My wife is in the hospital. Everything will be OK. Gallstones are the culprit, with pain from the secondary consequences of those unhappy minerals.
We have health insurance, First World medicine, and a community that rose up to help. We have only had to deal with the actual medical problem.
Many other people have to worry about whether they can afford health care. This is just wrong.
Universal health coverage now.
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21 comments:
amen!
people should worry about what kind of care they need, not whether or not they can obtain it.
That's right, Gruntled. Now if we could just get those "conservatives" -- radicals, more like -- to see the sense of the solution.
Of course, that would mean getting them to care about real people in the first place...
Best wishes to Mrs. G! Here's to a speedy and pain-free recovery as possible.
TallCoolOne - can you be any more offensive? Because people are conservatives means they don't care about others. Only liberals care?
Conservatives would just like to make sure that health care doesn't become sub-par and rationed and that there is an acceptable way to pay for it. That doesn't seem to be asking too much.
"No Name": yes, I could be much more offensive. You ain't seen nothing, yet.
However, I will merely point to the scare quotes in my post, and suggest a pondering of why they are there.
(Oh, and that the position you began to articulate in your post sounds almost "liberal.")
I need more government involvement in my life because I'm not competent to make choices myself. I should be treated, not as a citizen, but as a patient in need of therapy. Long live the new therapeutic state.
While we're socializing medicine, why don't we also outlaw disease, sadness, meanness, and all those other bad things which would certainly go away if only our benign nanny state would completely take over all human functions.
Heil, Nurse Ratched!
I don't know how many "No Name"s there are posting to this board, so I'll assume there are at least two.
To #2: what a great, Liberal argument! If this were 1809, everyone worth knowing would agree with you.
Get well soon, Mrs G! I had my gallbladder yanked out 6 years ago and have felt fabulous since (...remember how I missed my own wedding reception...yeah, turns out that was a gallbladder attack).
As for the healthcare question, we need to avoid following in the footsteps of the Canadians. In just 2 years, we have accumulated so many bad healthcare stories ourselves (and so many true horror stories from our friends) that most Americans would be appalled. Having spoken to some Aussies and Danes, it seems that their systems of universal public healthcare combined with a private system is the way to go. That way, if you can afford to pay extra and want faster/better service, then you may avail yourself of the private option.
Where will the poor Canadians go for quick emergency health care after we get single-payer? If you like waiting on line at the post office you will love single-payer. We all saw what kind of government idiots we had protecting us during the latest financial fiasco. Barney Frank. Need I say more?
My sister-in-law and her husband live in the U.K. When she was going through multiple miscarriages, they were told that there were six-month waits to get ultrasound scans to try to see what the problem was. Since they were already in their 30s and wanted to have a baby before it was too late, they started paying for private medical care out of their own pocket, over and above the high taxes they were already paying.
They got their baby. We will get the waiting here very soon.
I think we often make what I think of as the basic sociological error - not distinguishing between "what affects me" with "what affects the whole population."
The right comparison is not between "I have to wait more" versus "I have to wait less." The apples to apples comparison is "I have to wait more" versus "some don't get any at all."
The apples to apples comparison is "I have to wait more" versus "some don't get any at all."
Actually, the problem -- from a purely market, rather than a moral standpoint -- is that, insured or uninsured, there is next to no seriously ill person in America who gets no health care at all. That's not to say that they get enough health care, or timely health care, but they do get something, for which they often pay nothing.
We have a system in which the insured rather haphazardly and inefficently subsidize the health care of the uninsured. Emergency rooms, by law, cannot turn away patients in need of care, which is why the uninsured so often treat emergency rooms as clinics. This is, however, a terrible way to go about providing health care to the uninsured, particularly since uninsured patients with serious health conditons are never going to pay back even a quarter of their health care costs, and in many cases couldn't even if they wanted to.
So, instead of this ramshackle system of "universal" health care, we need to think seriously about how to rationalize the system so that everyone has access to timely and more efficient medical treatment. Will everyone have access to the same quality of care, at the same level of convenience? Nope. People with the resources to do so will still pay extra for better quality care.
Also, for better or worse, a system of national health care will probably have to rely on private insurance companies, or at least make a space within the system for them to survive, because otherwise, they'll shut the intiative down. Money and politics.
I agree with Black Sea and Katie about the best likely solution. Which I think will have to include some kind of public option.
I think you will find this interview, conducted by Bll Moyers quite interesting. Here is a description:
In his first television interview since leaving the health insurance industry, Wendell Potter tells Bill Moyers why he left his successful career as the head of Public Relations for CIGNA, one of the nation's largest insurers, and decided to speak out against the industry. "I didn't intend to [speak out], until it became really clear to me that the industry is resorting to the same tactics they've used over the years, and particularly back in the early '90s, when they were leading the effort to kill the Clinton plan."
The link is here:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07102009/watch2.html
These dudes have a lot of money to grease the system with.
Sorry, the link broke. I'll try to hyperlink it.
Go here
That didn't work either. Try this:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07102009/profile.html
If that doesn't work, I'm going to take it as some sort of insurance industry cover up.
Put a .html at the end.
The insurance companies benefit most from the current system. They will fight change the most. Nonetheless, they are not omnipotent, nor monolithic. If I were working the political side of this struggle, I would be working off splitting some insurance companies off from the others who could work with a public option.
It is easier to fight an insurance company (the government might even help you) than it will be to fight the government when medical problems occurs. Trust me I know.
As long as people still have the option to pay for private care, I'm o.k. with it.
I notice that the elite (the administration, Congress, etc...) don't ever have to worry about their care being rationed.
I assure you we won't have the same coverage as the elites in Congress. The public option will chase away the private option as it has with our seniors.
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