Universal health care: isn't it your responsibility to provide care for your family, not the government?

Question

The government shouldn't have the authority to dictate your health care, and especially that of your children... what if your child is sick, do you really think that it is fair that they wait for a week, just to be checked by a doctor? If you have a family, it should be your responsibility to provide care, or you should have waited until financially secure to have children...

Answer 1

Yes it is my responsibility.

Personally I don't want, nor take any handouts from the government.

Answer 2

I used to spout the same rhetoric that you do. But then a family member got sick with something that insurance companies normally don't cover. After investigating I discovered that there has been a bill in Washington for many years requiring Insurance companies to pay that has been consistently shot down by- guess what party.I recently heard a progressive talk show host offer the thought that our health should be one of our rights. He went on to offer that no one thinks that it is their responsibility to provide police or fire protection or military these are provided by the government. The insurance lobby is the largest lobby in Washington. Politicians have brainwashed you and countless other Americans into being heartless and soulless for the sake of big money.

Answer 3

Ideally, of course it would be every individual's own responsible to provide health care for his own family. Ideally being the key word. Unfortunately, not everyone who has children makes enough money to pay $400 a month for a family of three (which is how much my husband will be paying as soon as we have our child). That's the way it is, and that's the way it's going to be. So should only people who can afford it have it? That would mean that those with lower income simply wouldn't get health care. Should people possibly die because they don't have enough money to pay for a doctor? I hope you don't think so.

As far as the waiting period - in those countries that have universal health care (which is every developed country except us), the waiting period in the emergency room is no longer than the waiting period in one of our emergency rooms; in fact, it is even shorter in some cases. If it isn't an emergency, then don't you usually have to wait about a week to get in to the doctor anyway?

And as far as being financially secure before you have children - is anyone - besides the far upper class, of course - actually financially ready to have children? If everyone waited until they were financially secure, no one would have kids until they were 50. Actually, a lower population growth rate would be much better for this world anyway, but it's just not going to happen. People will always have kids before they're ready to (who can really be ready?). And if universal health care works so well in every other developed country, why are people in our country resisting it so strongly? Don't you want to have doctors who actually want to help people, not just get paid a ridiculous amount of money (and actually, with universal health care, they still make a very good amount of money)? Don't you want to have affordable drugs? Wouldn't it be worth it to pay higher taxes in order for everyone in our country to be able to have health care when they need it (including you)? Wouldn't the higher taxes be balanced by the decreased or eliminated out of pocket health care costs?

Answer 4

I don't know if any nation has established health care into their constitution. The nations that do provide Universal Health Care made that decision to aid the general health of their citizenry and to ensure all citizens receive equal quality in care, regardless of economic status.

The U.S. rejects this idea, which is of course their right to do so.

From my personal perspective, I don't think universal health care would work in the United States. The US government has a lousy track record with large bureaucracies and the health care systems in France, England and Canada took decades to refine, and even now they still have problems.

I do want more accountability against insurance companies, and I do want ability to force insurance companies to cover life-threatening treatment and in-particular cancer-screening procedures. I feel many health insurance agencies have such a powerful lobby, they get away with providing poor service to their clients, and there aren't enough laws to sue or force your insurance agents to live up to their expectations.

So while I advocate a private system for the most part, I want stronger laws for consumers to go after an insurance agency when it tries to weasel out of a claim, or delay payment on a claim for dubious and often selfish reasons.

Answer 5

I disagree. For one thing, most Americans aren't providing healthcare for themselves or their children, their employers are. The simple fact is that health insurance is too expensive for most people to be able to afford on their own. Sure, an HMO plan can be picked up for around 500 a month, but that's not a better level of service than the worst case scenarios Republicans are afraid of with Universal Healthcare.

The best possible thing we can do for ourselves and our businesses, is to nationalize the healthcare industry. Get rid of socialist insurance policies that have been milking both patients and doctors to keep prices high, and relieve employers all across the nation of the burden they've been carrying.

The problem with leaving healthcare to the free market, is that Supply and Demand simply doesn't apply in cases of life or death. There is simply no cost that can be presented that a consumer won't pay. If it comes to a choice of selling the house to pay for an operation, or watching your child die, you'll sell the house and live on the street. We can't rely on simple economics to keep those prices reasonable.

Should or shouldn't, many people have children long before they're ever close to "financially secure". Everyone has their own choices to make, but it's inhuman to refuse medical treatement to a child in the richest country in the world- no matter how poor their parent's judgement may have been.

Answer 6

You are absolutely correct that the government should NOT be in charge of health care. However, neither should the large insurance companies.

Thanks to their domination of the field, we have nothing but problems. We need some changes, and ten years ago would have been too late. These changes include:

price transparency--there is NO legitimate reason why a patient, with or without insurance, who is going to have a NON-EMERGENCY procedure can not know IN ADVANCE what HIS bill is going to be. The reasonably likely possible other charges should also be available for review. Specific example, assume a person is told he needs an angiogram. A significant number of patients will be found to need an angioplasty at that same time (one of the reasons they're having an angiogram). They should be told if they need an angioplasty what that would cost because the cardiologist may want to do the angioplasty right then in many cases. The patient will already have been informed of what is going on and it can be done (a lot of the work has already been done by having the angiogram).

Some will say, but there are different aspects to this and the coding is different and so are prices. Precisely. Coding is a scam. It's a way to NOT inform patient of prices and play billing games with them. The codes change every year, often in flat-out silly ways, and physicians can be denied claims for not using the brand new and NOT improved codes. They can be told they're committing fraud if they missed some subtlety in coding. The list goes on. News flash: doctors practiced real medicine WITHOUT CODES. Furthermore, other countries are not all hung up on these silly things. I am NOT talking about not having any data on diagnoses and procedures, I am pointing out the FACT that this is a waste of precious time and money. What is actually important is what was DONE to the patient and that needs to be charted with objective data (the coding comes LATER from the notes in many cases--as in all emergencies--and if a physician had to alter what he needed to do to treat the patient, he would, code be damned.) So much money is WASTED on this coding BS, but taxpayers and patients are paying for it all.

insurers need to COMMIT in advance to payment--too many insurance companies play games with claims. I've even had an authorized procedure, with a referral number, initially denied because they thought they could get away with it. Of course they had to pay as they had agreed in that specific case but the manhours that were WASTED for the doctor's office, the insurer (I apealed and won), and me is ridiculous. The ONLY "out" for not paying should be fraud. Fraud is NOT the norm. When you take your car in for repairs they have to write up an estimate and get your signature. If it's going to be more costly, usually more than 10% over, they need your approval again. No reason we can't do that with health care for NON-EMERGENCIES. Furthermore, you can do contingencies in any such situation. An angiogram is potentially dangerous--what would the additional charge be if the patient strokes out or has a heart attack?

Hospitals should have their prices available for view to the public. They should also be required to post their charity guidelines.

Clearly emergencies can't have as much certainty because if an unconscious person with multiple gun shot wounds is wheeled in prices can't be discussed and the extent of treatment is unknown, BUT how many people have THAT kind of medical expense? Few. Let's deal with the lion's share of the problem--NOW.

Another point is that insurance companies negotiate massive discounts for themselves. This means the uninsured pay many times MORE for the IDENTICAL service. This is stupid and unnecessary. And yes, the uninsured DO often pay a chunk if not ALL of their bills.

There is a good plan in a book I read that would allow ALL Americans to be insured and would relieve the ridiculous pressure on taxpayers for Medicare, Medicaid, etc. which can NOT be ended overnight, but must be transitioned out of. It's really not fair to tell an 80-year-old man he no longer has health insurance, nor a 35-year-old quadriplegic he's now SOL for health insurance.

You can read the basics here:
http://www.booklocker.com/books/3068.html
The plan is in the PDF.

BTW, some people are uninsurable and really through no fault of their own. I had an adult student who had A migraine and was unable to find coverage. As she was going to go into the nursing program, her option was the student health policy that nursing students MUST have. Unlike a normal person, however, she didn't have 100 policies to choose from--just one. If she hadn't been a student, she said she was told she was uninsurable. I tend to believe her because of many incidents I've seen. Many people who have something undesirable would rely on their state's "high risk pool." Not all states have such a pool. This is foolish and bites taxpayers ultimately--we lose productivity from people who can't afford paying 3 times what the insured pay for care and if they go bankrupt (half of all bankruptcies are the result of medical bills and most of those folks are insured) or don't pay, the taxpayer eats it.

Now there's a new wrinkle: predatory lenders have discovered this "gold mine":
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/nov2007/db20071120_397008.htm
Yes anywhere from basically 15-27% is predatory, especially when these are uninsured patients being charged multiple times what the insured are charged.

Answer 7

All of the people who oppose Universal Healthcare are just paranoid. Nothing would change about it. If anything, the change would benefit everyone you know. Would you let a friend of yours die because you think he/she is lazy? BTW, poor people aren't lazy, that's not true. I bet if I dissected your childhood and where you came from I would find out that you came from a privileged family and didn't have the same disadvantages as the people you wish death upon.

You do realize that your insurance company could deny you treatment for a covered illness. It happens everyday. Universal Healthcare would eliminate that possibility. Every country with Universal Healthcare is happy and content. The only ones who oppose it are being told to oppose by hack radio shows and Fox News.

How could we live in a country that hold something as materialistic as money higher than the well being of our own citizens? That is just ridiculous.

Answer 8

In a world where everyone could afford the rising cost of health care; yes it should be the responsibility of the individual. However, we do not live in a world like that.

As far as the rest of your "question" goes: What evidence do you have that a universal health care plan would cause week long waits to see a doctor.

In addition, where I live (city of 65,000), malpractice insurance has gotten so expensive that most MDs have either left town or become ER docs paid by the hospital. This means that I cannot even find a general practice doctor who is talking new patients at all, let alone after a week long wait. People in my town are finding it very difficult to get checkups, and can only get medical care at the emergency room! Our current system stinks. I'd welcome a change.

Answer 9

It is absolutely NOT the governments job to hand-ot or pay for for health care. The truth is, politicains, in order to get elected, like to offer the people things like health care for "free." The problem is they don't tell them who they stole the money to pay for it from in the first place - the people. In order to pay for universal health care, the government has to either raise tazes or continue to print money out of thin-air, either way, the people are hurt and become poorer. Plus, as with anything the government does, beurocracy is created and the whole system becomes laced with red tape.

The problem with "socialism" is that government has to buy the goods to provide this health care from private industry in some form or another (meaning the government is not involved in EVERY level of production of medical goods like vaccines or surgical instruments for example). As a result, the companies that produce such goods know that they no longer have to compete for the business of the individual citizens and therefore raise the price of their commodities and charge the government the ABSOLUTE MAXIMIUM for those products.

This is why when new technology is introduced in the medical field the price to use that technology goes UP over time rather than down. This is the opposite of what happens in other industries. For instance, DVD players used to cost $500 or so when they first came out, now you can get them for $30.

So, it IS the responsibilty of the individual, or perhaps their place of employment, to provide healthcare for themselves and their families, NOT the government. Furthermore, when the governments take over health care, it really becomes more of a burden on the indiviudal because, whether they know it or not they're really just paying the government more to pay for care than if they just bought it from doctors on their own.

Answer 10

Do you get the fact that over 40 million people in the greatest country in the world DO NOT have health care. Does that not bother you in the least? Do the fact that those of us who are fortunate enough to have health care are facing increasing premiums because of those who don't ever cross your mind? Have you been to your local ER lately to see how crowded it is on any given evening? The issue is not so black and white. We need affordable health care for all. No one is looking for a handout and no one should ever have to make the agonizing choice between seeking medical care or making rent.

Answer 11

I don't understand the argument against universal health care. In Canada health care is our right as stated in our charter of rights and freedoms. There are some problems just like everywhere else however the stories from people who are against it are just false(long wait times,expensive). Our health care is non-profit unlike the USA. I can't fathom why certain Americans would not want universal health care.