I made no such claim. Cory isn’t claiming overtreatment, he’s claiming unnecessary testing and exposing the fact that lab services are considered a profit center by the US medical industry. Lab services aren’t covered very well under most insurance plans. It’s more money out of the patients pocket for little to no improvement in outcome, but provides a pretty good inflated revenue stream for hospitals.
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I’m not suggesting conquering America for the purpose of imposing healthcare on them. I am suggesting recognizing facts about how badly their system works compared to other developed countries. If people are being intentionally misled about how well systems work by comparison (such as suggesting that a single payer would mean tax increases) i think it’s right to point out that’s not true.
i wouldn’t expect to be accused of cultural imperialism for making a post saying that climate change is real. This is no different.
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This is a big point that is often overlooked - while some people do get needless tests and treatment, many others can’t get the needed tests and treatment. And that of course leads to…
And I know two people who went to a doctor with strep throat only to be told “It’s probably just viral and even if it is strep it will probably go away on its own. Come back in a couple weeks if it hasn’t.” Only to, having now missed substantial work and gotten sicker, end up in the emergency room when it progressed, because they couldn’t get treatment from a normal doctor.
Strep throat, by the way, is something that can be easily, quickly, and cheaply tested for with a simple throat swab and cured with cheap and common antibiotics. But untreated, it can do permanent damage to heart, brain, etc., and become life-threatening. Note the line in WebMD’s article:
Because of antibiotics, rheumatic fever is now rare in developed countries. In recent years, though, it has begun to make a comeback in the U.S., particularly among children living in poor, inner-city neighborhoods.
Trying to avoid dying from what could easily and routinely be diagnosed and cured for $12 is one reason people end up in the ER. The lady taking her son to the ER was probably wise to do so and not risk him suffering permanent damage.
And of course people who’ve lost weeks of work (and pay) and suffered because the medical system deliberately failed them do not then want to pay several thousand dollars for what should have been a $12 treatment.
In a sane health care system, it would not be. Given the state of our health care system, where people can’t afford to treat it properly and doctors often won’t even try, that is an emergency.
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Whatever happened to paying some bored teenager working in a mall kiosk $20 to do it with a piercing gun?
(Or you can do it at home for free if you’re hardcore like I was.)
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Definitely time to find a new PCP. That’s a horrible thing to tell a patient.
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Sorry, let me rephrase. I consider a 3 month wait for an MRI to be under-treatment, so your claim that 3 month typical wait times for an MRI for privately provided service is a claim of under-treatment.
(Yes, the Canadian system under-treats lots of things because the cost savings are worth the under-treatment. The fact that we chose not to do them doesn’t remove the fact that the individual health outcome would be better if the MRI had no delay.)
I will say that I don’t understand why you would have a delay. In Canada, it is because we simply don’t have that many MRIs (about 1/4 per capita of the US), so they’re simply all in use. I’m trying to imagine areas in the US where there simply isn’t a free machine for 3 months.
Let me clarify. The cultural imperialism comment came not out of acknowledging the many truths in Corey’s article. It’s the claim that:
No system is unambiguously better. You cannot optimize along all 2000 axes of health-care “success” at once.
How you value all these axes to come up with your individual preference is in essence your culture. Which means that claims about “unmitigated good” or “something to lose is unsupportable” are tantamount to claims of objective superiority of your preferences over another’s.
Claiming that global warming is real is not cultural imperialism. Claiming that a given policy to address global warming is objectively better is cultural imperialism because the claim implies that your particular preference is objectively superior - which is classic cultural imperialism.
I would point out that there are a significant number of Canadians who would like to switch to a privately provided health-case system. I’m more than willing to suppress their wishes in the context of a democratic system (a milder form of cultural imposition, but someone’s culture is going to be imposed upon.)
But I’m not going to claim that my fellow Canadians preferences are objectively worse. They’re subjectively worse (from my stand-point) and I’ll be attempting to persuade them otherwise. But to claim objective superiority is simply too dangerous. It seems to inevitably lead to assuming that everyone who disagrees with me is stupid (=misinformed) or evil.
And at that point, I go from being marginally useful to promoting my preferred policies to being actively harmful.
In the U.S., you have to qualify that with “a free machine - owned by a company that is in your insurance network, staffed by personnel in your insurance network, cooperating with doctors that are in your insurance network, all of which use administrative personnel within your insurance network, all of which are located in the same state” (any one of those things being off makes it a no-go).
Last I heard there is only one doctor in the entire state that my daughter can see for certain issues, and naturally that doctor also has to handle all the other patients in the state, so wait times are horrible. We’re less than 15 minutes away from the border of a state with many more doctors who could deal with those things, but insurance doesn’t cross state borders. Because capitalism.
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These machines are in full use in the US. When not being used for something critical, the overbooking falls under the category of unnecessary and/or excessive testing as hospitals consider imaging to be “lab work.” It’s all part of the same pattern except MRIs have the extra joy of your appointment getting bumped in favor of a university or professional sportsballer. And never underestimate the amount of fuckery generated by private insurance as mentioned by @Daaksyde.
I have no idea what Canadian medicine has done to you, but you appear to have little to no idea just how much better you guys have it. Please stop trying to make it harder for us to have nice things, too.
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Sometimes people disagree because they have different preferences, sometimes people disagree because they misunderstand each other, sometimes people disagree because some of them are misinformed. I can’t chalk up every single disagreement to a cultural difference.
I object to you saying people don’t want to pay more taxes for a system that helps someone else because single payer is less expensive and so costs less taxes. I object to you saying that people like having more choices because “choice” in a capitalist system is choice between the options you can afford and because of “networks” a lot of people face very little choice in the American system. I object to you saying that people like the better outcomes or lower wait times because for most people outcomes are worse and because while Canada does poorly on wait times, America doesn’t really do that great either; other countries with single payer systems do better.
If people just plain like the way healthcare works in America that’s something I can’t argue with. I don’t want to mix up arguing facts about how the systems work and which is a better system with arguing which system people prefer. People like all kinds of things.
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