partner. But a lot of the time what I read about its supposed ills from Americans bears little or no resemblance to the system I know. Wait times for non-essentials and scarcity of doctors and nurses up north? Yeah, guilty, absolutely. But... the government dictating which family doctor you get? Um... what? Doctors forced to describe your medical secrets to the government in order to get paid? Uh, no. No medical research of any note? Sorry, wrong there too.

I'd love to read your post, above, but can't see it. Here's a random post re. the other side of Canadian health care (woefully out of date, but still relevant in some areas, and certainly less inflammatory and innacurate than Sicko ;))

http://www.newrules.org/journal/nrwin01health.html

[joanwilder.livejournal.com]

I've friended you so you can read it, if you like. It was written not too long ago.

The point is that I'm not against universal health care, but like many others, our President-elect included, believe that we need to merge what's good about our current system with one that provides especially preventative/maintenance care for the uninsured, who currently have little hope of affording it, unless they're wealthy. And in the U.S., chances are the garbageman or autoworker has better healthcare coverage than the senator--all depends on the employer group.

There's no doubt in my mind that both systems have their weak and strong points, but so far as equality of care here? It's fairly even for essentials, but Americans in general have come to expect that waiting is unforgivable, and don't understand well the term 'elective.' They're hoping a universal plan will solve the latter, but looking at statistics worldwide, there'll be a rude awakening.

[drgaellon]

don't understand well the term 'elective.'

Neither do many surgeons. I've been fighting all weekend with my surgeons who keep writing that my patient needs "elective" gall bladder surgery. No, she doesn't. It's not elective, it's obligatory. It's not emergent, which is the only distinction surgeons seem to make anymore. As soon as they can wait a few days, it becomes "elective," regardless of how life-preserving it is. And that just confuses laypeople further.

[annafugazzi.livejournal.com]

And you know what, reading over my reply to your comment, I come off sounding terribly bitchy, which was not how I was feeling or how I meant to sound at all. If you're getting a bitchy vibe, pls for to try to retone it in your mind as less of a "stfu u nasty nasty American!" and more of a friendly "we differ considerably on this, o Nice Person Who Has Written Something Thoughtful That I Disagree With."

[joanwilder.livejournal.com]

Haaaaa, no, I didn't think you were bitchy at all. :) I think it's a misunderstood subject; what gets my grinder going is when non-Americans call out our system without knowing the basics, particularly if their opinion is anecdotal--as you've pointed out, that's a dangerous jumping off point.

I think that, as in other areas, if we could only take the best of both systems and find a way to merge them, that would be optimal. In the U.S., though, anything that even has a whiff of the word 'socialized' attached to it is going to get quashed. I know many U.K./French folks shake their heads at this, but many Americans, particularly Republicans, believe that this issue, like many others, is none of the federal government's business. We're a republic, after all, not a democracy.

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know that you are not dealing with the turn-away system that Moore suggests that you are, because at the end of the day, doctors and nurses are, well, doctors and nurses, and even if there weren't legal protections in place, there is a certain humanity that means they would continue to make sure the really needy were cared for.

But you do have less in the way of caring for the most vulnerable members of the community than you had 100 or 200 years ago. Then you were the great nation of charity hospitals and had endless individuals who would practice private acts of bringing health care to the neediest. In the intervening decades, the churches have maintained a little of this tradition, but, like most of the West, it's moved dominantly to the government. And yours has NOT done the job it could have.

Instead, for ideological reasons rather than best-care plans, it has funneled the money to companies that provide more expensive services for fewer people, and that outrages me.

Remember that I, like most people outside the US, don't rail against things because we hate America, we do it because we love the ideals that America stands for, and remember the few brief moments when your country's government has lived up to them.

You are right that a broad-based health care system will need to be a conglomeration of systems if it's to work in the US (the Australian system seems practicable to my eyes), but the power in the system needs to move away from private corporations. Because the market really is not best at what it does!

And I do not think that the waiting times in the UK at least would have seen you or your husband disadvantaged in your treatment. Waiting lists are for illnesses that can wait. It might lead to people being pissed off or miserable, but if it is going to lead to your death, you are seen straight away.

I have had two friends with leukaemia treated in the public systems in the last five years, one in Australia and one in the UK. My English friend is now three years clear, she went from 'I think I have the flu' and the doctor doing a blood test just to be sure, to hospitalisation and the start of treatment within a week. All of her medications and her bone marrow transplant were covered publicly.

My Australian friend died, but not from lack of care, just through bastardry of disease.

In my own case, I have spent about $8000 on health care in the last 14 years, that's everything including physio, doctors, dentistry, crutches, medicines, etc. I had insurance for the first two years then let it lapse, because it cost more than it would have cost to just do everything privately when you took out the emergencies, and emergencies were all dealt with more than adequately by the public system.

In that time I have been run over and nearly killed, shattered my foot, broken a few sundry toes and fingers through stupidity, and had the flu too many times, as well as a few minor odds and ends and was on the pill for more than half that time. So that's three surgeries, about 50 scans and X-rays, three weeks in hospital, about 50 visits to physios and a few dozen prescriptions, as well as having my three old English fillings replaced with new ceramic ones.

Most of my money was spent on dentistry (which I have to admit is woeful here on the public purse) and medicines (which are retail up to a certain level, then subsidised thereafter, I usually only need the lower-priced things).

I usually go to my private doctor, which is $40 or $70 depending on when I go, and neither of the big cycling accidents cost me a penny (well, $100 deposit for crutches, which I was repaid when I gave them back).

My friend, who has children, did her maths and she has spent $15,000 over the same period, including her insurance costs. Most of that was on dentistry and insurance. Both of us spend more than our annual health budget on books, papers and magazines.

I have American friends who have had to remortgage their homes to pay for medical bills, and that just stuns me.

[drgaellon]

Don't kid yourself; on the public dole, the wait times here aren't much better... four to six weeks to get an appointment in our primary care clinic, three to four months to get an elective cardiology consultation, six months to get an appointment in the free eye clinic. Life threatening illnesses are, of course, rammed through the system at speed, but for routine stuff, if you're in a Medicaid clinic, you wait - *IF* you can get an appointment at all. (When I worked in the Medicaid clinic in Ocean County NJ, we had no cardiology, no pulmonology, no gastroenterology - you had to drive 45 miles to the nearest teaching center, and the wait times were even LONGER, because you were coming from out of county, so our patients were minimum priority.)