Or if you don't. Even our poorest people have better care than most of the world today.
You tell me... would you rather be healed, and have an expensive hospital bill.... or die... but get to die free?
I'll give you my answer. I went to the hospital, and I had no money or insurance. They treated me, and I got a bill. It was big bill. But they fixed me right up. I just paid the bill. $50 here, $100 there. It required about a year of payments... but I'll take that over a socialized hell, where you wait years to see a doctor.
For the overwhelming majority of people, the answer to your question varies with regard to the life stage, and their satisfaction with the life they've lived, in which they find themselves when they must actually answer that question for real. It's nice to say in the abstract, and for the sake of posting something on USMB, what one thinks one would do or want if/when that time comes, but until it does, trust me, there's no being sure about that sort of thing.
For example:
- My father was diagnosed three years ago with cancer. He chose to pursue no form of treatment for it. It took me a month to wrap my head around that choice, but it was the right one in spite of his having ample ability to afford whatever treatment is available.
- "Do no resuscitate/do not keep alive" declarations -- More than a few people expressly state they don't want to be kept alive or resuscitated in the event they die or suffer meaningful quality of life impairments. One need not be young, old, wealthy or poor, to make that choice, and the choice has nothing to do with the quality of medical care one can receive. Indeed, it's made in recognition of the fact that medical science can effectively keep a person alive indefinitely if one wants that.
Blue:
For how much of the typical person's healthcare, especially a generally healthy person, is seeing a doctor even necessary? For example, do you really need a doctor to perform your annual physical, deal with your routine cuts and bruises, sneezes and sniffles, etc? For nearly all, if not all, of that stuff, a nurse practitioner is more than sufficient, and less costly than seeing a doctor.
Importantly for your remark, American wait times aren't particularly short according to the Commonwealth Fund.
The Commonwealth Fund, a New York-based foundation that focuses on health care, compared wait times in the United States to those in 10 other countries last year. “We were smug and we had the impression that the United States had no wait times — but it turns out that’s not true,” said Robin Osborn, a researcher for the foundation. “It’s the primary care where we’re really behind, with many people waiting six days or more” to get an appointment when they were “sick or needed care."
The study found that 26 percent of 2,002 American adults surveyed said they waited six days or more for appointments, better only than Canada (33 percent) and Norway (28 percent), and much worse than in other countries with national health systems like the Netherlands (14 percent) or Britain (16 percent). When it came to appointments with specialists, patients in Britain and Switzerland reported shorter waits than those in the United States, but the United States did rank better than the other eight countries.
I don't know what you've heard/read or why, but the fact is that what you've heard/read about wait times re: American healthcare, to the extent it forms the basis for your comment in blue above, is a misrepresentation of fact. I don't know of any Western nation like the U.S. where wait times span years.
But we're assuming you want to live. If you want to die.... you can make that choice in either system.
For those who wish to be healed, do you want to have a cheaper death... or an expensive, but cured and happy life? Most people, would rather be cured, and have a bill, than to die for free.
Now it's true, that wait times have increased in specific areas of the country, and specific groups. Contrary to all the promises that ObamaCrap would reduce people at the ER,
all the data shows more people than ever before are piling into ERs of Gov-funded hospitals.
The problem with your survey is, which American adults, going to which places?
I've had to go to the hospital, and to the doctor in the past, and my wait time was 1 day for a specialist. 1 Hour for the ER.
But here is the difference. I don't go to the gov-clinics. Or the 'public' hospital.
I go to the private hospital, and a private clinic. Government funded hospitals in the US, are just as bad as government funded hospitals in Canada.
Texas Man Dies After Waiting 16 Hours for Treatment in ER
16 hours in the ER. Died there. Never seen by a doctor. Why? Government funded.
Just like Canada.
Aboriginal Man Died After 34-Hour Emergency Room Wait
Winnipeg Canada. 36 hours in the ER. Never seen by a doctor. Died in the ER.
Government funded health care, works just as badly in the US, as it does in other countries.
A Tough Report on the V.A. Waiting-List Scandal - The New Yorker
The VA waiting list scandal.
NHS waiting list scandal revealed
The UK's NHS waiting list scandal.
Gov-care works just as badly here in the US, as it does everywhere.
So, when you point to a survey by The Commonwealth Fund of wait times in America.... who did they survey? People going to the VA? People going to a government hospital? To a gov-care clinic?
America is not a monolithic health care system. We have private clinics, private doctors, private hospitals. We also have gov-clinics, gov-doctors, and gov-hospitals. We have private insurance, and public insurance. So again....
WHO... DID THEY SURVEY?
A friend of mine, came back from Iraq, and he works for the VA. He *HATES* the VA, for this very reason. If he wants to see a doctor, he schedules it RIGHT NOW... because it will be 3 to 4 weeks before he can see him... even though he works in the same building.
You show me a survey were they specifically separated out those going to private clinics, verse public clinics. Separated those going to private doctors, and those going to Medicare/Medicaid doctors. Those going to private hospitals, or gov-hospitals.
Because
I've seen the difference personally. I was sent to a medicaid clinic years ago, to have some testing done. I would not have gone there for nothing, but someone else required it of me. The place was a wreck. Lights were out. Place was stuffy and hot. No A/C apparently. The chairs were broken. The waiting room itself was dirty, and the ceiling had water spots. And the place was full. By the way, the staffing was rude and uncaring too. And as far as I could tell, not a single person... not even one, was seen between the time I got there, and the time I left, which was about an hour.
Now if they surveyed those people... yeah the wait time in America is horrible. But that was a gov-medicare clinic. Socialized care sucks. It sucks just as bad in America, as anywhere else in the world.
Red:
There's no sense to that remark in this context.
- Suicide is the option for folks who want to die. The health care system, and hospitals in particular, don't play into that scenario. "Death by hospital" is not a mode of effecting one's death as far as I know.
- Plenty of people with chronic and fatal illnesses want to live. Choosing not to prolong their lives is choice made out of their awareness of their relatively soon and impending death, not their wanting to die instead of living. Rejecting life extending medical care, and by doing so allowing one's life to come to an end, is not the same as wanting to die.
I suppose I should anticipated the senselessness with which you'd open your reply to my remarks for the original (red) question to which I replied is foolish as well in that it presents an "or" choice but the choices it offers aren't mutually exclusive, which makes the question mere rhetoric, not a legitimate inquiry or authentic presentation of undertakings, even though the alternatives it presents are among the possible actions one might undertake. The text you present in your very next paragraph presents one of the options not offered in your "or" question.
The lack of informed rigor in your assertions is emphasized by your frequent use of "colorful" invective, descriptions and aspersions. Nobody who has the weight of careful research and analysis needs to use terms like "socialized hell" and "Obamacrap."
Blue:
You'll need to show some credible/objective evidence to support your assertion about what most people want. You could tell me that every soul you know feels that way and it still would not support the assertion. Neither you nor I know what most people want. We each can, however, identify, as I did, what factors play into a person's determination of what they want if/when they are forced to choose.
You'll need to show credible evidence regarding the comparative "better-ness or worse-ness" of U.S. public hospitals vs. Canadian ones.
Again, you'll need to show some credible evidence that your assertion holds true at the broad level at which you made it. Being better or worse on a single or a few dimensions in no way supports an assertion of a whole system being better or worse than any other whole system. The report I provided clearly shows that national health care is delivered in the U.S. less effectively than it is in other Westernized nations. So, however bad it is there, it's worse in the U.S. That it's worse in the U.S. indicates there is ample room for improving the delivery of nationalized health care, so that at the very least, it's no worse than in other similar countries.
Purple:
If you want to constrain the context of our discussion to emergency room care, fine, but that's not a limiting factor you noted in the post to which I replied. The reason I'm fine with that constraint is obvious: ER wait times have increased with ER usage rates.
Emergency room use is increasing beyond what it was before the ACA's ratification. That ER usage rates have increased has direct implications for wait times in emergency rooms. It has little to do with wait times for scheduled health care services such as doctor appointments and scheduled procedures.
It's plausible that the ACA is one of the factors making ER use rates increase, but it's hardly certain.
Why isn't it certain? It's not because hospital ERs cannot reject patients. The ACA has made insurance, and thus non-emergency care, available to low wealth/income people; however,
the insurance such folks who are "poor enough" isn't necessarily accepted by all doctors and treatment facilities. That means that often enough, as evidenced in part by the boost in ER demand, poor folks must, or at least do, continue to use the ER rather than scheduling services for what to the non-poor would be routine or non-acute care. The ACA could have been written to require all doctors and care facilities to accept "poor folks'" insurance, but it wasn't, that it wasn't is in part why ER wait times are long.
Green:
Who goes where is not a problem with the survey.
Are you now withdrawing your early broad based assertions about wait times and instead making them only with regard to emergency room care, just public hospital services, or private hospital services?
Orange:
Were you to have read the report, you'd know the answer to that question.
Light Blue:
Yours, my, your friends, etc. anecdotal observations are of no merit in making credible claims about a system and its participating users and providers, the sum total of whom number in the tens of millions. Even if 100% of the people whom you or/and I know (even casually) were to feel the exact same way on the matter, that'd say more about whom we know than it does about what people experience re: wait times across the whole healthcare system.
Olive:
You go find one yourself. You are the one making the claim about the differences in wait times between public and non-public hospitals.
Red:
Perhaps my point is unclear. I'm not suggesting that people are literally thinking "I want to do. So I'll go to a hospital that is free". The logical failure is that people assume that government funded free care, is of the exact same quality as privately funded care.
It's not. It simply isn't. I have yet to see a single report showing that Gov-care is of the same quality as private care. Not once. Canada officials have on several occasions, come to the US for care, and paying for it, rather than go to the free-care hospitals they fund with tax money. Castro didn't go to a Cuban hospital when he needed surgery. He hired, and paid a private doctor to come to Cuba, just for him. There's a reason the rich in the UK, and the rich in France, and the rich all over world, fly out of their countries where care is free, and go to pay-for-service capitalist based hospitals in other countries.
If your wife has breast cancer, which country do you want her to be in? Hey, if you go to Norway, it's free! Granted 20% chance of dying instead of surviving, but it's free. That's what is important right? Or you can pay a bill.... but have a 90% chance of being cured. Which would she rather have? How about you get Bowel Cancer. The UK has free care! 50/50 chance of surviving... but that's not important.... what's important is that it's free.
Now to most people if you ask them would you rather be cured but have an expensive hospital bill.... or would you rather have no bill, but a much higher chance of dying..... most people would rather pay the money. We know this because people come to the US, and other countries, for care, even though they get "free" health care in their home countries.
Blue:
I should direct conclusive evidence, that showed gov-care facilities having the exact same problems in the US, as gov-care facilities in other countries.
Purple:
I already posted clear cut proof, that wait times on dozens of things was drastically longer under socialized care. Compare wait times for elective surgery. Wait times for diagnostic scans. Wait times on treatment. Wait times in the ER. I posted proof of this from Canada, and the UK.
The wait time for a check up, is not nearly as significant, as waiting for an MRI, or a cancer treatment.
While we can't say with absolute certainty, that the ACA is directly the cause of increased wait times in the ER, we can say that the ACA is a total failure at reducing wait times in the ER, which is one of the specific claims they made about what the ACA would do.
Again, this isn't a shock to anyone on the free-market capitalist right. I predicted this years ago.
That said, from my own experience, my insurance costs have drastically increased under the ObamaCrap. It's a fairly easy then, to conclude that more people, rather than fewer, are forgoing insurance all together, and just going to the hospital, because that is the situation I'm almost in myself. I don't make enough money to afford the now absolutely insane insurance premiums under ACA, and at the same time, almost make too much to qualify for forcing you to my insurance. If Aetna does abandon the subsidized insurance market, then I simply won't have insurance. That's who my insurance is with.
And since I can't go to a private hospital, I'll have to wait 36-hours at the public ones, like all the other idiots. Then you can proudly point to me, as an example of a right-wingers life you ruined. Thanks dude. Glad you care about the lower class.
Green:
It most certainly is.
ER Wait Time in Columbus Hospitals - Columbus, OH - HospitalStats
First the data from the survey does not go back before Obama Care was passed. We only have from 2009, onward.
But even under Obama Care, which hospital has the best wait time? The government funded Ohio State University Hospital? Or Riverside, or Grant, both of which are private hospitals? Mount Carmel which is now largely funded by government?
How many examples do you need before you start seeing a pattern?
This is a website I have downloaded to my hard drive. It's a blog from the Momocrats web site.
The reason I downloaded the entire page, to my computer, was because I knew once they figured out how bad this blog made them look, they would take it down, and sure enough they did.
The entire blog is how this DNC chick, went to the Denver Democrat National Convention in 2008, and got sick. She asked where to go, and they sent her first to a publicly funded gov-care clinic. The service was horrific. It was dirty, stuffy and hot, and she waited hours, and was never seen by anyone.
She got fed up, and left. She went to a pay-for-service private clinic, and was seen in minutes. The place was clean. Service was fantastic.
Of course this Idiotocrat, blamed Republicans somehow, because it was their fault that gov-care sucked, and private care was amazing.
Nevertheless, her experience has been identical to my own experience, and the experience of everyone I've met, and the experience of people who actually work for gov-care clinics.
At some point, it's no longer anecdotal, when EVERYONE has the same experience, even people who support the policies I'm against... are having the same experience.
Just for giggles. I don't live in New York, and never have. I punched in New York wait times.
Top two longest wait times.... Woodhull Medical (government owned and operated), and Kings County Hospital (government owned and operated).
The third one, was a privately owned hospital of some sort, and I didn't check to see where their funding comes from, to see if they are government funded or not.
I didn't because, already my point is made. Right there it is. National average 24 minutes. New York State average, 27 Minutes. Two longest wait times, at two government hospitals, 120 minutes.
As far as I'm concerned, I've given enough evidence to make my case. You on the other hand, have not.
That survey you posted, did not distinguish between government funded clinics hospitals and doctors. So when you include slow crappy gov-care, with snappy private care clinics, the survey is meaningless.
It does not show that capitalist based care is the same as, or worse than socialized care, because you are including socialized care wait times, in that survey. Thus the survey is completely useless.
