The contrast b/w the NHS and the US healthcare mess continues to frighten and astonish me. Why on earth we let this happen in this country is beyond me.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5491337

Here's the intro:

June 19, 2006 · When individuals lose their health insurance, it most directly affects them and their families. But when a lot of people lose their health insurance at the same time, the impact can be felt across an entire community.

Last year, Tennessee dropped some 200,000 people from TennCare, its health care plan for the poor and uninsured, and reduced benefits for hundreds of thousands more. The impact is being felt in places like Cocke County, one of the state's poorest.



Those silly diabetics, expecting to get their insulin! Yep, greatest healthcare system in the world. *Rolling eyes so far back in head it hurts*

Not mention a recent study that shows something anyone who has any concact at all with emergency rooms or the health care system already knows:

Friday, June 16, 2006

911 call for U.S. emergency rooms
The current system is swamped by routine emergencies and sick people with no insurance. A real disaster would tip it over the edge.

An emergency grips the nation's emergency rooms. According to a comprehensive, two-year study by the Institutes of Medicine, the emergency care system in the United States is "at the breaking point."

Fixing the system will cost billions of dollars and possibly the leadership of a new federal agency, the report recommends.

Most people give little thought to emergency rooms until they need one. That may be too late.

"The safety net ... has large holes," coauthor A. Brent Eastman, chief medical officer at ScrippsHealth in San Diego, told the Associated Press. "You may not be caught and saved when your life depends on it."

The reason is clear: While the number of emergency room visits has grown by 27 percent in the last decade, 425 emergency rooms closed during the same period.

A 1986 law requires emergency rooms to treat and stabilize anyone, regardless of ability to pay. As a result, the poor and uninsured often go to emergency rooms for nonemergency care.

With high levels of charity care and Medicaid patients, emergency rooms hemorrhage cash.

The inadequate resources have staggering implications. Ambulances with desperately sick or injured patients either idle outside waiting for bed space or are turned away from overcrowded emergency rooms to other hospitals that can be far away.

Patients are routinely "boarded" in hallways or temporary spaces while waiting an average of eight hours for an emergency room bed to open.

Once stabilized, patients can wait as long as two days to be admitted to a hospital bed.

As another co-author of the report warned, any national disaster -- a terror attack, for instance, or an avian flu pandemic -- would completely swamp the system.

"If you can barely get through the night's 911 calls, how on Earth can you handle a disaster?" asked Arthur Kellerman, emergency medicine chief at Emory University.

Repairing the emergency health care system, then, ought not be just a public health issue but a national security priority.

But because so many of the problems with the system result from inherent flaws in America's approach to health care in general, a real solution won't be easy.

Eventually, Americans will have to rethink the current market-driven health care system, with its enormous price tag and utterly inadequate results.

The floundering emergency care system is merely the latest symptom.

(From the Roanoke Times)

This is appalling. Why do people still believe this is ok? For all the complaining and moaning people do in the UK about the NHS how many stories do you hear of diabetics not being able to afford their insulin? Of people dying because they can't afford their heart medicine?

Should anyone, ANYONE have been surprised at the recent study that showed that in spite of spending twice as much per capita on health care in the US as the UK, the general rate of health in the US is much worse, by any measure? (And bear in mind that the UK diet is at least as bad as the US diet).

don't worry it's on its way to england

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1798512,00.html

Yes, I knew the NHS really was in trouble when I read that the government was consulting US "experts" about how to "fix" the NHS.

Clearly the US and latterly the UK governments are aimimg for the Turkmenistan solution to public health care.

Turkmenbashi, "father of the Turkmen" as he insists on being called by his "people", AKA Turkmenistan's President Saparmurat Niyazov was put in power by Gorbachev as the Soviet edifice crumbled and has been systematically dismantling his country's health care system to, well, to save money really. It's expensive and he cearly sees spending on poor sick people as a complete waste of dosh. He is known for his eccentric decrees, banning gold teeth or long beards, outlawing ballet, and naming a month after his mother.

From an article at Radio Free Europe...




From another interesting article about the radical way forward in healthcare in Europe...




Remember, this odious madman didn't get elected and cannot be removed from office in anything remotely resembling an election. We, however could and should make our voices heard with the people who sit in their seats of power. We must not let these arseholes take away universal healthcare just because their share-holding pals are whining about the lack of dividends.

and from today

http://society.guardian.co.uk/health/news/0,,1806336,00.html

I don't know why USers aren't banging down the doors of congress and the senate everyday over health care.

Why does such a tiny segment of the population deny an entire nation of the write to universal health care?

Why do they allow 'Medicare D's' ridiculous restrictions for medicines?

Could it be because the HMOs are so politically active?

Could it be because Insurance companies do not insure anyone with a history of illness in their family?


In Canada I currently have my two grandparents and my aunt in the hospital.

My grandfather has had a heart attack.
My grandmother has had a fall and now has a broken collar bone.
My aunt is recovering from major surgery.

It is all covered from our high taxes into the Ontario Hospital Insurance Plan.
A simple (tax) that comes off every single pay cheque and I pay it gladly.

According to a nationwide ABC/Washington Post poll in 2003, "Americans by a 2-1 margin, 62-32 percent, prefer a universal health insurance program over the current [private] employer-based system."

The other 6% must prefer Al Qaeda.

May 16, 2006
Avoid U.S. health model: Clinton
Former President warns of following US health care model

The answer to Canada's health-care woes cannot be answered by the "insane" system south of the border, former U.S. president Bill Clinton said in Toronto recently.

Clinton argued that the U.S. model is a "colossal waste of money" that is "killing" his country competitively.

full story here

Nor me.



This is the problem isn't it?

The idea that I might have to pay for somebody elses healthcare. It's the thing that divides socialists from capitalists. "If they haven't had the good sense to put a little aside for a rainy day then tough shit. fuck 'em. Why the hell should they expect me to pay for them?"
I imagine that for the majority of socialists the whole idea of walking by on the other side of the road is anathema. At the risk of sounding preposterously pompous and self righteous it is this "christian" aspect of socialsim that I'm most comfortable with. In stark contrast to the ideolgy of the capitalist who sees merit only in the law of the jungle and the survival of the fittest.

A measure of a civilsed society is how well it looks after it's least well off, it's sick and poor. Who said that? Whoever it was is dead right of course. If, as the United States does, you leave the poor, those mentally and physically incapable of making responsible decisions that will affect their lives to sink or swim as they will your society must ultimately be doomed. Lines must be redrawn as the costs rise and those capable of paying reduce in number.

This whole subject is excersising me intently at present. I have a grumbling molar and a bad back.
I also have no health insurnace, no job and no money.

Best make a start on that booker prize winning novel then.

PS: Good wishes and get well soon to your rellies, Tom.

Here is why the President's healthcare plan, as alluded to in the State of the Union Speech won't work.

A. Nothing he proposes ever works.

and

B. People without an employer based healthcare plan will receive a tax credit for purchasing health insurance. This will be paid for by taxing those individuals with good employer-based healthcare plans. The healthy individuals with good employer-based plans will opt out of their plan and puchase cheaper health insurance (because they are healthy) on their own to avoid the tax and to take advantage of the tax subsidy. Those employer-based plan will become more expensive on a per person basis as it will contain less healthy individuals. This will increase the "value" of the employer based plan so that those remaining in the employer based plan will be paying higher taxes on it. This in turn will provide an incentive for those of medium health to opt out of the employer-based plan to avoid the tax and take advantage of the tax subsidy...

[We were standing on the deck and the captain said, "tell me a story my son" and so I began, "We were standing on the deck and the captain said, ""tell me a story my son" and so I began...]

Ultimately, this means very few will remain in the employer-based programs so very little tax revenue will be generated for the now vast number of people who are receiving the tax subsidy.

C. It still doesn't help low income people. A tax break cannot be bigger than an individuals tax contribution. It is quite likely that the cost of healthcare insurance will exceed many low income individuals tax contribution.

D. Nothing he proposes ever works.

Plus, nothing he ever proposes works.

I heard a stat today that half of the currently uninsured don't make enough money to be able to claim a tax subsidy to pay for medical insurance. Intuitively that seems about right and fits with my Point C above.

Steven Colbert says it better, "Most people who couldn’t afford health insurance also are too poor to owe taxes. But...if you give them a deduction from their taxes they don’t owe, they can use the money they're not getting back from what they haven't given to buy the health care they can't afford."

It sounds like the hospital sketch in Monty Python's meaning of life:

Administrator: Morning, gentlemen.

First and Second Doctors: Morning Mr Pycroft.

Administrator: Very impressive. What are you doing this morning?

First Doctor: It's a birth.

Administrator: And what sort of thing is that?

Second Doctor: Well, that's when we take a new baby out of a lady's tummy.

Administrator: Wonderful what we can do nowadays. Ah! I see you have the machine that goes 'Ping'. This is my favourite. You see we lease this back to the company we sold it to. That way it comes under the monthly current budget and not the capital account. [They all applaud.] Thank you, thank you. We try to do our best. Well, do carry on.

The real problem of course is not that we don't have universal health care in this country. We do. There are hospitals that treat all patients if their condition is bad enough even if they can't pay. It is important to note that the patients who can't afford to pay and are seen only when they reach the emergency rooms of hospitals, require some of the most expensive treatments, often times treatments that would be unnecessary had they had access to health care earlier. And when hospitals treat these patients they end up passing the cost on to the consumers that can afford to pay because they have health insurance. This in turn drives up health insurance rates. For these resons the per capita price of health care for US citizens is two and a half times the median helthcare expense of other industrialized nations. Even worse, the current system results in massive paperwork and overhead so that the US spends three times as much on a percentage basis (which equates seven and half times as much in actual expenditures) on administration.

So, the problem is not universal health care but instead the lack of universal healthcare insurance! We obviously need some form of single payer healthcare system!!