Universal healthcare

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

Universal healthcare.

Obviously, after the revolution we'll have this. All of us will. It's sort of par for the course.

But that isn't what I want to discuss here.

As some of you know, I'm an American. Here in America, we don't have any kind of universal healthcare. The health insurance companies have us by the balls, and any attempt we Americans make to adopt universal healthcare in this country gets soundly defeated due to the influence of the health industry and fears of creeping 'socialism'. Often, they will tell us horror stories of what 'actually' goes on in countries with socialized medicine. Tales of rationed healthcare, of packed emergency rooms with long wait times, of people waiting for months for essential procedures that they die.


Now, obviously this is all bullshit, but I want to know.....in your respective country, what is your healthcare system like? I'm genuinely very curious, because you would not believe the bullshit that they feed us over here.

[tuwix]

In Poland, we have free health-care. Bur neoliberal governments have been doing much to destroy it. First of all, they don't give sufficient amount of money to fulfill needs. And they've done many “market” reforms which only extended the bureaucracy. And certainly members of families of those belonging to governments massively belong to that bureaucracy.
Nevertheless, it is possible to get free health-care, but the queues to doctor are longer and longer. Sometimes one must wait 2 years to get to specialist.
But before “market” reforms of health-care was much better.

[uk_communist]

Reporting from the U.K. here, comrade.

The N.H.S is a wonderful service, but it's true what they say about packed waiting rooms: people do have to wait ages before they're seen.
The stuff you're told about people "waiting months before being seen and dying" is a load of shit. That doesn't tend to happen over here.

The reason is the N.H.S itself is failing is down to five things:
1) Intellectual Property Rights;
2) Private Finance Initiative;
3) VAT;
4) Inflation;
5) Immigration.

Now, whilst I absolutely hate blaming immigrants for country's problems, this is one case where I'll accept it. The heavy immigration to the U.K. means that people are paying out but are receiving the healthcare. In theory, that's paradise; but in practice, that's not at all. In fact, it's rather damaging, as there's not enough to cover people without plummeting into debt and depression.

[Quail]

I'm in the UK, and I think the healthcare system is on the whole pretty good. The only specialist care I've needed has been mental health treatment, which hasn't always been very good though. The mental health services are woefully underfunded and often they'll try and fob you off with medication instead of any other therapies, or you'll find yourself getting passed from service to service with nobody able to help you. However, having said that, I have been able to access a wide range of services and the waiting times aren't always too horrendous, just depends on how many other people are also trying to access them at the same time.

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

Well, for the record, waiting times for the Emergency Room (aka the 'Dock In A Box') are notoriously long over here as well, though they usually have some sort of triage thing going anyway.

Of course, part of the problem is that so many people here in the States can't afford the insurance, which means they have no choice but to go to the Emergency Room....which of course brings us all the way back to the whole point of this thread.


I'm serious though, the bourgeoisie have fed us so much bullshit over the years about socialized medicine that we Americans are terrified of the very notion.

Remember the hubbub about Obamacare?

Obamacare doesn't really do shit, as all it does is give a government incentive to the insurance companies that already own our asses. But the absolute hysteria that the right-wing reacted with was so deeply irrational and base that you'd have thought America was being invaded by Mongol hordes.

[JPSartre12]

My family in Canada is very supportive of Medicare (the name to their universal healthcare program). It's structured in a very similar way to the US' Social Security scheme in that a direct payroll tax is placed on the citizens, and the money that is collected is pooled into one aggregate fund. This fund covers everyone in the country, but people have the option to "opt out" and buy private insurance. If a person or family has private insurance, they may be able to go to more-expensive hospitals than those without and get treatment that those on Medicare can't (ie, dental or eye care, cosmetic surgery, etc).

Most hospitals are private, but because citizens who use Medicare have the ability to choose which hospital to go to, the hospitals are forced to compete (to a limited degree; the "competition provides better services" capitalist rhetoric isn't as true as the "free" marketers think it is). The hospitals that get the most patients are able to get the most Medicare funds, so Canada's national health insurance is able to take some advantage of market forces by giving the citizens the choice of where they use their Medicare.

PM Harper hasn't treated Medicare very well, and his "market-based" reforms are chipping away at its funding. I'm not sure what the situation is in Poland, but comrade Tuwix has a point. It's only lead to increased bureaucratization and wasted public funds.

[Pelarys]

The state of the healthcare over here in France is pretty satisfying, but we've got another problem in the form of widespread consumption of antidepressant and general overconsumption of meds. A lot of meds are obtainable for free or for very cheap here which is pretty cool but facilitate misconsumption.
But a as always it's not going in the right direction, the system is slowly "liberalizing" and we lack trained medical staff in certain areas. Overall an average 75% of a person's medical expenses were being covered in 2005 but that number is slowly decreasing
I haven t been hospitalized for a while so I don't know about queus a lot.

[MarxSchmarx]

I no longer live there, but in the middle-income country where my parents live there is a two-tiered system. Yes there is universal healthcare, but the poor and precarious have to go to public hospitals that have severe staff and occasional equipment shortages. The concept is similar to NHS, but it is grossly underfunded for a whole variety of complicated reasons (it always is, isn't it?). Although this system is just decent enough to be adequate and nobody (or very few people) dies for lack of health care unlike in America or parts of Africa, although you do have people who are not treated as they should be, particularly psychiatric cases that are often left to charitable organizations.

Also, they do not help with physical therapy and reconstruction surgery and the like so people with disabilities and chronic care issues are left to go through the private system. Those who can afford it prefer to use privately run clinics for which you have to buy separate insurance if you need anything expensive like surgery. My parents mostly use the latter, although the privately run clinics are generally affordable to pay out of pocket for routine things and they only use insurance for private clinics for the expensive treatments in emergencies. Still, they have it a lot better than a large majority of their compatriots.

A related problem is that this country has occasional infectious disease outbreaks, and people are reluctant to seek treatment, although not as reluctant as in America, which can exacerbate the problem, because they don't have the same non-chalantness with which insured Americans or Canadians/N. E. Asians/W. Europeans visit doctors. So I think in many respects it is somewhere inbetween the two extremes of having in theory universal healthcare but in practice having many of the same problems the American system has.

[brigadista]

i live in the uk and i have had major surgery here twice - last time a couple of weeks ago after being rushed to hospital in severe pain.

I cannot say how much i appreciate the care and expert treatment i received . I would have been very ill if i did not get that treatment and it upsets me to think it is not available to people elsewhere because they cannot pay. I was given excellent drugs so i had no pain at all once i was at the hospital both before and after the surgery.

The surgery and treatment i got is the equivalent cost of $45,000 in the US.

However this government wants to get rid of our NHS and introduce a private health insurance system.

Most of the med negligence cases currently in the UK come from private medicine here .

imho free healthcare is a human right like a roof over your head and food on your plate.

the hospital where i received my treatment is currently threatened with closure.....

[Red Commissar]

Well, for the record, waiting times for the Emergency Room (aka the 'Dock In A Box') are notoriously long over here as well, though they usually have some sort of triage thing going anyway.

Of course, part of the problem is that so many people here in the States can't afford the insurance, which means they have no choice but to go to the Emergency Room....which of course brings us all the way back to the whole point of this thread.


I'm serious though, the bourgeoisie have fed us so much bullshit over the years about socialized medicine that we Americans are terrified of the very notion.

Remember the hubbub about Obamacare?

Obamacare doesn't really do shit, as all it does is give a government incentive to the insurance companies that already own our asses. But the absolute hysteria that the right-wing reacted with was so deeply irrational and base that you'd have thought America was being invaded by Mongol hordes.

Indeed, a lot of stuff was said about Obamacare but as far as "government-run healthcare" goes it's not happening. Still gets thrown around alot though, and that'll be useful in defeating any future notions for a single-payer system since the inevitable problems the healthcare "reform" will bring is going to going to be pinned as a failure of single-payer medicine. Even though it's not that at all.

As to why Americans are skeptical of it, there is definitely the factor of talking about how other countries have problems with their systems. Around the time the first parts of obamacare were being pushed through I remember John Stossel had a feature where he went up into Canada to get stories about how citizens were being stuck on absurdly long waiting lists, giving rise to the idea of "rationed" healthcare. What a lot of these failed to really point out though is how many of these people in spite of their problems would actually want to switch to an American-type system? That would not really solve anything. Honestly the private-basis on which the healthcare system grew out of here is a major reason why costs in the US tend to be pretty bad and is one of the main reasons why the system here is in so much deep shit.

However I think in general this just stems from a great deal of skepticism towards the government to provide services. The backlash that started in the late 70s and grew in the 80s was a big blow to the ideas of public provision of certain services like education and healthcare, tying that to the inevitable rise of a big government which would tax people to death and wreck the economy while welfare leeches grow. It's not really surprising that this mentality is strongest among middle-class types who've been duped into this from media over understandable strain from taxes and their shrinking, crappy incomes.

I mean the one government service that gets routinely ridiculed in American society is the Department of Motor Vehicles, or what ever state equivalent of it exists in your particular area. The long lines, detached service, the long time it takes for anything to get done, etc., the very representation of government bureaucracy and ineffectiveness.

I live here in the states but I have relatives who live in many parts of the world. Those in Sweden generally seem to be pleased with their system (most of them lower income) but they've seen the effects of "reforms" justified under the reasoning of cutting costs and bureaucracy, which hit them pretty bad considering the neighborhood they lived in. A lot of it gets tied up in immigrant bashing too, but my relatives there are immigrants so that's not one of their concerns of course. That being said those in Sweden were... amused for lack of a better word for the way the debate was being framed here and how they were being invoked a lot with their own problems- again, no one actually wants an American-style system. Same case for those in the UK or France, though the ones in Austria haven't seen as bad yet. Back home there is no real healthcare system to speak of, officially the government funds hospitals but being a developing country this translates into not being very much. There's also a problem there with double-dipping, with doctors taking money from the government to render services but half-assedly, then spending most of their time at private clinics to give services to the rich where they make even more money.

[PC LOAD LETTER]

I'm from the US and my area (not sure if it's state or county level) has public hospitals with graded fees based on income once you fill out some invasive forms and provide 30,000 types of documentation. With my income I get a 100% discount on ... everything. Which was nice when I broke my hand. The ER splinted me up and had me at orthopaedics in a couple days, but a year later I had an impacted and infected wisdom tooth, they said ... "Oh, we can get you in to the oral surgeon in about two months" as I was sitting there with a 102.F fever from the infection, so I borrowed $800 for a private oral surgeon to do it after he put me on antibiotics for a week.


But yeah, in general healthcare in the US fucking blows, is ridiculously expensive (broke my arm and cash discount for a private place with no insurance came up to a $4,000 bill ... I said what the fuck, how the hell much do you charge the insurance co? Never paid, let it go to collections, then contested it off my credit report like a BOSS), and people don't have access to that stuff.

[Bardo]

Often, they will tell us horror stories of what 'actually' goes on in countries with socialized medicine. Tales of rationed healthcare, of packed emergency rooms with long wait times, of people waiting for months for essential procedures that they die.


Having lived in both America and Australia I can tell you this is complete bullshit. We're in and out of the doctors office in Australia in the time that we would be filling out paperwork even with insurance in America. I've experienced no unnecessary procedures in Australia that I might in America.

The wait time for elective or non-emergency surgery through the public health service in Australia is a little longer, but no one is turned away. Give me the Australian health system over the American any day.

[helot]

The NHS in the UK is crumbling because the govt has been purposefully introducing inefficiencies in their slow march to destroy it. Its destruction is the last part of their decades old practice of dismantling the concessions after WWII.