What do you about this country's health care system???

Question

Healthcare and Pharmacy companies are making billions of dollars with this system. I have seen a documentary call "SICKO" about how are health system works and compare with all the other countries, we are #13 on the list for providing good healthcare for our citizens. Even Cuba has a better system than us, inhaler medicine cost $120 in the U.S., but in Cuba $2.50. Tell me what the ((*&&*(&*(& is going on. If we don't do anything about this, I think we will only work to pay for our healthcare.............................

Answer 1

it makes me sick

Answer 2

There are two sides to this issue.

On one hand, socialised medicine would provide healthcare for everyone. The people currently not covered would be required coverage.

Now SICKO compared us to the British and Canadian socialised systems, from which I have heard all too many horror stories. The problem with socialised medicine are the following.

First, a socialised system fails to adequately pay doctors. Thus, the best doctors end up migrating to capitalised systems, like America. Canada is facing a dearth of qualified doctors for this reason.

Also, when you treat everyone, the lines come into play. The 70s taught us that a price freeze on gasoline is not a solution, well, a freeze on medicine isn't great either. I know lots of people in socialised systems who are dying on the wait list, knowing that if they were in America, they would have been treated. In fact, medical tourism, the practice of going to another country to get healthcare, particularly for Thailand, is the strongest from socialised countries, where people dying in line finally leave the country for healthcare!

I don't think we should abandon our poor, however, socialising the medicine system has worse consequences for all of us. Somewhere in between, we should find a semi-capital, semi-social method of conducting affairs that takes into account both the market forces and the social needs of our fellow human beings.

An interesting idea I stumbled across was one where you go to a site where you post your profile, and insurance companies bid on you...this introduces market forces into insurance which seems to be the number one problem people have with our current system: high costs of insurance. As an entrepreneur, one should see not a problem, but rather, an opportunity.

Answer 3

Well in your example of using Cuba,realize when Fidel's Colon was falling out and the doctors their suggested a colostomy bag,he said NO! and hired a doctor from Spain to do the operation of retaining his colon.Why? If socialist medicine is so good?Also realize that the Government in the last 15 years has stepped in the works creating HMO's and taxes on the drug manufacturers and Doctors,not to mention the wasteful spending in emrgency rooms by people who dont pay and use the emergency room as their source of healthcare,since they cant be denied care at the emergency room.Government healthcare will not work,but prolong suffering to the sick,because their ailments will be run a time alotted schedule.You get what you pay for,if Doctors wages go down,what kind of treatment and education would they have or strive for?Maybe thats why other people in other countries come here for their major surgeries.

Answer 4

You decide if you want to keep it or change it.

Before I explain more, let me add that Spain is a socialist country (which is where a poster said that Cuba's doctor came from) and like the UK, and in fact almost every single other western democracy, Spain has better infant mortality and life expectancy figures than the USA. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care#Economics I work in the NHS in the UK (the National Health Service) and can tell you that there are waits for routine operations. But emergencies are treated as emergencies. Like you can in the USA, I can take out private health insurance, and some employers offer that as well.

The US is the most powerful country in the world and the richest. Is it right that babies born in the US are more likely to die than if they were born in any other western democracy?

Answer 5

This country is getting to be one big corporation.
We are fooled into thinking we live in a democracy. The insurance companies have more power than the voters. OIl companies and defense contractors own our government. The levy in New Orleans was never allowed to be fixed properly but just today, Seventy Billion Dollars 70,000,000 MORE has been dedicated to a war based on lies.
Canada and England's healthcare policy works, ask a Canadian, dont trust the president to tell you why Canada's health plan wont work here. It is about greedy men and women who are selling us out to whoever in the world has the cash. The war is paid for by constant loans from foriegn banks every day EVERY DAY! We b*tch every day but the corporations own us becasue we are afraid to do anything except work and pay our bills as our teeth rot out from lack of dental insurance and we skip medication since we cant afford it.

Answer 6

Sicko? hahahaha. That's propaganda. None of those facts are true. Even moore's supporters know that he makes all of that up. (I've also seen the movie)

But about the inhalers. do you think some guy is going to invest millions of dollars to develop a new inhaler if he knows he won't be able to sell it for much? If some guy knows that he will make truckloads of cash off of an inhaler, he's going to work super hard to get it developed. It's called capitalism. It works.

Move to canada. they have socialized medicine there.

Answer 7

"Sicko" isn't a documentary--Moore sets things up. His little Cuban trip was PR for them--regular Cubans don't have the kind of care he depicted.

The problems with US health care are real. It stems from three things primarily:

government interference--all the micromanaging at every level adds costs and slows things down tremendously

the HANDFUL of large insurers who dictate what goes on, get ridiculous discounts forcing the costs to the uninsured and taxpayers to ridiculous heights, special tax breaks, etc.

the third problem is for some bizarre reason people think ALL THE MEDICAL CARE YOU WANT SHOULD BE FREE. Not what you NEED even, but what you WANT. That's nuts. Period. People blow money on fancy parties/food/clothes and complain about $60 at a walk-in clinic which may have saved their lives.

However, we see when the free market is allowed to work that medical care is quite affordable.

Check prices on LASIK surgery--in the last decade it's fallen like a rock.

Check prices on plastic surgery--a major procedure like a tummy tuck is typically under $10K from all the sites I've looked at out of curiousity--can't get an appendectomy for that price without insurance.

Some docs have left the insurer-dominated system and offer far more reasonable pricing--but they do get paid at time of service--kind of like how people buy their groceries, gasoline, and more. See:
http://www.simplecare.com/

When doctors, who were NEVER proven to be "robbing us blind" as many claimed when managed care got its hooks into the system, OWN and RUN a hospital, it's more efficient and people do not have to fear bankruptcy to go there. Here's one example:
http://www.azcentral.com/community/gilbert/articles/0217er17.html

Moore "loves" Medicare, a system he does not understand clearly. FACT: premium in 1998: $43.80, in 2008 $96.40--up more than 100%--but not benefits. In that time period, many HMOs (popular with Medicare folks because if you don't have one and you have traditional Medicare if you have any real health problems, you end up paying more to buy a "medigap" policy to take care of your 20% co-pay responsibility. There are some other options: PFFS and PPO as well.) reduced their prescription coverage to conform to the idiotic federal "donut hole." Doctors are leaving Medicare--too restrictive, poor pay, and to "balance" the Medicare budget (doesn't happen) they keep wanting to reduce payments to DOCTORS. Medicare is broken and broke.

Sensible plan, getting no attention, is at this PDF:
http://www.booklocker.com/books/3068.html

Answer 8

Actually, we don't have a so-called "health care system". Instead, we have a "crisis intervention anarchy". Big Pharma is making a "killing" on new drugs because they are basically holding us all hostage to the doctors they support. Doctors are all trained to "push pills". They say, "Eat right, and exercise", but they have about a thousand opinions on those topics, depending on the personal philosophy of the particular doctor you happened to be assigned to. As long as you have to work at a paycheck-job, live in a city, and drive a car, you are at the mercy of countless chemicals, pollutants, and poisons that will ultimately make you chronically ill. Big Pharma and Doctors' solution: Pills. Heaven forbid that anyone is actually in charge of their own life and their own bodies! If the REAL causes of chronic medical conditions actually had to pony up with big dollars to support those they have made ill, you would see a very, very different medical care philosophy that the one America has right now.

Answer 9

Our healthcare system is dysfunctional, but it is a very complicated issue. One that our representatives in Washington should, but haven't the integrity, to come up with a solution.
Hopefully the next administration can start on that course.

Answer 10

on the serious side Id do a public- private partnership, training would be subsidized Some type of national service for doctors medical professionals through out their careers,affording low and no income people access, and seek market solutions for medicine and drugs, we need to find a way to get back to the old system where the individual pays for care.

Answer 11

Well, as someone already said, you need to stop watching the crap Micheal Moore productes. He's the perverbial idiot that loves to kick the bee's nest and doesn't care who gets stung..as long as he can put it on film and make money from it.
Most of what he makes are very lose interpretations of the truth....from his own point of view...and not documentaries at all, since documentaries contain truth and facts.....two things that the liberal bloated one has little correlation with.
Secondly, don't blame the medical industry for things like medical inhalers. You can run that one back to the global warming idiots since the expellant gas in medical inhalers is now considered a "green house effect gas".
Why oh why do you people think Conservatives hate liberals sooo bad ? it isn't that they have different views, it isn't that they are against our positions necessarily. It is simply that they envision the world in thier point of view...which from experience has taught me is a very selfish view, then they tryand change the world to what they want. They do'nt bother to ask people if they even want a change. They do'nt care who gets hurt in the process, all they wan't is thier way...like a little 5 year old.....no care for the way they have so adversely affected the world and the USA in the past, they do'nt learn from history, they rarely rely on actual scientific data , or statistics, or facts.
Sure, I know this doesn't speak of all liberals, but it is the majority of them. And its a shame when politics and willing ignorace has taken hold of our society and been given higher esteem than truth, facts and proven results.
Look at any one of the major movements of liberalism in our society and you will see failure, whether it be the Vietnam protest to the war on poverty, to thier particular brand of governing and making either a repressive rule of taxing everyone to pay for thier socialist agenda (look to Michigan for a microcozm) to creating nanny states to protect those too stupid not to know better than to violate obvious rulse.
If there were sensible liberals out there, they either need to change to conservatism or at least reign in the loser big mouths in thier party and stop them from messing our country up.
So don't blame big medicine, it is only one cog in the wheel, and any business that goes into business does so to make a profit. We may have some problems that need some real solutions, but you can't claim France, UK or Canada's system is better than ours. Instead of accepting some liberal dribble of a conclusion on who's "best", try thinking for a change and ask why is it supposedly best. Or for that matter, ask why its supposedly bad. I call 6 months on a waiting list for a serious illness bad..(Canada), France has finally come to the conclusion...much like alot of "sanctuary" cities harboring illegals....that they just can't afford to keep thier ways up. UK even advised pregnant mothers not to show up at hospitals for delivery. This is your supposed interpretation of "better" ?
You pay for car insurance, life insurance, home insurance, why is it such a stretch to pay for medical insurance ? Your "free" system will cost someone....i e ....tax payers.