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letting uninsured die

mellster

Marco
Messages
805
Location
San Francisco
Well the baby boomers literally mortgaged and HELOC'ed their kids future away but it is what it is and without the young/healthy paying for the old/unhealthy, free/affordable healthcare is almost impossible to finance - so why not start now :)
 

Waverunner

Senior Member
Messages
1,079
Well the baby boomers literally mortgaged and HELOC'ed their kids future away but it is what it is and without the young/healthy paying for the old/unhealthy, free/affordable healthcare is almost impossible to finance - so why not start now :)

Because it won't work. In Germany they have a so called "Generationen" (generations) contract which means that the young pay for the old. The young not only pay for health care but also for pensions and the whole welfare state. In a few years one working person will have to pay the pension for 1 to 2 old people. This is why many qualified people leave Germany while the unqualified stay. From a normal loan the government takes away about 75%. Please mark my words, in the near future, this system is about to collapse. Prescription drugs cost double to three times the price in Germany, compared to countries at its borders. Who gets the money? Pharma companies. The reason for this is that the pharma lobby has a huge influence on politicians. This has nothing to do with free market of course, the biggest companies as well as politicians have direct access to the money of the tax payers. This is absolutely insane. On a transatlantic flight I spoke to a salesman of surgery equipment. I asked him why these instruments are so expensive and he told me that this surgery equipment actually isn't that hard to produce. However the few companies which produce them always look at the other companies prices and everyone keeps a certain price level far above the production costs. He said that if we would have real competition the prices for surgery equipment would be 2/3 lower.

Free market for me means that there is NO affiliation between government and pharma companies. Government should not regulate the production of drugs. The consumer himself should be allowed to decide what drugs he takes and he/she should be able to buy whatever medication he/she likes in the super market without prescription as long as these drugs are not addictive. Many people think that the FDA needs to protect us from bad companies, this is wrong. In a free market no company in the world has an interest in harming people or producing bad drugs because noone would buy these drugs. The CEOs should take full responsibility for their drugs and moreover of course, the consumer should have the right to sue these companies if they are negligent in any way. Imagine a cancer patient short before his death. Who in the world has the right to prevent this patient from taking any experimental drugs, which has a slight chance to save his life? Noone. But the government not only prevents him from taking certain drugs but what is much worse, the government prevents small companies from developing drugs at all because it is much too expensive to follow FDA regulations. This is anything but a free market, it's a government/big pharma monopoly at the expense of the ill.
 

mellster

Marco
Messages
805
Location
San Francisco
I agree with most of your points, but I don't think that means that the system does not work. I also highly doubt that a lot of people are leaving countries in northern Europe for "better" opportunities. For example immigration into the US has been steadily declining from those countries. I think people are willing to pay what it takes for healthcare and some social security. Taxes in Scandinavian countries have been sky high for decades, yet the people are happy with the system (for the most part). I agree though that further measures are needed to bring prices down, dismantle big pharma and insurance monopolies and their ties to regulators etc. as well as giving small novel companies a fair leveled ground to succeed.
 

*GG*

senior member
Messages
6,389
Location
Concord, NH
The only difference between having to wait for treatment in the UK and not having insurance or "adequate insurance" in the United States is that if you ever do get the treatment in the United States, you now have a bill that will bankrupt you. There are many people in the United States who die of cancer because they have no insurance to get the diagnostic tests or preventive treatment they need or, because of lack of regulations, their insurance company refuses to pay for it. I'd rather wait without the bill.

I am sure there are other differences. Like potentially dying while waiting for services. Bankruptcy is not the end of the world, I believe you can keep your home and many other important items.

GG

PS Did you hear of the guy in the US who was denied (gov't) cancer treatment because he is/was a male?
 

Mya Symons

Mya Symons
Messages
1,029
Location
Washington
I am sure there are other differences. Like potentially dying while waiting for services. Bankruptcy is not the end of the world, I believe you can keep your home and many other important items.

GG

PS Did you hear of the guy in the US who was denied (gov't) cancer treatment because he is/was a male?

No, I have not heard that story. The point I was trying to make was that people in the United States die waiting for care because they were denied insurance based on a pre-existing condition or could not afford it. I guess, however, it would be their relatives who get stuck with the bill after they die. My husband got laid off and his COBRA ran out. I had inadequate insurance and waited six years for a diagnosis. Besides CFS and FMS, I also have arthritis. By the time I got the diagnosis, the damage was done. I am still paying off medical bills from back then. This happens all to often in the United States. I really would have rather waited for treatment that would have been paid for instead of inadequate treatment that I am still paying for. If I had been sick because of cancer, under both medical systems, I would have died before I received treatment.

I forgot to mention that my husband and I are both sick and could not work in the fields we had previously worked in--the jobs that provided good insurance.

My experience with American doctors has been that if you don't have enough insurance or good enough insurance to pay for a specialist, they won't give you the referal. That other doctor might not like them anymore and that would be horrible.

Do you know where I could read a article on the man who was denied insurance because he was male?
 

SilverbladeTE

Senior Member
Messages
3,043
Location
Somewhere near Glasgow, Scotland
For the gawd damn record, the NHS in the UK works on a sort of "triage" system, where the wealth of the patient doesn't matter a damn
delays occur because EMERGENCIES GO FIRST!
if anyone can't can't accept that, too damn bad, the world needs less sociopaths anyways ;)

And unfortunatley that may mean your minor but needed surgery is delayed because a bunch of folk were dying and needed aid, first.
So please, don't anyone go on about "death queues" or other such ridiculous garbage

Is the NHS hampered by problems, mismanagment, government meddling etc?
yes.
No system's perfect and anyone who thinks the "private sector" does it better is truly clueless. One of the advantages of being disabled is no longer have to put up with the moronic ratpukes whoseem to have infested the private sector :(
and of coruse you get similar morons in public sector, why douchebags seem to gravitate to management positions though?!...it's like poo floats to the top! :p
Only about 1/3rd of companies I've ever dealt with/in are run by folk with a clue, or a care about their staff

People who work for a common cause do a damn sight better job than those who do it because they have to work to support themselves and dont' care OR are scumbag greedy gits.
Many of the folk who work in the NHS care about it, it's much akin to military service in sense of committment to your people.

Nobody deserves better health care than another, NOBODY. Or better justice etc
I think the grotesque issues brought up by the ability to basically buy your way out of heinous crimes by hiring better law team, should be sufficient wanrings to the perils such cause society.

Easy way to solve fair number of the problems NHS has:
every drunken, drugged up piece of moronic rat-filth who chokes the emergency wards at the weekends should be forced ot pay for treatment because they are criminal acts, or so as not to bring the spectre of paying for health per se, they should be very heavily fined, and that used as detterent and general societal payback.
Those wastes of space often take over 60+% of the emergency capacity at weeekends, which sets many other needed surgery etc and honest emergencies back.
I'm sure anyone who's ever brought a loved one in distress ot an emergency ward at weekeneds will know what I mean :/
Despise those selfish, callow morons, and of course, quite often it's their innocent victims who need medical aid.

Alcohol, worst damn drug of them all!
 

Wonko

Senior Member
Messages
1,467
Location
The other side.
I've recently been in A&E on a friday and saturday night and despite what various TV programs have said RE drunks clogging up A&E I've yet to see one person who was obviously drunk.
 

currer

Senior Member
Messages
1,409
Good post politcally silverblade, but like Wonko I also was in A&E on a tuesday and I was heartened by the mutual support and care among the patients while they waited to be seen. No-one was drunk. We all looked out for each other.

God knows what will happen to our NHS now. My heart bleeds for it, much maligned, wrongly criticised by those who want to make a fast buck from its destruction.
I used to nurse and all our NHS patients got the best treatment available, rich or poor.

Its a lie about the waiting lists. That has been talked up in order to have a stick to beat the NHS with. That is why we are facing relentless negative publicity about "a broken system".

Private companies will make massive profits form the new markets opening up in Bitish healthcare, both in medical treatment and in insurance for loss of earnings. A major US insurance firm comes to mind....

What a hateful world we are being forced into.
The most damaging element in our political system is that there is no opposition. Right and left, (those categories are meaningless now) they are all set on privatisation.
 

SilverbladeTE

Senior Member
Messages
3,043
Location
Somewhere near Glasgow, Scotland
Well, being near Glasgow...while most folk are lovely, ye gods, it's hard to believe the stupidity and awfullness of "Neds", unless you've dealt with 'em ;)

And yeah, they are trying to push us into the utterly failed US system, at current rate, only upper middle class in US will have any health insurance in 30 years time, it's sick and crazy (and I have lots of US relatives, and know how good/bad it can be there and how it's got worse for folks).
UNUM, those scumbags, had a little venue with the Liberal-Democrats at their recent party conference...what's that tell you?
 

Sallysblooms

P.O.T.S. now SO MUCH BETTER!
Messages
1,768
Location
Southern USA
People from all over the world, leaders from all over, do come to the U.S. to get help, not failed at all here. Doctors have freedom so that is what sets it apart.
 

SilverbladeTE

Senior Member
Messages
3,043
Location
Somewhere near Glasgow, Scotland
Sally
the US has the world's best medical facilities...and not so very far away, what have you?
See, Washington DC, Bethesda...and compare to the health/life choices of the not so well off in D.C.

As always, the gulf between the mostly very decent people of almost any nation, and how it's government ends up working in reality, is a gulf vast as the ocean.
Many fine people go into politics ot help thier fellow citizen, to better their nations...many are just lousebags or become so corrupted by all the mini-sellouts, there's nothing left of 'em inside and go whereever the power/money cal.

As noted elsewhere, big part of problem is that Humans in groups *SUCK*.
Capitalism, Communism, Socialism all work well on small scale and with decent folk, scale 'em up and they inevitably become monsters. I can prove that too if any need ;) Even Adam Smith warned about taking it too far...but that inconvenient bit of wisdom got ignored, sigh

The USA, richest mightiest warrior nation on the planet, enough nukes to turn much of a continent into molten glass and mansions that would make a Doge of old green with envy...has about 40% of it's people medically uninsured...so you can have, like in "Developing Nations", folk living in squalor near others living in palaces.
The tragedy and waste of that is apalling.

We on this side of the Pond are not "better", we've just learned more, after very very ugly horrors we've oftne done to ourselves.
Took the obscene atrocities of World War2, on our own soil or nearby or done by us, to "bitchslap" us into trying ot behave more like sane, caring adults, in a national level. That's the difference.
Americans are usually the kindest, courteous folk you can meet :) But at a national level, it's still like the 1800s, look at current insane partizanship at a time when the nation desperately needs good governance, ugh.

An important and very heinous bit of law in late 1800s USA, set us down our current catasrophic road, to whit, giving corporations some rights as if they were "real individuals".
Complex, but ended up letting corporations running totally out of control. Hence, monsters like UNUM came about.
(and as often the case, us in the UK started the ball rolling, lol. Al-Qeda eventually came about because of of British greed in the 1700s, no kidding)

A long standing problem in US was (don't know if still true) because of the bullcrap of out-of-court-settlements, negligent doctors could get their misdeeds hidden, and, if exposed, merely move to another state and start again.
UK learned 300 years ago that "fire insurance" companies were burning out folk to make them join up, and other heinous crimes! (again, no kidding)

Alas, IMHO, pained opinion, people in large groups, like nations, never ever learn any way but the very hard way.
An odd part of this is the US government covered up much of the horrors of the nuclear bombings on Japan, until a few years ago they'd managed to keep footage shot by the nation's own experts, secret.
Point being was those lunatics didn't want their own people ot grasp the real horror of what would happen if nuclear war occured, as they wanted a huge nuclear arsenal for many resons, one being greed as it made vast fortunes for some in business,and a complaining/scared Public was not wanted, so they censored out the atrocity that is nuclear warfare.

See the manically gleeful bomb test films of the 50s/60s, and how they often grossly distorted the resulting destruction they'd cause. "City buster" thermo-nukes do NOT "merely" cause 100,000 deaths, jebuz
and yes, I knwo what the Rusians did too, Tzar Bomba was one of the "cleanest" nukes ever built, but Sakarov turned against the damn things after he realized the fallout would kill 500,000 people over the centuries the radionucliedes existed, you'd just never see it, tiny tiny rise in cancer etc worldwide.

many years later, President Reagan didn't go to any of his nuclear briefings due to dread and ingorance of the reality (not exactly a light burden to bare for any person after all, ick!), and madmen on his own side were pushing for nuclear confrontation, so he finally went to a briefing, and was horrified to learn that at minimum, expected US casualties would be 110 million.
he could see the insanity in that, and he sought out Gorbachev to pull back from that abyss. Freaking nutcase "Hawks" never forgave him for that...jeesh, see "ABle Archer" and how we all nearly went up in smoke. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83

I'm explaining this because as a nation, the USA has never been "massacred", seen it's major cities wiped out by invaders etc. So it's people still don't grasp at a national level (not individuals, the general broad public and how they react en masse' I'm talking about)
Note how 9/11 vastly shocked and changed perspectives, an atrocity on massive scale, but it was an singular atrocity...compare it to the Rape of Nanking, Seige of Leningrad, Warsaw Uprising, London Blitz, firestorm bombings of Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo...

those huge atrocities and war carnage altered the way entire societies looked at things, and part of that became drive for better social and medical care.
America has been spared carnage so far, thank goodness, but it's left it "weak" as a "coherent nation" And has thus been exploited by sociopathic ratbags like UNUM.
GI's returning form Europe and the Pacific did bring some of this realization back, but the nation itself hadn't suffered like that and so the leasson wasn't learned en masse.


The USA is too big to have a single body like the NHS, heck the NHS is too big, more autonomy is needed, but the US desperately needs a coherent, single health care social outlook, cna't force it on people, they have to learn, and they'll learn the hard way, alas. Not going to be long before only the very well off can afford medicla insurance in the USA, 30 years at most.

In simple terms: The quality of the USA's citizens as decent Human Beings, great expertize of the nation's medical experts etc mean nothing, when ratbags like the pharma and insurance corps can exploit the sick and dying for vast profit. Until folk learn that health cannot be about profit, that we're all connected....then it will inevitably get ugly.

Please go see the scale of profits for pharma and insurance corps and see why we folk with ME are being silently slaughtered by deliberate neglect. Sums of money involved are so vast, so intertwined with government that's then terrified of being caught out at this evil, that they will kill or ruin anyone who threatens that.
We are an "inconvenience" that may burst the Publics' bubble of perception, so we must be made "untermensch"

Er, sorry for droning on so long ;)
 

mellster

Marco
Messages
805
Location
San Francisco
Until folk learn that health cannot be about profit, that we're all connected....then it will inevitably get ugly.
I have to agree on that. I am a libertarian at heart but I support the principles of Obamacare (not necessarily what came out of it) and the buffet-tax :)
 

Mya Symons

Mya Symons
Messages
1,029
Location
Washington
Its a lie about the waiting lists. That has been talked up in order to have a stick to beat the NHS with. That is why we are facing relentless negative publicity about "a broken system".

Private companies will make massive profits form the new markets opening up in Bitish healthcare, both in medical treatment and in insurance for loss of earnings. A major US insurance firm comes to mind....

What a hateful world we are being forced into.
The most damaging element in our political system is that there is no opposition. Right and left, (those categories are meaningless now) they are all set on privatisation.

Really? No waiting for emergencies? That's all we hear about from our politicians is how government run healthcare would be horrible. We will die while we wait! This is good to know. Could you all from the U.K. tell our politicians that? I guess they know and it is all about the money. I also had no idea that they are going after your healthcare system too. Hopefully, the insurance industry won't get their way and there will be no privatization.