15 ms·

In Australia the Leftist government of Gough Whitlam introduced health-coverage-for-all in 1975 with a scheme called Medibank. In 1984 after a couple of governm

by cletus 8y ago

In Australia the Leftist government of Gough Whitlam introduced health-coverage-for-all in 1975 with a scheme called Medibank. In 1984 after a couple of governments, Bob Hawke's Leftist government created the Medicare scheme (Medibank became a government provider of private health insurance), which exists to this day. The most interesting stat I ever heard about Medicare was this: prior to Medicare the number one cause of personal bankruptcy in Australia was medical bills. So I'm with Bernie on this: health coverage for all is an incredibly important goal. While we're at it, let's end the monopoly given to drug companies on the sale of pharmaceuticals in the US. You should be able to legally import them from, at the very least, any NAFTA country and any EU member.

chaosbutters 8y ago
doesn't matter who is president in 2020, if the senate isn't blue. And right now, it doesn't look like the senate will even hit 50/50.
- metalliqaz 8y ago
  The political system in the US biases area over population. The Senate will remain conservative as long as rural states remain conservative, and that will never change.
  - rootusrootus 8y ago
    I'm not sure I'd bet on that. Cities are almost universally liberal, and even rural states start to turn blue as they get their own big cities.
    - cannonedhamster 8y ago
      Unfortunately without proportional voting being mandated purple states like Texas remain solidly red due to vast gerrymandering purposefully made to deny people the right to their representation by diluting their vote. This is actually the main cause of polarization in the US as candidates need to play to their base instead of moderating to play to a moderate base.
- kibwen 8y ago
  Fortunately (ironically, sardonically), thanks to the precedents being set by the sitting president, future presidents will be free to declare healthcare a national emergency and divert funds away from, say, the defense department in order to pay for it. A slim majority in the senate and a minority in the house won't be near enough to stop them. The current senate dissolves the checks and balances at their own institutional peril (and no, this isn't a situation anyone ought to be celebrating, except for the authoritarians).
  - madeofpalk 8y ago
    > future presidents will be free to declare healthcare a national emergency Well, actually, maybe it is a national emergency? Definitely seems more of an emergency than some wall.
    - rootusrootus 8y ago
      So is climate change. We have lots of emergencies to tend to. It is going to get interesting.
- cletus 8y ago
  So there's a lot I could say about this. First is an example. As much as I, personally, liked (and continue to like) Obama as a person and as much as I agree with most of his policies, at the end of the day he was a pretty ineffective president. Why? Because he could get hardly any legislation passed (Obamacare aka the Affordable Care Act being the principle counterexample). He was a president who ruled by executive order. The White House is the largest and loudest bully pulpit in the country, by far. You can point to Congress and call them obstructionist but the buck stops with you as president to move your policy agenda and change the national debate. And Obama just wasn't effective at that. Again, with one exception. It used to be a fairly popular opinion in the US that health coverage was for those with jobs, basically. That still is the position of a significant portion of the population but it's not as popular as it used to be. Obama did change the national debate on this such that the question became how we should provide health coverage and not whether we should. Go back a decade or more and the Bernie Sanders coverage-for-all policy platform would've relegated him to being a minor player in the primaries, not taken seriously. The fact that he was as prominent a figure as he was is in no small part due to Obama changing the debate on health care (IMHO). The second thing I'll say is that nothing lasts forever. Demographics change. Opinions change. California voted for Reagan. Twice. It used to be a competitive state. Now it's safely Democratic. Florida used to be safely Republican but (largely due to migration from the Northeast) but now it's a battleground state. Let's just say that at some point Conservatives get what they've been hoping for: Roe v. Wade overturned in the SCOTUS. It could happen. Largley though the "damage" has been done already. It won't be illegal. It'll just be a state issue. Many states will legallize it the next day. New York for example has already made moves to enshrine the legality of abortions in state law. Now this will suck for particularly poor people in Alabma but in a way Alabamans will get the state government they seem to want. So let's say that happens. The problem then for Conservatives is they've lost a defining and unifying (for their base) issue. One can argue they're better off politically this way as they'll fracture in the aftermath. I see the current Conservative bent as a desperate last gasp for what is a majority (in their respective states) that's in decline. A lot of damage can be done before this naturally remedies itself but we're not headed to a dystopian Handmaid's Tale future either.
  - asark 8y ago
JamesBarney 8y ago
I'm all for universal coverage too. But reducing the profits of pharmaceutical companies well reduce the money they have for r&d dramatically. This will slow down the speed of pharmaceutical development. So I think it needs to be paired with reforms to the FDA to reduce the go to market costs for drugs.
- rndgermandude 8y ago
  What kind of evidence do you have for this claim?
  - mtgx 8y ago
    There is none. People just like to parrot that Big Pharma line because it "sounds like it makes sense, so I guess it does?!" Big Pharma already abuses the patent system so much, like inventing something and then when the 20 year monopoly has passed they create a new patent that says "this same drug can be used for Y purpose, too" - and bam, another 20 year monopoly on the exact same or very slightly tweaked recipe. Tens of thousands are already dying every year in the US because they can't afford healthcare. If the argument is that "if we reduce the Big Pharma profits then it would be even worse!", I'm sorry, I just don't buy it. If drugs were cheaper, a large portion of those people could be saved (yes, I realize there are problems with the healthcare system, too, but those would also be fixed by Medicare for all).
  - JamesBarney 8y ago
    Evidence that if the profits of new drug drops significantly that the money spent on R&D on those new drugs will also drop? Imagine the government decides to tax 80% of all revenue from all technology companies forever. Do you think funding for startups would increase, stay the same, or drop? The obvious answer is drop, but what type of evidence would you expect to support this statement. A study of people taxing technology companies @ 80%? Or are you arguing with the premise that investment rates are correlated with profitability?
    - rndgermandude 8y ago
ranie93 8y ago
I think the current friction in free flow of medication across borders is not unwarranted. I'm thinking of Thalidomide as an example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Oldham_Kelsey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Oldham_Kelsey
- chimeracoder 8y ago
  > I think the current friction in free flow of medication across borders is not unwarranted. I'm thinking of Thalidomide as an example. That's a completely different situation. Currently, if an American pharmaceutical company produces a drug in the US and exports it to another country, people in the US cannot purchase it from foreign suppliers, even though it's both FDA-approved and produced by the same manufacturer. This dramatically raises the prices of drugs in the US. Allowing imports of FDA-approved drugs from both domestic and foreign manufacturers would reduce prescription costs in the US greatly.
  - ranie93 8y ago
    > [Allow] imports of FDA-approved drugs from both domestic and foreign manufacturers I agree. I interpreted the OP's comment of "You should be able to legally import them from, at the very least, any NAFTA country and any EU member." to be too lax.
5trokerac3 8y ago
The United States currently has the highest 5 year survival rate for all cancers combined. I think it's a fair question to ask if that would continue to be the case in a MFA system for 300 million patients. Considering what a disaster the insurance marketplace was, I'm very skeptical. Edit: what I mean by "disaster": when it launched, the site completely crashed for over a month and then, when it finally came back up, the policies offered weren't accepted by most doctors, because they had crazy restrictions.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- dontreact 8y ago
  The U.S. actually has worse health outcomes overall than Japan and France who both have universal coverage (through different systems)
  - 5trokerac3 8y ago
    What are "health outcomes"? "5 year cancer survival" is a definable metric. "Health outcomes" is very vague. Is there a scoring system? Are different illnesses/conditions ranked?
    - dontreact 8y ago
      Lifespan Deaths due to preventable causes On both of these the US is somewhere in the 30s in terms of rank among countries. But we are #1 in terms of cost per capita :) 5 year cancer is too low level in my opinion to give an overall picture
      - 5trokerac3 8y ago
        And how much of that is due to the obesity epidemic in the US and has nothing to do with the healthcare system?
        8y ago
flexie 8y ago
And that's the essence of this: In the developed world, this is all but a US specific issue. Cancer and other life threatening diseases rarely bankrupt Europeans, Canadians, Australians, Kiwis, Japanese etc.
- chimeracoder 8y ago
  > Cancer and other life threatening diseases rarely bankrupt Europeans, Canadians, Australians, Kiwis, Japanese etc. Sure, but they're also dramatically less likely to survive the cancer than Americans are at a population level. There have been multiple long-term studies on cancer survival rates that have demonstrated this.
  - flexie 8y ago
    The US is barely in the top among developed nations, and it's not much better than the next 10-15 countries: https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/cancer-trends/data-cancer-frequency-country https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/cancer-trends/data-cancer... And it's notoriously difficult to compare. If cancer is registered as "discovered" early, because a for profit doctor starts treating it early, but the government hired doctor maybe doesn't, the early treated will statistically appear as living longer.
    - chimeracoder 8y ago
      > The US is barely in the top among developed nations, and it's not much better than the next 10-15 countries: https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/cancer-trends/data-cancer.. https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/cancer-trends/data-cancer.... First, you're posting data that isn't relevant: that's the rate of cancer incidence, not the survival rates. That says nothing about how well the cancer is treated. Secondly, it's nonsensical to compare aggregated cancer statistics between countries, because the demographics vary drastically, many cancer risk factors are highly hereditary, and the survival rates for different types of cancers vary so dramatically. If you look at the actual survival rates, once adjusted for racial composition and type of cancer, the US comes out far ahead. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18639491 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18639491
onetimemanytime 8y ago
If health care for all reduces prices and total cost, then yeah. Otherwise, the cost will cripple the government, and by extension taxpayers. Right now they can declare bankruptcy and just don't pay (at a great cost, no doubt) but the government will have to pay. Cancer is a fact of life,38.4% will get it in their life https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/understanding/statistics https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/understanding/statistics and unless costs are dramatically lowered any plan will be bankrupt.
- bubbleRefuge 8y ago
  The federal government cannot be crippled because it can issue currency ad-infinitem. As AOC is wonderfully publicizing, the notion that government finance works like household and business finance is finally starting to be debunked and at least talked about openly. There maybe other problems with universal healthcare, but financing it is not one of them.
  - onetimemanytime 8y ago
    nope, doesn't work that way. USA issues a lot of debt, maybe more than it should, but issuing trillions of new dollars a year is not good policy.
  - moduspol 8y ago
    It's truly worrying that comments like these are made unironically. Is there any amount of currency printing that you believe might be problematic? Or is the sky the limit? Perhaps most importantly: What happens if we accept your claim, spend and print money ad infinitem, and then you're wrong?
    - danieltillett 8y ago
      MMT sounds awfully like the Magic Pudding [1]. If governments can just print any amount of money they like to pay for everything whence cometh hyperinflation? 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Pudding https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Pudding
tmaly 8y ago
We still cannot get a price list of medical procedures in the US thanks to the antitrust exemption provided in McCarran-Ferguson Antitrust Act of 1945. I think repealing this would be a good start. All other industries are required to provide price lists. My friend went to the ER recently for a sprained thumb. They wrapped it in some bandage and he got a bill for $14,000. His insurance is covering 80% but he is still on the hook for $2800 for a sprained thumb. Something is not right here.
- throwaway5752 8y ago
  Why did he go to the ER?
  - donaldknuth123 8y ago
    Depending on where you live an ER might be the only place you can go for an urgent medical issue. Was he supposed to wait a month to see a GP or drive across the state to find an Urgent Care?
  - will_brown 8y ago
    I think you are trying to make some point about wasting resource...but the ER is how accute injuries like this are generally treated. Sure there may be urgent care centers equipped for this, but that isn’t a guarantee and those often have more restrictive hours than an ER, especially acces to urgent care services like x-rays or mri/cat scans. Sure in hindsight it’s a sprained thumb, but likely because of pain thought to be broken or worse...requiring x-ray and being set by a trained professional or maybe even surgery. It is a thumb so it would be less than ideal to lose feeling or mobility or the thumb itself (say there was nerve or circulatory damage).
  - torpfactory 8y ago
    Thumb injuries are actually treated very seriously (at least more seriously than you might think) by medical professionals because thumb injuries can have very high consequences for quality of life. You can live a totally normal life without an index finger but a missing or disabled thumb is a much more significant impact.
mnm1 8y ago
This is the only solution. Every other developed country in the world has healthcare for its people. Politicians that don't support this are monsters who'd rather kill millions and ruin millions' more lives. They are disgusting, inhuman, immoral scum who would rather enrich their billionaire backers than help people live and recover from illness. These are the people that we should use the death penalty on because they have killed and will kill millions unnecessary. All out of greed and hate for their fellow Americans.
coredog64 8y ago
A fair chunk of what we in the US would consider “medical bankruptcy” is not the bills, but a consequence of chronic illness. If I’m living paycheck to paycheck, any disruption is going to hurt. That could be unpaid leave, but it could also be disability insurance that doesn’t replace 100% of your income. Regardless of how health insurance is paid for, those are going to happen.
- cletus 8y ago
  Let me play devil's advocate. What if living paycheck-to-paycheck is a consequence of having no health coverage? Think about it. If you're on a low income that largely matches your outgoings, bills of thousands of dollars will wipe you out regardless of whether or not you save. So why save? You may just reduce any benefits you get from the state or Federal government (medical or otherwise) and those will be wiped out anyway. So you may as well spend now. Consider, the Earned Income Tax Credit is one of the few times lower income households can make large purchases (and there's evidence of this in TV purchases and elsewhere).
- notabee 8y ago
  Disability insurance, like other insurance, is motivated to find loopholes with which to deny you. Make sure to read the fine print while you're still well and able.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

by cletus 8y ago

chaosbutters 8y ago

doesn't matter who is president in 2020, if the senate isn't blue. And right now, it doesn't look like the senate will even hit 50/50.

metalliqaz 8y ago
The political system in the US biases area over population. The Senate will remain conservative as long as rural states remain conservative, and that will never change.
- rootusrootus 8y ago
  I'm not sure I'd bet on that. Cities are almost universally liberal, and even rural states start to turn blue as they get their own big cities.
  - cannonedhamster 8y ago
    Unfortunately without proportional voting being mandated purple states like Texas remain solidly red due to vast gerrymandering purposefully made to deny people the right to their representation by diluting their vote. This is actually the main cause of polarization in the US as candidates need to play to their base instead of moderating to play to a moderate base.
kibwen 8y ago
Fortunately (ironically, sardonically), thanks to the precedents being set by the sitting president, future presidents will be free to declare healthcare a national emergency and divert funds away from, say, the defense department in order to pay for it. A slim majority in the senate and a minority in the house won't be near enough to stop them. The current senate dissolves the checks and balances at their own institutional peril (and no, this isn't a situation anyone ought to be celebrating, except for the authoritarians).
- madeofpalk 8y ago
  > future presidents will be free to declare healthcare a national emergency Well, actually, maybe it is a national emergency? Definitely seems more of an emergency than some wall.
  - rootusrootus 8y ago
    So is climate change. We have lots of emergencies to tend to. It is going to get interesting.
cletus 8y ago
So there's a lot I could say about this. First is an example. As much as I, personally, liked (and continue to like) Obama as a person and as much as I agree with most of his policies, at the end of the day he was a pretty ineffective president. Why? Because he could get hardly any legislation passed (Obamacare aka the Affordable Care Act being the principle counterexample). He was a president who ruled by executive order. The White House is the largest and loudest bully pulpit in the country, by far. You can point to Congress and call them obstructionist but the buck stops with you as president to move your policy agenda and change the national debate. And Obama just wasn't effective at that. Again, with one exception. It used to be a fairly popular opinion in the US that health coverage was for those with jobs, basically. That still is the position of a significant portion of the population but it's not as popular as it used to be. Obama did change the national debate on this such that the question became how we should provide health coverage and not whether we should. Go back a decade or more and the Bernie Sanders coverage-for-all policy platform would've relegated him to being a minor player in the primaries, not taken seriously. The fact that he was as prominent a figure as he was is in no small part due to Obama changing the debate on health care (IMHO). The second thing I'll say is that nothing lasts forever. Demographics change. Opinions change. California voted for Reagan. Twice. It used to be a competitive state. Now it's safely Democratic. Florida used to be safely Republican but (largely due to migration from the Northeast) but now it's a battleground state. Let's just say that at some point Conservatives get what they've been hoping for: Roe v. Wade overturned in the SCOTUS. It could happen. Largley though the "damage" has been done already. It won't be illegal. It'll just be a state issue. Many states will legallize it the next day. New York for example has already made moves to enshrine the legality of abortions in state law. Now this will suck for particularly poor people in Alabma but in a way Alabamans will get the state government they seem to want. So let's say that happens. The problem then for Conservatives is they've lost a defining and unifying (for their base) issue. One can argue they're better off politically this way as they'll fracture in the aftermath. I see the current Conservative bent as a desperate last gasp for what is a majority (in their respective states) that's in decline. A lot of damage can be done before this naturally remedies itself but we're not headed to a dystopian Handmaid's Tale future either.
- asark 8y ago

JamesBarney 8y ago

I'm all for universal coverage too. But reducing the profits of pharmaceutical companies well reduce the money they have for r&d dramatically. This will slow down the speed of pharmaceutical development. So I think it needs to be paired with reforms to the FDA to reduce the go to market costs for drugs.

rndgermandude 8y ago
What kind of evidence do you have for this claim?
- mtgx 8y ago
  There is none. People just like to parrot that Big Pharma line because it "sounds like it makes sense, so I guess it does?!" Big Pharma already abuses the patent system so much, like inventing something and then when the 20 year monopoly has passed they create a new patent that says "this same drug can be used for Y purpose, too" - and bam, another 20 year monopoly on the exact same or very slightly tweaked recipe. Tens of thousands are already dying every year in the US because they can't afford healthcare. If the argument is that "if we reduce the Big Pharma profits then it would be even worse!", I'm sorry, I just don't buy it. If drugs were cheaper, a large portion of those people could be saved (yes, I realize there are problems with the healthcare system, too, but those would also be fixed by Medicare for all).
- JamesBarney 8y ago
  Evidence that if the profits of new drug drops significantly that the money spent on R&D on those new drugs will also drop? Imagine the government decides to tax 80% of all revenue from all technology companies forever. Do you think funding for startups would increase, stay the same, or drop? The obvious answer is drop, but what type of evidence would you expect to support this statement. A study of people taxing technology companies @ 80%? Or are you arguing with the premise that investment rates are correlated with profitability?
  - rndgermandude 8y ago

ranie93 8y ago

I think the current friction in free flow of medication across borders is not unwarranted. I'm thinking of Thalidomide as an example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Oldham_Kelsey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Oldham_Kelsey

chimeracoder 8y ago
> I think the current friction in free flow of medication across borders is not unwarranted. I'm thinking of Thalidomide as an example. That's a completely different situation. Currently, if an American pharmaceutical company produces a drug in the US and exports it to another country, people in the US cannot purchase it from foreign suppliers, even though it's both FDA-approved and produced by the same manufacturer. This dramatically raises the prices of drugs in the US. Allowing imports of FDA-approved drugs from both domestic and foreign manufacturers would reduce prescription costs in the US greatly.
- ranie93 8y ago
  > [Allow] imports of FDA-approved drugs from both domestic and foreign manufacturers I agree. I interpreted the OP's comment of "You should be able to legally import them from, at the very least, any NAFTA country and any EU member." to be too lax.

5trokerac3 8y ago

The United States currently has the highest 5 year survival rate for all cancers combined. I think it's a fair question to ask if that would continue to be the case in a MFA system for 300 million patients. Considering what a disaster the insurance marketplace was, I'm very skeptical. Edit: what I mean by "disaster": when it launched, the site completely crashed for over a month and then, when it finally came back up, the policies offered weren't accepted by most doctors, because they had crazy restrictions.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dontreact 8y ago
The U.S. actually has worse health outcomes overall than Japan and France who both have universal coverage (through different systems)
- 5trokerac3 8y ago
  What are "health outcomes"? "5 year cancer survival" is a definable metric. "Health outcomes" is very vague. Is there a scoring system? Are different illnesses/conditions ranked?
  - dontreact 8y ago
    Lifespan Deaths due to preventable causes On both of these the US is somewhere in the 30s in terms of rank among countries. But we are #1 in terms of cost per capita :) 5 year cancer is too low level in my opinion to give an overall picture
    - 5trokerac3 8y ago
      And how much of that is due to the obesity epidemic in the US and has nothing to do with the healthcare system?
      - 8y ago

flexie 8y ago

And that's the essence of this: In the developed world, this is all but a US specific issue. Cancer and other life threatening diseases rarely bankrupt Europeans, Canadians, Australians, Kiwis, Japanese etc.

chimeracoder 8y ago
> Cancer and other life threatening diseases rarely bankrupt Europeans, Canadians, Australians, Kiwis, Japanese etc. Sure, but they're also dramatically less likely to survive the cancer than Americans are at a population level. There have been multiple long-term studies on cancer survival rates that have demonstrated this.
- flexie 8y ago
  The US is barely in the top among developed nations, and it's not much better than the next 10-15 countries: https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/cancer-trends/data-cancer-frequency-country https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/cancer-trends/data-cancer... And it's notoriously difficult to compare. If cancer is registered as "discovered" early, because a for profit doctor starts treating it early, but the government hired doctor maybe doesn't, the early treated will statistically appear as living longer.
  - chimeracoder 8y ago
    > The US is barely in the top among developed nations, and it's not much better than the next 10-15 countries: https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/cancer-trends/data-cancer.. https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/cancer-trends/data-cancer.... First, you're posting data that isn't relevant: that's the rate of cancer incidence, not the survival rates. That says nothing about how well the cancer is treated. Secondly, it's nonsensical to compare aggregated cancer statistics between countries, because the demographics vary drastically, many cancer risk factors are highly hereditary, and the survival rates for different types of cancers vary so dramatically. If you look at the actual survival rates, once adjusted for racial composition and type of cancer, the US comes out far ahead. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18639491 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18639491

onetimemanytime 8y ago

If health care for all reduces prices and total cost, then yeah. Otherwise, the cost will cripple the government, and by extension taxpayers. Right now they can declare bankruptcy and just don't pay (at a great cost, no doubt) but the government will have to pay. Cancer is a fact of life,38.4% will get it in their life https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/understanding/statistics https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/understanding/statistics and unless costs are dramatically lowered any plan will be bankrupt.

bubbleRefuge 8y ago
The federal government cannot be crippled because it can issue currency ad-infinitem. As AOC is wonderfully publicizing, the notion that government finance works like household and business finance is finally starting to be debunked and at least talked about openly. There maybe other problems with universal healthcare, but financing it is not one of them.
- onetimemanytime 8y ago
  nope, doesn't work that way. USA issues a lot of debt, maybe more than it should, but issuing trillions of new dollars a year is not good policy.
- moduspol 8y ago
  It's truly worrying that comments like these are made unironically. Is there any amount of currency printing that you believe might be problematic? Or is the sky the limit? Perhaps most importantly: What happens if we accept your claim, spend and print money ad infinitem, and then you're wrong?
  - danieltillett 8y ago
    MMT sounds awfully like the Magic Pudding [1]. If governments can just print any amount of money they like to pay for everything whence cometh hyperinflation? 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Pudding https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Pudding

tmaly 8y ago

We still cannot get a price list of medical procedures in the US thanks to the antitrust exemption provided in McCarran-Ferguson Antitrust Act of 1945. I think repealing this would be a good start. All other industries are required to provide price lists. My friend went to the ER recently for a sprained thumb. They wrapped it in some bandage and he got a bill for $14,000. His insurance is covering 80% but he is still on the hook for $2800 for a sprained thumb. Something is not right here.

throwaway5752 8y ago
Why did he go to the ER?
- donaldknuth123 8y ago
  Depending on where you live an ER might be the only place you can go for an urgent medical issue. Was he supposed to wait a month to see a GP or drive across the state to find an Urgent Care?
- will_brown 8y ago
  I think you are trying to make some point about wasting resource...but the ER is how accute injuries like this are generally treated. Sure there may be urgent care centers equipped for this, but that isn’t a guarantee and those often have more restrictive hours than an ER, especially acces to urgent care services like x-rays or mri/cat scans. Sure in hindsight it’s a sprained thumb, but likely because of pain thought to be broken or worse...requiring x-ray and being set by a trained professional or maybe even surgery. It is a thumb so it would be less than ideal to lose feeling or mobility or the thumb itself (say there was nerve or circulatory damage).
- torpfactory 8y ago
  Thumb injuries are actually treated very seriously (at least more seriously than you might think) by medical professionals because thumb injuries can have very high consequences for quality of life. You can live a totally normal life without an index finger but a missing or disabled thumb is a much more significant impact.

mnm1 8y ago

This is the only solution. Every other developed country in the world has healthcare for its people. Politicians that don't support this are monsters who'd rather kill millions and ruin millions' more lives. They are disgusting, inhuman, immoral scum who would rather enrich their billionaire backers than help people live and recover from illness. These are the people that we should use the death penalty on because they have killed and will kill millions unnecessary. All out of greed and hate for their fellow Americans.

coredog64 8y ago

A fair chunk of what we in the US would consider “medical bankruptcy” is not the bills, but a consequence of chronic illness. If I’m living paycheck to paycheck, any disruption is going to hurt. That could be unpaid leave, but it could also be disability insurance that doesn’t replace 100% of your income. Regardless of how health insurance is paid for, those are going to happen.

cletus 8y ago
Let me play devil's advocate. What if living paycheck-to-paycheck is a consequence of having no health coverage? Think about it. If you're on a low income that largely matches your outgoings, bills of thousands of dollars will wipe you out regardless of whether or not you save. So why save? You may just reduce any benefits you get from the state or Federal government (medical or otherwise) and those will be wiped out anyway. So you may as well spend now. Consider, the Earned Income Tax Credit is one of the few times lower income households can make large purchases (and there's evidence of this in TV purchases and elsewhere).
notabee 8y ago
Disability insurance, like other insurance, is motivated to find loopholes with which to deny you. Make sure to read the fine print while you're still well and able.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]