Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/08/06/sicko.html
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Well, that’s not ENTIRELY true, @doctorow … they are pretty good at collecting our money and refusing to pay for needed procedures without a mountain of paperwork from either the doctor or patient… they are also good at that.
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Yeah, but that’s number 2 on the list…
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Do you think the average Trump voter could understand or care about Regulatory Capture?
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That would be a hard NO…
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Well, if nothing else, all these soon-to-be-unemployed marketing flacks currently working for thr American “healthcare” industry will have plenty of training for entering a new profession: horror-writing for novels, television and movies. I fully expect a large supply of medical horror stories in the next decade from them, when (not if) Medicare For All becomes the law of the land.
I’ll stick with my bogeyman Socialized Medicine. I didn’t have to pay for my cataract surgery, multiple endoscopies or HALO procedures, my wife’s breast cancer surgery and 5 years of medications, her appendectomy, her gall bladder surgery or any of the procedures and tests on both of our parents.
Meanwhile my American niece and her husband had to pay $40K US to have a baby when he was between contracts (no, she couldn’t hold it in for another month).
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One sweet note is that the middlemen and other industry parasites who used to spread the scare stories in the context of the “danger” to the “free” market haven’t been as active in the last few years as they used to be. Not that anyone was ever jonesing for that Libertarian BS.
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Bear in mind, they are trying to export our super great for-profit healthcare system to countries that already have socialized medicine. Since it’s designed to enrich the people in power at the expense of everyone else, keep a close eye on your government officials.
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That’s the surest way to lose an election in Canada. We have long wait times for some specialists and procedures but everyone gets looked after. I never have to balance my need for healthcare against paying my bills. Canadians spend much less per capita for healthcare and have better outcomes with much better average life expectancy than our neighbors to the South.
We also see the debacle you suffer through in the US and hear the BS your Republican politicians and for-profit “healthcare” businesses spew about our system. There are a lot of reasons we live here and not South of the 49th; proper SOCIALIST healthcare is a biggie.
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It’s a shame y’all aren’t more of an invader class of people. That would be most funny if Trump and crew were focused on the border to the south, and in came Canada with socialized healthcare and politeness.
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I for one welcome our new (polite) overlords!
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would $2 Million drug price tags exist under universal heathcare?
this blew my mind, how can they even charge that, who has that?
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There was a Anaheim Ducks player who had what turned out to be a staph infection in his leg. The Ducks didn’t want him sitting around a Calgary hospital during the slowdown between Christmas and New Year’s, so they sent him back to OC, where he sat around for a good many hours in the ER waiting. Apparently the Ducks organization heard later that the Calgary ER was not busy and he would have been seen pretty quickly.
I always cite that anecdotal story when the uninformed try to tell me how slow the Canadian system is.
[Not gonna mention the name of the player, but I will say that my husband knew him fairly well at the time (I practice HIPAA for friends and acquaintances!).]
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I hear my dear Canadian friends gripe about their medication costs all the time. Until I point out that I can’t take half my prescribed meds since they cost 8-20 times more than what they pay.
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If you go to almost any Canadian hospital Emergency Dept., you are triaged and sent to Treatment for less critical issues or moved into the ED proper if it’s more serious. Expect to wait in any ED anywhere in the world if they get a lot of heart attacks, anaphylactic shock or other extremely time sensitive emergencies. If patient issues and intake are normal, expect to get looked after pretty quickly. Everyone gets the appropriate treatment in the appropriate time unless the patient flow is overwhelming.
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Yep, just like an ER visit in the US.
I broke my leg in 1994 and was the third broken leg that evening. It was a pretty long wait. But life-threatening heart issues and head traumas take precedence, so it’s expected.
What wasn’t expected was the two-week wait to see a specialist. This was during the peak HMO fad of the 1990s. You had to go through a committee to get approval to see a specialist. My PCP somehow pushed me through in a week because newer x-rays had shown that my bones were shifting and in danger of healing improperly.
When people whine that socialize medicine removes medical decisions from doctors, they forget that their insurance companies already do this.
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Isn’t that also true of the whole boogey man called ‘death panels’? When Obamacare was being debated, Repubs and lobbyists were spreading rumors that there would be government agencies in charge of whether you live or die, thus the term, death panels. People seem to forget that for-profit healthcare and insurance companies have been doing this for decades already.
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Yes. It means business gives him money
Last time I went to the hospital, I was having an allergic reaction to something I ate. I took a Benadryl, but it wasn’t enough.
I had to wait for a couple of hours because there were no doctors available. Why? Because somebody died. My symptoms weren’t immediately life threatening and if they’d gotten worse, I would have been in faster.
This is what I think about when people complain about waiting: yes it seems long, and maybe it’s scary or it hurts, but you don’t know how bad someone else might be. Maybe the triage nurse detected a complication or saw something in their file. Emerge isn’t a strict “first come, first served” for a reason. And the nice thing about our system is that a mother doesn’t have to debate how bad the cough needs to get before taking her kid in, just based on the money. Even the infamous “wait lists” are based on need, not “can you pay”.
Unfortunately, for profit health care is sneaking it’s way in. https://www.thevillagelangley.com for example. Check out those rates and take a wild guess about who will get to live there.
Me? I want to see vision, dental and mental health covered without needing supplemental insurance. At least for the basics – cosmetic stuff like teeth bleaching can stay as an add-on (unless a compelling medical need can be proven… like how my province covers breast reductions for medical reasons, but not enlargement – but covers both for gender-confirming surgery). Proper vision and dental care can save $$ and trouble down the line. Poor people need working eyes and teeth, too.
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