"Carl Boyd" wrote in message
m...
"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...
"Larry Jaques" wrote in message
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On Fri, 11 Jul 2008 02:46:20 -0400, with neither quill nor qualm, "Tom
Gardner" quickly quoth:
"Gunner" wrote in message
m...
On Fri, 11 Jul 2008 09:38:50 +1200, Jack wrote:
"Libertarian legacy?
Ron Paul's campaign manager, 49, dies uninsured,
of pneumonia,leaving family $400,000 debt of medical
bills.
What a testament to the Libertarian creed, which
abhors the idea of universal health care."
mo
http://tinyurl.com/5davpe
-- Posted on news://freenews.netfront.net - Complaints to
--
At least he didn't force his neighborhood, at gun point, to pay his
medical bills.
You really want to be one of the jack booted thugs forcing everyone
around you to cough up the dough for Your Kind... Comrade?
Gunner
The guy wouldn't owe $400k if the left had it's way...he would have died
a long
time ago from lack of treatment.
...and/or misdiagnosis, wrong treatment, or negligence, not to mention
hospital-only totally-antibiotic-resistant strains of ghastly bugs.
Wrong-leg amputations still happen at $7-per-aspirin hospitals.
All three of you are as nutty as fruitcakes. First, Gunner: You didn't
seem to mind that the neighborhood paid your wife's bills, when she had
an emergency and you weren't insured. Even if you pay them back, you
seemed willing to squeeze the system for a loan. And what happens if you
get disabled? Then you've squeezed them for the whole tab.
Tom: The evidence is the opposite. Where they have universal healthcare,
they have vastly better preventive care. In the US, Mt. Sinai hospital in
New York, one of the best diabetes treatment hospitals in the world,
can't get insurance companies to pay for diabetes training and
prevention. But the insurance companies will pay for an amputation.
There's free market healthcare for you.
Larry: The misdiagnoses, etc. are occurring in hospitals that are part of
the *existing*, commercial healthcare system, not some universal
healthcare system. The problem you identify is with a system that runs
for commercial profit rather than for patient care.
What happened to the three of you, did you all start taking the wrong
drugs and get confused? You've got it all backwards.
--
Ed Huntress
I spend 2 years living in England in the late 1980's. For sniffles, and
sneezes the national health care system was fine. For serious problems
good luck. The company I worked for said their best recruiting tool was
their private health care policy and I had to, had to, had to make sure I
mentioned it when I was interviewing job candidates. Two stories:
1 guy I played basketball with tore cartilage in his knee (at work not on
the court). 1st available appointment with National Health Care system was
6 months. He managed to come up with private insurance somehow and got it
taken care of in about 2 weeks.
A co-worker of mine broke his foot one Saturday. National Health Care
would not even talk to him until Monday and could not look at him for at
least 10 days. They well could have had to re-break the foot to set it
properly. Private insurance to the rescue.
I was common knowledge, regularly reported in the paper, that old people
were denied care and it was rationed to the "productive" people. I was
surprised that this did not cause and uproar.
Seeing how the government has mishandled education, social security, and
almost everything else it touches, I would hate to give them the health
care system.
CarlBoyd
What you're missing there Carl, among other things, is that we DO pay for
other people under our present system. If they can't afford care and don't
have insurance, you pay for it in three ways. The first is in
hospitalization rates, which determines your insurance rates. They nail you
because they can't nail *them*. There are other ways, including state and
federal support for charitable cases in hospitals. That's your tax money.
Secondly, the UK's system is hardly a good example. When you look at most
healthcare systems around the world, you find that these stories about
delayed care are not typical of most of them. Sometimes the mixed systems
are worse.
Third, the "sniffles and sneezes" advantage extends to all kinds of
preventive care. In the US, one of our biggest problems is that the
uninsured do not get preventive care. Even the insured sometimes can't get
it, as in the Mt. Sinai example I gave above, in which it's no problem to
get a foot amputated as a result of diabetic neuropathy or gangrene, but you
can't get preventive education or care because hospitals can't afford to
offer it. And most endocrinologists are not able to give enough of it in
their offices, because they won't get paid for it, either. This is one I
know from experience and from involvement with the charitable foundations
that deal with it.
All in all, if you know the basics on epidemiology, you can compare figures
between countries and you'll find that the US, aside from having a shorter
lifespan than many other developed countries, tends to have more medical
crises and emergency care. Again, that's because we have inadequate
preventive care and low-level treatment of chronic conditions.
If you're fortunate to have good insurance, count yourself lucky. I had to
pay my own way for myself and for my son last year, at a rate of $12,500/yr.
That's for a good, but not excellent level of insurance. A lot of people
can't afford it. That's part of the reason my rates were so high. And for
those who don't have insurance, their crisis care costs you and me a hell of
a lot more than it would if we had universal care.
--
Ed Huntress