Socialized medicine does not work...

It can't work, because the deadbeats will always abuse the system every time…

Single payer healthcare is an assurance that even deadbeats like you will have access to healthcare. When needed.
I pay for my own shit I don't expect anyone else to least of all the federal government…

That's nonsense. So do you send a check to the faa everytime you book a flight to cover the cost of their service? To help make sure you arrive at your destination safely.
Because if not & according to you, you're just another deadbeat abusing the system.
 
rustic...you are a traitor to The Constitution and Its Writing's, The Bill of Rights, Freedom, Democracy and The Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness. Nothing more, nothing less. 200 years ago, they would have hung you.
 
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Socialized medicine does not work...

At least Universal Care would have citizen oversight panels instead of the clandestine "kill for profit" private insurance we see today...that allows for no citizen oversight..

A private health insurance/hospital (HMO) killed a family member of mine. They just did it by withholding simple medication that would've saved his life...as he spoke clearly that he wanted to live at the time, after signing a living will saying "take me at the right time". His power of attorney decided his bank accounts would be more easily accessed if he wasn't around. The HMO seemed to agree with her and the "decision" was made in spite of his protests. God rest his soul. If you're old and belong to an HMO (who profits the less they have to take care of you), you are failing Darwin's test.

I THINK the argument of some is that if we have universal healthcare, "death panels" will exist. What I can assure you of is that I'd much rather gamble with a healthcare system with ample citizen oversight, than an HMO who STANDS TO PROFIT WHEN YOU DIE handling my medical care as I age and retire. After a number of years where they've padded up your premiums you've not yet used in a bank account they control, as you age and start needing medical help more, you are nothing but a losing bottom line.

And so "decisions" like the one made for my family member with the help of the hospital attending which was an HMO, can be made for financial gain and not the longevity of the patient. There's no motive to kill the elderly, or the young unwell off like for-profit private insurance. The financial model demands it in fact as a service to shareholders.

HMOs should be illegal. They are where the insurance company IS the hospital. Whereas in normal situations, the hospital and insurance companies are divested financially. Doctors in regular hospitals make the hard calls and wrangle with insurers demanding the patient come first. With an HMO, all that is done 'in house'...and so if there's a question...and the doctor wants to keep his job *ahem*, he sides with the financial bottom line instead of the patient.....which is exactly why an HMO conspired with my family member's power of attorney, who stood also to gain hugely $$ when he died, to kill my family member.

And that is exactly what happened...as he asked to be spared no less from his sickbed. They called that request "merely a delusion" because he had impaired mental capacity (wasn't sure what day it was or who was president when they asked him upon my insistence). So, they had their loophole and they ran with it..
 
They don't demand you pay them. And they don't owe you a damn thing. How amazing leftist entitlement is.

They set the rates. They are the parasites. How come your premiums are so expensive? Because they have to make a profit. Health is one of the few industries that should not be for profit (I'm talking about the hospital side of things, not the drugs and all the peripheral stuff)
so doctors, nurses, the janitors, food prep people, all of those that develop, build, sell and maintain the equipment should all work for free? hospitals should never upgrade in order to keep up with technology?
interesting
 
What the OP and his cheerleaders on the right are trying to say is that healthcare should only be available at market prices to those who can afford to pay for it out of their own pocket.
 
OK, so where is not socialized medicine working better than wherever it's socialized to one degree or another?


Yeah...all of these countries I linked to before.......
Iceland...


Iceland's Universal Healthcare (Still) On Thin Ice - The Reykjavik Grapevine

One year ago, Iceland’s lauded universal healthcare system seemed to be teetering off the edge. Doctors’ wages had stagnated after the economic crash, and following a bout of failed negotiations, they went on strike for the first time ever. While they coordinated their actions to avoid endangering patients’ lives, the doctors’ message was clear: if demands were not met, they would seek employment elsewhere.

Coupled with years of tough austerity measures, faltering morale, and an infrastructure in dire disrepair, there was not much slack to give. In an in-depth analysis, we at the Grapevine tried to figure out what, exactly, was going on, and where we were headed.
=========

WHO | New Zealand cuts health spending to control costs
New Zealand cuts health spending to control costs

New Zealand’s health-care system is undergoing a series of cutbacks to reduce costs, but critics are concerned that the health of people on low incomes and in some population groups may suffer. Rebecca Lancashire reports in our series on health financing.

When Robyn Pope was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008 she was told that she would have to wait two months for a mastectomy if she wanted breast reconstruction as part of her treatment in the public health system. “Two months may not seem like a long time,” says Pope, a mother of three, who lives on the Kapiti Coast of New Zealand, “but a day lived knowing that you have cancer in your body is like an eternity”.

The underlying reason for the delay was a familiar one – funding. Like other countries offering universal health care, New Zealand struggles to meet the steadily growing demand for a full range of high-quality health services offered largely for free to everyone, while remaining cost efficient. In the past eight years, New Zealand’s total health expenditure has doubled to 3.6 billion New Zealand dollars (NZ$) (US$ 10 billion). In the face of economic slow down, the government is calling for reform to rein in this expenditure.

===========


Sweden


'Sweden's healthcare is an embarrassment'



Swedish was once a health care model for the world. But that is hardly the case anymore.

This is not primarily due to the fact Sweden has become worse - rather it is the case that other countries have improved faster.

That Sweden no longer keeps up with those countries is largely due to its inability to reduce its patient waiting times, which are some of the worst in Europe, as the latest edition of the Euro Health Consumer Index (EHCI) revealed in Brussels on Monday.

The 2014 EHCI also confirms other big problems within Swedish healthcare.
===============

France....

France's Health-Care System Is Going Broke

Yet France’s looming recession and a steady increase in chronic diseases including diabetes threaten to change that, says Willy Hodin, who heads Groupe PHR, an umbrella organization for 2,200 French pharmacies. The health system exceeds its budget by billions of euros each year, and in the face of rising costs, taxpayer-funded benefits such as spa treatments, which the French have long justified as preventive care, now look more like expendable luxuries.
“Reform is needed fast,” Hodin says. “The most optimistic believe this system can survive another five to six years. The less optimistic don’t think it will last more than three.”
===========


Finland...

Why is Finland’s healthcare system failing my family? | Ed Dutton

Finland’s health service has been in a parlous state for decades and it is getting worse.
According to an OECD report published in 2013, the Finnish health system is chronically underfunded. The Nordic nation of five million people spent only 7% of GDP on its public health system in 2012, compared with 8% in the UK. In 2012, the report found, 80% of the Finnish population had to wait more than two weeks to see a GP. Finland’s high taxes go on education and daycare.
Finland has more doctors per capita than the UK but, at the level of primary care, a far higher proportion of these are private than is the case in Britain. And the Finnish equivalent of the NHS is far from free at the point of use.
A GP appointment costs €16.10 (£12.52), though you pay for only the first three visits in a given year. A hospital consultation costs about €38, and you pay for each night that you spend in hospital, up to a maximum of €679. And once you get to the chemist, there is no flat fee; no belief that you shouldn’t be financially penalised for the nature of the medicine you require.
The service is not national, but municipal, meaning that poorer areas of the country tend to have a bad health service and limited access even to private GPs, who set up practices in more affluent areas.

---------

Canada....

If Universal Health Care Is The Goal, Don't Copy Canada

Amongst industrialized countries -- members of the OECD -- with universal health care, Canada has the second most expensive health care system as a share of the economy after adjusting for age. This is not necessarily a problem, however, depending on the value received for such spending. As countries become richer, citizens may choose to allocate a larger portion of their income to health care. However, such expenditures are a problem when they are not matched by value.
The most visible manifestation of Canada’s failing health care system are wait times for health care services. In 2013, Canadians, on average, faced a four and a half month wait for medically necessary treatment after referral by a general practitioner. This wait time is almost twice as long as it was in 1993 when national wait times were first measured.
--------

Long wait times in Canada have also been observed for basic diagnostic imaging technologies that Americans take for granted, which are crucial for determining the severity of a patient’s condition. In 2013, the average wait time for an MRI was over two months, while Canadians needing a CT scan waited for almost a month.

These wait times are not simply “minor inconveniences.” Patients experience physical pain and suffering, mental anguish, and lost economic productivity while waiting for treatment. One recent estimate (2013) found that the value of time lost due to medical wait times in Canada amounted to approximately $1,200 per patient.

There is also considerable evidence indicating that excessive wait times lead to poorer health outcomes and in some cases, death. Dr. Brian Day, former head of the Canadian Medical Association recently noted that “[d]elayed care often transforms an acute and potentially reversible illness or injury into a chronic, irreversible condition that involves permanent disability.”

And more on Canada...


The Ugly Truth About Canadian Health Care

Mountain-bike enthusiast Suzanne Aucoin had to fight more than her Stage IV colon cancer. Her doctor suggested Erbitux—a proven cancer drug that targets cancer cells exclusively, unlike conventional chemotherapies that more crudely kill all fast-growing cells in the body—and Aucoin went to a clinic to begin treatment. But if Erbitux offered hope, Aucoin’s insurance didn’t: she received one inscrutable form letter after another, rejecting her claim for reimbursement. Yet another example of the callous hand of managed care, depriving someone of needed medical help, right? Guess again. Erbitux is standard treatment, covered by insurance companies—in the United States. Aucoin lives in Ontario, Canada.

When Aucoin appealed to an official ombudsman, the Ontario government claimed that her treatment was unproven and that she had gone to an unaccredited clinic. But the FDA in the U.S. had approved Erbitux, and her clinic was a cancer center affiliated with a prominent Catholic hospital in Buffalo. This January, the ombudsman ruled in Aucoin’s favor, awarding her the cost of treatment. She represents a dramatic new trend in Canadian health-care advocacy: finding the treatment you need in another country, and then fighting Canadian bureaucrats (and often suing) to get them to pick up the tab.

And the truth.......that Canadians don't see until it is too late.....

My health-care prejudices crumbled not in the classroom but on the way to one. On a subzero Winnipeg morning in 1997, I cut across the hospital emergency room to shave a few minutes off my frigid commute. Swinging open the door, I stepped into a nightmare: the ER overflowed with elderly people on stretchers, waiting for admission. Some, it turned out, had waited five days. The air stank with sweat and urine. Right then, I began to reconsider everything that I thought I knew about Canadian health care. I soon discovered that the problems went well beyond overcrowded ERs. Patients had to wait for practically any diagnostic test or procedure, such as the man with persistent pain from a hernia operation whom we referred to a pain clinic—with a three-year wait list; or the woman needing a sleep study to diagnose what seemed like sleep apnea, who faced a two-year delay; or the woman with breast cancer who needed to wait four months for radiation therapy, when the standard of care was four weeks.
Norway.....
Government Health Care Horror Stories from Norway

I'll admit this: if, like me, you're a self-employed person with a marginal income, the Norwegian system is, in many ways, a boon – as long as you're careful not to get anything much more serious than a cold or flu.

Doctors' visits are cheap; hospitalization is free. But you get what you pay for. There are excellent doctors in Norway – but there are also mediocrities and outright incompetents who in the U.S. would have been stripped of their licenses long ago. The fact is that while the ubiquity of frivolous malpractice lawsuits in the U.S. has been a disgrace, the inability of Norwegians to sue doctors or hospitals even in the most egregious of circumstances is even more of a disgrace.

Physicians who in the U.S. would be dragged into court are, under the Norwegian system, reported to a local board consisting of their own colleagues – who are also, not infrequently, their longtime friends.

(The government health system's own website puts it this way: if you suspect malpractice, you have the right to “ask the Norwegian Board of Health Supervision in your county to evaluate” your claims.)

As a result, doctors who should be forcibly retired, if not incarcerated, end up with a slap on the wrist. When patients are awarded financial damages, the sums – paid by the state, not the doctor – are insultingly small.
------------

Take the case of Peter Franks, whose doctor sent him home twice despite a tennis-ball-sized lump in his chest that was oozing blood and pus – and that turned out to be a cancer that was diagnosed too late to save his life. Apropos of Franks's case, a jurist who specializes in patients' rights lamented that the Norwegian health-care system responds to sky-high malpractice figures “with a shrug,” and the dying Franks himself pronounced last year that “the responsibility for malpractice has been pulverized in Norway,” saying that “if I could have sued the doctor, I would have. Other doctors would have read about the lawsuit in the newspaper. Then they would have taken greater care to avoid making such a mistake themselves. But doctors in Norway don't have to take responsibility for their mistakes. The state does it.” After a three-year legal struggle, Franks was awarded 2.7 million kroner by the Norwegian government – about half a million dollars.

Another aspect of Norway's guild-like health-care system is that although the country suffers from a severe deficit of doctors, nurses, and midwives, the medical establishment makes it next to impossible for highly qualified foreign members of these professions to get certified to practice in Norway. The daughter of a friend of mine got a nursing degree at the University of North Dakota in 2009 but, as reported last Friday by NRK, is working in Seattle because the Norwegian authorities in charge of these matters – who have refused to be interviewed on this subject by NRK – have stubbornly denied her a license. Why? My guess is that the answer has a lot to do with three things: competence, competition, and control. If there were a surplus of doctors and nurses instead of a shortage, the good ones would drive out the bad. Plainly, such a situation must be avoided at all costs – including the cost of human lives.

Then there's the waiting lists. At the beginning of 2012, over 281,000 patients in Norway, out of a population of five million, were awaiting treatment for some medical problem or other. Bureaucratic absurdities run rampant, as exemplified by thisAftenposten story from earlier this year:
 
OK, so where is not socialized medicine working better than wherever it's socialized to one degree or another?


Yeah...all of these countries I linked to before.......
Iceland...


Iceland's Universal Healthcare (Still) On Thin Ice - The Reykjavik Grapevine

One year ago, Iceland’s lauded universal healthcare system seemed to be teetering off the edge. Doctors’ wages had stagnated after the economic crash, and following a bout of failed negotiations, they went on strike for the first time ever. While they coordinated their actions to avoid endangering patients’ lives, the doctors’ message was clear: if demands were not met, they would seek employment elsewhere.

Coupled with years of tough austerity measures, faltering morale, and an infrastructure in dire disrepair, there was not much slack to give. In an in-depth analysis, we at the Grapevine tried to figure out what, exactly, was going on, and where we were headed.
=========

WHO | New Zealand cuts health spending to control costs
New Zealand cuts health spending to control costs

New Zealand’s health-care system is undergoing a series of cutbacks to reduce costs, but critics are concerned that the health of people on low incomes and in some population groups may suffer. Rebecca Lancashire reports in our series on health financing.

When Robyn Pope was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008 she was told that she would have to wait two months for a mastectomy if she wanted breast reconstruction as part of her treatment in the public health system. “Two months may not seem like a long time,” says Pope, a mother of three, who lives on the Kapiti Coast of New Zealand, “but a day lived knowing that you have cancer in your body is like an eternity”.

The underlying reason for the delay was a familiar one – funding. Like other countries offering universal health care, New Zealand struggles to meet the steadily growing demand for a full range of high-quality health services offered largely for free to everyone, while remaining cost efficient. In the past eight years, New Zealand’s total health expenditure has doubled to 3.6 billion New Zealand dollars (NZ$) (US$ 10 billion). In the face of economic slow down, the government is calling for reform to rein in this expenditure.

===========


Sweden


'Sweden's healthcare is an embarrassment'



Swedish was once a health care model for the world. But that is hardly the case anymore.

This is not primarily due to the fact Sweden has become worse - rather it is the case that other countries have improved faster.

That Sweden no longer keeps up with those countries is largely due to its inability to reduce its patient waiting times, which are some of the worst in Europe, as the latest edition of the Euro Health Consumer Index (EHCI) revealed in Brussels on Monday.

The 2014 EHCI also confirms other big problems within Swedish healthcare.
===============

France....

France's Health-Care System Is Going Broke

Yet France’s looming recession and a steady increase in chronic diseases including diabetes threaten to change that, says Willy Hodin, who heads Groupe PHR, an umbrella organization for 2,200 French pharmacies. The health system exceeds its budget by billions of euros each year, and in the face of rising costs, taxpayer-funded benefits such as spa treatments, which the French have long justified as preventive care, now look more like expendable luxuries.
“Reform is needed fast,” Hodin says. “The most optimistic believe this system can survive another five to six years. The less optimistic don’t think it will last more than three.”
===========


Finland...

Why is Finland’s healthcare system failing my family? | Ed Dutton

Finland’s health service has been in a parlous state for decades and it is getting worse.
According to an OECD report published in 2013, the Finnish health system is chronically underfunded. The Nordic nation of five million people spent only 7% of GDP on its public health system in 2012, compared with 8% in the UK. In 2012, the report found, 80% of the Finnish population had to wait more than two weeks to see a GP. Finland’s high taxes go on education and daycare.
Finland has more doctors per capita than the UK but, at the level of primary care, a far higher proportion of these are private than is the case in Britain. And the Finnish equivalent of the NHS is far from free at the point of use.
A GP appointment costs €16.10 (£12.52), though you pay for only the first three visits in a given year. A hospital consultation costs about €38, and you pay for each night that you spend in hospital, up to a maximum of €679. And once you get to the chemist, there is no flat fee; no belief that you shouldn’t be financially penalised for the nature of the medicine you require.
The service is not national, but municipal, meaning that poorer areas of the country tend to have a bad health service and limited access even to private GPs, who set up practices in more affluent areas.

---------

Canada....

If Universal Health Care Is The Goal, Don't Copy Canada

Amongst industrialized countries -- members of the OECD -- with universal health care, Canada has the second most expensive health care system as a share of the economy after adjusting for age. This is not necessarily a problem, however, depending on the value received for such spending. As countries become richer, citizens may choose to allocate a larger portion of their income to health care. However, such expenditures are a problem when they are not matched by value.
The most visible manifestation of Canada’s failing health care system are wait times for health care services. In 2013, Canadians, on average, faced a four and a half month wait for medically necessary treatment after referral by a general practitioner. This wait time is almost twice as long as it was in 1993 when national wait times were first measured.
--------

Long wait times in Canada have also been observed for basic diagnostic imaging technologies that Americans take for granted, which are crucial for determining the severity of a patient’s condition. In 2013, the average wait time for an MRI was over two months, while Canadians needing a CT scan waited for almost a month.

These wait times are not simply “minor inconveniences.” Patients experience physical pain and suffering, mental anguish, and lost economic productivity while waiting for treatment. One recent estimate (2013) found that the value of time lost due to medical wait times in Canada amounted to approximately $1,200 per patient.

There is also considerable evidence indicating that excessive wait times lead to poorer health outcomes and in some cases, death. Dr. Brian Day, former head of the Canadian Medical Association recently noted that “[d]elayed care often transforms an acute and potentially reversible illness or injury into a chronic, irreversible condition that involves permanent disability.”

And more on Canada...


The Ugly Truth About Canadian Health Care

Mountain-bike enthusiast Suzanne Aucoin had to fight more than her Stage IV colon cancer. Her doctor suggested Erbitux—a proven cancer drug that targets cancer cells exclusively, unlike conventional chemotherapies that more crudely kill all fast-growing cells in the body—and Aucoin went to a clinic to begin treatment. But if Erbitux offered hope, Aucoin’s insurance didn’t: she received one inscrutable form letter after another, rejecting her claim for reimbursement. Yet another example of the callous hand of managed care, depriving someone of needed medical help, right? Guess again. Erbitux is standard treatment, covered by insurance companies—in the United States. Aucoin lives in Ontario, Canada.

When Aucoin appealed to an official ombudsman, the Ontario government claimed that her treatment was unproven and that she had gone to an unaccredited clinic. But the FDA in the U.S. had approved Erbitux, and her clinic was a cancer center affiliated with a prominent Catholic hospital in Buffalo. This January, the ombudsman ruled in Aucoin’s favor, awarding her the cost of treatment. She represents a dramatic new trend in Canadian health-care advocacy: finding the treatment you need in another country, and then fighting Canadian bureaucrats (and often suing) to get them to pick up the tab.

And the truth.......that Canadians don't see until it is too late.....

My health-care prejudices crumbled not in the classroom but on the way to one. On a subzero Winnipeg morning in 1997, I cut across the hospital emergency room to shave a few minutes off my frigid commute. Swinging open the door, I stepped into a nightmare: the ER overflowed with elderly people on stretchers, waiting for admission. Some, it turned out, had waited five days. The air stank with sweat and urine. Right then, I began to reconsider everything that I thought I knew about Canadian health care. I soon discovered that the problems went well beyond overcrowded ERs. Patients had to wait for practically any diagnostic test or procedure, such as the man with persistent pain from a hernia operation whom we referred to a pain clinic—with a three-year wait list; or the woman needing a sleep study to diagnose what seemed like sleep apnea, who faced a two-year delay; or the woman with breast cancer who needed to wait four months for radiation therapy, when the standard of care was four weeks.
Norway.....
Government Health Care Horror Stories from Norway

I'll admit this: if, like me, you're a self-employed person with a marginal income, the Norwegian system is, in many ways, a boon – as long as you're careful not to get anything much more serious than a cold or flu.

Doctors' visits are cheap; hospitalization is free. But you get what you pay for. There are excellent doctors in Norway – but there are also mediocrities and outright incompetents who in the U.S. would have been stripped of their licenses long ago. The fact is that while the ubiquity of frivolous malpractice lawsuits in the U.S. has been a disgrace, the inability of Norwegians to sue doctors or hospitals even in the most egregious of circumstances is even more of a disgrace.

Physicians who in the U.S. would be dragged into court are, under the Norwegian system, reported to a local board consisting of their own colleagues – who are also, not infrequently, their longtime friends.

(The government health system's own website puts it this way: if you suspect malpractice, you have the right to “ask the Norwegian Board of Health Supervision in your county to evaluate” your claims.)

As a result, doctors who should be forcibly retired, if not incarcerated, end up with a slap on the wrist. When patients are awarded financial damages, the sums – paid by the state, not the doctor – are insultingly small.
------------

Take the case of Peter Franks, whose doctor sent him home twice despite a tennis-ball-sized lump in his chest that was oozing blood and pus – and that turned out to be a cancer that was diagnosed too late to save his life. Apropos of Franks's case, a jurist who specializes in patients' rights lamented that the Norwegian health-care system responds to sky-high malpractice figures “with a shrug,” and the dying Franks himself pronounced last year that “the responsibility for malpractice has been pulverized in Norway,” saying that “if I could have sued the doctor, I would have. Other doctors would have read about the lawsuit in the newspaper. Then they would have taken greater care to avoid making such a mistake themselves. But doctors in Norway don't have to take responsibility for their mistakes. The state does it.” After a three-year legal struggle, Franks was awarded 2.7 million kroner by the Norwegian government – about half a million dollars.

Another aspect of Norway's guild-like health-care system is that although the country suffers from a severe deficit of doctors, nurses, and midwives, the medical establishment makes it next to impossible for highly qualified foreign members of these professions to get certified to practice in Norway. The daughter of a friend of mine got a nursing degree at the University of North Dakota in 2009 but, as reported last Friday by NRK, is working in Seattle because the Norwegian authorities in charge of these matters – who have refused to be interviewed on this subject by NRK – have stubbornly denied her a license. Why? My guess is that the answer has a lot to do with three things: competence, competition, and control. If there were a surplus of doctors and nurses instead of a shortage, the good ones would drive out the bad. Plainly, such a situation must be avoided at all costs – including the cost of human lives.

Then there's the waiting lists. At the beginning of 2012, over 281,000 patients in Norway, out of a population of five million, were awaiting treatment for some medical problem or other. Bureaucratic absurdities run rampant, as exemplified by thisAftenposten story from earlier this year:

Maybe the problem is the prices charged?
 
Last edited:
Your a capitalist. Already proven to be predatory by nature....commoditizing everything...even life itself for profit and now you go against all of what you believe to give the poor a better life?......fuuuuuuuuuck yooooooou. What a crock of shit. Give me socialised health care now. Fuck your profits. I could not care less about your profits.
 
OK, so where is not socialized medicine working better than wherever it's socialized to one degree or another?


Yeah...all of these countries I linked to before.......
Iceland...


Iceland's Universal Healthcare (Still) On Thin Ice - The Reykjavik Grapevine

One year ago, Iceland’s lauded universal healthcare system seemed to be teetering off the edge. Doctors’ wages had stagnated after the economic crash, and following a bout of failed negotiations, they went on strike for the first time ever. While they coordinated their actions to avoid endangering patients’ lives, the doctors’ message was clear: if demands were not met, they would seek employment elsewhere.

Coupled with years of tough austerity measures, faltering morale, and an infrastructure in dire disrepair, there was not much slack to give. In an in-depth analysis, we at the Grapevine tried to figure out what, exactly, was going on, and where we were headed.
=========

WHO | New Zealand cuts health spending to control costs
New Zealand cuts health spending to control costs

New Zealand’s health-care system is undergoing a series of cutbacks to reduce costs, but critics are concerned that the health of people on low incomes and in some population groups may suffer. Rebecca Lancashire reports in our series on health financing.

When Robyn Pope was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008 she was told that she would have to wait two months for a mastectomy if she wanted breast reconstruction as part of her treatment in the public health system. “Two months may not seem like a long time,” says Pope, a mother of three, who lives on the Kapiti Coast of New Zealand, “but a day lived knowing that you have cancer in your body is like an eternity”.

The underlying reason for the delay was a familiar one – funding. Like other countries offering universal health care, New Zealand struggles to meet the steadily growing demand for a full range of high-quality health services offered largely for free to everyone, while remaining cost efficient. In the past eight years, New Zealand’s total health expenditure has doubled to 3.6 billion New Zealand dollars (NZ$) (US$ 10 billion). In the face of economic slow down, the government is calling for reform to rein in this expenditure.

===========


Sweden


'Sweden's healthcare is an embarrassment'



Swedish was once a health care model for the world. But that is hardly the case anymore.

This is not primarily due to the fact Sweden has become worse - rather it is the case that other countries have improved faster.

That Sweden no longer keeps up with those countries is largely due to its inability to reduce its patient waiting times, which are some of the worst in Europe, as the latest edition of the Euro Health Consumer Index (EHCI) revealed in Brussels on Monday.

The 2014 EHCI also confirms other big problems within Swedish healthcare.
===============

France....

France's Health-Care System Is Going Broke

Yet France’s looming recession and a steady increase in chronic diseases including diabetes threaten to change that, says Willy Hodin, who heads Groupe PHR, an umbrella organization for 2,200 French pharmacies. The health system exceeds its budget by billions of euros each year, and in the face of rising costs, taxpayer-funded benefits such as spa treatments, which the French have long justified as preventive care, now look more like expendable luxuries.
“Reform is needed fast,” Hodin says. “The most optimistic believe this system can survive another five to six years. The less optimistic don’t think it will last more than three.”
===========


Finland...

Why is Finland’s healthcare system failing my family? | Ed Dutton

Finland’s health service has been in a parlous state for decades and it is getting worse.
According to an OECD report published in 2013, the Finnish health system is chronically underfunded. The Nordic nation of five million people spent only 7% of GDP on its public health system in 2012, compared with 8% in the UK. In 2012, the report found, 80% of the Finnish population had to wait more than two weeks to see a GP. Finland’s high taxes go on education and daycare.
Finland has more doctors per capita than the UK but, at the level of primary care, a far higher proportion of these are private than is the case in Britain. And the Finnish equivalent of the NHS is far from free at the point of use.
A GP appointment costs €16.10 (£12.52), though you pay for only the first three visits in a given year. A hospital consultation costs about €38, and you pay for each night that you spend in hospital, up to a maximum of €679. And once you get to the chemist, there is no flat fee; no belief that you shouldn’t be financially penalised for the nature of the medicine you require.
The service is not national, but municipal, meaning that poorer areas of the country tend to have a bad health service and limited access even to private GPs, who set up practices in more affluent areas.

---------

Canada....

If Universal Health Care Is The Goal, Don't Copy Canada

Amongst industrialized countries -- members of the OECD -- with universal health care, Canada has the second most expensive health care system as a share of the economy after adjusting for age. This is not necessarily a problem, however, depending on the value received for such spending. As countries become richer, citizens may choose to allocate a larger portion of their income to health care. However, such expenditures are a problem when they are not matched by value.
The most visible manifestation of Canada’s failing health care system are wait times for health care services. In 2013, Canadians, on average, faced a four and a half month wait for medically necessary treatment after referral by a general practitioner. This wait time is almost twice as long as it was in 1993 when national wait times were first measured.
--------

Long wait times in Canada have also been observed for basic diagnostic imaging technologies that Americans take for granted, which are crucial for determining the severity of a patient’s condition. In 2013, the average wait time for an MRI was over two months, while Canadians needing a CT scan waited for almost a month.

These wait times are not simply “minor inconveniences.” Patients experience physical pain and suffering, mental anguish, and lost economic productivity while waiting for treatment. One recent estimate (2013) found that the value of time lost due to medical wait times in Canada amounted to approximately $1,200 per patient.

There is also considerable evidence indicating that excessive wait times lead to poorer health outcomes and in some cases, death. Dr. Brian Day, former head of the Canadian Medical Association recently noted that “[d]elayed care often transforms an acute and potentially reversible illness or injury into a chronic, irreversible condition that involves permanent disability.”

And more on Canada...


The Ugly Truth About Canadian Health Care

Mountain-bike enthusiast Suzanne Aucoin had to fight more than her Stage IV colon cancer. Her doctor suggested Erbitux—a proven cancer drug that targets cancer cells exclusively, unlike conventional chemotherapies that more crudely kill all fast-growing cells in the body—and Aucoin went to a clinic to begin treatment. But if Erbitux offered hope, Aucoin’s insurance didn’t: she received one inscrutable form letter after another, rejecting her claim for reimbursement. Yet another example of the callous hand of managed care, depriving someone of needed medical help, right? Guess again. Erbitux is standard treatment, covered by insurance companies—in the United States. Aucoin lives in Ontario, Canada.

When Aucoin appealed to an official ombudsman, the Ontario government claimed that her treatment was unproven and that she had gone to an unaccredited clinic. But the FDA in the U.S. had approved Erbitux, and her clinic was a cancer center affiliated with a prominent Catholic hospital in Buffalo. This January, the ombudsman ruled in Aucoin’s favor, awarding her the cost of treatment. She represents a dramatic new trend in Canadian health-care advocacy: finding the treatment you need in another country, and then fighting Canadian bureaucrats (and often suing) to get them to pick up the tab.

And the truth.......that Canadians don't see until it is too late.....

My health-care prejudices crumbled not in the classroom but on the way to one. On a subzero Winnipeg morning in 1997, I cut across the hospital emergency room to shave a few minutes off my frigid commute. Swinging open the door, I stepped into a nightmare: the ER overflowed with elderly people on stretchers, waiting for admission. Some, it turned out, had waited five days. The air stank with sweat and urine. Right then, I began to reconsider everything that I thought I knew about Canadian health care. I soon discovered that the problems went well beyond overcrowded ERs. Patients had to wait for practically any diagnostic test or procedure, such as the man with persistent pain from a hernia operation whom we referred to a pain clinic—with a three-year wait list; or the woman needing a sleep study to diagnose what seemed like sleep apnea, who faced a two-year delay; or the woman with breast cancer who needed to wait four months for radiation therapy, when the standard of care was four weeks.
Norway.....
Government Health Care Horror Stories from Norway

I'll admit this: if, like me, you're a self-employed person with a marginal income, the Norwegian system is, in many ways, a boon – as long as you're careful not to get anything much more serious than a cold or flu.

Doctors' visits are cheap; hospitalization is free. But you get what you pay for. There are excellent doctors in Norway – but there are also mediocrities and outright incompetents who in the U.S. would have been stripped of their licenses long ago. The fact is that while the ubiquity of frivolous malpractice lawsuits in the U.S. has been a disgrace, the inability of Norwegians to sue doctors or hospitals even in the most egregious of circumstances is even more of a disgrace.

Physicians who in the U.S. would be dragged into court are, under the Norwegian system, reported to a local board consisting of their own colleagues – who are also, not infrequently, their longtime friends.

(The government health system's own website puts it this way: if you suspect malpractice, you have the right to “ask the Norwegian Board of Health Supervision in your county to evaluate” your claims.)

As a result, doctors who should be forcibly retired, if not incarcerated, end up with a slap on the wrist. When patients are awarded financial damages, the sums – paid by the state, not the doctor – are insultingly small.
------------

Take the case of Peter Franks, whose doctor sent him home twice despite a tennis-ball-sized lump in his chest that was oozing blood and pus – and that turned out to be a cancer that was diagnosed too late to save his life. Apropos of Franks's case, a jurist who specializes in patients' rights lamented that the Norwegian health-care system responds to sky-high malpractice figures “with a shrug,” and the dying Franks himself pronounced last year that “the responsibility for malpractice has been pulverized in Norway,” saying that “if I could have sued the doctor, I would have. Other doctors would have read about the lawsuit in the newspaper. Then they would have taken greater care to avoid making such a mistake themselves. But doctors in Norway don't have to take responsibility for their mistakes. The state does it.” After a three-year legal struggle, Franks was awarded 2.7 million kroner by the Norwegian government – about half a million dollars.

Another aspect of Norway's guild-like health-care system is that although the country suffers from a severe deficit of doctors, nurses, and midwives, the medical establishment makes it next to impossible for highly qualified foreign members of these professions to get certified to practice in Norway. The daughter of a friend of mine got a nursing degree at the University of North Dakota in 2009 but, as reported last Friday by NRK, is working in Seattle because the Norwegian authorities in charge of these matters – who have refused to be interviewed on this subject by NRK – have stubbornly denied her a license. Why? My guess is that the answer has a lot to do with three things: competence, competition, and control. If there were a surplus of doctors and nurses instead of a shortage, the good ones would drive out the bad. Plainly, such a situation must be avoided at all costs – including the cost of human lives.

Then there's the waiting lists. At the beginning of 2012, over 281,000 patients in Norway, out of a population of five million, were awaiting treatment for some medical problem or other. Bureaucratic absurdities run rampant, as exemplified by thisAftenposten story from earlier this year:

I asked where is healthcare working better where there is NO socialized medicine?
 
Socialist entitlement programs and socialism are living off borrowed time, only a fool would think there's anything good about socialism…
 
Your a capitalist. Already proven to be predatory by nature....commoditizing everything...even life itself for profit and now you go against all of what you believe to give the poor a better life?......fuuuuuuuuuck yooooooou. What a crock of shit. Give me socialised health care now. Fuck your profits. I could not care less about your profits.


Then you will die waiting in an ER room moron........good luck...
 
Your a capitalist. Already proven to be predatory by nature....commoditizing everything...even life itself for profit and now you go against all of what you believe to give the poor a better life?......fuuuuuuuuuck yooooooou. What a crock of shit. Give me socialised health care now. Fuck your profits. I could not care less about your profits.


Then you will die waiting in an ER room moron........good luck...

Lol,thats another colossal crock of shit too.
 
Your a capitalist. Already proven to be predatory by nature....commoditizing everything...even life itself for profit and now you go against all of what you believe to give the poor a better life?......fuuuuuuuuuck yooooooou. What a crock of shit. Give me socialised health care now. Fuck your profits. I could not care less about your profits.


Then you will die waiting in an ER room moron........good luck...

Lol,thats another colossal crock of shit too.


Yeah......keep lying to yourself...socialized medicine only works for the young and healthy, the ones who don't need it...for the actual sick and old......don't count on it....and all of those systems are failing.....they can't keep up with the demand...and if they actually have to start paying for their own country's military defense.....then they are going to collapse far faster....
 
rustic you communist corporate traitor, corporate welfare thats dwarfs any social programs you are ok with though. How do you feel about 21 trillion dollars given to the banks since 2008? Or the over 100 corporations profiting in Iraq and Afghanistan?...and thats just 2 countries. As long as its the poor and minorities dieing....thats ok... You are just so fucked up. Why are you in this country when you say The U.S. is just a shit eating Democracy? Go to china or viet nam and you wont have to change a thing.
 
Your a capitalist. Already proven to be predatory by nature....commoditizing everything...even life itself for profit and now you go against all of what you believe to give the poor a better life?......fuuuuuuuuuck yooooooou. What a crock of shit. Give me socialised health care now. Fuck your profits. I could not care less about your profits.


Then you will die waiting in an ER room moron........good luck...

Lol,thats another colossal crock of shit too.


Yeah......keep lying to yourself...socialized medicine only works for the young and healthy, the ones who don't need it...for the actual sick and old......don't count on it....and all of those systems are failing.....they can't keep up with the demand...and if they actually have to start paying for their own country's military defense.....then they are going to collapse far faster....

No, those systems are not failing you lying piece of shit. You better go tell that propaganda to some young kid blue collar worker that you have also convinced that unions are bad for them.
 

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