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Socialized hospitals have waiting lists while for profit hospitals have health insurance companies denying coverage. The problem is the demand outstrips the sup
by johnebgd 1y ago
Socialized hospitals have waiting lists while for profit hospitals have health insurance companies denying coverage. The problem is the demand outstrips the supply and you end up with some form of rationing of care, this is not a problem with profit motive.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago>while for profit hospitals have health insurance companies denying coverage At least you immediately get the treatment you need, in the case of the latter.
- fisherjeff 1y agoHmmm, I’m not sure my (very much for-profit) primary care provider is aware of this rule
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoCare to elaborate?
- fisherjeff 1y agoI’m lucky to schedule an appointment of any kind less than 8 weeks out, unless there’s a cancellation. Recently, it took me like six weeks to get an MRI to diagnose a broken pelvis. I live in a rural area and there’s a hospital system here that owns basically all the providers - everything is all remarkably expensive and booked out way into the future. There’s a smaller independent provider that I recently looked into but they’re scheduling new patients out by more than a year!
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago> Recently, it took me like six weeks to get an MRI to diagnose a broken pelvis. Bruh, where I am in European socialized medicine land, six weeks wait for an MRI is rookie numbers. How about 6-12 months. Sure, you might die until you get your turn, but at least it's "free"*. *) paid form everyone's taxes
- fisherjeff 1y agoSix weeks is also very far from “immediate” EDIT: Spot checking in a Canadian town with similar demographics as my own shows wait times roughly comparable to mine, and nothing anywhere near 6-12 months - worst case is about 14 weeks.
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoI said I was form Europe, not Canada.
- fisherjeff 1y agoRight. I still don’t think your original contention that for-profit systems are, in general, orders of magnitude better than socialized ones is accurate, but I do concede that your particular situation seems pretty bad. EDIT: Just checked NHS too, most recent month had ~3% of MRIs waitlisted more than 13 weeks, so pretty similar in that European country as well.
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoI don't live in the UK either. That's linke me saying American wait times are not so bad and Googling data from Mexico.
- fisherjeff 1y agoI mean if we’re doing analogies here, I’d say it’s more like you said “the sky’s always blue in the US”, and I said “actually it’s kind of cloudy here right now, and in fact it’s often as cloudy as other places.” To which you just keep responding that I’m wrong because there’s a tornado outside your house.
- const_cast 1y agoThe US medical system is objectively bad, period. It's not even an argument so please stop trying. Not only do we pay significantly more, but we have significantly worse health care outcomes. The hallucination and delusion that Americans get "good healthcare" because they pay so much is just not true. We, objectively, get worse healthcare.
- tptacek 1y agoThere are apparently more MRI machines in Pittsburgh than there are in all of Canada. Access to imaging is very definitely not a comparative weakness of the American system; most analysts would say part of our problem is we do way too much imaging.
- fisherjeff 1y agoAgreed. MRI machines are not the bottleneck - we have 3 in my area, serving maybe 100k people. Assuming most people are like me and spend about an hour in an MRI machine every 40 years, we should be at something like 25% utilization, which seems comfortable.
- s1artibartfast 1y agoThats a pretty big assumption. How old are you? My elderly parents are getting MRIs once or more per year. They are very common in orthopedic medicine.
- tptacek 1y agoYes. That's probably a bad thing.
- s1artibartfast 1y agofrom a system cost perspective, absolutely. For specific beneficiaries, not so much, especially after they have aged out of paying into the system. This is a textbook challenge with the US healthcare economy.
- tptacek 1y agoNot just from a cost perspective: overuse of imaging, particularly in orthopedic medicine, is apparently a major driver of iatrogenesis in American medicine. It actively does harm.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoSo increase taxes and increase supply until it meets demand. You can still do this while prohibiting private ownership of medical systems and their underlying real estate. https://www.axios.com/2025/03/17/private-equity-health-care-state-legislation https://www.axios.com/2025/03/17/private-equity-health-care-...
- tptacek 1y agoEasy to say, very difficult to do. Public funding and the single-payer portion of the US health care system is responsible for the scarcity of doctors --- Medicare controls residency slots, and deliberately restricts them to prevent an oversupply of doctors. Medical systems around the world in every configuration have these problems in one form or another.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoCertainly, I expect more of the UHC CEO’s outcome until the system moves towards success versus failure as long as the US for profit machine continues to squeeze the population for healthcare while public funding declines in the near term. “We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of options.” seems to be the equilibrium we keep arriving at, despite it being unsustainable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZhCYisIQB8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZhCYisIQB8
- tptacek 1y agoI'm really not interested in attempts to mascotize the mentally ill guy who pointlessly shot someone to death on the street in Manhattan.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoI'm not taking a moral perspective on it, I am saying cause->effect. If people run out of options in a failing, suboptimal system (which I'm unsure you can say the US healthcare system is anything but, based on the evidence), they will resort to the options that remain for recourse.
- inetknght 1y ago> Socialized hospitals have waiting lists while for profit hospitals have health insurance companies denying coverage For-profit hospitals have waiting lists too. I had to wait 6 weeks to see one doc, who referred me to another doc. I waited 3 weeks to see that, then was referred to yet another. Another 5 weeks to see the third, and another 5 weeks to see a fourth. Each time I have to take time and money out of my schedule to do this important runaround. Give me that socialized healthcare please.
- gdbsjjdn 1y agoThe experience of "socialized hospitals" since the 1980s is also biased by the neoliberal push to cut everything to the bone and then justify privatization. The NHS and provincial healthcare in Canada are two examples where they've gotten less functional over the last 50 years on purpose because the government wants to push for a two-tier system with inferior care for poor people.
- cameldrv 1y agoJust because a hospital is non profit doesn't mean it's "socialized." A lot of places have county or state hospitals, but most non profit hospitals were originally started by a religious or community organization, or a group of doctors. Medicine has a lot of things that make it naturally not work like a normal good or service market. To deal with some of these issues, it's a heavily regulated field, but many of these regulations also make it ripe for exploitation by for-profit entities.