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My mother lives in country australia and had pancreatitis it seemed. Hospital, cat and mri’s, spent a week in hospital, sent home, returned after pain returned.
by gregsq 6y ago
My mother lives in country australia and had pancreatitis it seemed. Hospital, cat and mri’s, spent a week in hospital, sent home, returned after pain returned. More tests, it was decided she should be sent to a larger regional hospital for biopsy. Flew by Lear jet, drove by road home I guess about three hundred miles. Advise was a Whipple procedure. I wasn’t inclined to agree for reasons I won’t go into. I declined before second opinion from brisbane world class surgeon. He agreed. Flown commercial to brisbane. More mri’s and cat scans. Acinar cell carcinoma suspected. No need for full duodenectomy. Hospital stay and operation. After care and so on. Total cost zero.
I live in the US. Healthcare here is a grift. The wife did medical billing, mostly reconciling and working all the codes. It’s a complete mess
- aantix 6y ago“Total cost zero”. The cost is never zero. Doctors, nurses, don’t work for free. Infrastructure isn’t maintained without money. It comes from somewhere.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago“Total out of pocket cost zero, with taxes funding a functioning care driven universal healthcare system.” We’re not arguing that funding is required, simply how it flows and to whom. Disclosure: I too have first hand experience with Australia’s healthcare system. It’s very good.
- xtian 6y agoWhat is the cost of an unhealthy population that defers or forgoes medical treatment? Where is that price exacted? In a 2019 Gallup poll, 25% of US adults said they or a family member had delayed treatment for a serious medical condition that year for financial reasons.
- chadcmulligan 6y agoAustralian here - was listening to a local doctor who has a radio program. He travelled to the US for something and remarked on the number of people he saw squinting - apparently this is treated here by the appropriate glasses when young (for free) but not so over there.
- gregsq 6y agoYes I should have said zero to her at the various points of delivery. There’s a different method of accounting at play. Till recently a volunteer firefighter in an environment somewhat like California’s. You might call it socialism light. The tangible benefits to the wider community, and there are many she and her ancestors have brought, are also accounted for. The working population agree to pay a fixed proportion of their taxes for this very purpose. A community based insurance. This is an approach proven to not be very appealing in the USA. I think mores the pity.
- uoaei 6y agoPaying for healthcare via taxes would look very, very similar to how it is now. Because that's how insurance works: you are paying into a pool now to get access to help later. I can't tell if you're being sarcastically libertarian or deliberately antagonistic.
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- __blockcipher__ 6y agoI’m surprised you couldn’t tell because my reading is their point was quite clearly genuine and not at all sarcastic. They were just expressing the notion that while the acute personal cost is zero the actual cost is still borne. They didn’t make the point in a very nuanced way but any system that divorces the cost from the person receiving the treatment hides information by suppressing the natural price discovery mechanism. Anyway, I agree that insurance has a similar problem, at least if policies like “no pre-existing conditions” are followed. However if such policies are not in place then premiums would go up and thus the information propagation of the price mechanism is (all else equal) restored. I don’t have time to get into it but speaking from the US perspective I really wish we had a real free market system with no government revelation or licensure laws whatsoever. What we have now is criticized by the ignorant as a “failure of unbridled capitalism” but it is of course anything but. It is absolutely absurd that I can’t decide that I don’t want insurance and equally that I’m not told what a procedure or drug or item will cost beforehand. I’ve been to the ER several times and you’re always treated like a bag of meat to poke and prod and I have to be very diligent about constantly getting them to tell me what they’re actually doing. (And don’t even get me started on the chargemaster system where they initially charge you 10x more than what they expect to recoup purely for leverage to negotiate with insurance)
- redler 6y agoUnder such a system, if your choice is not to have insurance, what should happen if you step in a hole and shatter your ankle in a way that requires complex surgery to repair? And if the response is to simply pay the cost out of pocket, what if that "choice" not to have insurance was made because you're working at a minimum wage job?
- sumedh 6y ago> The cost is never zero. I dont understand this argument. You literally dont have to pay anything after you come out of the hospital so yes the cost is zero. You do pay overall for the cost in taxes but so do Americans yet their hospital costs is non zero.
- heavyset_go 6y agoNobody is under the impression that there aren't costs to care, so your response feels like you're addressing a strawman argument and isn't really insightful.
- MystK 6y agoNot sure why you think that. There are definitely people who think universal healthcare will cost nothing.
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- heavyset_go 6y agoAgain, sounds like a strawman argument to me. Have any examples of people who think that?
- MystK 6y agoSure it's written about all the time. https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/healthcare/484301-22-studies-agree-medicare-for-all-saves-money https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/healthcare/484301-22... https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/01/416416/single-payer-systems-likely-save-money-us-analysis-finds https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/01/416416/single-payer-system... https://www.courthousenews.com/study-universal-health-care-in-us-will-save-money/ https://www.courthousenews.com/study-universal-health-care-i... https://pnhp.org/news/implementing-a-universal-healthcare-system-costs-less-provides-better-care/ https://pnhp.org/news/implementing-a-universal-healthcare-sy...
- heavyset_go 6y ago> https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/healthcare/484301-22-studies-agree-medicare-for-all-saves-money https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/healthcare/484301-22... I'm struggling to find where this author concludes that universal healthcare is free like free energy from a perpetual motion machine. Can't find it. Could it be that you're misinterpreting the repetition of the fact that countries with universal healthcare have better health outcomes, and yet pay less than half of what we do for healthcare, with it somehow being completely free? The same fact that's repeated in the title "22 studies agree: 'Medicare for All' saves money"? Which of those 22 studies claims that cheaper healthcare with better outcomes is the result of free labor? Looking at the rest of links, it seems to me that you believe that anyone claiming, with evidence, that universal healthcare saves money somehow thinks that universal healthcare doesn't cost anything.
- puppable 6y agoThanks for pointing this out. I had thought the Lear jet was just made out of magic, until I saw your comment.
- hippira 6y agoObviously he and his mother has already paid for in taxes, zero cost here is in the sense that the cost is not going to eat into their current savings. While in the US you paid taxes and can still potentially go bankrupt if you have major diseases.
- aantix 6y agoBut their current savings is lower because of their higher taxes.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago50% of bankruptcies in the US are medical cost related, so the whole “you can save more in the US with lower taxes” argument is moot. You’re doing the same as driving without car insurance; it works right up until the crash site.
- redler 6y agoUnder the US system, everyone's savings is also lower -- because of extremely high insurance premiums, co-pays, coinsurance, deductibles, high out-of-pocket payment maximums, uncovered care, predatory billing complexity designed to minimize "medical loss", lesser job mobility due to linkage of employment with the ability to get medical care, far higher drug prices, and so forth. It's a system full of holes into which almost anyone without wealth can fall -- even people with good insurance. If you simplify and subtract the need for intermediaries to extract profit from this kind of system, remove all risk of anyone in the country being personally financially destroyed by their health care needs, remove from US businesses the obligation to manage and pay for their share of their employee health benefits, and distribute the resulting costs across the entire population, would you argue that would somehow cost more? That the resulting "higher taxes" would exceed the lowering of all the systemic, business, and personal costs and risk above?
- heavyset_go 6y agoI pay for health insurance on the individual market, without employer or government subsidies. It's a shitty plan that I pay over $9k in premiums for and have a $3k deductible with an $8k out of pocket maximum each year with co-pays, and that's without utilizing the plan at all. If I wanted to buy the same plan I had from an employer, a family plan, it would cost over $30k in premiums, with an $8k deductible and a $17k out of pocket maximum each year with co-pays. All of those costs and it is still routine for the insured in the US to find out that the care they received actually isn't covered by their insurance, as well, so they're on the hook for paying for some care completely out of pocket. I would love to hear your explanation for how my savings is actually higher now while I'm being extorted each year with higher and higher premiums for less and less care.
- chris_wot 6y agoHe meant the total cost to the patient is zero. We pay for this via a regular yearly Medicare levy (if you don’t have private health care) and via our taxes. As Australians, we are fine with this.
- Gatsky 6y agoYeah it’s pretty good. You can walk into any hospital in Australia and they’ll just look after you and try to do their best to help you. You won’t be asked to pay anything, except maybe some pharmacy fees. Novel concept. And there is also the private system if you want alternatives. Problem is, I don’t think it’s going to last. The ageing population means health costs will spiral, and health budgets will consume an unsustainably large proportion of revenues.
- chris_wot 6y agoIt will last because any government who threatens it will be removed. We have watched what is happening in the U.S. and almost every Australia who is aware of the U.S. model is absolutely appalled. Actually, the U.S.’s standing in Australia has totally dropped in the last four years, and was already gradually dropping before then.