Life expectancy in the U.S. is declining for middle-aged people of all groups

The medical profession is cripplingly dependent on trust. Decreased faith in the goodwill of medical practitioners may lead to people not doing things that have major impacts non overall public health, like getting immunizations.

I'd expect a potential rise in suicide rates due to mental problems becoming more prevalent; if not because of escalating paranoia due to "don't get hurt, you can't afford the medical costs", then due to the over-time integration of the assumption of not having any societal value assigned to some injury being fixed. I think this is an oft overlooked aspect of the social experience of having a problem. There are many who look at people with medical issues that are dismissive that it must somehow be all that person's own fault. While the argument can be made in some cases, in the case where you can't afford medical treatment, the message is sent that your (the injured party's) suffering doesn't matter at a social level unless somehow you can demonstrate you can produce X amount of worth where that worth becomes at least strongly correlated to some significant fraction of whatever the Medical Industrial Complex decides.

It is funny, because I'm reminded of the story Erehwon, where physical ailment vs. Social ailment was flipped around in how it was handled. If you had a chest congestion, you'd be locked away in a prison, away from everyone else, but moral failings like stealing things were not crimes, but things treated as being in need of slight adjustment. The argument put forth against "Doctoring/Medicine" in the story is that eventually, a medical Doctor would accrue too much power over too many people's lives. It seemed ridiculous to meat the time; but as I look at what we have now, I see echoes of it.

If you can't afford to exist in the system, you are cast aside. Can you receive treatment? Yes. Will you financially weather that storm without the advantages of full-time representation, negotiation, and legal counsel? No.

"First, do no harm" means something; and harm comes in many forms nowadays. I know not where the capacity for ruinous financial inflation is being introduced; the exorbitant costs of medical schooling, the production and certification of medical equipment/research, administrative overhead and profit skimming; but it needs to be addressed and evaluated at each point.

Prescription drugs are a start, but the entire infrastructure needs an audit and readjustment in my opinion to bring it back within some semblance of sane operating parameters.

It can always get worse

Disclaimer: Medicare For All (single payer) supporter

I've just been called in for a check up on my blood pressure and if it had worstened, I would on the end of quite a lot of dietary and excerise advice in an attemp to avoid additional medication. Many GPs in the UK has teamed up with Parkrun and now prescribe park run participation for certain patients and conditions.

The same thing goes for quality of medical care - when they mess up they get to fix their own mess and charge for it.

For example when our first kid was born, the gynecologist had her trainee pull our son out with their rope thing. She was supposed to apply pressure during the contractions, only she panicked and pulled my son out in one go (she was using her legs to push for force, you can't make this up). The result is that the baby was born quickly and my wife was ripped open. She required urgent surgery to put herself back together, then a month stuck laying in bed and about three months before she was mobile. She still have problems because of it.

The hospital were happy because they could charge three times as much for the corrective surgery than they charged for delivery.

My example was in The Netherlands, where the healthcare costs are well under control and the culture isn't quite so brutally selfish ("free market") as other countries. I can't imagine what it's like living in the US.

US hospital did a terrible job of splinting it, told me to come back following day to see a surgeon. (Cost $1000+, high copay since I didn´t yet have my work insurance which didn´t kick in for another month etc.)

Went back home and googled it. NHS treatment, splint for 6 weeks do not disturb splint under any circumstances, followed by simple physiotherapy. I re-splinted using a plastic spoon handle (which is perfect for this btw.) and today the finger is completely recovered.

A year after all this, I ran into a guy at a rental place in the US who had a little finger sticking out at right angles, and which was functionally immobile. He´d had the operation - several years previously, you could see the stiches. Finger had never recovered properly.

But you can see where the profit incentive would lie for the American hospital.

From experience in the UK Private insurance is not worth it as an employer benefit as you get taxed on it.

Currently I am in Germany, and I had a serious health issue. The sort of thing that makes you go bankrupt in the US. I had surgery and months of treatment for free. I stayed on my own private room in the hospital, and it looked like a hotel room, with a private bathroom. I payed zero euros, this was all on public healthcare. They even offered me a few days in a SPA to recover after surgery. They even funded the metro tickets to go from my house to the place where I received the treatment.

Some other EU member states do not have the resources for such niceties, but you will absolutely get the treatment you need.

I feel sorry for people in the U.S. I read about all sorts of situations that are heartbreaking, and it confuses me that most people there still vote against universal healthcare. This serves nobody except the very rich people exploiting the situation.

I listen to North American podcasts and such, and I am still surprised to hear educated people repeating lies about the situation in Europe, as if we were some almost-communist repressive society about to collapse. The most common assertion is that, after all, the US is the only country with "real freedom". To my European ears, this sounds exactly like the sort of propaganda you get from any authoritarian regime. As if "freedom" is some simple one-dimensional things that can be measured like this.

I think it would be good if U.S. citizens had a more realistic picture of how the rest of the western world lives.

What Europe lacks is private funding. I don’t find the article now, but years ago read that there’s 5x as much funding in the US market as compared to the EU market. Seed funding is 3-5x less than you would expect in the US.

There are several things going on here:

* "Europe" isn't one place.

* It can both be true that there are higher taxes and more regulations, and the health care system is better. You're still paying less for health care as a % of GDP, so it's not like you're paying the same amount, just through taxes.

* There are a lot of other factors such as universities, access to capital, and simply 'culture'.

The U.S. does great with these “bet the farm” business models because most of them can fail, and the few that succeed can pay off the capital class handsomely.

Personally, I would rather live in a world where all of my most talented friends can start lifestyle businesses that allow them to do their best work, and be healthy.

The success of startups has some nice macro effects on GDP, but does not solve the problem of labor exploitation that, for me, is just as important a goal of entrepreneurship as making a windfall for the capital class.

Israel is not in Europe, but anyway the rate there is 10.3%

This indicates to me that the circle of people that you know is not representative of the population at large at least when it comes to health insurance coverage.

There's no need to infer statistics about the whole of Europe from your small sample size. All you have to do is look up† the data.

Page 4 (Figure 2.1) here: http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/310838/V...

The majority of countries (38 versus 11) are below 5%, only 5 are above 10%

---

† I googled: percentage private health insurance european countries

While every developed country (and every OECD country, which are overlapping but distinct sets which are not subsets of each other in either direction), except the US in both cases and maybe Mexico in the OECD case, as I've seen sources going both ways on Mexico and universality, has a healthcare system providing universal access to comprehensive medical care with a substantiallty larger percentage of total healthcare funding coming from public sources than the US (though often not more per GDP or especially per capita public spending), there is not, whether in Europe or more generally, single model for this, there are many, fairly radically divergent models from the government-as-provider model of the UK NHS, to the government-as-exclusive-insurer-of-core-services, to mandatory-and-need-subsidized-insurance-with-a-default-public-option, among others.

So, except for “don’t emulate the US’s broken system”, there is nothing even approximating a single “European public healthcare model”.

And the information on the pharmaceuticals involved fails to mention the feeder research that comes from universities in Cambridge, Zurich, London, Tokyo, etc. Most of this had gigantic participation of state research institutions, and if you look at the American pharma companies, almost all are based and house most of their research efforts in the state of New York and New Jersey, Massachussets, and the Bay Area, to the exclusion of pretty much everywhere else.

That makes for a great case of the utility of the well-funded research universities in forming staff for pharma, but it's not exactly a proof that any particular model of funding for pharma works better than others.

It's also interesting to note that most of these pharmaceuticals target and _incredibly small_ number of people worldwide at outrageous costs. Not to take merit away from the huge research efforts, but honestly it just shows where profit-driven research efforts go instead of rational, nation-wide public health initiatives that are objectively far better at increasing quality of life for entire populations.

The same idea applies here. We talk a lot about healthcare access (and I'm not suggesting that should stop). We don't talk enough about going after what's causing the mental illness and fixing that.

Those kids have access to health care.

How many of the parents know how to spot the problems? Do they know when to get their kids into a professional?

Researchers have documented many of the causes yet we rarely talk about them or do anything about them. For example, smart phones and social media are a major factor. This was first correlation and then researches later figured out the causation.

How come we don't even talk about what's causing this?

Looking just at the means by which we get healthcare isn't going to fix all the things. We need to talk about the other elements and do something about them if we want change.

Maybe access to more healthcare would help, though the US already uses more healthcare than almost any other nation, but I suspect, like the rest of health, the real gains are to be found elsewhere, and this is a huge canard so people can feel like their pet political policy will solve something real.

For the general: Whoever is not Trump, they are all superior in myriad ways...the only Dem who isn't superior to Trump is Marianne Williamson, because she's just as qualified and sensible as Trump.