Healthcare

Um, what? Am I misunderstanding you? There's all kinds of ways you can have cheaper healthcare at the cost of some quality of life, and often the quality-of-life cost is extremely small. There's no real reason why everyone should have every operation the doctor orders done every time, but if the person is paying the same price whether they get it or not, then of course they'll get it far more often than is really economical.

This is a problem with private insurance as well, which is why people like my family who are willing to take responsibility for their own health can gain by carrying only disaster coverage and paying for the routine stuff that they actually need out-of-pocket. Under a universal system, or even a economic mandate system like Obamacare, that option would go away and people like us would be forced to pay for the higher rate of care, thus hurting our quality of life.

In general, I'm in favor of systems that give individual patients choices and allow them to bear the consequences of those choices.

I could get on board with a universal system if there was an opt-out option where the person would get a tax break corresponding to the expected average payout of the system, then provide their own care out-of-pocket.

What's that you say? All the healthy people would opt out and the system would crash? Well, then just call your system what it is: A tax on healthy people to fund another welfare system.

I think most healthy people would have enough common sense to know that everyone can get cancer and many other diseases. No one's immune to everything.

edited 10th May '11 7:39:10 AM by BestOf

^ But the risk of cancer is statistically so low on average it's not a high priority to worry about. Especially for those under the age of 40. Below that age, you're far more likely to be injured on the job catastrophically (an event itself highly improbable for non-reckless people) that contract any kind of cancer.

edited 10th May '11 8:04:57 AM by MajorTom

And yet the number 2 cause of death is cancer. The number 1 is heart attack.

EDIT: Old age? Ignore me, its too hot today...

edited 10th May '11 8:39:12 AM by GameChainsaw

^^^ That's why we have coverage for disasters. Where the silliness is is in constant x-rays, prescription drugs for every little thing, etc, which are often as not mostly to protect the doctor from any possible liability.

Just as an example, a while back my grandfather had severe pains, and went to the emergency room, where they concluded that he might have had a gallstone, put him on some meds, and recommended that he have his gall bladder removed. In reality, there was probably a 30% chance that it was a gallstone and a 70% chance it was something fairly harmless like a bad stomach cramp, but the doctors can't take any risks. My grandfather being able to think for himself decided not to have the surgery, thus saving medicare and himself a chunk of money, and as it has turned out, he was right: he hasn't had any trouble since.

Under a universal healthcare system, there'd be no incentive for people to make choices like that.

edited 10th May '11 8:08:03 AM by EdwardsGrizzly

^ And it gets worse with healthcare insurance mandates. People like me (active, healthy, young) are punished and taxed to fund the old shits who didn't take care of themselves and the defective at lesser cost to those people than should be incurred. Your health your costs, you live well your healthcare costs are low, you don't live well I hope you like bankruptcy.

And the mandate situation is made worse by the fact that people under the age of 30 even if healthy and active are often quite impoverished or barely living on working class wages. Spare me the subsidies for the poor bullshit, you know health insurance mandates are going to drive scores of poor people into bankruptcy.

^ Not to mention that some of us don't want to be subsidized by the government.

@Game Chainsaw: That's because our excellent healthcare technology can cure everything else.

edited 10th May '11 8:17:05 AM by EdwardsGrizzly

Better safe than sorry is key here, you won't need to worry about a choice. You'd get checked/treatment due to having paid taxes.

Also as I've linked to earlier in the thread the WHO ranks Britain's universal healthcare as a lot higher than the US' healthcare. (I'm using the UK for comparison as I live there.)

A huge difference I feel is the attitude towards the healthcare, as judging by posts/articles/opinion pieces there is a distinct lack of empathy/care towards others who are less well off and suffering ill health.

^ The lack of empathy is because 90% of health problems are preventable by simply not being a lazy idiot. There are few health issues other than dying (which everyone goes through) that emerge despite being healthy, active and smart about your health.

It'd be interesting to see a breakdown of the relative costs of preventive care versus emergency care.

Do avoid the made-up numbers though. One of the most common health problems is allergies, which are kind of hard to avoid.

edited 10th May '11 8:41:34 AM by blueharp

Depends on the allergy. There's a lot of them that are easily handled by OTC medications. Some however like requiring epinephrine for bee stings not so much.

But what if you're old and thus at risk? What you've got a condition that you can't prevent? What if you do get cancer or something else despite being the best athlete in the world? Lou Gehrig got ALS. Now, granted, a professional athlete can afford insurance, but what if you're unemployed through no fault of your own or in a low-paying job?

Having people pay for healthcare is silly.

For one, it causes people with potentially serious conditions to not seek help 'cause there's the chance that they'd end up paying for a check-up that found nothing serious or treatment for something that they could've lived with.

It creates an incentive to simply live with conditions that decrease one's quality of life if they're not life-threatening 'cause people want to save money.

The point of healthcare is not just to save lives; it's also to improve life. If people are avoiding going to the doctor or can't get treatment because they can't afford it, you know you're living in a really shitty place.

Note that this doesn't mean that people don't have the option of ignoring their health; no one's forcing them to seek treatment. But they should have the option, and it should never cost money to do so.

edited 10th May '11 8:49:54 AM by BestOf

You aren't preventing it, you're dealing with it as it happens. And of course, antihistimines aren't free. They cost money. So...what does laziness or idiocy have to do with that?

But really, just don't make up statistics.

edited 10th May '11 8:47:27 AM by blueharp

I consider myself capable of deciding how safe I want to be, and whether a small risk of being sorry is worth it for the potential benefits.

If healthcare is given, people are paying for it. Did you mean to say "having the people that benefit from healthcare pay for it is silly"?

That incentive is a good thing. Healthcare costs resources to produce, and if the benefits don't outweigh the costs then those resources would be better used elsewhere.

With universal healthcare though the benefits outweigh the costs as evidenced by the aforementioned WHO reports on quality of healthcare, where those comparable nations with universal healthcare are ranked higher.

Also the benefit of having healthcare readily available to anyone regardless of income, for the cost of a tax that doesn't actually bankrupt everyone. (Because otherwise you know, it wouldn't be used.)

@Tom: Turning a blind eye and saying 'well, its your fault for not living a healthy lifestyle" is one, pretty cold, and two, somewhat silly to say given a lot of people simply cannot afford a healthy lifestyle or dont have the education to realize otherwise.

I'd wager more than a few parents in the lower wage brackets have two choices. feed their children 1 dollar hamburgers from mcdonalds or burn their entire paycheck on healthier groceries, and without the education and readily available knowledge of how to turn the seemingly more expensive ingredients into multiple healthy meals, the one dollar hamburgers are gonna win every time.

edited 10th May '11 9:14:47 AM by Midgetsnowman

^ Actually, Mc Donalds hamburgers cost more than many of the more healthy home-cooked meals.

I do believe that was what the last bit was stating.

I fail to see how the WHO report suggest that the benefits outweigh the costs. It shows that there were in fact benefits according to their scale, but says nothing at all about the costs, or about their weight relative to the benefits.

^^ In other words, the problem is people not making healthy choices, not people being economically unable to provide themselves with health, if I understand him correctly.

@Grizzly: this is true. But on the surface, it doesnt appear that way.

To the layman, 5 dollars for lettuce, 10 dollars for a large package of ground beef, and a couple dollars for a large tub of mustard looks like a much higher cost than 3 dollars worth of mcdonalds, even if the first will likely last 2-3 meals. people arent wired to look at the longterm, and in the short term if you havent been taught any better, fast food looks insanely cheaper.

^ The problem is people not being educated enough to make those choices, yes. School teaches you about the food pyramid and whatnot, but schools NEVER bother teaching you how to plan a budget to buy all the ingredients, let alone the basics of cooking,

edited 10th May '11 9:34:39 AM by Midgetsnowman

That problem, maybe, but then that's why education was also covered in said example. Other circumstances may be quite different. Health care is not as simple as that one particular case, there are numerous other concerns, some of which happen spontaneously, or genetically, so there's little any one person can do.

Healthcare should be covered by taxes - so yes, people are paying for it, but if it's covered by taxes, assuming that tax policy is fair, no one's paying more than they should.

And free and universal healthcare benefits the society as a whole, by enabling people to work longer and more productively and by reducing health conditions that cause stress (in the patient as well as other people) or other symptoms that reduce efficiency. Even the fear of going bankrupt or dying from something that's easily preventable if you can afford treatment is enough to make people too stressed out to be as productive as they could be.

So I did not mean to say "having the people that benefit from healthcare pay for it is silly", but that everyone that does benefit - i.e. the entire society - should pay.

I can be saying something rather stupid right now, but wouldn't teaching anything that doesn't have anything directly to do with academics be the parent's responsibility?

Not to mention increasing entrepreneurial opportunity, instead of being chained to a job, if you have a good idea, you can pursue it without worrying about your health, or your family's.

That would be limiting the scope of education in very counter-productive ways, and putting a burden on parents, and on children whose parents are not informed and educated already.

That seems a bad idea.

edited 10th May '11 9:48:33 AM by blueharp