Universal Healthcare

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There're all sorts of awesome options. If you're rich. If you're not, you're basically stuck with the healthcare plan your employer provides.

 

If the doctor your insurance sends you to isn't to your liking you can always go to another one on your own dime.
Had that problem with my own ins. company. Got an opinion from the doctor they sent me too that i didn't agree with, so i went & got a seconf opinion on my own. Totally different diagnosis & resulted in me changing doctors.

Oh and i agree that there are horror stories here in the states considering that medical mistakes cause somewhere between 95,000 & 400,000 deaths a year in the us(depends on which statistics you believe).
I just don't have any faith that the government would do even as good(or bad) of a job as is being done now.

 

This type of thing is also possible under medicare and title 19, so even if we did move to Single Payer (which isn't bloody likely), the ability to do this wouldn't go away.

 

WOW! Great "choice" there, Martaug. And that would be different from a public option in which way? What is being considered is the actual insurance being provided for individuals by the government, rather than a private company. It has nothing to do with your doctor. What you may be thinking of is a single payer program. That is not what is supposedly being considered, but rather an option to get the insurance itself in a different manner. In reality you get another option with the Obama healthcare reform - supposedly. I have yet to see the actual reform plan as of yet.

 

I think the best option would be to provide an optional government-subsidised insurance program. This would NOT be free, but would rather be based off a (constant) percentage of your income, with the rest being payed by taxes. This system still allows for healthy competition (as odds are anyone could offer a better system than the government) while also allowing everyone (well, maybe not the homeless) to have some kind of insurance. It won't impact hospital quality, as they'll still be run the same way, but will put a LOT more people into the "insured" category.

Chandos, moods and tones are notoriously unreliable in forums, but I have to say I get the feeling your own experience may be clouding your judgement with an emotional reaction. If this is entirely off base, just ignore me, but if not, take a second and examine why you feel this way and whether or not it is really supported by the evidence. I know quite well how emotional topics can get in the way of rational considerations.

 

As we are talking about major changes in healthcare and one of the things (indirectly related to this discussion) that Obama did is try to open up ways of evaluations hospitals and healthcare plans.

This can be helpful because it lets people know how good a job one hospital system does compared to another and how cheap it is comparatively.

One things that has yet to be corrected is a survey that was done by HHS (I think) that asks people how well their problems were explained and how well their pain was treated.

This survey is actually pretty dumb right now and I wonder if the reason it wasn't released to the public before was because it was so worthless in its current form.

It is worthless because it asks nothing in terms of background information (which can relate to how easy it is to explain things to people). It also doesn't ask what kind of problem people had (some injuries hurt alot more than others so treating pain for one person with one type of injury is very different from treating another).

I think being open about stuff is good but sometimes things are measured in bad/useless ways.


http://www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov/...anguage=English&defaultstatus=0&pagelist=Home

Look under "Survey of Patients' Hospital Experiences".

Here is a link to the website with the survey. It struck me more as a store customer satisfaction survey that asks how you felt while you were in the store but not about what you bought while you were at it.

Note it doesn't even give you a way to accurately compare "experiences" (such as between 2 people with the same problem), which is what it is supposedly measuring.

 

May I ask what insurance company you use that gives you only one option? Every insurance provider i have had in the last fifteen years, 4 to be exact, has provided a list of doctors in your immediate area and i was supplied with a list of doctors for the entire state i was living in that fall under their plan. Not just one doctor. I know if i had a serious enough health issue, i would be willing to drive more than an hour to get that 2nd opinion thats still covered by my insurer? Are you implying that all the doctors in your insurance group would give the same diagnosis?

 

Most insurance companies have a listing of network providers. That means that everything, including additional testing, must be done within the "network." If you chose a provider outside of that network, you are out of luck.

 

Alot of HMOs do the same. They try to get patients to stay within the network. They do this a different way by pressuring/encouraging the doctors to send most patents that need something done available somewhere else to just different places within the network even if those places aren't the best or closest.

 

Which is not to say that there still aren't plenty of other doctors available within the network once could visit for a second opinion...

 

But what do you know about them? We were discussing choice, and now we are saying, really, here's what you get: Take it or leave it...what about choice?

 

I've not followed this thread very closely, so you'll have to excuse me if I reached an incorrect conclusion or if someone has already pointed this out, but I noticed that one argument against universal health care brought up earlier is that you're "stuck with it", whereas with private health care you have a choice of which doctor to go to. Now something that martaug said got my attention: if you have insurance coverage and don't like the doctor/network they force on you, no problem, just go to another one on your own money.

In this case, what's the difference between universal and private, as far as you're concerned? Every Western country with universal health care that I know of also has private clinics. Just like with a private insurance, you're paying for health care "in advance", so to speak. Just like private insurance, if you don't like the doctor you get through the system, you can go to a private clinic on your own money. If all this is true, doesn't universal health care just look like one big insurance company with almost all of the same benefits and disadvantages? The only major difference that I see is a humane one: everyone is getting health care.

 

Ziad, that entirely depends on what kind of universal system you're talking about. If you're talking about universal government medical coverage, then you're talking about a government-run medical program, with gov't-payed doctors in a gov't funded facility, and private practice doctors will likely end up either specialized-only or possibly even run our all-together.

If you're talking about universal health insurance, then the option of going it alone is always there.

The other issue, even with universal health insurance, is the quality of the system. If their health insurance is run like the DMV or the IRS, then I don't want it. I'd rather save the money (taxes and premium) and pay out-of-pocket. If it's run like U.S. Army Boot Camp, where every shoelace is tied to the exact same length and all, then it could be very good.

 

Ok, I was talking about how badly the US gov't has run the health care insurance it offers now.

Specifically i am talking about TRICARE(formerly known as Champus) which is a single-payer health care system.

Less than ~40% of doctors will accept it as it sets ridiculous low rates for standard procedures.
If your doctor's base visit cost is $95, you have a copay of 10-15%($9.50-14.25) even though tricare only pays $45 for a visit.
So the doctor just got $54.50-$59.25 for a $95 bill & tricare doesn't offer any way to dispute the payment, since by accepting the payment you are agreeing to the fine print of their policy that states that you CAN'T dispute the payment.

Now, do i think that a new insurance policy from this same gov't would be any better? No, i think it would probably be even worse as it would basically be transforming all non-private healthcare into the V.A.

If none of you have been to the V.A. lately, i can sum it up in 4 words, OMFG!!!

 

The great thing about it is that no one will force you to take the government option. You will still be free to choose a private insurance company. Others, like me, who despise the blood-sucking, crooked insurance companies, will FINALLY HAVE OUR OWN CHOICE to choose another option, like government insurance. In your case, Martaug, it appears you have neither. So we can both have what we want. Why would you want to complain over that?

 

Martaug, I'm starting to wonder if you understand what Single-Payer is. Tri-Care is an insurance policy like any other and, like most other insurance policies (I have yet to see a universally accepted insurance policy), only a certain percentage of doctors actually accept it. Single-Payer healthcare is when everyone in the country has the same insurance policy...in other words, for any and all medical costs incurred by Americans, there is but a single payer...hence the term.

Tri-Care does pay out slightly less than many other insurers do, but they are hardly the only insurance policy -- public or private -- that does this. The reason they are able to pay such low rates to private practices and hospitals lies with the sheer number of people using Tri-Care. It is a fact of life that larger insurance companies -- public or private -- pay private practices and hospitals less than smaller ones do. The reason for this is simple. A Doctor can handle losing all the patients using a smaller insurance company, because that company won't be sending him very many patients, so smaller insurers have far less leverage when negotiating their pay scale with potential clients (ie the practices who will provide services to their policy-holders). Refusing to carry a larger insurer, on the other hand, can really hurt. Larger insurers really have the medical community by the balls in this regard.

The practices that won't accept Tri-Care are the smaller ones -- practices that aren't terribly hurt by losing the massive number of patients Tri-Care would send their way. Larger practices and Hospitals, on the other hand, pretty much always take Tri-Care.

 

Woah, I admit to being a lurker in this thread, but this is news to me. Is this true, that the government just wants to compete with all of the HMOs and insurance companies? Does this mean the government is going to be charging people premiums? I may actually be willing to accept that as I will be able to stay with my company provided HMO which has excellent coverage and benefits. I always assumed that the administration was going to push for a single payer system in which all of the HMOs and insurance companies would disappear and be replaced by some enormously bloated government agency that would probably cause the death of us all. Although, I pity you Chandos if you think your health care decisions will be better in the hands of government workers (who are never held accountable to anything).

 

Having spent most of my life on Government insurance (first, as a military brat, then as a service member, and then for a year or so on title 19 when I was still seeking higher paying work) I can honestly say that I'm no worse off for it.

 

That is the overall idea I was getting. Wasn't that what Obama was offering since the primaries - to offer people the option to buy a healthcare plan similar to what the US politicians had? I have yet to see him or his administration push for a unified healthcare plan. The closest he got to that was when he was suggesting that all children be insured, but that does not require a single plan either - as long as they are insured.

BTW - government is seldom that accountable, but it seems to me private enterprise is not always a shining beacon of righteousness either. Well, anyway, as long as the government simply offers a plan and does not mandate that everyone has to follow it and no other, it is little different in concept to what the other insurers are doing. As long as you could move away from the government-offered plan if you are not happy with it, it is about as likely to be responsive as any of them.

 

Wow drew, i'm wondering if you even read links before posting comments.
from the link :

So apparently you don't know as much as you think.

PS Also Drew, can you honestly say that you received equivalent care(as in timeliness, quality of care, thoroughness,etc.) from the VA as you get from your general practioner now?