Myth busting universal healthcare

[jreeves]

Wrong again or should I say as usual.

The Federal Pie Chart

World Military Spending - Global Issues

War Registers league, don't think they could be a little partisan do you?

How about this outlay, with numbers from government sources? Like say the Commerce Dept.....

 

[Chris]

War Registers league, don't think they could be a little partisan do you?

How about this outlay, with numbers from government sources? Like say the Commerce Dept.....
View attachment 5706

And you got your chart from Michael Hodges right wing blog.

 

[jreeves]

And you got your chart from Michael Hodges right wing blog.

The data came from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which is a part of the Department of Commerce. Whereas, the cite by midcan doesn't include a cite to any government source, at least that I could see.

 

[jreeves]

The data came from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which is a part of the Department of Commerce. Whereas, the cite by midcan doesn't include a cite to any government source, at least that I could see.

Furthermore...

Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid accounted for more than $1 trillion of the $2.3 trillion the federal government spent in 2005, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, which publishes the only consolidated source of data on the geographic distribution of federal expenditures.
US Census Press Releases

 

[Chris]

Furthermore...

Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid accounted for more than $1 trillion of the $2.3 trillion the federal government spent in 2005, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, which publishes the only consolidated source of data on the geographic distribution of federal expenditures.
US Census Press Releases

But SS taxes are a trust fund supposedly seperate from the general fund. That is the difference in the two graphs.

 

[busara]

But SS taxes are a trust fund supposedly seperate from the general fund. That is the difference in the two graphs.

i think thats why there are different opinions on the budget here.

 

[DiamondDave]

How often do you seriously ask that question of our military budget?

Funny.. the federal government is constitutionally charged with nation defense... not to kiss your boo-boos

 

[editec]

Social security payments aren't spending taxes, they're returning our investments.

Thought you Republicanistas were all about giving us our money back?

 

[Avatar4321]

Social security payments aren't spending taxes, they're returning our investments.

Thought you Republicanistas were all about giving us our money back?

If you think social security is an investment, i dont want you anywhere near any national budget.

 

[KMAN]

2008 is shaping up to be the election year that we finally get to have the Great American Healthcare Debate again. Harry and Louise are back with a vengeance. Conservatives are rumbling around the talk show circuit bellowing about the socialist threat to the (literal) American body politic. And, as usual, Canada is once again getting dragged into the fracas, shoved around by both sides as either an exemplar or a warning -- and, along the way, getting coated with the obfuscating dust of so many willful misconceptions that the actual facts about How Canada Does It are completely lost in the melee.

I'm both a health-care-card-carrying Canadian resident and an uninsured American citizen who regularly sees doctors on both sides of the border. As such, I'm in a unique position to address the pros and cons of both systems first-hand. If we're going to have this conversation, it would be great if we could start out (for once) with actual facts, instead of ideological posturing, wishful thinking, hearsay, and random guessing about how things get done up here.

To that end, here's the first of a two-part series aimed at busting the common myths Americans routinely tell each other about Canadian health care. When the right-wing hysterics drag out these hoary old bogeymen, this time, we need to be armed and ready to blast them into straw. Because, mostly, straw is all they're made of.

1. Canada's health care system is "socialized medicine."
False. In socialized medical systems, the doctors work directly for the state. In Canada (and many other countries with universal care), doctors run their own private practices, just like they do in the US. The only difference is that every doctor deals with one insurer, instead of 150. And that insurer is the provincial government, which is accountable to the legislature and the voters if the quality of coverage is allowed to slide.

The proper term for this is "single-payer insurance." In talking to Americans about it, the better phrase is "Medicare for all."

2. Doctors are hurt financially by single-payer health care.
True and False. Doctors in Canada do make less than their US counterparts. But they also have lower overhead, and usually much better working conditions. A few reasons for this:

First, as noted, they don't have to charge higher fees to cover the salary of a full-time staffer to deal with over a hundred different insurers, all of whom are bent on denying care whenever possible. In fact, most Canadian doctors get by quite nicely with just one assistant, who cheerfully handles the phones, mail, scheduling, patient reception, stocking, filing, and billing all by herself in the course of a standard workday.

Second, they don't have to spend several hours every day on the phone cajoling insurance company bean counters into doing the right thing by their patients. My doctor in California worked a 70-hour week: 35 hours seeing patients, and another 35 hours on the phone arguing with insurance companies. My Canadian doctor, on the other hand, works a 35-hour week, period. She files her invoices online, and the vast majority are simply paid -- quietly, quickly, and without hassle. There is no runaround. There are no fights. Appointments aren't interrupted by vexing phone calls. Care is seldom denied (because everybody knows the rules). She gets her checks on time, sees her patients on schedule, takes Thursdays off, and gets home in time for dinner.

One unsurprising side effect of all this is that the doctors I see here are, to a person, more focused, more relaxed, more generous with their time, more up-to-date in their specialties, and overall much less distracted from the real work of doctoring. You don't realize how much stress the American doctor-insurer fights put on the day-to-day quality of care until you see doctors who don't operate under that stress, because they never have to fight those battles at all. Amazingly: they seem to enjoy their jobs.

Third: The average American medical student graduates $140,000 in hock. The average Canadian doctor's debt is roughly half that.

Finally, Canadian doctors pay lower malpractice insurance fees. When paying for health care constitutes a one of a family's major expenses, expectations tend to run very high. A doctor's mistake not only damages the body; it may very well throw a middle-class family permanently into the ranks of the working poor, and render the victim uninsurable for life. With so much at stake, it's no wonder people are quick to rush to court for redress.

Canadians are far less likely to sue in the first place, since they're not having to absorb devastating financial losses in addition to any physical losses when something goes awry. The cost of the damaging treatment will be covered. So will the cost of fixing it. And, no matter what happens, the victim will remain insured for life. When lawsuits do occur, the awards don't have to include coverage for future medical costs, which reduces the insurance company's liability.

3. Wait times in Canada are horrendous.
True and False again -- it depends on which province you live in, and what's wrong with you. Canada's health care system runs on federal guidelines that ensure uniform standards of care, but each territory and province administers its own program. Some provinces don't plan their facilities well enough; in those, you can have waits. Some do better. As a general rule, the farther north you live, the harder it is to get to care, simply because the doctors and hospitals are concentrated in the south. But that's just as true in any rural county in the U.S.

You can hear the bitching about it no matter where you live, though. The percentage of Canadians who'd consider giving up their beloved system consistently languishes in the single digits. A few years ago, a TV show asked Canadians to name the Greatest Canadian in history; and in a broad national consensus, they gave the honor to Tommy Douglas, the Saskatchewan premier who is considered the father of the country's health care system. (And no, it had nothing to do with the fact that he was also Kiefer Sutherland's grandfather.). In spite of that, though, grousing about health care is still unofficially Canada's third national sport after curling and hockey.

And for the country's newspapers, it's a prime watchdogging opportunity. Any little thing goes sideways at the local hospital, and it's on the front pages the next day. Those kinds of stories sell papers, because everyone is invested in that system and has a personal stake in how well it functions. The American system might benefit from this kind of constant scrutiny, because it's certainly one of the things that keeps the quality high. But it also makes people think it's far worse than it is.

Critics should be reminded that the American system is not exactly instant-on, either. When I lived in California, I had excellent insurance, and got my care through one of the best university-based systems in the nation. Yet I routinely had to wait anywhere from six to twelve weeks to get in to see a specialist. Non-emergency surgical waits could be anywhere from four weeks to four months. After two years in the BC system, I'm finding the experience to be pretty much comparable, and often better. The notable exception is MRIs, which were easy in California, but can take many months to get here. (It's the number one thing people go over the border for.) Other than that, urban Canadians get care about as fast as urban Americans do.

4. You have to wait forever to get a family doctor.
False for the vast majority of Canadians, but True for a few. Again, it all depends on where you live. I live in suburban Vancouver, and there are any number of first-rate GPs in my neighborhood who are taking new patients. If you don't have a working relationship with one, but need to see a doctor now, there are 24-hour urgent care clinics in most neighborhoods that will usually get you in and out on the minor stuff in under an hour.

It is, absolutely, harder to get to a doctor if you live out in a small town, or up in the territories. But that's just as true in the U.S. -- and in America, the government won't cover the airfare for rural folk to come down to the city for needed treatment, which all the provincial plans do.

Mythbusting Canadian Health Care -- Part I | OurFuture.org

This is a good article but how much does it cost? How high are canadian taxes? Just want to be as informed as possible. Thanks.

 

[Chris]

This is a good article but how much does it cost? How high are canadian taxes? Just want to be as informed as possible. Thanks.

Read the whole article on the link. Americans pay almost twice per capita what the rest to the Western world pays for healthcare.

 

[jreeves]

If you think social security is an investment, i dont want you anywhere near any national budget.

Actually stealing from trust funds is a major contributor to the national debt.

 

[KMAN]

Read the whole article on the link. Americans pay almost twice per capita what the rest to the Western world pays for healthcare.

Ok, then let me put it this way... What percentage of your income do you pay in taxes?

Thanks.

 

[Chris]

Ok, then let me put it this way... What percentage of your income do you pay in taxes?

Thanks.

If you read the article, it tells you.

 

[KMAN]

If you read the article, it tells you.

My bad, I thought you included the whole article here in your post... guess you only took portions of it...And since you don't want to tell me what percentage you pay I looked it up... For this person who wrote the article he said he pays about 10% more than the US in taxes... So if you make $100,000 you pay an extra $10,000 a year... Which is basically what it costs for healthcare in this country.... If I didn't have a kidney disease it would cost me and my family about $500/month $6000 a year, with my kidney disease I pay $1000 a month....

So the cost is about the same... the only difference is in Canada the government pays for it and in the US the individual pays for it...

Call me crazy but I would rather make my own financial decisions than let a congress with a 10% approval rating make the decisions for me...

You are lucky, it sounds like people like the government in Canada... here they are all crooks.

 

[busara]

My bad, I thought you included the whole article here in your post... guess you only took portions of it...And since you don't want to tell me what percentage you pay I looked it up... For this person who wrote the article he said he pays about 10% more than the US in taxes... So if you make $100,000 you pay an extra $10,000 a year... Which is basically what it costs for healthcare in this country.... If I didn't have a kidney disease it would cost me and my family about $500/month $6000 a year, with my kidney disease I pay $1000 a month....

So the cost is about the same... the only difference is in Canada the government pays for it and in the US the individual pays for it...

Call me crazy but I would rather make my own financial decisions than let a congress with a 10% approval rating make the decisions for me...

You are lucky, it sounds like people like the government in Canada... here they are all crooks.

i will admit i didnt read the whole article, but youre assuming the only difference is healthcare, everything else is equal. but canada has far cheaper college tuition and a cheaper cost of living, for example. so it seems their money goes much further than ours, and their tax dollars give them more benefits, not just healthcare.

 

[Tech_Esq]

How often do you seriously ask that question of our military budget?

The cost of Iraq, Afghanistan and indeed the invasion of the Chinese mainland, will pale in comparison to the cost of national health insurance for 300 million people. Talk about straw men. Geeez!

 

[AllieBaba]

So it sounds pretty much like it's a crap shoot in Canada.

I know I can get treated anywhere I go in the US. For anything I've got. Within hours.

Pretty simple.

 

[Tech_Esq]

Read the whole article on the link. Americans pay almost twice per capita what the rest to the Western world pays for healthcare.

The primary problem with the American health care system which feeds many of the major problems with the system is delinking who consumes the health service from who pays for the health service. Until this problem is resolved, you can only have increasing costs. You may choose to lower costs by artificially keeping prices low, but in the end you'll pay for that by breaking the system.

Only when the consumer has to make rational purchasing choices based on having to spend money he considers his own, will the system be repaired and brought back into balance. Consider the following system as an example:

I have an amount of money set aside, for the moment, let's assume we don't care how it got there. This amount of money is enough to deal with the average health issues of a normal healthy family or individual. It covers a couple of prescriptions per year, a couple of visits to the doctor etc. If I consume more than that amount, my insurance kicks in. So, I'm covered in case something bad happens.

If I don't use all the money I have set aside, I get to keep it and it bears interest so I can keep it from year to year. If I don't use all of it the following year the amount continues to grow. Over the course of a lifetime of health care, it could grow to a large sum if I were healthy. If I had health issues, I would really be no worse off, but I wouldn't have this additional source of wealth because I would probably spend most of my funds each year.

Who provides the insurance? Here's one place that government might be able to lend a hand. I would not be opposed to government mandated risk pools. "If you want to insure people in our state, you have to accept everyone who applies and you have to accept rates we set." I'm a little ify on that last part. I don't know if I like it, but sake of discussion let's leave it in. So, insurance companies become a regulated utility with "x" amount of profit. The pools will be large enough that the healthy will offset the sick because real insurance doesn't kick in until you REALLY get sick. Other than that, you pay for your own health care costs out of your set aside money.

So, how does the money get there? If you are poor, the government puts it there and buys your insurance. If you can afford it, you put it there and you buy your own insurance.

So what is so good about this? Because the vast majority of health services are consumed in the under $5,000 range, real consumer activity will take place. Right now, there is no incentive for you to shop around or even put the same effort you use to pick a dishwasher to purchase health services. This model encourages you to be picky and demanding. It also provides an incentive to save, but the flexibility not to save if you really need care.

 

[Chris]

So it sounds pretty much like it's a crap shoot in Canada.

I know I can get treated anywhere I go in the US. For anything I've got. Within hours.

Pretty simple.

You really are living in a fantasy world.