The American “Healthcare” system is a money-making venture, first and foremost. Health care is simply the structure the corporations use to wring as much money from the masses as possible.
For those who are interested, the population of those countries combined is roughly the same as the US: 331,137,369 compared to 339,996,563 for the US.
But the cost of the US Healthcare generally shouldn’t be ignored either. And it seems to be by a good majority of our politicians.
IMHO, our population should give us MORE leverage to get cost reductions but it’s just not going to happen. We need a severe overhaul of our healthcare system and the people who benefit from our current system have too much power and influence.
It should though because economy of scale works to make things cheaper, not more expensive. They’re literally ignoring basic economics to make that argument.
Not always, and not that I disagree with your point either. The US healthcare system is so over bloated with administration that it’s likely experiencing diseconomies of scale instead
Well that’s the issue. We don’t have a single system. We have an industry. I also love how that link completely dodges the motivation to raise prices purely for profit. But even with that, we already know the legitimate cost problem is due to multiple middle man companies that provide no value and just take money. And the more care they deny, the more money they make. So it’s a combination of problems. We have to pay them enough for them to employ people to find reasons to deny care.
These stats are easy to find. The US spends a much higher percentage of its GDP on health care (16.6%) than anyone else. The difference is bigger than the entire US military budget. If the US cut its health care spending to the level of France (12.1%) or Germany (12.7%), it could more than double its military spending.
It terms of actual resources, the difference is even bigger, as US-Americans work much more than Europeans. I’m not sure what for.
ETA: At the same time, the US has a younger population, which should not really need as much care.
How timely! American here who just received a bill for scoping my sinuses by an ENT specialist: insurance covered $28 out of the $415 procedure. This is on top of the $70 copay I owe for the $195 office visit. So all accounting factored in, I owe $450 for what I thought was going to be $70.
Because it was billed through insurance, the provider’s hands are tied in terms of further negotiation. I would bet if I had gone in as a cash patient, I’d be much better off.
The icing on the cake is that the scoping procedure was non-conclusive.
The US healthcare insurance system is the ultimate way to make money fast, for little effort. As long as you’re on the right side of it, that is.
The worst is that insurance companies “cover” things and that’s all they can say before anything is done. After, when billed, they can say “we cover 5% of the final bill. See? We covered it.” And we have no idea how much we will need to pay for standard necessary procedures.
Fuck. Canadian here who is just aghast at the charge. Had a friend go through the same procedure but essentially never paid a dime. We don’t even pay MSP any more but back when we did it was locked to your income bracket and while I had some bumpercrop years (my base rate is 33 bucks an hour and I work 12 hour days standard with time and a half applied for everything past 8 hours for 2019 I worked 11 months with routine 60 hour weeks) my payments never crested $250 for a quarterly payment. Heck I didn’t even realize that they stopped charging for two years because I had the thing rigged to autopay.
Heck a friend of mine’s Dad needed emergency hospital transfer from a small town and they used a helicopter ambulance and the family was never charged.
People want to complain that we’re slower and that people have to actually wait in waiting rooms and sure, non life-threatening stuff needs to be put in a queue but from what I have heard from my US buddies wait times at least are pretty comparable.
I swear people who talk about waiting have never visited an ER for something mundane because it’s the only option opened after 6, or who never had to meet with a specialist, or get a procedure that requires one.
Story time. January 2019. I have a 6 month old baby with mysterious rash. Pediatrician has us cut out common allergens and he clears up. Tells us to book with a pediatric allergist.
Now, I don’t live in BFE. I live in Southeastern MA. By no means an area underserved by doctors. The doctor refers us to Boston Children’s Hospital. It’s an hour and a half away without traffic, or 2 hours and 3 transfers on public transit.
The first appointment available was in October. Kids 7 months old at this point and already getting appointments for longer than that out.
We get put on a cancellation list and around March we get a call for him to be seen and get a scratch test. We take it, we are going on vacation 3 days after that and we’d love to know exactly what to avoid.
Kid lights up like a damn Christmas tree, but only one food allergy (peanuts) and it comes in like 1.5x the diameter of positive control.
Next, because of his age, they want to get him into an exposure therapy study, but he needs a good challenge first and they would call us when we got back from vacation.
Well, we came back from vacation the first week of March, 2019. BCH was now not scheduling any challenges due to the pandemic. Try again after Easter when the whole thing blows over. Then a month later. And another month.
Eventually they are booking again and after getting through the backlog of people that were cancelled due to the pandemic , the next appointment is 14 months out. By that point he’s too old for the study and we neeed to wait till he’s 4.
Well, now he’s 4. We book an appointment for his food challenge. The old scratch test is no longer good. He needs another one. Next booking for that is 10 months out, again. As luck would have it, though, we called back over and over again and eventually got a booking for his scratch test.
That was back in August. We booked his food challenge while we were in the office. It will be next October, barring any more global catastrophes or blind luck on the cancellation list. He will be five.
It’s amazing to me that there’s a person who can beat me at Smash Bros who has been waiting for a doctors appointment for nearly his entire life. And people tell me healthcare in America is fine. Those motherfuckers don’t know about this. They don’t know how much it costs every time he’s out of school for a couple of days with a fever and the school wants a doctor’s note. They don’t know that after wages, the single biggest part of their compensation package is their employers portion of their health insurance. In fact, depending on their job, it may even be more than their wages.
That last bit is important. People don’t realize how much their healthcare actually costs. They see the pre-tax line item for their share of premiums, never their employers. They see that as separate from the Medicare pre-tax item, and the vision and dental, all of which they don’t see the employers portion. They might see the bills if they got the high deductible plan, but they’re somewhat expected because “they got the ‘cheap’ plan”.
See up here people go all “I had to wait six months for a specialist! Bloody socialized medicine!” lt’s a blindness caused by not having anything to compare to and buying into the American political lies about our own system. That kind of wait time for a scratch test is insane even by our standards.
I admit that I technically have a horse in the US healthcare system. The industry I work in contracts our labour vs the US market because they don’t have to pay in to sponsor our medical insurance policy coverage. Technically speaking if the US fixed it’s healthcare my job would be less competitive.
People talking about dismantling the military to pay for health care distract themselves from the fact that the health care system already holds all the money that is needed for single payer health-care. Which is what the people making money off this system want. They want people to blame the military, because that doesn’t solve shit.
For example, the entire admin back end can be civil service. (Some of it already is) and contracting needs to go die in a dumpster fire. You’ve got at least 30,000 infantrymen sitting around doing nothing on any given day. Take a survey of their skills and start assigning additional duties. You can always fall back on contractors if you run out of grunts.
Also, for the love of God stop maintaining an entire mechanized army. You don’t need to mount every soldier at the same time. Yes it’s awesome. But most infantry units aren’t going much of anywhere once they’re dug in.
Until superheroes or the Carebears become real we will need a military. The things I mentioned don’t touch the power projection debate on purpose. That’s a whole ideology thing that people need to be voting for and stuff. I’m taking about ways to save money whether we pull back or not.
Source: Ukraine. Gave up nuclear weapons in exchange for an accord specifying its borders and promising peace. Almost immediately got invaded by a nuclear power with an army after making political decisions on its own. If it had kept its nuclear weapons, Russia would not have been so cavalier about straight up invading. Disarmament is a lie.
Disarmament of an actual nuclear power has been done once. South Africa.
Ukraine never owned or controlled those nukes. They were guarded by Russian soldiers. They would have had to attack Russian soldiers, somehow repulse a Russian counterattack without Western aid, and then reprogram them since they didn’t have launch codes. Ukraine got the best concessions they could for giving Russia back the Russian nukes.
Ironically, without the “bigger threat” of the USA, they’d likely be at odds against each other. China still wants Outer Manchuria back, a region it was forced to cede to Russia back in 1860. Iran wants to be the de facto power of the muslim world, but has to deal with many other muslim countries that don’t want it, plus Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan are countries that Russia would prefer to have control over.
I doubt China would steamroll them. People thought Russia would steamroll Ukraine, it very clearly didn’t. Besides, China isn’t exactly a loved country, it has “allies” that would likely abandon them on the first opportunity and many countries that would love to see them getting kicked in the proverbial nuts.
Any militaristic action of China against any of those big targets would trigger a response from several countries. While everyone will talk peace, in reality a good portion would try to play the war up for as long as possible, to bleed both dry.
They also distract themselves from the fact that a single payer system would be cheaper so we could actually afford more military with one. No dismantling needed.
Somehow you have more money for Israel, bailing out banks, covering police with pension, spending on stadiums, buying lavish gifts for SC Judges, and PPP loans but not enough to pay your citizens who built your country and shoulder it everyday?
Just to point out that people argued this position to the legislature both some they were crafting and while they passing this law, and the legislature didn't want to hear it.
Yeah a placebo trial would be evil. I think widening the trials is important too, but there’s probably a huge medical difference between a puberty-blocker trans puberty for an adolescent and an adult trans second puberty. While estradiol is a basic easy one, none of these meds are all that great for you - its just the medical need to transition is greater than most (not all) of the health risks.
This is actually quite scary that the recommendation is for children as young as 13 years old. Research shows that a lot of gender dysphoria is the result of puberty and medicalizing treatment of it creates a pipeline to further transition including surgeries, while if not treated, the dysphoria often desists after puberty. Growing up is difficult and confusing - how many of us decided we were Absolutely Something as a kid and then shrugged it off later? Something as life-changing as hormone therapy for a physically healthy child should be handled very, very carefully.
ETA: for a thoughtful discussion of these and other topics, I suggest reading Holly Lawford-Smith’s book Gender Critical Feminism (extremely well cited with primary sources) and Helen Joyce’s book Trans.
… quite scary … pipeline to transition … dysphoria often desists …
You worked really hard to throw every catch phrase possible into that.
It’s telling that the first one is you’re scared … which is a poor motivator because it means you make important decisions based on falsehoods and fear-mongering.
It includes 13 year olds because puberty blockers are included. No one is giving estrogen to children. If a child experiences gender dysphoria, their parents can have them work with a psychiatrist and their doctor to make sure they delay puberty so the child can keep growing and decide if they want to transition when they approach adulthood.
Everything else you’ve said is bullshit. Your ignorance is not a free pass to make up facts and spread misinformation.
Research shows that a lot of gender dysphoria is the result of puberty and medicalizing treatment of it creates a pipeline to further transition including surgeries, while if not treated, the dysphoria often desists after puberty.
This right here, this is evil. If someone took you at your word here, they may choose to ignore or punish their child if they were experiencing gender dysphoria. I know you have no sources from any respected institution, and the medical community en masse rebuke this line of thinking.
Edit: Both of the books the original commenter added to try and support their claims are books that posit TERF views that sex is biological and gender either doesn’t exist or is equally biological and cannot change. They dehumanize trans folks and their struggles. They are not medical studies or journals supporting their claims.
Good thing hormones are only prescribed in a minority of trans kids anyways, even though the vast majority of them do not desist as they get older. In fact, the majority of them continue on to transition as adults, and 99.5 or so percent of trans kids given just puberty blockers, much less hormones, grow to adulthood with no regrets.
Also, before you ask, I can provide sources, but that which is declared without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, especially when the dismissal is in line with literally every major medical organization, including the World Health Organization, due to the sheer amount of clear evidence that transition is a safe and effective treatment for gender dysphoria at any age.
Something as life-changing as puberty should be too. What if you grow up to regret having gone through forced puberty like I did? The damage is unbelievable and, in some instances, can never be reversed.
If hormones for trans teens are “quite scary” then necessarily puberty for all teens is “quite scary”. Should we thusly force everyone to take puberty blockers until they’re 18? Or do you trust cis children to know their gender but not trans children?
You clearly don’t even understand what trans people are. It’s really not something you can simply convince yourself of, and by the age of 13 under direct supervision of psychologists and doctors a trans child should be able to avoid going through what I and many other trans people go through. I knew I wanted to be a girl when I was 5. I never had access to gender affirming care until I was 18. It has traumatized me for life and done untold amounts of damage to my body and my mind. I am not alone. Knowing that you’re a girl is different than “playing pretend” or “having a phase”. It’s not even remotely the same. It’s something fundamental about who you are, something that affects every single aspect of your life from the day you’re born until you die. Trans children should be allowed to go through the hormonal development they choose. No one should be forced to undergo hormone changes that mortally horrify them. No one should be forced to pretend they’re a gender they aren’t.
This shit takes lives. Trans kids are one of the highest risk categories for young suicide. This isn’t a joke, this isn’t a game, and it’s about time that you and other ill-informed people sat back and let actual professionals take care of their patients.
Gender Critical Feminism is the conceptual framework that gender is a social construct, innate gender identity doesn’t exist, and biological sex is a class that causes oppression of women.
I have trauma related to my uterus (nice armchair diagnosis there!) And yet my oppression is due to my societal gender role, not the organ I possess that you just accused me of having trauma from?
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