Access to insulin
Access to insulin
Posted Feb 4, 2019 9:46 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)In reply to: Access to insulin by tao
Parent article: An open-source artificial pancreas
The US manage to spend at least twice as much money per capita for healthcare (and that is excluding what individual people contribute out of pocket) than all other developed nations; even so, you can get pretty good healthcare in the US if you're rich but if you aren't things can get dicey pretty fast. The weird thing is that the US could move to a system along the lines of what everyone else is using and actually save a lot of money, which should appeal to fiscal conservatives but somehow doesn't.
Posted Feb 4, 2019 15:15 UTC (Mon)
by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
[Link] (3 responses)
First there are the corporate lobbyists pretending to be fiscal conservatives.
Those aside, there's the more or less unconscious belief that if it's not american, then it cannot be better. How could it be? Especially not for something business related. End of story I'm not really listening to the (boring!) numbers you're trying to tell me. We've seen demonstrators with signs like "We don't want healthcare like in country X", replace X with some of the countries with the most efficient healthcare system.
Then "fiscal conservatives" are all about paying less taxes. How could a more centralized system result in less taxes? That's just not possible, or at least not without less healthcare.
There's also something a bit more logical and not directly money-related: the deeply rooted desire to be *free* to choose my doctor/insurance/etc. Granted the current system grants very little freedom (unless you're insanely rich and don't care being in-network) but surely the current system can be fixed while a single payer system would make that worse.
Of course there are people who know better, however all the above is very common.
Posted Feb 7, 2019 17:54 UTC (Thu)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (2 responses)
But there are easy ways to bring in money that are ignored. Allow people who are on sick pay to jump the queue to get them back to work ... especially if they or the company will chip in some money. Allow people to have private rooms and public healthcare if they want to pay for it...
I'm sure there's plenty more easy money saving fixes if only political dogma didn't get in the way ... our air ambulance system survives on charity money, yet getting a seriously injured patient to hospital an hour earlier saves more money in intensive care than it cost to fly the ambulance - so why isn't some of that saved money diverted to the air ambulance service?
From what I've seen of the Australian system (not a lot :-) I get the impression that it does a very good job of providing affordable health care with choice. But "choice" is a dirty word among patients here because we are being pushed to choose for ourselves based on no evidence whatsoever, and my personal experience is that (a) there is little choice and (b) if you're not happy it's very hard to switch.
Cheers,
Posted Feb 9, 2019 22:05 UTC (Sat)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Feb 13, 2019 18:05 UTC (Wed)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
Hmmm... I was thinking along the lines - like with the air ambulance example - of the money being diverted from other budgets.
I know it's tricky, but surely it's not beyond the wit of man to come up with some way of the DWP (Department of Work and Pensions, responsible for sick pay) working out how much someone is going to cost on sick pay, and then paying that money to the NHS for a "private" operation if that is going to cost less. So it's funded from a completely different budget to that for the old/unemployed.
Cheers,
Access to insulin
Access to insulin
Wol
Access to insulin
Allow people who are on sick pay to jump the queue to get them back to work ... especially if they or the company will chip in some money.
That was in fact proposed, but then it was pointed out that this led to effective denial of healthcare to people not in work and/or whose employers will not pay when the system is under any sort of stress at all (e.g. all winter, every winter). This includes many old people, who tend to vote and vote Conservative, so the Tories acted and very rapidly the not-at-all-politically-influenced think-tanker's suggestion happened to be withdrawn. Funny that. (The think tanker used to work for... a US HMO! And went back to work for an HMO shortly afterwards. One of the other suggestions in the same report was that HMOs should "assist" with healthcare provision "in this time of crisis". Funny that.)
Access to insulin
Wol