Definitely the government.
People with severe disabilities may not be profitable, but I'd still like them to have the option to live.
People with severe disabilities may not be profitable, but I'd still like them to have the option to live.
So, yes, the government. It may not be monetarily profitable but money shouldn't matter to build a humane society.
"It's crazy that I live in Canada, but now I'm looking at having to sell my house for coverage of my medication."[1]
[1]http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/a-tale-of-2-f...
> Helen Anderson, provincial lead for systemic therapy for the BC Cancer Agency, said that Ibrance is currently under active review for coverage in B.C.
There are several expensive medications that the Canadian health system has elected not to cover.
Here is another example where if the husband didn't have drug coverage through his employer, he would have been on the hook for the entire cost. Eventually he had to shell out $3,000 per month.[1]
At first, he says, his company insurance covered the price of the drug. But years later – Gary’s employer changed insurers and he was now on the hook to pay more than $3,000 a month.
[1]https://globalnews.ca/news/1654757/canadian-patients-struggl...
No, but if that's the standard, I'm fairly certain we can find a lot more "no insurance, couldn't get treatment at all" stories in the US than we can "Canadian needs unusual, not-yet-approved medication" ones.
> There are several expensive medications that the Canadian health system has elected not to cover.
You'll find the American medical system does the same.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2007/12/21/teen-dies-hours-after...
https://www.today.com/news/man-battles-health-insurer-drug-c...
All medical systems will have rules and timelines for approval of drugs and procedures. Sometimes they'll lead to unfortunate situations.
In the US, though, approval's just the first step. You might then have to scrape together the $6k deductible for your family's bronze plan. You might have to wait until next year to switch insurers to one who covers that particular med.
Covered in Canada? Maybe never. And that's one of the best drugs out there to treat that type of cancer.
I'm not arguing the US system is better than Canada's. Just calling out there are trade offs with single payer systems. If American's think they can move to a single payer system and keep all the bells and whistles they have now, they will be deeply disappointed.
And your 2nd link actually proves my point. The drug in the article is not covered in many Canadian provinces at all. The guy in the article is being denied the drug because it's not approved for his mutation. Most people with the correct mutation do get coverage for that drug (again, a new, state of the art drug).
Sure, but that's true in the US here, too.
No insurance? No med. ERs aren't gonna give you it.
Can't make your $6k bronze plan deductible? No med. Maybe you'll qualify for a patient assistance program from the drug company, maybe not.
> If American's think they can move to a single payer system and keep all the bells and whistles they have now, they will be deeply disappointed.
It's entirely possible to have a supplemental private health insurance system for the experimental or unapproved stuff. You can get private coverage for stuff like IVF in Australia, for example.
A lot of America's bells and whistles are already inaccessible to a large portion of the population.
> And your 2nd link actually proves my point. The drug in the article is not covered in many Canadian provinces at all. The guy in the article is being denied the drug because it's not approved for his mutation. Most people with the correct mutation do get coverage for that drug (again, a new, state of the art drug).
As the article mentions, the insurer approved their sibling with the same mutation for the same medication. Private insurance can be just as capricious as a single-payer's approval system.
Government-funded health care suffers from all the same economic problems that privately financed health care suffers from, and the government is just as corrupt as any private organization, plus there tends to be little incentive for efficiency, so government programs tend to be extremely inefficient and wasteful.
I appreciate (and agree with) your concern for the disabled, but letting the government be in charge is a recipe for making everything worse.
Except the biggest one: the need to maximize the extraction and distribution of profit to shareholders, while funding the cheapest and least amount of care possible without jeopardizing that imperative.
Except we have pretty much the entire developed world's healthcare systems to debunk that claim. They have similar life expectancies, medical outcomes, infant mortality, access to care, wait times, etc. for half the cost.
* 31st for Life Expectancy [1]
* 32nd in infant mortality [2]
* 5th for colorectal cancer survival [3]
* 1st for breast cancer survival [3]
* 19th for cervical cancer survival [3]
* 7th for heart attack mortality [3]
The actual numbers are reasonably close, but the cost is also about 25% more per captia [4] than the second highest-spending country.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_an...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_quality_o...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.
Forgive me while I laugh uncontrollably
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investor%27s_Business_Daily#Er...
> In July 2009, an editorial in Investor's Business Daily claimed that physicist Stephen Hawking "wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the [British] National Health Service (NHS) would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless." Hawking has always lived in the United Kingdom and receives his medical care from the NHS.