That same day 38 Studios employees were told their health
insurance would expire in two days.
That same day 38 Studios employees were told their health
insurance would expire in two days.
Public service announcement: you can't COBRA on companies that go bankrupt. COBRA allows you to keep your group plan from your former employer. If that plan goes away, since the company goes away, you will be unable to COBRA. May have changed with Obamacare but this is how it was in the past.
We need shopping anyway, as people with insurance are quite insensitive to the cost of care. There's no need for hospitals to break someone's leg if competition can lower the price of service to a reasonable level.
If you have had a major illness requiring serious care (e.g., heart disease, cancer, organ failure, stroke), please talk about exactly how you would have comparison shopped for the best bargain in hospitals.
In some case, cheaper actually means better surgeon. Obviously, this won't work as well for surgery procedure that are more exotic.
This is already true in heart surgery:
I had required emergency care 3 times before the age of 21.
If you have had a major illness requiring serious care (e.g., heart disease, cancer, organ failure, stroke), please talk about exactly how you would have comparison shopped for the best bargain in hospitals.
If somebody isn't immediately dying and mentally unable, the relatives or caretaker can take care of comparison shopping or they can just buy the service from the nearest hospital.
Whatever they choose, will determine the price of the service that they pay for. If everyone is provided insurance, we will all pay an arm and a leg and the hospital get to make extravagant profit due to price insensitivity.
The healthcare system anywhere in the world can't save everybody or care for everybody. There will be some rationing of some kind. It could be long waiting line, denial of care for certain individuals, or based on ability to pay. This is the reality of all systems in the world. The only alternative is to be ruthless in improving efficiency, reliability and cost of a healthcare system so that those dilemma can't happen.
Have you had a major illness requiring serious care? Apparently not. But you still answered the question. You know why that's relevant? Because you quite literally have no idea what you're talking about. Because you didn't and can't talk about how you would have fit comparison shopping in the busy schedule that goes with not dying.
The notion that somebody is going to say, "Hey, I'm going to see if I can get a discount on dealing with my impending kidney failure" is so far from the reality of what's reasonable in a hospital setting that I don't know where to begin. Other than saying that I should have learned by now not to try to have rational conversations with fundamentalists, be they biblical, Freudian, Marxist, or free-market fundamentalists.
Emergency care is serious care. I was rushed to the hospital. Is that's not "serious care"?
The notion that somebody is going to say, "Hey, I'm going to see if I can get a discount on dealing with my impending kidney failure" is so far from the reality of what's reasonable in a hospital setting that I don't know where to begin. Other than saying that I should have learned by now not to try to have rational conversations with fundamentalists, be they biblical, Freudian, Marxist, or free-market fundamentalists
Never mind. I guess you're right. In some circumstance, when you're healthy, you could comparison shop. When you're very ill, you can't comparison shop as well, due to mental state of mind. Still, I think my economic reasoning is not entirely without merit.
<strike>You obviously felt that your anecdote have more weight than my economic reasoning. Just because you don't comparison shop in your situation doesn't mean other people won't. Ever heard of medical tourism?</strike>
Except: you can't. Try to find out how much a major medical procedure will cost you -- if you can find anyone who gives you any numbers at all, you'll be lucky if that's what you actually get charged. (And then try to find out how much your insurance, if you have any, will pay for! And then try to complain when the final bill is different!)
So fuck shopping around. Fuck the market. Fuck economics. Fuck capitalism. Fuck the Republican and really the Libertarian outlook. Fuck everyone who thinks it's every man for himself, I got mine, everyone else can go fuck themselves. Until they wake up one day to find they've got some horrible problem and need help too.
You know when it makes sense for everyone to compete and not give a rat's ass about anyone else? Say you're running a 100-yard dash. Or playing a video game contest. Those are true competitions, may the best man wins. But when you're sick, your family, a neighbor, a fellow citizen, that is precisely the time when it is NOT okay and NOT humane or civilized to think like that.
Guess what? Not too long ago, I had a random, extremely stressful, and utterly terrifying healthcare situation and it involves me, bleeding lot of blood and not knowing why. It just so that I have a different perspective.
So fuck shopping around. Fuck the market. Fuck economics. Fuck capitalism. Fuck the Republican and really the Libertarian outlook. Fuck everyone who thinks it's every man for himself, I got mine, everyone else can go fuck themselves. Until they wake up one day to find they've got some horrible problem and need help too.
You know when it makes sense for everyone to compete and not give a rat's ass about anyone else? Say you're running a 100-yard dash. Or playing a video game contest. Those are true competitions, may the best man wins. But when you're sick, your family, a neighbor, a fellow citizen, that is precisely the time when it is NOT okay and NOT humane or civilized to think like that.
I don't give a rat ass about capitalism, socialism, or any political ideology, just that the healthcare system works esave as many lives as possible and preferably without charging an arm and a leg for said medical care.
So either show why I am wrong or don't comment at all.
Nobody's going to take the time to educate you on all that just to drag you up to the level so that you can understand why your proposal, once you got around to making it, would be wrong. That's your job.
The people who will be adversely affected by this layoff in this domain will be those who get catastrophically ill, requiring huge hospital bills, who aren't otherwise individually covered and who don't find employment before they get sick. I expect that number to be really, really low. Insuring this entire population against that event seems silly.
Ultimately, relying on your employer for these things is a ticking time bomb.
You know there is a whole continent where most people think of healthcare as a right, not a benefit.
And the Hippocratic Oath doesn't mention anything like "only if they have money". And people in the wast majority of other professions don't usually take oaths.
Healthcare and medicine are treated specially around the world.
Isn't it odd how the US mandates car insurance but not health insurance?
Car insurance is liability insurance. It is completely different. Doctors do carry liability insurance, for example.
Europe does not have free healthcare, it has universal healthcare. It is only free for those who can't pay for it - and believe me, nobody remotely sane envies them for that privilege.
Thanks for asking, btw, I knew it is bad, but I never even thought it is THAT bad.
http://video.minpress.gr/wwwminpress/aboutgreece/aboutgreece... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_(United_States)
Despite spending that money you have an unhealthy population (obesity especially a problem); not many doctors (2.4 per 1000 population, fewer than anywhere else except Japan).
Brand name meds are more expensive. The top 30 drugs are more than twice the price in the US than in the UK.
The US does a lousy job of handling long term illness. Preventable mortality among asthma sufferers between 5 and 39 are high, as are lower limb amputations for diabetics. (And diabetes is a considerable problem because of the amount of obesity.)
People often mention excessive spending in US hospitals - lots of high tech equipment, good doctors, many tests, etc. US hospitals are more expensive than many other countries. US doctors get paid more than non-US colleagues (but this is the same for other high-paid workers in different industries.) US hospitals are more expensive even though the stays are shorter. What do you get for this money?
The US does do a good job with some cancers - survival rates for breast cancer are very good. Expensive hospitals don't seem to be working in other areas - people with heart attacks are more than twice as likely to have bypass surgery or angioplasty if they're in the US than in Canada; but there's little evidence that US patients live longer. And some cancers (cervical) have poor outcomes in the US compared to other countries.
Of course, collecting the money that people have to pay also costs money. The US has a high number of admin workers (2.2 per office based doctor). Collecting revenue was estimated to cost 12% of revenue by one doctor group.
The US spends 50% more per person than the next highest spending countries, and more than double of most countries.
The estimated population of the United States is 312,840,860 so each citizen's share of this debt is $50,000
Who can sue US of A and send it to bankruptcy? Make it sell the 5th fleet to Iran to cover the portion of the debt? I'm not saying that 15 trillion debt is good or bad, I'm just saying that dividing it by population and coming up with a $50k figure is a propaganda. If I'm a US citizen and have $5k in credit card debt it doesn't mean that my debt is now $55K. These are two different debts.
(People with serious, chronic pre-existing conditions are another matter entirely)
I expect that number to be really, really low.
Insuring this entire population against that event seems silly.
I was actually in that sort of position. Do I spend 80k+ on medicine or just let it be because that's a ridiculous amount that my insurance wouldn't cover because of my pre-existing condition (that really only sidelines me now and then)? If I was still working at a corporation, I wouldn't have had an issue. Alas, bootstrapping and freelancing are different ball-games altogether.
Thankfully, I had the choice of moving back to Canada. In exchange for tax-payers taking the burden of my medical costs for a month or two, I recovered as a productive member of society, i.e. paying taxes, contribute to the economy, and started a business here of my own. As much as I loved living in the U.S., I feel a responsibility to return something positive back to Canada for giving a shit about me instead of trying to gouge me with fees.
There are a lot of things I can sympathize with when a business goes under, but defaulting on your employees' health insurance with a 2-day notice in the US in our current climate (and not really even a real notice, from what I read, someone's doctor told them about it before the company did!) is pretty crappy.
For healthy people, it's usually cheaper to pay your doctor dentist and other specialists in cash...well, if you are healthy, you don't usually need to see any specialists.
There are plenty of reasons to think health care will not be efficiently produced by the market (adverse selection in health insurance is one). But, the reason the government will do such a bad job isn't that we have "stupid partisan assholes". It's that the incentives for government bureaucratic are all screwed up (see public choice theory). The problem is deeper than politics.
The second has a straightforward answer: universal health care has been implemented successfully in basically every industrial democracy (including the USA, for people over 65). I'd like one of those, please.
The idea that there are first-principles reasons why this "can't work" when it so clearly can and does is just ridiculous. But I see it again and again. It's like libertarians have never been to Canada (or don't have grandparents).
Your advocacy for universal health seems to have two parts:
1. It would be nice for someone else to pay for my health care.
2. Universal health care in other countries is better than what we have in the U.S.
My responses would be:
1. Everyone would like this, but it doesn't make us any better off in aggregate. (If you want to redistribute income, it doesn't have to be done via healthcare).
2. Is debatable. There are trade-offs. Look at wait times in Canada. What about innovation over time. Maybe other countries are free riding off of our innovation. Just because costs aren't as visible don't mean they don't exist.
I'm not against all government intervention into healthcare. But, we should understand why the market is failing and how the government is correcting those failures. That is the only way to make good choices about the trade-offs involved. Otherwise, we are just setting ourselves up for failure in the long run.
What about them? Wait times are only an issue for urgent care situations, and you can't assume that wait times are problematic for all cases. The urgent cases usually get shorter wait times than the less urgent ones.
Most Canadians are pretty happy with the health care system and get a good laugh at how US politicians like to point out the flaws in our system. It may not be perfect, but it's pretty damned good.
As a Canadian who has had cancer twice, I can tell you first hand that the time between diagnosis and treatments were never a problem for me. I received excellent care, and have had access to all the diagnostic tests that I've needed.
Excessive wait times have been an issue for a very long time. Things are getting better, in part because there is a drastic comparison to quality of life health care across the border.
http://www.cma.ca/multimedia/CMA/Content_Images/Inside_cma/M...
EDIT: For those interested in the wait time stats for Canada, the CIHI has statistics compiled annually.
I'm sure these programs are not all encompassing, and free or reduced cost solutions like Catholic hospitals are not ubiquitous, hence the discussion in the States about reform.